 Hi everybody. Welcome to your Unbroke Show. I guess something was muted, right? We have sound now. Can you guys hear me? Yes. Okay, cool. Let me see. You guys on the chat, can you guys hear now? No, I can't hear us. Yes. Yep. Yeah. One, one wrong. Yes, if I am muted here. That also means the music. Okay. Thanks for joining me today on Saturday. I hope everybody's having a great weekend. And today we're doing an AMA. We've got our panelists. We'll see who else joins us. And we'll take questions. We'll also take questions for the super chat. So that is also available. I thought I'd just say a few things quickly about just news coming out of Russia quickly. And then we'll go straight into the Q&A. I think it's this morning or yesterday morning. I can track exactly. A prominent Russian right-winger, what would you call it? A militarist Russian nationalist was arrested by the Russian Authority. His name is Gokin. This is a guy who was in charge of the Russian takeover of Crimea. It was also in charge of the hostilities in 2014 in the Donbass. So he considered a war hero, considered a hero of the Russian state. But as the wars progressed in Ukraine has been becoming more and more critical of Putin. Just one other element to that. In 2014, he is the guy who has been deemed responsible for the downing of the passenger jet, killing 300 people. If you remember, there was a passenger jet flying over Ukraine and it was shot down by a Russian battery out of Donbass. He was the guy who ordered it. He is under indictment in the court at the Hague. So this is a guy very, very well known within Russia. He was a hero, hated in the West. Anyway, as the war has gone on, he's become a bigger and bigger critic of Putin, of Russia's military failures, of things not going well in front. His latest post just before he was arrested, but probably not the ultimate cause of him being arrested, his latest post basically called Putin a mediocrity and called from the Russian people to replace him and called Putin a woman, which is in those circles a significant insult and weak and pathetic and so on. This is the second big challenge to Putin's authority and Putin's position. Pugosin Mutini was the first and this is the second. He is under arrest right now. So nobody knows exactly where we'll see what happens to him, but he is under arrest. Also, affiliate with the FSB, I mean this guy is a big shot, a very prominent big shot within Russia and is just being arrested. I think again more signs of Putin's weakness and the Kremlin trying to rally the troops around him, secure his position, make sure that he is perceived as a tough guy and trying to clamp down an opposition. Even when that opposition is from his right flank, even when the opposition is from significant and dramatic nationalists who would like to be a lot more aggressive than Putin has been. All right, that was a quick update and we'll jump into the questions. Let me just thank Jonathan, Catherine and Amin. Good to see you back. Amin just did a hundred dollars. Thank you Amin and thanks guys. They all did make contributions without asking a question, but you guys can't ask questions. But in the meantime, we will start here with a panel and we will start with Ryan. Hi, hi, Ron. Long time listener, first time caller, so I'm thrilled to be here. I realize that if I'm going to contribute lots of super chats, I might as well be a $25 contributor and be able to ask long-form questions. I've been reading Atlas Shrugs for five years, so the reason for that is that I've stopped purposely throughout the book to study the philosophy and to better understand it, and so I'm in part three. Dagny has just left the gulch and the question I'm really struggling with, between the time that Francisco speaks with her at the cabin to the time that she leaves, she's incredibly intelligent, capable, strong, and I get the sense that Rand is trying to portray how even the most capable people are capable of evasion. I feel like she's evading, even though she's extremely attached to the legacy of her father's business and the railroad. There's a sense I get that she's actually not ready to commit and is in some sense evading, and I wanted to get your thoughts on that. Yeah, I'm not sure I'd call it evasion. I mean, it's very difficult. I don't think it's just the issue of the love of the job and the love of the railroad and all of that. I mean, there's a certain sense in which, and I know people like this, right? She is convinced that, still convinced that there's something she can do, that it's not going to be that hard to change the world, right? I know so many people like that today who just, if you only did a little bit, the marketing a little bit different, and if you only said this and not that, the world would just poof and everybody would change, and there's something of naivete, of a benevolence gone, that is a little divorced from reality, and she's just the cumulative evidence. She just doesn't see it, and I'm trying not to give anything away. She just doesn't see it. Sorry, the piece that I'm struggling with, though, that Francisco has basically told her that the person she's been looking for all this time, the destroyer, is essentially herself, and I don't know if she gets it yet, so. She doesn't. She doesn't see how her actions are ultimately what's keeping the beast alive. She doesn't quite see how deep-rooted altruism is and how impactful it is on