 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. All right, everybody, welcome to Iran Brookshow on this, what is it? It's a Saturday. Hope everybody's having a fantastic weekend. It's been a while, I know, some of you were complaining, I saw. But I'm back, here I am, you got a show? Don't complain. I was traveling, as I think many of you know, with Costa Rica at a conference, speaking at the Einwand Center Latin America Conference. I was in Mexico, speaking at another Einwand Latin America center conference, fantastic events, really fun, really good. Costa Rica probably about 70 people in Mexico City, I don't know, anywhere between any given point between 100 or 250 people in the audience during the day. It kind of fluctuated, but yeah, two fantastic events. Sorry I didn't do any shows on the road. It was, I don't know, there was just a lot going on and really couldn't find the time to do it. So that's what happens when you're on the road. It says you have good intentions, but they don't always come to fruition. So I apologize for that. In terms of the new formats, I will be starting on the, what do you call it, the daily news briefing shows, short shows in the morning every day, every weekday. I will start that on Monday, that'll happen starting this coming Monday. I expect it to be at about 11 o'clock East Coast time, but stay tuned and my fluctuate a little bit from day to day, given my other things I've got on my calendar. So that is yet to be determined. I will also be doing shows in the evening as well. There'll be a show tomorrow and then we'll see during the week exactly what days will do it. This week, of course, there's also complicated by the fact that it is Thanksgiving. So there definitely will be a Thanksgiving special show, probably either the day before Thanksgiving or the day after Thanksgiving. I still have to work on that. Any other logistical stuff? Yeah, and the week after that, I'll be traveling again. So the daily shows will get disrupted until December, where I'll be here for a whole month and then starting December 3rd, I'm here for the whole month and we can get on a nice schedule and we can see if this works and if you like it and if you're willing to support it financially and yeah, we'll see how much value we create and based on that, we'll continue, we'll decide what we're gonna do, what we're gonna do next week, next year, sorry, next year. All right, let's see, today we're gonna talk again about FTX, I know God, I mean, I already did a whole show on it, why would I do another one? Because this is the gift that keeps on giving. You know, particularly, what's his name, SFB, something like that, right, Sam? No, SBF, FB, anyway, it doesn't matter. Sam, the former CEO and owner of FTX, just as the gift that keeps on giving, I mean, it really is amazing. He, the stuff he says in interviews and he did a Twitter interview with a Vox reporter, which was just fascinating and it's a fantastic, it's a fantastic opportunity to talk about altruism, maybe about effective altruism, certainly about virtue signaling. And about, most importantly, I wanna talk about today, is the relationship between altruism and pragmatism. So, why altruism almost necessarily in business leads to pragmatism and pragmatism often leads to the kind of fraud we've seen here at SBF. We'll try to get some of SBF's own words in how he describes what happened and what he did. I think some of what he says confirms what I told you in the show I did on FTX, so we'll talk about that as well, so we'll get some confirmation on kind of my view on how the fraud kind of happened. Yes, I think that's good. Let me just try one thing here, just cause, let's see if it's its source. Let's see if I can see this better. I can't see his tweets that were, oh, much better. Okay, there we go. Okay, let's see. So, before we get to that, let me just remind everybody quickly what you already know, that is that you could support the show while you're listening live by Super Chat, but of course the advantage of doing that is also that you can ask questions and I can answer those questions and we can get into discussions via the Super Chat on different issues, so I think it's a real value to you, the Super Chat and of course a value to me. So, we have a goal for the Super Chat, $650. We have made that goal and exceeded that goal in the last few shows, so let's keep that up. The goal for the shorter shows will be 250. Those of you who don't listen live who listen on the podcast or listen on YouTube later, those of you in YouTube, there's still an applause button down there where you can make a financial contribution to the show whenever, so it's like a Super Chat, just you don't get to ask a question, but you at least get to support the show value for value and of course those of you who would like to support the show or you can also become a member on YouTube and next month in December, I will do the first members only show and then you can also support the show of course monthly on Patreon, Subscribestar, Locals and in your own book show dot com slash support. I think those four and if you, those four somehow don't work for you and none of them is acceptable, we can arrange a Venmo as well. Although Venmo is owned by PayPal, so I don't see the, anyway, I will, and if you want to give me crypto, I'll take Bitcoin and Ethereum I guess, as long as you teach me how to sell it immediately and show me how to do it because I don't wanna be stuck with any of it. All right, let's see. All right, so there's an elephant in the room, Michael H. claims, so let's get the elephant in the room out of the way. I hope a bunch of people don't stop listening live once I answer this question, but let's do it so that it doesn't bother you from listening to the rest of the show. This is not the topic of my show, this is, you know, just Michael has asked a super chat question, even though it's only $10, we'll get out of the way quickly so that it is not bothering you, what does you wanna think about what you might say? About the fact that the Daily Wire, the outfit that has today Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson and Matt Walsh and God, every religious conservative on the planet as its host has just bought an option. Now notice, it isn't making Atlas Shrugged, it's bought an option to buy, it's a one year option to buy the right to make Atlas Shrugged. So there are a lot of steps that have to happen between now and then. Oh, and Coke says, don't forget clueless Candace, yes. Of course, there's Candace Owen on there as well. So there's a lot of, so just to explain this to you, they bought an option. What an option says is that they, a year from now, will be able to buy, or anytime during the year, they will be able to buy at a set price the right to make the movie, but they can also walk away from it. They've paid the option price and they can walk away from it. During that year, the rights to make the movie can be sold to anybody else. They have the exclusive option to do this. Why do people do this? Why do they buy an option and don't just buy the right to make the movie? Basically, because they wanna go out, and this isn't a movie, this is a TV series. So this would be a TV series that would be streamed. Why do they buy an option and not outright just buy the right to make a movie? Because the option is cheaper, significantly cheaper, and it gives them time to figure out if they can make it. Can they find a writer? Can they find actors? Do they have the capital? Is this reasonable? Is it gonna make money? A million different things are involved in going from saying I wanna make a movie to actually making it. So first, everybody's blood pressure come down. Nothing's happened yet. Nothing's going to happen anytime soon. Maybe sometime in the next year. We'll take a next step. But options on Iron Rands materials are sold all the time and almost never does a movie actually get made at the end of that. So that's one issue I just wanna resolve in terms of just the process here. The process, there's still a lot of money that a lot of time, a lot of stuff that has to happen between now and an actual TV series. Second, the big concern is, of course, well, these guys are religious conservatives. What kind of a series are they gonna make? Well, probably not a very good one. Certainly not philosophical, right? Philosophically. You know, the series is likely to be likely to focus on, and if you heard the CEO of the Daily Wire talk about this, this is his understanding what the novel is about, and this is what I think they'll focus on. Likely to focus on economic freedom, divorced from any kind of philosophy, any kind of philosophical foundation, any kind of philosophical outlook. This will focus on the evil of socialism, the evil of government intervention, the evil of regulations, the evil of taxes. Who knows, but it will focus on something like that. And the solution to that is, quote, free markets, right? And the gold speech to the extent that there is a speech will be limited to some economic advocacy for a limited government in the realm of economics, and I don't expect more than that. So it's not gonna be a deep movie. It's not gonna be a TV series. It's not gonna be a philosophical TV series, particularly philosophical. I think the heroes will be knocked down a little bit in a sense that it's unlikely that, you know, that it is unlikely that the heroes will be presented as philosophical heroes. I certainly don't think Weirton's whole affair with Dagni and as well as with her wife is going to be presented positively. Again, these religious conservatives, it's unlikely. So it's gonna be a massive mixed bag. And if you expect a philosophically great movie, it won't be. I do think though, that the production values will be good. That the production values will be much higher than the movies. The movies that try to stick with Iron Man's philosophy, but production value is so bad that who cares what the philosophy actually said? I think here the production values will be high. I think Daily Weir won't do, I think they perceive this if they do it as a big deal as their premier product for their streaming channel. And therefore I think they'll invest a lot of money and they'll make this from a production values perspective. I can't tell you if the writing is gonna be good or anything like that, but the writing probably won't be good because they'll be conflicted between free markets and a philosophy they don't agree with. So it will really be focused on, so it really will be high production value, mediocre or bad philosophically, and it will present a free market perspective. You know, Iron Man's wishes for a movie of Atlas Shrugged and I think this applies to TV series will always, that it sells the book and get it done. The quality doesn't really matter. Nobody's gonna be able to do it anyway other than Iron Man, just get it done. That was her perspective. Good perspective, bad perspective, I don't necessarily agree with Iron Man, but that was her perspective. And that I think is the reason why the sale went through. It's a fulfillment of her wishes in that sense. I do think that the one issue the movie makers are likely to stay away from, I hope, and I think that there's good reason to believe that they will, is I don't think they'll try to pretend that Iron Man was religious. I don't think they'll try to pretend that religion is a salvation. I think they'll stay away from that. I think they have enough integrity to stay away from that. I mean, that's a strong statement, but I have reason to think that. We will see, we will see. So, we'll see how that plays out, but that is the real danger. The real danger, the two real dangers here, that the filmmakers make Iron Man out to be a religionist, that is the philosophy behind free markets is some form of religion, or that they make Iron Man out to be a libertarian. And let's hope that neither one of those two things happen. But other than that, let's wait and see. I'm not, I don't know where this goes. I doubt that they will want any kind of philosophical guidance from the people at the Iron Man Institute of a real objectivist. I think they're gonna