everybody around her, and how she is not acting ultimately in her own self-interest, and she just doesn't see all the connections, and look, it's a novel, so it's a certain dramatic reason why she can't just stay in the valley, and that's it. The book's over. But she's not seeing all the connections, and of course I think Rand recognizes that there's so many people around her who don't see the connections, so of course she wrote Atle Shrugged in the hope that people would, that they would save Dagny in that sense, get this going faster, but it didn't in the end. A lot of people love Atle Shrugged, but don't get it, right? They don't, it's so many people read Atle Shrugged and don't get the philosophy and don't, they like it and they go on with their lives as if nothing's happened. Some of us, it completely revolutionizes our life or commits us to a particular type of life, but a lot of people just nothing, and some of those people are honest people, some of those people are honest and incredibly successful. I mean, I think the entrepreneurs who built Silicon Valley, almost all of them read Atle Shrugged, almost all of them will say it inspired them, and yet it didn't really have beyond inspiring them and maybe making them more committed to what they're doing and giving them a certain moral backbone. It didn't really change the way they thought about the world in any dramatic, significant way, in spite of reading the book, and you'd say, are they evading? Maybe, maybe it's just not enough evidence for them, maybe it's just not enough something for them. But yeah, I mean, and you know, so the question now is, what more evidence does she need? And I think that's what, to some extent, the rest of the book is about. Great, thank you. All right, Ian. If I remember correctly, your background in finance is also related to banking, right? Was that kind of your specialty? So I've got kind of maybe a maybe a little bit of a basic question about banking. So it comes up related to runs like the Silicon Valley bank run that happened and other runs. So why don't more or any banks structure their savings accounts with withdrawal limits? So for example, you can spend whatever you want out of checking, you can do it, you can transfer a million dollars, whatever. But if you've got money in savings, you can only take out one percent a day, something like that. And that would guarantee that they have three months to figure out what they're doing or adjust their interest rates or whatever else. But it doesn't seem like that's a product that exists. Is that just a regulations thing? Or is that something that bankers don't think makes sense? Well, but I think many savings accounts are structured like that. So you can only, you know, some savings accounts can only move money in a certain way. But the reality is that, take Silicon Valley bank, for example, the depositors put their money in a checking account. They were getting basically zero return on it. That was very cheap capital for the bank. If they'd encouraged them to put it into a saving account, they would have had a pay interest on it, that would have made it more expensive for the bank would use their profit margin significantly. In addition, if they put any kind of constraints on withdrawal on the saving account, then these businesses wouldn't have put it in the saving accounts because they needed it. It's kind of cash that they need to for payroll and for unexpected expenses. And then they run their business out of the checking account. So it wouldn't have really saved them because the real problem was these accounts, which were transactional accounts, which allowed people to take money out at will, people had more than 250,000 in it. So it wasn't insured. And as soon as the rumor hit, and there's a lot of irrationality here because Silicon Valley bank without the rumor hitting would have been fine. None of this crisis would have happened, unless the rumor mill starts happening and word of mouth starts happening and emotions take over. But the reality is that, so it always had enough money available to deal with with normal or even extraordinary withdrawals. What it didn't have enough money for is just out of this world kind of bank run. And not even a traditional bank run because in a traditional bank run, people stand outside and wait in line. That buys you time. There's a lot of time that you can now arrange. You can borrow money. You can raise money here and there. You can advise your time. It's a physical time of dealing with people and paying them out. Here, people were moving money electronically instantaneously when the bank was closed. So the night before and during that morning, gazillions of dollars flowed out without giving the bank any time. So everybody all at once withdrew their money. And even though the bank had plenty of money, they didn't have enough. Now, usually what happens is that banks put some of the money on reserve into, and this is something that came out of Dodd-Frank, Dodd-Frank encourages banks to take a chunk of their money and put it into bonds. Now, why US Treasuries? Now, why US Treasuries? Because they're liquid. You could sell them like that. You could sell them instantaneously. And therefore that's supposed to provide you with liquidity. So they did that. They took all the extra cash that they had and they put it into Treasuries. What happened to Treasuries? Interest rates went up. The value of the Treasuries went down. And so they had lost a lot of money at this point in March on all those Treasuries because interest rates had gone up. They had bought all these Treasuries when interest rates were zero and nobody ever thought interest rates would go up, that nobody saw inflation coming. Inflation went up, value went down. So now they were selling and they were taking real losses, losses to the bottom line. That only encouraged more people to withdraw their money and encouraged the stock market to just collapse, to penalize them dramatically. And all of this happened because of this interstate mismatch, because they had lost money on their Treasuries. They went out and said, okay, we'll raise capital. We need more liquidity. So we'll raise money in the stock market. We'll take a hit. They looted our shares, but we'll raise money in order to deal with this. They had a little trouble raising money. Goldman first said they'd give them money and then withdrew. And then everybody panicked. How come they need to raise money? This is what's going on here. Everybody just panicked and everybody started withdrawing money out of the bank all at once. And the problem with Silicon Valley Bank is it's a lot of money in checking accounts. It's a lot of uninsured deposits. Everybody was really, really worried they're going to lose all the money. And this is startup money, venture capital money, money like that, business money. This is not individuals, this is primarily businesses. Yeah, I guess the part I'm surprised at is that those businesses had that money in the checking account. Because I know it was partially working capital, but it was also, we raised $100 million. We're not going to spend $100 million in the next month. You would think that you would put $90 million of that in a savings account. You would think, but this is Silicon Valley. It's a mentality of, I speak to people like this and say, so I can get 4% in a savings account? 4%? Are you kidding? We're going for 20X. Anything less than 20X? I'm not interested. I'm not going to even spend one minute of my time thinking about 4% when I should be working hard to get my 10X, 20X return. And that doesn't exist, I think, in other industries where people do care about yield and they do care about the 4%, but particularly in Silicon Valley, particularly the venture capital mentality. No, it was all in checking accounts. And Silicon Valley Bank had thrived for decades since the 80s. I remember Silicon Valley was an institution. This was not some second-rate bank. This is an institution. It was hailed as one of the great banks in the country and it had. It had done an amazing job during the dot-com bubble and during the whole venture capital era since the early 1980s. So they made a lot of money from having hundreds of millions of dollars at 0% and then lending it out or buying treasuries and they did a lot of buying treasuries because they didn't lend a lot of money because venture capital funds firms don't typically borrow that much money. They're not highly leveraged. So that combination, it was the bank where this would happen and then of course there was a trickle effect to all the other banks and we got what we got during that period. Excellent. Thanks. Yep. All right. Let's see, Adam. Yes. Did you get the email I sent you? I did not. Okay. In that case, I will try to share my screen so that everyone knows what we're talking about. No host has disabled participants screen sharing. So can you enable it or? If you can share it now. Okay. Here. Can you guys see it? Yep, we can see it. Oh, this email. Yes, I did get this email. Sorry, I forgot about it, but now that I see it, I did get this email. Okay. So Louis Rung is, in my opinion, the best romantic sculptor active today. And one thing that separates her from the rest of the field is that she minimizes the narrative. She goes directly to the sense of life if you look at her sculpture. Yep. And I'd like your opinion on that. I mean, I think sculpture generally good sculpture minimizes the narrative. The sculpture doesn't tell a story. It's usually a figure. It's usually one figure. Sometimes it's a combination. Sometimes it's more than one, but it's rare. Usually it's one figure. Sculpture, I think, should be in the nude, because I don't think clothes add anything unless it's a portrait or if it's some kind of monument where you're doing it. But sculpture should be in the nude. Unless like here, I think the clothing adds an element to the actual nature of the kind of the theme. So here I think it works. It works nicely. So I think the essence of sculpture is that while it's in 3D, it's very essentialized. It's very conceptual because there's no real story. Even Michelangelo's David, if you don't know the story of David, you don't see a story of David. You see elements of a story. Somebody's got a slingshot. He's looking intently and obviously he's facing a foe. So there's an element of that there. But the essence of the sculpture isn't the story. The essence of the sculpture is the sense of life and the value judgments that it is conveying. So I think that's inherent in any good sculpture that's inherent. A sculpture where there's a scene and there's a story. I don't have any great sculpture where that is the case that I can think of where that's the essence. So yeah, I think this is beautiful. I mean, I like aspects of it. I have to admit I'm not crazy about other aspects