have a hard time finding a good writer. I think they're gonna have a hard time finding just people to participate in the project that'll be good. I don't think money will be the problem. I think it's just talent will be the problem. Now, we will see, we will see. Maybe I might very well be wrong about all of that. Okay, so now that's off the table, Mike Oak. You can now breathe a big sigh of relief and focus on the actual topic of today. All right, so let's jump into SBFs. This is Sam, SFB, sorry, Sam, something, something. It was a CEO of FTX that just went bankrupt and didn't just go bankrupt, but it is quite evident that fraud was committed, that assets, customer accounts and assets were used in inappropriate ways, that accounts were mingled between FTX and Alameda Research, that customer assets, in spite of being promised that they were there and they were not being used, were clearly being used for speculation by Alameda, who ultimately lost much of it. There's at least $1 billion whole, potentially up to $8 billion of a whole. A lot of customers are gonna lose their money. A lot of the customers are small. A lot of the customers are retail. A lot, some of you might be customers, I don't know. Now, we went through the whole bankruptcy story. We went through about what happened at FTX. We went through about how this kind of financial fraud usually happens kind of in a step-by-step way. And it is interesting that, and today I don't wanna focus on that, what I really wanna focus is on SBF's philosophy and how that relates to altruism and how that relates to pragmatism, because at the end of the day, what SBF is as a pragmatist and pragmatism is kind of what led to exactly this. So we will get to that. Ragnar, thank you. Ragnar just stepped in with $100. I really appreciate that. Let me just see, here it is. Let me see if I can find actual exchange. Yeah. Right, so this is kind of, this was kind of, this is, I first wanna describe, I first wanna go over, like what I told you the process is, you do something small and then you try to cover it up and then you do something small and try to cover it up, but it's all these small steps and suddenly you've got massive fraud on your hands and you don't even know you did it in some sense. I mean, you knew you evaded, you knew every little step was fraudulent, but you never thought it would get out of hand. And I just wanna show you that this is exactly what happened with SBF. So this is the interviewer asked him, this is all happening on Twitter. This is an interview that happens on Twitter and it's been confirmed that this is really SBF answering. And I'll be quoting this interview later as well. The interviewer asked, you tweeted some stuff like, we never invested deposits. That was BS, right? And SBF says, it was factually accurate. Interviewer says, ha, but like the deposits were totally not there or do you just mean technically it was Alameda? FTX correct, he said, it was in Alameda. And the interviewer says, so FTX technically wasn't gambling with their money. FTX was just loaned their money to Alameda who had gambled with their money. So it wasn't FTX gambling, it was Alameda gambling and lost it. And you didn't realize it was a big deal because you didn't realize how much money it was. So SBF says, yeah, he didn't realize how much money it was because all of these were supposedly small transactions. And we'll get to that. There was no zero, zero, literally zero, you know, accounting, monitoring. He says, and also thought Alameda had enough collateral to reasonably cover for it. Again, no accounting and how did he think this and what kind of evasion did he go through? So the interviewer says, I get how you could have gotten away with it, but I guess that seems sketchy even if you get away with it. SBF says, it was never the intention. Sometimes life creeps up on you. And they go on, was that Alameda thing when Loona crashed and SBF says, messy accounting and margin exchange, position buildup over time, though in retrospect Loona crash was a lot to do with it. But messy accounting, I didn't realize full science of it until a few weeks ago. If you could do it all over again, would you just be more careful accounting, never touch customer funds, never go into crypto? SBF says more careful accounting plus off-board Alameda for FTX separate the two once FTX could live on its own. So what he's saying is, I didn't know. I didn't know it was so bad. It creeped up on me. It was all these little steps and everything imploded. And it turns out, it turns out that, I mean, the accounting was pretty unbelievable by any measure of what accounting is. I mean, here's what the CEO who's going through the bankruptcy says about it. And this is a guy who's been around and did the, this is a guy who did the Enron bankruptcy. So he was the lawyer that kind of unwound Enron. And he says, quote, never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. Never in his career. This makes Enron look like nothing, right? That's pretty amazing, pretty amazing. He says, I do not believe it appropriate for stakeholders or the court to rely on the audited financial statements as a reliable indication of the financial circumstances of these companies. So the audits are no good. Now there are at least two maybe more accounting firms that are gonna get into big, big trouble because they audited this and they cleared FTX. Now if you remember Arthur Anderson at the time one of, if not the largest accounting firm in the world went bust because of shoddy auditing. He continues to say, in the Bahamas I understand the corporate funds of the FTX group who used to purchase homes and other personal items for employees and advisors. I understand that there does not appear to be documentation for certain of these transactions as loans. And that certain real estate was recorded in personnel, personal name of these employees and advisors on the records of the Bahamas. And then he says, the debtors did not have the type of disbursement controls that I believe are appropriate for business enterprise. For example, employees of FTX group submitted payment requests through an online chat platform. Can you believe this? A chat platform where a disparate group of supervisors approved disbursements by responding with personalized emojis. So unbelievable. Now one of the lessons learned here and we'll get to the moral lessons in a minute. But one of the lessons learned here and I think is an important business lesson for those of you who wanna go into business those of you who are in a startup those of you who wanna start a business one day or in a startup right now. And I hate to say this because I'm not a fan of this profession but it's crucial. Accounting matters. Let me say that again because I'm a finance guy this is pretty shocking. Accounting matters. Procedures matter. It's a way to keep track. It's a way to record what is going on. Now I don't know that FASB is the right accounting or that the government approved accounting system is the right accounting. It's probably not, not for every company. But accounting matters. It keeps track of where the money is. It allows you to figure out what's going on. I mean, SBF clearly didn't use accounting, didn't believe in accounting, didn't do accounting, didn't look at accounting and therefore didn't know what was going on in its own business. Accounting makes it possible if you'd account to hold, to figure out what's happening to hold people accountable. Now accounting, the reason you know as a finance guy we look down on accounting accounting is about history. And to some extent about the present but it's about history. But history is crucial because history provides you the knowledge of what has happened in the business, what has happened in the company, how much our liabilities, how much debt do we have, who have we loaned money out, who owes us, how much do they owe us, why do they owe us, are they gonna pay it back? And accounting allows you to make people, hold people accountable. Accounting also tells you where the funds are going. Oh, why are people buying homes with the money? Why are people buying personal assets with the money? But if there's no accounting, the money goes wherever and then who knows what the audit is doing? Now there's also, I've been reading a bunch of articles about all the red flags that this presented. And that's a whole other question and I'll get to I think the answer to this question but the whole other question is how did they get away with this? The auditors turned a blind eye to all of this. It's unbelievable that there's audited financial statements when this guy is saying that they all know financial records, really, the emojis. But also, how did investors, sophisticated investors, smart investors, big investors, investors who usually do many rounds of due diligence and interviews and really invest in figuring out if the business is a real business, how did they get conned? How did they invest? I mean, invest billions of dollars. Sequoia Capital alone, something like 250 million. This is a really sophisticated company. How did they do it? Why did they do it? Is it just that they were blinded by the, I don't know what to call it, but the bizarre potential of crypto? Or was it they were blinded by SBF? And part of being blinded by SBF was to be blinded by the perception of, the perception of his quote morality which we'll get to. Okay, Colleen says, I have to answer this question. Colleen says, why aren't you a fan of accountants? Some of us are awesome. Okay, let's be very clear. I love some accountants. I've known some amazing accountants. People working for the institute, the phenomenal, they did an amazing job. I could have run the institute without them. My tax accountant is amazing. I love the guy. Who was my tax accountant when I lived in California? There's some amazing accountants that they call. And I love accountants. Why don't I like accounting? I mean, of course I love accounting. So the reason I, we in finance look down on accounting is because it's just the past. Who cares about the past? We won't focus on the future. What we want is the future. Finance is about making money. And accounting is about how we made money. Well, how we made money is less important than how we're gonna make it in the future. But of course that's not true. None of that is true. In order to make money in the future, you have to understand how you made it in the past. The only way to understand how you make it made in the past is to understand accounting. One of the reasons I say I don't like accounting is because I think that the accounting, many of the accounting rules and regulations are arbitrary. Many of them are dictated by an arbitrary set of ideas that come down from regulations and come down from the fact that all companies have to use FASB accounting instead of having a market to determine what the ideal accounting system would be. I find accounting often frustrating. But so I always, for example, had one column of accrual accounting and another column of cash accounting because I like to see things as cash. And as accrual both. But it's the fact that accounting is backward looking and finance is forward looking. But no, I don't really not like accountants. I love accountants and I love accounting. But in finance, again, the general tendency is to look down on accounting because again, it's backward looking. All right, to Colleen, don't take it personal. Please, please. All right, so let's talk a little bit about Sam. Sam, if I can call it SBF, Sam. It's much easier to call it Sam than SBF. And the whole SBF thing is a little pretentious. How many people go, we should just call me YB? Hey, YB? I don't know, it's just a little weird. So SBF is, and I did it, right? Sam is an interesting character because he is and presented himself as a super intelligent, super intellectual and presented himself clearly as somebody who present a moral front and somebody who presents and argues a moral argument. And somebody who's pursued his career following, at least in his mind, following a particular moral agenda, a particular moral code, a particular moral direction. And that makes him