of it, but I like aspects of it. I like the fluidity, the movement. I think that's where this white cloth really adds to it because it gives it a great intensity of movement because it's blowing back. You really get the sense of forward movement, which you get. You get a very positive sense of life to it. So yeah, I think this is, I think it's quite beautiful in that sense. And I think I love the spirit and the movement of it. The certain aspects of just the way it's done, which I don't particularly appeal to me, it's a little, I don't know what the right word is. Yeah, people are already complaining because I don't, I'm not completely enthralled by it. Sorry guys. There's a certain, I don't particularly like her face and her hair is a little too plastery. There's something about her limbs that are just a little too thin, particularly in the shoulder area. And I've seen some of her sculptures live and usually I have, so it's not just that it's a photograph. So there's just something about it that doesn't appeal necessarily to me, but I get why people are loving it and I agree. I mean, in terms of that beauty movement, that movement and that projection of dynamism and joy, I think it's, I think it really is, it really is beautiful. So thank you, Adam. Okay, thank you. And I guess you can stop sharing the screen. Let me see. I think you need to stop sharing it. Okay, I'm looking for the correct controls. There's a red on the bottom somewhere. Let me see. Did that do it? No, that just shifted it to another screen. Now we're seeing something else from your computer. All right. Business. Let me see if I can, let me see if I can view options. Stop participant sharing. There we go. All right. Thanks, Adam. Pini. Hey, Pini. Hi. So I have a couple of questions. I'll start with one of them, seeing that I'm also from Israel originally. It's what's going on right now in Israel. It's quite disturbing. And I thought that some of this legal reform that's been tried since already a few months, some of them actually made sense. And I saw one of your show that was, I was glad that we had a very similar opinion that some of them made sense and some of them not. And finally, with all the protests, they're now going as one by one, if at all. And now that they're going on this reasonable cause or whatever to call it, I thought that it made sense because it's what they try to cut is the political involvement of the court, not legal. So legally, the court, if the government decide to do something against human rights or the rights of citizen, the Supreme Court still have the say, but politically, they cannot get involved in who to put as a minister or some political decision, which I think makes sense. And to my knowledge, there's no country in the world that have this kind of crazy clause. But in the last episode that I saw a couple of few days ago, you kind of mentioned, so I was not sure what is the reasoning because I see logic in what they're doing. So the problem, the fundamental problem in Israel is, right, there is no right solution here because there is no, there is no constitution, there is no fundamental standard by which they evaluate. There's no standard of individual rights, there's no standard of, so they have this reasonableness, reasonableness standard. But that's completely subjective. It's not well defined. And when the court has been, and the court has been over the last 20 years, very left, reasonableness for a left-wing court is very different than what it is, maybe the rest of Israelis and so on. So I can completely understand the motivation of getting rid of it. The problem is that my understanding, and maybe I'm missing something, and my understanding is by getting rid of this, you are basically making it impossible for the court to decide that a law, not just an appointment, but a law is unreasonable. That is, it violates the basic law or it is so, you know, again, it's not anti-constitutional because there is no constitution. This is the problem. There's no standard. So the challenge is you can't, I mean, you can't really reform the system in any kind of reasonable way without asking the fundamental questions of why do we have a court system, a Supreme Court in particular, and what oversight does it have over the government and over the parliament? What are the boundaries of that power? You know, how do we figure that out? And so these are little band-aids that have the potential to do more harm than good, and it depends on how they're interpreted and how they're used and by whom they're used. So it was just, look, I think the last, the thing that stimulated this was the government appointed as a minister a guy who had been, if I remember right, you know, found guilty for a fraud on a number of occasions from the political party, Shas, an ultra-authodox political party, and the Supreme Court said, look, it's not reasonable to put somebody in the government as a minister in the government who has committed fraud. Now, yeah, so shouldn't first what I understood again, and I saw some showing Israel that they were actually showing that the Supreme Court has different ways for again, for if it's infringed on the citizen or the human rights. So they do have it and they will still have it. About this minister, which I know what you're talking about, again, as much as ethically is wrong, and I agree, but if legally, if legally it's okay, the Supreme Court cannot say don't