interesting. Now, on top of that, it's interesting that both of his parents are Stanford professors, law professors. It turns out that, I think it's his mother, is a real philosopher of law. I don't know if she has a philosophy degree, but she writes a lot about philosophy of law. She is a utilitarian. She is an explicit moral stand vis-a-vis utilitarianism and advocates for it and is quite engaged in it. It's also true that Sam was heavily influenced by the effective altruist and Oxford philosopher Will McCaskill, who is one of the leading lights in the effective altruism movement. And that McCaskill's views had a profound impact on Sam and on the business, the kind of the direction he took his business and the fact that he even founded his business. I think I said last time Sam got his degree in physics at MIT, so obviously a super smart guy, and he worked for an investment firm, but why didn't he go into investments? I mean, he has somebody who says he's committed to ethics, who's committed to effective altruism. And you would think that somebody in a conventional sense, in the sense in which we understand ethics today, would not go into finance. After all, is a self-interested endeavor is perceived by most of the culture and by most ethicists. It is not productive, again, perceived as such by most ethicists, by most altruists. Finance is just making money off of money and therefore about getting rich and nothing much more than that. It has no quote social value. Sam's original company, the Alameda Research Company, what it did was arbitrage, arbitrage prices of Bitcoin across different exchanges. According to conventional wisdom, not very wise, by the way, arbitrage does not serve any social purpose, it doesn't benefit society, it doesn't benefit people. So why would somebody who is explicitly a utilitarian, explicitly an effective altruist do this? Now, just to give you a sense of effective altruism, effective altruism is the idea that altruism is, that is living for others, others who are being, charity, helping those in need, particularly those who are really in need, the very poor people in Africa, the people who are really suffering, that is your primary moral purpose in life. It's they help, you know, if you could send all your money to Africa, that's what you need to do. So it's helping other people, and your whole moral, ethical orientation is towards helping other people, it's altruism. What is effective about it? Well, it's effective in a couple of senses. One is they're trying to do it well, that is they do a lot of research into which philanthropic organizations are well run, which ones have an actual impact on poverty, which ones actually do a good job with the poor, with the suffering, which ones actually allocate the resources well, or so there's, and there are algorithms and they put a lot of thinking into it, and they do a lot of statistics analysis about this, and they really do a lot of due diligence on figuring out what are those charities, what are those programs that really help the poor the best and we're gonna give money to them. And then they also are very cognizant of the fact that charity is hard for people, that unfortunately people are wired to be immoral, that unfortunately people are wired to be self-interested, and therefore people will not give to charity just freely and openly. So what they encourage people to do is just make it into a habit, turn it into a habit. I mean, the Catholic Church figured this out a long time ago, it's called tithing. And what the effective altruist says is just take a certain percentage of your income every month and just send it to a charity of your choice, a charity that you've chosen based on it being the best, that it being effective. But don't wait, don't trust that you'll think about it, remember it, just do it, just set it up as an automatic transfer every month. And the amount can vary, I think the common amount is 10% tithing, Christianity is everywhere, you can't get away from the church. And just give it 10% every month. So it recognizes kind of quote what they consider human nature, which is not to be altruistic supposedly according to them. And at the same time, it tries to seek the most effective ways of having an impact on the world, on the world. Of course, business to them is not very effective, although I have seen effective altruists consider the idea, huh? Maybe actual business work is the most effective thing to do, right? Maybe business work, maybe business to trade, win-win transactions is the way to really change the world. They're considered that, but they almost never pursue that because for obvious reasons, business is just, it's to win-win, right, for an altruist. You're benefiting from it and that just doesn't seem right for an altruist, the effective altruists struggle with this. I'll give them credit for they at least try to engage with something like this. So given that, given that, what you're supposed to do with your income is figure out the best charities, you're supposed to give, give, give, give until it hurts, give as much as you can, why did SBF go into finance? Why, how is finance legit as a mall endeavor when it's a zero sum in everything we talked about? And this is another aspect of effective altruism, at least according to the way SBF understood it. And I think the way McCaskill, who is kind of after Peter Singer, probably the number two popularizer of effective altruism in the world out there, I think at least it's what McCaskill has suggested in his writings and in his talks, although he is now denying that it is, this is the logic. If you were really smart and you have the ability, then you could go to work for a nonprofit and you would make a difference. But that difference would not be commensurate with what you potentially could do if you went into a different career, like in finance, made a gazillion dollars and then contributed it to the charity. So basically the idea is that you should sacrifice your interests, your passion, what you really wanna do and going to a career, the career, and you should choose that career based on the career where you can make the most money. Because once you make the most money, you can take that money and do, quote, good with it. Now, of course, there's no recognition of fact that making money is itself a good, making money is a sign that you've made an impact on the world, that you've changed the world, although that's questionable in crypto, but usually the idea is you go into a trade, investment banking, crypto, whatever it is, to make as much money as you can so that you could give as much of it away as possible so that you can really have an impact on the world. And SBF claimed this is exactly what he was doing. The reason he went into crypto was to make gazillion dollars and he committed publicly that he was going to give 99% of it away, 99% of it away. This is him, you know, he signed, you know, the Giving Pledge. This is a program initiated by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates that gets billionaires around the world to sign a pledge that they're gonna give at least 50% of their income to charity before they die or when they die or whatever. This is what Bankman Fried wrote in his Giving Pledge. He wrote, quote, a while ago, I became convinced that our duty was to do the most we could for the long-run aggregate utility of the world. And in the case of somebody really, really, really smart, somebody really, really, really smart, that means it's utilitarianism. So it's whatever is good for the world out there. That means making the most money you can. At least that's one interpretation of what it means. And therefore, that's what Sam did. And indeed, he founded, in 2021, he founded the FTX Foundation, which supports causes such as improving animal welfare, fighting global poverty. Animal welfare is a big deal for effective altruism and funded research and projects that would improve humanity's long-term prospects through the foundation's future fund. So there's a future fund that looks at the long-term projects, effective altruism also, claims to be able to predict the long-term problems that the universe or the human beings face and invest in solving those problems. You can't do that through a business, they claim. This is why we invest in charities that think long-term in ways that business can't. So he was actually doing it. He was giving, he gave huge amounts of money to charity. I mentioned last time that he also was very, very, very involved in the Democratic Party and in politics and giving huge amounts of money, all from the same perspective of trying to have an impact on the world for the good. I'm gonna take this super chat question just because it's relevant and it's a good point right now to talk about it. But Doron Regev says, love your show, thanks for what you do. I think effective altruism is a wonderful idea in philosophy, unfortunately humans corrupt everything, Sam. Harris had a good podcast on this. I think everything you just said, thank you for the support Doron and I'm really happy you love the show, but on this show you only get the truth and you only get my perspective on the truth. It's the exact opposite. EA is a horrible idea. An evil philosophy and because it is an evil philosophy, because it is an evil philosophy, humans are corrupted by it and bad things happen. And it's exactly what I wanna talk about today. So this is exactly, I wanna talk about how altruism, effective or otherwise, is corrupting, is destructive, particularly for business people, particularly for people who make money. Any philosophy first, any philosophy that says you, tells you you have a moral obligation to others is, a moral obligation, a moral duty to others is undermining human life. And therefore, bad and wrong, but how does it play out? So imagine you're somebody who has a certain passion, crypto or otherwise, and you go and start a business. And the business makes money and it makes money for you and it makes it possible for you to live a good life. But at the same time, you know that your moral purpose in life, that morality itself is focused on other people, is helping other people. It's about giving to other people. It's about sacrificing to other people. And yet you're having a good time. You're living well. Indeed, morality of altruism would actually tell you that profits are selfish, the pursuit of your own ambition and your own passions are immoral because you should instead be focusing on other people. You should instead be giving, giving, giving till it hurts. So you are living this conflict. You're living a conflict. Altruism creates this conflict. It creates a conflict between your call itself interest even though I don't think it's fully self-interested because I don't think it's necessarily rationally thought out, but it's your instinct, not instinct, your interest in surviving. Your interest in thriving, your interest in having fun, your interest in doing interesting things, your interest in pursuing your passions, your interest in making money. It puts that in opposition to goodness, virtue, morality, and there's a clash. And something has to give. Something has to give. Now what is morality? Morality is an idea of principles. Principles that guide your long-term actions. Principles that guide your long-term actions in pursuit of, quote, the good. So morality is a system of principles that helps you navigate life to achieve good outcomes and avoid evil outcomes. And so it's a crucial part of human life. You cannot have life. You cannot succeed in life. There are some moral guidance. But if that guidance is other-oriented, which is what effective altruism is, it orients your morality to others. It tells you that the good is what's good for others. And therefore the principles by which you live must be oriented towards good for other people, not good for you. So EI is an obligation, Dorne, whether you see it or not. And it's not an informed choice to help others in an effective way. It's a moral obligation to help others in a more effective way. Now, the fact that they put out lists of better charities and worse charities, great. But that's not what it's about. That's