take this minister because as long as there's no legal or law that forbid a minister to serve, it's not their business. First, have a law, then follow it because their job is to interpret and protect the rights of their citizens. So I agree with that. So if the law, if what they're trying to pass right now is limited to that extent, that is it just applies to these political issues, yeah, then fine, then the government should do it. And I'm not sure what the protests about. I mean, the protests have taken on a life of themselves. I mean, there's a dynamic of that. But I mean, the protests also worried about the slippery slope that passed this one, we don't do anything, then they'll pass another one because they think they won't do anything, which is probably true. I mean, this is probably a test balloon. If it passes, Netanyahu is going to try to do other ones. He wants to see what the response is. And look, I don't think Netanyahu wants any of this. This is all just because he promised his coalition partners who are pretty bad. So yeah, I don't disagree with you that this particular law probably isn't as bad as it seems. It's the package that is problematic. I don't know if you know, but I actually debated the guy from the Knesset, from the Israeli parliament who heads up the legal commission. Yeah, Rotman. Rosman, I debated him in Israel. I didn't see it. I was looking for it, but I couldn't find it. I was really curious to see it somewhere up. I left to ask Boas if he's got it up. But anyway, what was interesting was I said, you know, I said things like, you know, you want, yeah, I agree that the way judges are pointed in Israel right now is completely arbitrary and it doesn't make any sense. And so why not have the entire parliament vote just like in the United States? Have them come and interview the nominee and have them vote just like in the U.S. they vote rather than this committee, which is now going to be tilted towards the government, government gets complete control, make it a parliamentary thing. Yeah, but the parliamentary, sorry, the parliamentary will be worse. Nobody will accept it because whoever has the coalition has the vote. So imagine the protest that will go. Yeah, but that's what happens in the U.S., right? Right, right. And in Canada as well. I'm in Canada and it's the right way. I agree. You got to do it. I agree 100%. You said, yeah, but it's a mess, but it's better than the government, the executive branch in a sense, doing it unilaterally. At least you get parliamentary discussion and debate. And he said, yes, you're right, you're wrong. And then I said, it's ridiculous that the Supreme Court cannot overturn laws that you pass. And he started to say that in America, that's the case. And I said, you don't know what you're talking about, right? The Supreme Court can and does all the time. But there was a number of things that he actually agreed with me on. And I said to him, so why don't you propose those things? And he rolled his eyes in the coalition. He can't get everything he wants. But yeah, it's, Israel's a mess. And as I've said many times, this is all just a, the real issue is what kind of state should Israel be? Should it be a Jewish state or a state for Jews? Right. And until that is settled, this is going to... And constitution. Yes. And you need a constitution to formalize it and put it into writing. And you won't get that because you'd have to come to a conclusion about the role of religion in the state. And there's no way that will happen in Israel. Right. Okay, thanks. Thanks, Pini. Deborah. Hi, Aaron. Hey. So I recently listened to the Masculinity show. And I was struck by something, actually, that it occurred to me that the way the left and the right define masculinity are actually in pretty good agreement with each other, factually. Like they say men, the left says men are oppressors and exploitors of women and so on and so on. But isn't that what Andrew Tate is bragging that he is? The women can't leave the house and they're just objects. And the only difference seems to really be whether or not that's evaluated as positive. I think that's right. The bottom line of it is right. I think some people on the right would say, well, we don't believe in violence. And so Matt Walsh would say, I want my wife to have dinner ready for me when I get home, but I don't believe in violence. I don't think masculinity is about violence, but I do believe it's about dominance in some way without being without the use of violence. But I think at the core, you're absolutely right that at the end of the day, they all agree with the, they both sides agree with the definition of masculinity that belongs in the Middle Ages, right? The elder is dominant. It's all about physicality. It's all about and violence, violence for protection, but violence is part of masculinity or the capacity at least inflict violence. The mind has no role. And the left views that as masculinity and says we've rejected. We don't want any masculinity. Masculinity is a bad thing. We throw all of it out. And the right says, yeah, we like that. That's exactly masculinity and we embrace it. And when I think the rational position is if masculinity is a trait that is involved in human survival and is crucial, I think, to human survival. So it's a particularly human trait, a set of characteristics that represent a certain attitude that human beings need to have in order to survive. Then