not the moral basis of it. That's not the life guidance that it's providing. All you have to do is read Peter Singer and read MacAskill to see that. You need to structure your entire life according to effective altruism in pursuit of these charities and the good of other people. And look, we all want to be good and we all need guidance. Life is complicated. We all believe that goodness is a good thing. So we have a choice as business people. We can either be good or we can be good business people. But at the end of the day, deep down we know if you're an altruist, effective or otherwise, that you can't be both. You can't be both. So it's either morality. It's either morality or it's profit. And morality here is the morality of altruism, the morality of otherism, but it also includes as part of that kind of the standard code of morality. Don't lie. Don't cheat. Don't deceive your investors. All those things partially because you wanna be able to help other people. So when you give up morality, what you really give up, and it's not that they think, oh, I shouldn't be wrong. It's that practically in order to make a profit, they realize that they can't be consistent with their morality, so it gives slowly. And what they adopt is pragmatism. What they adopt is a view of look. Everything I do is immoral. So the real question is, can I get away with it? Or what really matters? What really matters is success. I don't need principles for success. Principles, but if I followed principles, I'd have no business. If I followed principles, I wouldn't pursue profit at all. If I followed principles, then there is no business. There is no profit. There is no income. There is no pursuing my passion. There is no living a great life. I now wanna live a good life. So they chuck altruism, but they don't just chuck altruism. They chuck principles altogether because they don't have a morality that's an alternative to altruism. There's altruism and there's pragmatism. And pragmatism is the idea that principles don't matter. That you can't plan long-term anyway, so why think about the long-term? That principles ain't effective. So just do what works. Do what works in the short run. Whatever you can get away with is okay. Now, of course, nobody will actually admit to actually holding that kind of perspective, but that's a perspective I think that many businessmen hold. And that is the kind of perspective that every businessman I know of who's committed fraud, this kind of fraud, held. And in Sam Beckman-Freed's case, this is exactly the perspective he has. He tells everybody morality is important. He tells everybody morality is crucial and that we are going to be a moral company and I am doing this for future generations and I am doing this to sacrifice for everybody else, but he also knows that none of that is true. He's pursuing this because he loves the money. He's pursuing this because he's having fun. He's pursuing this because he wants a productive activity. He's pursuing this once and make a profit, but morally he's supposed to be divorced from all that. Morally he's doing this just to benefit humanity, but that's impossible. You can't actually hold in your mind a position where I need to really sacrifice, but I'm having fun so I'm gonna make a lot of money. It doesn't work, something you have to give up either they're making a lot of money or the moral beliefs. And you don't completely give them up, you just compromise with them and compromise with them and compromise with them until you become a full-fledged pragmatist and do whatever's expedient at the moment. And if you listen to Fried's interviews, it's exactly what happened. Now of course the alternative, as I think you know, is a morality of rational egoism and that's for another time to describe that, but there is an alternative, there's a morality that actually says your duty is to yourself or your duty is the wrong word, but your responsibility is to yourself, your responsibility is to your own life, your responsibility is to your own flourishing and ultimately to your happiness. Your responsibility is to follow morality, but morality is a code of values and a code of principles to guide your life towards success or it's flourishing towards success, not towards defeat. But rational egoism is not known, not practiced, not discussed, not debated, not advocated for by anybody really, other than Ironman. It's certainly not a presence in the culture. So somebody like SBF, when they think about morality, all they have is altruism or all, you know, well that's the excuse anyway. Now again, so they have altruism, but they don't because altruism is not practical. So let me say that again, altruism, effective or not, is not practical. You cannot actually live your life based on altruism. Altruism is the philosophy of death, not a philosophy of life. How much should I sacrifice to others? More and more and more, I'm still alive, other people are still suffering. I'll have to sacrifice everything. The logic of altruism is a logic of death. The logic of altruism is anti-life. Effective altruism doesn't change that. It just tries to make it more efficient, but it's still the logic of death. It's still the logic of anti-life. And therefore, people rebel against it. And what happens then is you become cynical. What happens then is you use morality for PR purposes. What happens then is you pretend to yourself that you're good while you're doing bad things, while you're doing things that you can get away with. A whole concept of morality, including the good parts of morality, be honest, don't cheat, go out the window. And this is exactly what happened with FCPF. So for example, this is from the interview. The interviewer says, I've started putting together a picture where you don't believe anyone is doing anything for good reasons. You don't believe the good guys are good. So why not make it a big, why not make it big and then be the ones who get to decide what good is. And if you have to do sketchy stuff along the way, everyone else is doing it too, and plenty of them are worse, and people still like them as long as they win. And he says, FCPF says, what we're left with at the end of the day is only the rich can inest, invested. I don't know what inest means, but only the rich are players, right? Only they can make or lose money. And there's some truth to it, but it's also true that I didn't want to do sketchy stuff. Of course not, he had this moral thing in the back. There are huge negative effects from it, and I didn't mean to do sketchy stuff. Each individual decision seemed fine, and I didn't realize how big their sum was until the end. This is typical of pragmatism, because there's no principle. It's like every lie I told was a little lie. It didn't seem to have a lot of consequence, it's just a little lie, and then another little lie, and then only when I looked at the whole confluence of lies that I see, oh wow, that's a big thing. But this is not according to what Durant said, humans corrupt everything. I mean, all there is is humans. Humans can't corrupt everything, and look at human achievement to know that that's just not true, that humans corrupt everything. This is Sam Harris' malevolent view of the world. Humans don't, humans are what there is. You deal with human beings as they are, and you have to have a judgment about human beings. See, if there's a system that says this is morality, but human beings, there's something different. They don't matter, well, where does this morality come from? Shouldn't morality fit what human beings are? If human, well, this morality is good for aliens, that we invent for the Borg, well, but that's irrelevant because we're dealing with human beings. Sam Harris should know this, because Sam Harris knows that morality doesn't come from a God, doesn't come from some spiritual mystical thing. So morality has to come from nature, the nature of what? The nature of human beings. So if we don't get the nature of human beings right, we're not gonna get morality right. One of the big issues in altruism, that they don't really think about the nature of human beings when they think about morality, they take Christianity as is, Sam Harris certainly does this, he takes the morality of Christianity and then rationalizes it, doesn't challenge it, doesn't question it, doesn't bring in the question of what are human beings and what is an appropriate morality for human life? It's not what he does. He just, and in that sense, he's a Christian, in a weird kind of way, right? The ultimate altruist, when it comes to morality as a Christian. Let me just find this other, so this is continuing the conversation he was having. I was just listening to a conversation we had this summer about whether you should do unethical shit for the greater good. SBF says, what did I say? You were like, no, don't do unethical shit. Like if you're running Philip Morris, no one's going to want to work with you on philanthropy. Huh? SBF says, and there's a risk of doing more harm than good, but even if you subtract that out, pretty not worth it. Yeah. I was trying to figure out if that was kind of PR off the cuff answer. SBF says, man, all the dumb shit I said, it's not true, not really. So here's the question. In a utilitarian world where you're trying to maximize utility for others, not yourself, is it okay for you to do unethical things if other people benefit from it? And in the previous interview, SBF had said, no, at the end of the day, me doing unethical things will make it impossible for me to help other people. So it's not good, even from a utilitarian perspective. And now he's saying, man, all the dumb shit I said, it's not true, not really. Yeah, I thought you might not be. So SBF goes on. Everyone goes around pretending that perception reflects reality. It doesn't. Some of this decade's greatest heroes will never be known and some of its most beloved people are basically shams. So the interviewer says, see, kind of don't believe in like, quote, doing ethical shit as anything other than a judgment we bestow upon the losers. SBF says a month ago, CZ, CZ is the guy who runs Binance was a walking example of don't do unethical shit or your money is worthless. Now he's a hero. Is it because he's virtuous or because he has a bigger balance sheet? And so he won. And you see, there's the pragmatism. What matters is the big balance sheet. What matters is expediency. Morality doesn't matter. Pragmatism is cynicism, right? Morality doesn't matter. What matters is the big balance sheet because the big balance sheet can do stuff and the small balance sheet cannot. So the interviewer says, so the ethics stuff mostly affront people will like you if you win and hate you if you lose and that's how it's all really works. Notice also, by the way, the second-handedness, right? What matters is what people think of you. What matters is perception, not ethics, but perception. So again, the question is ethics stuff mostly affront people will like you if you win and hate you if you lose and that's how it all really works. And SBF says, yes. I mean, that's not all of it, but it's a lot. The worst quadrant is sketchy plus lose. That's the worst thing. The best is win plus sketchy or not, he has question marks. Clean and lose is bad, but not terrible because you at least stayed clean. But winning is implied by this, whatever. And he says, you're really good at talking about ethics for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers. And SBF says, yeah, I had to be. It's what reputations are made of. To some extent, I feel bad for those who got fucked by it, but this dumb game we woke Weston as play where we say all the white shibals and so everyone likes us. And that's the virtue signaling. So at some point, the pragmatists knows that he has to pretend to be a good guy. He has to pretend to have ethics even though he knows deep down that he has none because other people matter. So he virtue signals, he says the right things, he does the right things, he gives to the right charities, he has the right friends. Notice that what matters is other people, both in terms of who he sacrifices to, who he gives to, but also in terms of how people perceive him. That's what matters, not his own perception of himself, not what he actually does, not whether he's living a good life or not, not whether he's pursuing his own values or not, whether those values are rational or not. What matters is others, others in terms of sacrifice, but others also in terms of perception. That's all that matters. You are empty, you are nothing, you are meaningless. This is effective altruism. This is the impact it has. This is the result it has. This is the result. It must have. Altruism is other-centered. And other-centered ultimately leads to other being other-centered in everything in your life. Everything in your life. As Ben says, this sounds, Ben in the chat says, this sounds like James Taggart and his friends. Absolutely, absolutely. This is the villains of Atlas Shrugged. And you know, people say, oh, there are no people like that really. And here it is. Sam is exactly one of those villains. What will others think of me? I have to say the right things. I have to do the quote right things, but I don't have to be moral, not really. I just have to say the right things. Not even by the morality of my own, by the standards that I claim to uphold, I don't have to really be moral because I can't be, nobody can be moral. Nobody can actually be an altruist. Not consistently. I mean, you can be an altruist, but you can't be consistently an altruist. You can't be an altruist all the way. You have to compromise somewhere and that compromise keeps creeping and keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And I'm not gonna compromise on what I say or how much charity I give up because how people look at me are compromised on honesty, are compromised on things like that. So I thought this was a great real life example of the way altruism becomes pragmatism. A great real life example of virtue signaling as a pragmatist, which is what pragmatists do because if you say, no, no, no, I believe in, I'll do whatever it takes. I'll get away with whatever I can get away with. I mean, the only pragmatist I know who says it, who says it that way, is Donald Trump. If I win, and by the way, Sam sounds like Trump. Trump's whole attitude is if I win, it doesn't matter how I win. It doesn't matter what I did to win. It doesn't matter what lies I told to win. The only thing that matters is that I win. It's interesting for a loser, that's an interesting perspective. Sam is basically saying the same thing. What matters is winning or losing. Everything else is just pretence. Everything else is just a facade. Everything else is virtue signaling. Everything else is just virtue signaling. No, Sam hates Trump. And that's pragmatism. And that's what, you know, in the case of some people like Trump, I think altruism is just, you know, he was always a pragmatist and I don't think he pretends to be model. Sam started out, committed, I think, to these ideas of effective altruism, thought it was a great idea, played with it, had held it in his mind, funded books about it, and then tried to embrace it, discovered the contradiction, abandoned altruism for pragmatism, but continued to virtue signal altruism throughout. That's my story about Sam. And for now, I'm sticking to it. All right, let's see. Good, I hope you found it interesting and valuable. I think it is. I think the more you understand what altruism is, the more important, the more you will appreciate the alternative, the real alternative, and Rand's alternative, which is egoism, a proper understanding of egoism. I think the more you think about altruism and you identify it's evil, and again, don't buy into people having effective altruism or rational altruism or any altruism. Altruism, altruism is evil. It is the force that is destroying the world. It is the force behind statism, behind nationalism, behind socialism, behind communism, behind fascism. It is the excuse for murder. It is the excuse for war. It is the excuse for the most horrible things a man has ever done. Altruism is the enemy. It is the source of all of our problems, all of our problems. So we should reject altruism in every single form. Your purpose in life is to live. That doesn't mean you don't, and let me just be clear here. Altruism does not mean helping other people. Altruism does not mean being charitable. Altruism does not mean making the world a better place. Indeed, capitalism makes the world a better place better than altruism. Self-interest makes the world a better place better than altruism. Altruism means self-sacrifice. That's what it necessitates. It means being selfless. It means ignoring your own values. It means ignoring your own well-being. It means helping other people at the expense of you. Why do that even a little bit? Why hurt yourself even a little bit? Why move away from life and towards death even a little bit? You can be charitable and an egoist at the same time, but you better know why you're being charitable. It better be rational. You better will have figured out what are the benefits to you and to the world in which you live for you, for the charity that you do. Charity is not being kind. It's not opening doors to old women. It's not helping an old woman across the street. It's not caring about the poor. That's not what altruism means. It means otherism. It means your all entire moral orientation in life is towards the well-being of other people. So it's really, really important we use these terms right. So again, there's no such thing as balance between life and death. There's no such thing as a balance between poison and healthy food. Life should be pursued consistently. And if you find that charity is consistent with your pursuit of life, do charity. If you find work even on profit consistent with human life, I did, then do it. If you find helping your neighbor when he's in trouble, consistent with your life, do it. But to do things that hurt your life, to do things that get you closer to death, to do things that get you closer to self-destruction, to give up stuff for no benefit to you, that's just moving towards death and that's evil, that's wrong. Why would you do that? So there is no such thing as balancing otherism with egoism. It's either you or them. Now we know that if it's you, then what do you wanna do? You wanna trade with people. You wanna create values and trade. And that trade benefits other people. We know that we as individuals, because we value life and because we value our own life, we value life, are very charitable and very benevolent towards other people, not all other people. Some people I won't help, won't help. Some people I'm happy to help. It depends. And I'm not sending money to Africa. I don't care how good the charity is. Plenty of issues I can deal with right here at home that are relevant to my life. Africa is not very relevant to my life. Sad as it is what's going on over there. I would not give a dime to a charity that invested in Africa unless it was an ideological charity because it's far removed from me. But effective altruism is not about its altruism. They wanna pretend that it's all nice, it's about choosing the best, but that's not. That's just the effective part. But what about the altruism part? What about the question of whether you should even give to charity? Is charity, quite charity, worthwhile doing? And how do you discern it by what standard? All right, now, again, let me encourage everybody because I know there are a lot of you who haven't read Iron Man. And I wanna encourage you all to read Iron Man. And it's really, really important that you read Iron Man. Not for me. I mean, it is for me too. And not for the world. It is for the world too. But for you. I think the most egoistic thing you could do, the most pro-life thing you could do is go read Iron Man. The virtue of selfishness, the whole book, essays about different aspects of what it means to be egoistic and what altruism means. Of course, Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead, Fountainhead is a great illustration of what egoism actually means. And what an Atlas Shrugged think about the character of Reardon and see how altruism, in a sense, eats at him. In spite of it being such a courageous moral character. So yeah, please go out there and read Iron Man. All right, I think, let me just take a few questions that might be relevant in the 20 plus category to this discussion. Jennifer says, might some people mistakenly think pragmatism is useful because they think they are taking context into account? That's not pragmatism. Pragmatism is a philosophical system and a particular approach that people take. You can see it again in kind of the statements. Again, I think the most explicit pragmatist I've ever seen anyway is Trump. It's the approach of, as long as I can get away with it, it's the approach of, it doesn't matter, expediency, short termism, lack of any principle. And the idea of getting stuff done, the idea of taking context into account and getting stuff done is more being practical. And being practical is fine. There's nothing wrong with being practical. Being practical is not a philosophical agenda. It's not an approach to the world that down it's being practical is getting stuff done, but getting stuff done not necessarily just in short run, in the long run, it's taking reality and facts into account. To be pragmatic is to avoid principle. To be pragmatic is to avoid the long term, on principle, if such a thing is possible. So I think a lot of people use pragmatism in the wrong sense. A lot of people use pragmatism innocently, but that's what pragmatism actually means. As the pragmatic philosophers who are almost all American, Dewey James, couple of others whose name I can't remember, but Dewey and James are certainly among the most important of the pragmatic philosophers. Remember that Dugan, when I did that show on Dugan, the Russian philosopher, of all the philosophers, modern philosophers, the ones he really liked with American pragmatists, and there's a reason for that. Mr. Matt says the detail surfacing from the story also seemed to highlight the problem of cronyism. One example, SBF has been meeting with SEC Chairman Gary Gensler while running a Ponzi scheme. Would love to hear your thoughts. Yeah, I mean, there's no question that this has a lot to do with cronyism. Of course, again, lack of principle on both sides here. But not just with Gensler, and there's a real question of whether there was, he was bribing any of the regulators, Gensler. There's some questions being raised around that. But more broadly, SBF spent a lot of time with politicians, a lot of times lobbying, I'm always suspicious, always suspicious, of politicians that spend a lot of time, sorry, a businessman who spent a lot of time lobbying. I think it's a sign that something is very, very, very wrong with the businessman. Something that often, Enron, the guys at Enron, spent a lot of time lobbying, a lot of time lobbying. Now, notice here too that SBF, here's what SBF has to say about this lobbying. Let me just find what he says about lobbying. So this is the interview again. You said a lot of stuff about how you wanted to make regulations, just good ones. Was that pretty much just PR2? SBF says, there's no one really out there making sure good things happen and bad things don't. Usually there's only one toggle, do more, do less. Yeah, what I said was just PR, fuck regulators. They make everything worse. They don't protect customers at all. So the interview says, does it seem like some kind of consumer protection would be good though? Like maybe regulators can't deliver it, but sure it does look like customers lose their shirts a bunch. SBF says, agree on both, it would be good, but regulators can't do it. And the interview says, and you couldn't do it. And CZ sure isn't doing it, so who? SBF says, they can't actually distinguish good and bad. This is regulators. Just do more business or do less business. And put up more modes versus put up fewer modes. No one will. But you want to know the truth? No one's doing it in the rest of finance either. Or for that matter, other areas that are regulated. The FDA isn't helping, the giant crackdown on big tech has no point, the goal, the philosophy behind it. OFAC, that's the office of foreign stuff, is slowly undermining US interests globally and is the single biggest threat to US being a superpower, which is BS. ESG has been provoked beyond recognition. So you can see here that even his lobbying for regulation was from a cynical perspective. From a cynical perspective. Which is, again, this is what altruism leads to. See, altruism leads the cynical perspective of human nature. Altruism leads the cynical perspective of human beings. Because if you set yourself up with a morality that's impossible to live by, or if you set up with a morality that is painful to live by, that is if morality equals pain, which is what Christian morality is, morality equals pain, then you become cynical. And what you discover is you can't live by that because you don't want to feel pain. So you're cynical about morality, which used to be cynical about human beings. This is Sam Harris. He believes whether he'll admit it or not that morality equals pain. He doesn't want to live through pain. He's rational enough not to want to live through pain. He sees people around him, none of them are living with the pain that involves altruism. So what does he do? He gives up not on altruism. No, you never question altruism. Nobody ever in our culture questions altruism. This is why I say they're all Christians. They don't question it. They take it on faith. So what do they do? They don't question altruism. They question human nature. And that's exactly his comment before the Doron told us, right? Humans corrupt everything. Altruism is beautiful. Humans corrupted because they can't live by it. If only they were willing to sacrifice. If only they were willing to suffer. If only they were willing to put their interests of other people above their own. They're not these selfish, horrible human beings. So out goes human nature. Human beings are corrupt. The morality, ooh, that's beautiful. That's perfect. That's wonderful. God gave it to us. Not in Sam Harris's perspective. It's somehow we got it. That's just right there. Don't question it. It's good. Humans, that's the problem. Now there has to be something wrong there because morality is a guide to human life. If human beings can't follow the morality, isn't the morality the problem? Isn't the morality a problem if human beings can't follow it? Of course the morality is the problem. All right, I'm getting all excited, but that's good. This is good stuff. Doron says, thank you again for clearing this up. I hope I helped clear it up. Whoops, I clicked on the wrong button. Thank you again for clearing this up. I always learned something new when I listened to your show. Thank you Doron, I really appreciate it. I also just bought all of Rand's books. Keep up the great work. Good, so read the books and then we can have, we'll follow this up as you're reading with questions that come up from it. But I think you'll find that reading the book will change your life. Because it's so different. It's so revolutionary. It's so challenging to everything else out there. It's so challenging to the Sam Harris conventionality. Sam Harris is conventional. Let's see, we got tons of super chats. So if we could limit from now on super chats at $20 or more, just because there's so many it's gonna be really difficult for me to get all through all of them today. But thanks everybody. Rob says, awesome show, thank you Rob. And Richard says, just to celebrate the first time I was available for a live show, I had to run to the store. So you're grocery shopping with me now, okay? Yeah, it's cool. Thank you, thank you Richard, really appreciate it. All right, let's see. Let's see. We've got a Dave Goodman $100 question and then we'll go to the 50s and then the 20s and then we'll go to the column with the 10s. We've already, thank you Dan, thank you Daniel. We've now surpassed 650, our goal for today. So thank you guys. All right, Dave Goodman says, do you think most people are vibrating at a lower frequency? I don't know what that means. This is why they cannot resonate with objectivism. To resonate with the sense of exaltation and capacity for reverence, where it presents, your psyche has to be already be vibrating at a particular frequency. I don't know that anything vibrates anyway. Well, some things do. But I don't think that's it. I think there's something to what you're saying in the sense that to respond to Iron Man's hero worshiping, you have to have something in you that already wants heroes, that admires heroes that is gonna respond to those heroes. It's not an issue of frequency. It's an issue of sense of life. It's an issue of the basic foundations, the basic formulations, the basic ideas that you have established for yourself. The conclusions you have come to in your life about the world, about yourself, the shape, your soul. And most people either don't have a soul or have a pretty, I'd say, poor, diminished, uninteresting soul. And therefore they don't respond to heroes. They don't respond to Iron Man's characters. They don't respond to heroic actions. Life is just dull because they are dull. So I don't view it in terms of frequency, but in terms of this, what kind of soul do you have or if you have one at all? And I think a lot of people have a soul that is incompatible with heroism. Incompatible with achievement. It's just cynicism all the way down. And you see that reflected in our culture. So it's very easy for our children to become cynical because that's the culture in which they brought up. That's the cartoons that they watch, the movies they watch, the TV series they watch, and most of the people around them, including their parents often. All right. Let's see, Liam has a two-part question. Part one, when to end a friendship is so tricky. Especially if you've been friends for decades. You just feel a duty to overlook injustices so you don't have to make hard decisions to burn the bridge. I ended a friendship with someone over politics due to their constant attacks of Iron Man. While I enjoy hanging out with a person to an extent to attack such a life-changing, profound values, objectivism, I will not sanction. I agree, Liam. I mean, that would certainly be one of my standards for ending a friendship. If somebody attacks my values, I would end a friendship. Iron Man being a primary one at that. To attack anyone of my values, I think is, any significant value would be somebody attacks my wife would be a reason to end a friendship. Somebody attacks my, I don't know, my livelihood. Somebody, anything like that. Somebody challenges your values, your nature, who you are, what you are, diminishes you. It's a reason to end a friendship. There are a lot of reasons, unfortunately, that people give you to end friendships. On the other hand, friendships are really, really valuable and precious and you don't want to end them gratuitously. You don't want to end them for no reason. I quote, thank you for the support, really appreciate it. So, but it is true that there's, that they are, when somebody is challenging or somebody is attacking, when somebody's diminishing, the things that are most important to you, the most important values to you, then yes, there's no alternative but to end those kind of friendships. Recognizing the enormous value that friendship is. So you don't want to do it unless there's really good reason. But again, if somebody is dishonest, if somebody is dishonest, you know, I've had friends who have said irrational things, who have said things I don't understand, I don't get, I've forgiven and forgiven and forgiven, but the reality is that once they start spouting irrational stuff, it's just a question of time before they can do more and more and more and they become more and more irrational and if you challenge them on the irrational stuff and they don't completely retract it or they, so, you know, if anything, I probably should have cut our friendships earlier. I probably tend to wait longer than I should in cutting our friendship because friendship is such a high value that I want to give them as much benefit as a doubt as possible. But in almost all cases, once they start down a path of immorality, once they start a path of dishonesty or a path of deception or, you know, then it's just too late and by that point, you just have to cut it off. All right, thank you, Liam. Let's see other $50 questions. James says, no matter how vicious and evil our intellectuals are, I believe that they are certain levels of authoritarianism and poverty. People in the West will always find unacceptable. That's why we see these pushbacks against CRT, woke and Trumpism. I think that's still the case. I think there's still a sense among most people that they want to live well, they want to be successful, they want to achieve something, they like money, and they like, more importantly, more fundamentally, they like freedom at least to some extent. So they're not quite willing to give all that up and just, you know, embrace communism, embrace fascism, embrace some other form of authoritarianism. Indeed, I think that we're gonna become authoritarian not because kind of incrementally and somebody will then capitalize on a crisis and tell us he's the only way to get us out of the crisis. But yes, I think there is something in people there's a sense of life that is still pro-values, pro-success that is not quite willing to roll over to the authoritarian's completely. At the margin, yes, but not completely. And that's what recently has been leading to the far left losing and the far right losing. And I think overall that's good. Now because there's a solution there, but because it buys us time to offer the world a solution, to move the world towards a solution. So right now it's all about buying time and neither the far right or the far left winning is what will buy us time, what will buy us time right now. Thanks, James. Let's see, Dan says, oh, this is cool. Recently met a young guy, Joey, from New Hampshire. Five years ago, he was Gung Ho Teenage Libertarian Activist. He listened to Iran Brooke and now he's an ARI supporter and a student at ARU, Ayn Rand University. Thank you, Iran. Oh, wow. I love these stories. It's fantastic. And I love converting libertarians into objectivists, conservatives into objectivists, leftist into objectivists, anybody into objectivists. Doron is next. We're slowly moving people in the right direction. This is the goal. I was in, so the guy who organized the event in Costa Rica, David, who organized the event in Costa Rica is a businessman. 40s, 50s. And he discovered Iran Brooke Show pretty much by accident and started listening to Iran Brooke Show. And because of that, started reading Ayn Rand. And now it's like a committed objectivist running organizing conferences, spending money on conferences and bringing me to Costa Rica to do stuff, right? All because he listened to the show and spiraled from there to Ayn Rand and Objectivism. And then I'm in Mexico City at the conference and this guy comes up to me, young guy, and he says, you know, again, I happened upon the Iran Brooke Show. And because of that, I've read Ayn Rand and I'm an objectivist now. And it's all because I listened to Iran. So yes, I am single-handedly changing the world. And I love it. And I'm doing it for completely and utterly self-interested reason. No altruism here. I love doing this if you haven't noticed and I love meeting people who've been impacted. I had lunch today with John. John is in Puerto Rico on his way for a vacation in the British Virgin Islands. And he stopped by and we had coffee. And it was great. And again, he loves Iran Brooke Show. He's become much more of an objectivist because of it and really dedicated to studying objectivism. And here we are. Richard said, I was a neoconservative libertarian Catholic. Neoconservative libertarian Catholic. That's good. And you can't be a neoconservative anti-libertarian. We can talk about the differences but you cannot be a neoconservative anti-libertarian. Catholic you can be with either one of those. Seven years ago, an objectivist friend in college and Iran helped convert me. I've never looked back. Thanks Iran and thanks Conor. All right, Richard. So we're having an impact guys. We're really having an impact. So it's exciting. I hope you're excited. I'm excited because this is only going to grow. And it's not about subscribers because the subscribers grow at whatever pace the subscribers go. But it's you guys. It's the guys whose mind to be changed. And a lot of people, in a sense, graduate from the Iran Brooke Show and they go to Iran University and they get busy. And there were a lot of graduates of the Iran Brooke Show out there. And then look at how many people they are here. We're only going to grow in influence. And ultimately, that will also show up in the numbers here. But it's already out there in the world had a profound impact on people's lives. All right, Michael. In your discussion with Malice, you said force and science are not marketable. Not marketable. I understand why force is not market good. Oh, in that sense, it's not a market good. But why not science? The combination of science and business is what gives us prosperity. Yes, but first you have to have the science. Science in and of itself, truth in science is not determined by the market. Truth to science is ultimately determined by reality. The value of science is not determined by the market. It's determined by other scientists, by really smart people who understand the science. They understand what's true and what's not. It's determined by an individual human mind who's capable of understanding the science and connecting it to reality. It's not determined by democratic vote. It's not determined by people trading in it. There's no market in science. So it's a different mechanism. Let's assume peer-reviewed journal was a good thing, right? And reflected, because I think it can be a good thing. And it's just been provoked and distorted by scientists. But peer-reviewed journals are not determined by market processes. You submit a journal, you submit an article, people review it, they submit the reviews, they say thumbs up, thumbs down, no good, good. But that's not a market process where I can buy truth. Let me buy that article. That's going to make it legit. No, that's not how it works. So in that sense, science is not a market good. It's not a market phenomena, not a market in the sense of price signals and buying and selling. It's different signals. It works through a different mechanism. So does the law. So does truth in the law, right? And that's why I reject anarchism. OK, PB says my adult friend recently left his wife kids. Shared friends, including his ex-wife, argue he should be shunned. Well, I think there's room to support him in determining his values. What is the objective issue here? Oh, absolutely. He shouldn't be shunned. I mean, it depends why he left his wife. I mean, is he rational? Is he irrational? Is he on a cocaine binge? Is he just falling out of love with his wife and wants to pursue something else and has really tried and to make it work and it just doesn't work and he can't do it? You shouldn't sacrifice, pursue your values. The fact that you marry somebody, even if you have kids with them, does not put you in a position where you are now in dengent servitude to them or you're committed and you have to be with them for the rest of your life. If you change your mind, if you're rational about it, you change your mind, then so be it. Nathan says, can you provide an update on the war in Ukraine? A quick one. I'll do more of that next week when I do the newsy kind of shows. But basically, one Ukraine is going Ukraine's way. Gerson, I just saw pictures of the first train from Kiev running straight to the southern city of Gerson and the celebration at its arrival in the city. The Russians are hunkering down on the territory they still occupying, they still occupy a significant amount of territory of Ukraine. They're hunkering down for defensive action. But there's no indication that they're going to make any progress and move forward. There was this air missile that hit Poland and everybody was all excited about it. This is Russia attacking or then they said, no, it's not Russia attacking, it's a Ukrainian missile. So therefore Russia, the whole arguments around this was stupid. But basically nothing has really happened, particularly in Ukraine since last time I talked about it about a week ago. There is still a lot of war left, unfortunately, and winter is coming. So very little will happen in the next few months, I suspect, as the ground gets frozen and the snow comes into the ground, particularly with the snow, it becomes mushy, it's hard to move, it's hard to attack. Now I think the Ukrainians have better winter equipment than the Russians do. But it's still going to be hard for the Ukrainians to advance much. And then the spring is terrible because the spring is muddy, the snow melts, the ice melts, and everything becomes mud. So we might not see real progress until we see the summer, the summer where the ground hardens again after the snow melts. But anyway, I'll talk more about Ukraine as the week progresses. Mr. Matt, the details surfacing from this story also seem to be highlighted in the problems of cronyism. Yes, we talked about this already. Absolutely. Richard says, I'm not an expert on crypto, but I know a fair bit about it. But I really don't get NFTs. Why pay a million dollars for a virtual picture of a monkey? What makes it valuable other than speculation is this tulip mania 2.0? I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of tulip mania in it. But look, let's say there's a particular image that's particularly beautiful, and you love, and you want to own it. The fact that it's digital versus on the wall, what differences it make, you can project it on the wall. And imagine that they're giving you exclusivity. You will be the only person in the universe to have this image and to have the property right to this image, and be able to project it on your wall. Nobody else is allowed to do that. You have a property right to it. Then maybe it's worth something. You do own it. You own that particular digital image of it. Nobody else can use a digital image of that thing. That's my understanding of an NFT. An NFT is just a property right over an image of something. Reed says, I don't understand what NFTs are. So that's always possible. OK, so Reed says I don't know what I'm talking about. John Wayne says I don't know what I'm talking about. So it sounds like I don't know what I'm talking about. So the consensus is, anyone can use the image. It just says you own the token to the image. Well, if anybody can use the image, then it's dumb and stupid. But there has to be some exclusivity here. That is, the token is meaningless unless there's some form of exclusivity here, unless that token represents something that is rare, that is non-duplicatable. If anybody can use the image in any way, then no. I think it's a declaration of ownership. The token represents the fact that you own it. But it's a representation of ownership. The token gives you ownership for it. That's my understanding. Again, if there's no ownership involved and there's no exclusivity involved, then it's just a scam. There's nothing there. Richard says, I'm a student with one year left in school. What are the best ways to surround myself with beauty and heroic art? Sometimes it's hard to find the time to read, although it can be hard. So yes, reading is really cheap in a way you can read about heroes. And it's a great way to do it. But you can buy posters. You can find art you really love. And buy a poster and put it up on the wall. I've always had posters on my wall since I left home. I don't always today look back and like the art that I like back then. But whatever you like, whatever you conceive as is beautiful at the time, use that. You can arrange your living conditions in a comfortable, pretty, beautiful way. Again, in the context of what you know you can do. So it's within your budget. You can listen to great music. You can have, you can spend time listening to music. You can put some flowers on the desk. You can buy something pretty that doesn't cost a lot of money. Flowers don't cost a lot of money. You can have a plan. I mean, it really depends on your values. But within your budget, find things that make your environment more beautiful. The sculpture costs more than most people's have a budget for art. But that poster costs, the frame costs a lot of money. But the poster costs 20 bucks, maybe. So get a 20-buck poster. Richard says to clarify, I was a neoconiform policy in the libertarian and economic social issues. Well, I don't think you were really, I don't know if you were really a neoconiform policy. I mean, neocon means something. And people use it in a way that's not untrue. He says, I enjoy my career a lot, but I find myself very drawn to intellectual activism. How do I know if I should pursue an intellectual career? Your career is law. You're a law student. I thought you were a law student. You could do public policy law. You could join something like IJ Institute for Justice or Pacific Legal Foundation and combine the two, combine the intellectual activism with the law if I remember right that you're a law student. So yeah, I mean, I would say that is one way to do it. But partially, if you're studying law now, go and start on law and see if you like it. On the other hand, you could take a gap year, take a year off after law school, go study full time at the Einren Institute, at Einren University, try to see if that kind of intellectual life that some of the scholars there engage in is of interest to you. We have some lawyers who work at the Einren Institute. Augustina is somebody who finished a law degree and ultimately became an intellectual at the Institute. You can talk to Augustina about what it's like to work at the Institute and why she left law. So a lot of things you can do to gain more information about and so that you can make the right career choice. All right, let's see. Woo, I'm tired. And now 45 minutes. And I'm very passionate today, so a lot of energy consumed. All right, we've got a bunch of two, 10, 5, $6 questions, which I'm going to run through. I will do this fairly quickly. Richard says $20 questions. I can't ignore it. Yes, I'm a law student. I think the things I find more interesting are scholarly work, research, and teaching. I also like the intersection between law and economics. I look into Einren University. Thank you, Iran. But also, I would look into Institute for Justice, Pacific Legal Foundation, and the work that they do because you could find there a really interesting intersection between your ideas and kind of legal activism. All right, Harper Campbell says, John Peterson recently said masturbation is immoral because instead of engaging in pair bonding, you are now bonding with yourself. This strikes me as rationalizing a hatred of pleasure. I think you're absolutely right. But look, if the alternative was, should I have sex with my wife? No, I'm going to go masturbate. Then I would say, yeah, something's a little weird going on there if you'd prefer masturbating on having sex with your wife or having sex with a girlfriend or having sex with somebody whom you have good sex with. Sex is so much better than masturbation, that the sacrifice to give up sex and not to masturbate is a massive error and a massive mistake. But if the alternative is no sex or masturbation, then what's wrong with it? And what's wrong with bonding with yourself? I mean, I think masturbation doesn't vote bonding with yourself. What's wrong with that? Pleasurable? It seems fun. It seems, yeah, kind of exciting. Why not do it? And you're not giving up something, i.e., sex, then do it. If you've given up on sex for masturbation, then that's a real problem. Now, you know in a manosphere, in the manosphere, there is a very negative attitude towards masturbation, which is bizarre and nuts. And I think a problem. There's nothing wrong with masturbation, so wonderful. Actually, there's everything good about masturbation. Nothing wrong about it. It's fantastic. Do it as often as you can. Now, don't, again, do it at the expense of having sex, because sex is even better. But, yeah, it's kind of absurd. And this applies to women and men, right? Cook says, Sam, the bank is fried, man. All right. Jacob says, what could the show writers do that would pleasantly surprise you but you see it having a reasonable chance of occurring? Oh, God. I mean, those are the kind of, there's a hard questions, and I'd have to really think about that. I can't just off the cuff. What would the show writers do that would pleasantly surprise you? I mean, anything that they would do highlighting the theme of the novel, what is the theme of Atlas Shrugged? Did free markets work? Statism doesn't? No. What is the philosophical theme of the novel that Einränder said was the theme of the novel? It's the role of man's mind in his survival, in his flourishing, in his success. The role of man's mind in human life. And the free market and statism are just consequence of particular view of man's mind. So if they could get certain aspects of the role of man's mind and the giving up the mind is giving up everything, that would be huge. I mean, we could probably think of particular storylines, particular characters, particular things that happen that concretely illustrate this. I think the whole novel concretely illustrates this, but it's the thinking, the extent that they can illustrate the businessmen as thinkers. Businessmen as heroic thinkers. That's it. So the thing the show writers could do would pleasantly surprise me and there's a maybe not so reasonable chance that I'll do it is present businessmen as heroic and thinkers. All right, whoops, what did I do there? Michael asks, looking forward to your review of Jordan Peterson's interview with Newt Gingrich. I'm gonna look for that and try to present parts of it. I can't, obviously can't do the whole interview. Liam says, why do Israelis have boundary issues? Why do Israelis, do Israelis have boundary issues? I don't know what that means. I don't have boundary issues. Other Israelis I know don't have boundary issues. Maybe some Israelis do, but I don't know. I'm not sure exactly what it means. You'd have to elaborate. Hopper Campbell, is there any myth that evil people don't feel remorse, feel anxiety? They just process it differently and have a much higher threshold for disturbance? No, I don't think that's true. I think there's vast ways in which they do experience fear and anxiety, maybe not so much remorse, but they certainly feel fear and anxiety. I mean, there's a story that when Stalin was in his, you know, that Stalin, after World War II, I think it was, Barrow came to visit him and Stalin was petrified that Barrow was the head of the KGB was coming to kill him, to execute him. So they constantly live in fear, constantly. Their whole life is dominated by fear. So evil people are fearful constantly and full of anxiety. Why was Mises a great economist and Milton Friedman, Adam Smith? Partially because he was more consistent. Partially because he had a better understanding of how markets work, but he was more consistent. He was uncompromising. He saw every aspect of the economy and how it interacted and how it ultimately required freedom in ways that Milton Friedman and Adam Smith just didn't. Michael says, don't even public a president to win the popular vote in the last 40 years was Ronald Reagan. Why is this and has the electoral college slowed down the growth of statism? Probably the electoral college has slowed down the growth of statism and why is this? Because Ronald Reagan is the only Republican to actually make a positive, inspiring American case for America that got people, no matter what their political tribal status was to get excited about him. He actually projected a vision, a view of what America can and is that inspired people, inspired people across the political spectrum. A lot of former Democrats became, some said, lifelong Republicans. I mean, there's probably a deeper answer in terms of analyzing this, but I'll have to leave that for another time. Michael says, once one country becomes objectivist, it will be a rapid domino effect. I hope so. I'm not sure it depends on which country, but one hopes so. Liam says the vast majority of philosophy is useless and always has been. It's actually worse than useless because it actively killing us every day. Yes, it's worse than useless. It's actually destructive. It's actually undermining of human beings. So, you know, Kantian philosophy or Hegel, I mean, it's actually destroys life. So, it's much, and I don't know. It's probably true. Certainly the vast majority of modern philosophy or philosophy post renaissance is that way. Maybe. That doodle then, Bunny says, JP is a charlatan in a hack. He says absolutely nothing, mystical nonsense. A total witch doctor who overloads the crow by speaking a lot of incoherent nonsense and quick succession. Yeah, incredibly popular and incredibly influential and God, he gets millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of views. That doodle Bunny is a true ran took speed and amphetamines regularly while writing at LeShwag. She felt those substances were rational values. They, I don't know to what extent she took them. I don't have intimate knowledge of her biography. It's nothing I've really ever studied. I do think she took them for a while and I think the reason was, I don't know about speed, but I think amphetamines, I think it kept her awake, it kept her focused, it kept her engaged in productive activity. It enhanced the ability to be productive. And the question is, what are the side effects or what are the downsides? I don't know, I haven't studied it, but I'm not against drugs that without side effects and without downsides actually enhance your ability to stay awake and to stay focused and to stay productive. And to complete a massive, incredible project. So what she exactly did, I don't know. I mean, we'll have to wait for biographers who are objective about these things and actually look at the evidence to make clear. But I have nothing against if somebody can come to me with a pill that makes it possible for me to stay more in focus and engage more and be more productive and has no negatives associated with it, I would take it, why not? I mean, after it was well-studied and I don't like playing with my brain. Frank says, my take on Titanic is that rich people inherited dollars and were living off the rewards of the hard-working grandparents. Is this Cameron's view? Well, Titanic is much more than that. Yes, I think that's Cameron's view, but the theme of Titanic is a Marxist movie explicitly. So in the visuals, emphasize the Marxism and it's not just that they're living off of the hard-working grandparents, but they're living off of the poor people who are actually doing the work. You can see that in the cross-section shots of the Titanic, the rich people sitting on top in their lounge chairs, and as you go lower down in the ranks, it gets less comfortable until you get to what actually is driving the ship, which is the men feeding the coal and sweating and working. They are the real producers and everybody else is exploiting off of them. That's a strong visual in the movie. And then of course, the lifeboat situation where the rich get off first, and all of that is a fundamentally Marxist theme. It's an awful movie. I hate that movie. And teaching a rich kid how to live is teaching them how to spit. I mean, I found the whole movie disgusting and despicable and I despise that movie, Titanic. And it's the beginning of the end of James Cameron or maybe the end of the end of James Cameron, whatever. PB, why is a little bit of altruism? Oh, I already answered that. Michael says, how can you trust somebody who has read and studied I ran and has now become an objectivist? Well, it depends what you mean by trust somebody. They are still challenged by it. They still have questions. They don't agree with it. What does it mean trust them? Am I giving them all my money? Am I, you know, are they now automatically a rapist? What are they exactly? I ran, I ran philosophy is not easy. It's not easy to accept and it's not easy to live up to and it's not easy to maintain. Daniel, thanks for the cheers. Fenblow, figure it, top it off. Figure it, top it off. Thank you Fenblow. Thank you, Richard. Let's see, Simon says, this comes from my girlfriend. She's a theist and wants to know why not keep some magic alive and have that faith in God or keep some mystical in life because it's irrational. Because it conditions your mind to accept the irrational. It conditions your mind to accept stuff on faith. And faith is irrational. Faith is the negation of reason, negation of rationality. And once you accept magic or God or mysticism into your consciousness, how do you limit it to that literal area? Because you've accepted that the irrational is legit. You've accepted that not everything has to be guided by reason and rationality. And once you do that, I can sell you gremlins under the table. I can sell you all kinds of magical stuff. That's anti-life. That's anti-survival. It's dangerous. Literally is dangerous. How do you know what of God to accept or what not? What magic is true and what is not? I mean, there's lots of fairy tales. Which ones are true and which are not? How do you tell? And if you open a fairy tales, then wow, you open all kinds of nonsense. And that's what belief in God is, it's a fairy tale. So it's very destructive, not a little destructive. It's dangerous. Do your own cognition. It's not an accident, as I said before, that I think religious people are more prone to authoritarianism. Religious people are more prone to conspiracy theories. I mean, secular religionists too. I think the left is very much religious as well. Environmentalism is very much a religion. CRT in some sense is a religion. So yeah, beware of magical things. Beware of magic. Wow, Armin, thank you. Really appreciate it. Really appreciate it. Armin with a hundred dollars, that's great. Richard says, is there a non-mystical way to do Santa Claus with your kids? I love Christmas and some of the magic that comes with it, but don't wanna lie to my future kids. Don't lie to them, it's just like, does anybody think that when you see Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse at Disneyland, it's really Mickey Mouse and it's really Minnie Mouse. That they're really a mouse that can talk and stand up on two legs and dressed up in a thing. But is it so fun to meet Mickey and Minnie in Disneyland? Absolutely, even though they know there's a human being inside the costume, pretending. So Santa Claus is a human being inside a costume, pretending. And it's fun and it's great and it's hard, you know, let's have fun and let's give presents and let's make a big deal of it. You don't have to tell them that some mystical being that flies in with reindeer and comes down the chimney and that's real and that's where the presents come from. In order to have fun with it any more than you have to have, you can't have fun with, I don't know, somebody dressed up as a dinosaur. Oh, Goofy, yeah, Wonder Freeman says Goofy. Yeah, I mean Goofy is fun. And he's just a dressed up guy, but he's still fun. Kids love those things. They love to go and they love to have pictures with them and they love all that stuff. So no, I mean, you can have Santa Claus and not make Santa Claus mystical at the same time and still have fun and still enjoy it and still enjoy the fantasy and the story and the pretense and all of that. Applejack says, 20 bucks, sorry, I'm late. Thank you, Applejack. All right, everybody, this has been great. Thank you for all the support. I will see you tomorrow. Not sure what the topic will be tomorrow, but I'll see you tomorrow sometime, either three or eight PM, three or eight PM. Put a week in time, which is actually two or seven PM East Coast time. I will let you know tomorrow. I will also let you know about the topic. I will also start the short news briefings on Monday and we'll go from there. So don't forget to like the show before we leave. A lot of people watch live today. So certainly we can get more than 118 likes out there and yeah, share my content and let people know and talk, talk, talk and promote and help us change the world. Bye, everybody.