it also needs to be able to evolve as a concept as what is required in order to survive changes, right? And to the extent that what's required to survive is using the mind and trading, i.e. communicating with other people, for example, those should become part of what masculinity means. Now, not to take away some of the more physical stuff, because I think that's also part of the concept. But there should be some addition and some replacement of the force, which is not needed anymore, with the mind, which is very much needed. Well, I wonder if this doesn't explain a lot of the popularity of someone like Andrew Tate. If people are just inundated with the uniform message of this is what it means to be a man. And there's, of course, going to be some independent thinkers that don't agree with that reject that entirely. But if it's just, well, this is what I am. So I can either go with the people who say that makes me horrible and hate me, or I can go with the one that says, no, this is something that makes something to be proud of. And it kind of seemed to explain that. I'm a little, go ahead. So much of our culture is built around that concept. I mean, think of all the movies where the person who's having fun is the bad guy. And part of having fun means lots of women and fancy cars and lots of money. And think about the rap musicians, who that's their shtick. And so much of our culture is built around kind of a very, very narrowly materialistic view of success associated with kind of a male dominance and with with the dangers of violence. And you know, the cops and the good guys are usually meek and pathetic and not masculine. And yet they're the good guys and the bad guys are masculine, but then it's associated with all these negative traits. So in our view negative, not in their view. And so a young boy growing up is offered two alternative to be this weak, pathetic, miserable good guy. This exciting, you know, get all the girls, get all the money, get all the cars, bad guy. And maybe I don't want to be completely a bad guy, but I could be a little bit of a bad guy, bad boys, right? Girls like bad boys. And that's, you know, that's what I should be. And the culture I think is overwhelmingly either in a sense to completely eliminate masculinity from his vision or to inculcate him with the and rotate vision. And then was surprised that and to trade as possible. He is popular. He's just reflecting back what the culture is reflected to these kids for a long time. He just has no shame about it. He's just out there saying it, what is implicit in much of the cultural message. Yeah. So it's, it's, yeah, it's a, I can't believe, I mean, I, I have so many people who follow you on book show and who were subscribers who like and rotate and it just that that doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, you need to see him as for two minutes and you can tell there's something very wrong. It's absolutely disgusting. And you know, I think this person has zero self, zero self, I think he absolutely hates himself and he's desperate to look, look good and successful. And, you know, like a total second-hander that he can only achieve any kind of pseudo self-esteem is if, if other people see him as this, what they see him as. And Rand talked about this type. I mean, it's not that she didn't, she talked about the womanized and the playboy and these, talked about the fact that they lack self-esteem, that they're trying to get pseudo self-esteem from sexual conquest. Sexual conquest becomes a substitute for self-esteem and it's a pseudo self-esteem. But, but it's very, people don't, it's very hard, particularly in this culture for people to get it. It's still true that for many boys, many young men, sexual conquest is the standard of success and manly. Okay, Bradley, thank you, Deborah. Can you hear me? I can barely hear you, so you have to speak up. Is it worth, is it worth drawing a distinction for analytical purposes between a conceptual and perceptual self? Perceptual self is largely formed before the conceptual mind is fully established and the conceptual self sort of is built on top of the perceptual self and it can't abolish the perceptual self. And they're sort of co-equal partners in the sense that like a perceptual self, we will lie upon for interests and dispositions, which are essential to decision making. And, but perceptual self can't direct abstract conclusions and there has to be some way of harmonizing the two. Or do you think I'm, I know, metaphysically, that's sort of just the one self, but anyway. I mean, I mean, there's an article on, you know, what is it called, the preconceptual mentality or the perceptual mentality. I mean, she talks about the fact that, unfortunately, humanity, much of humanity is still, in a sense, stuck at the perceptual level. The observing reality, the integrating it, but their level of abstraction that they can take it and the use of logic and reason to integrate and understand the world and come to new conclusions about the world is very limited and very minimized. And this is the challenge we have when we're communicating with the world out there. And this is why Lena Peacock has said it's too early, right? The culture is not ready for freedom, for liberty or for objectivism because people are still at the preconceptual level. They're still not embraced the Enlightenment. They still haven't. Yes, AP reminds me that the article that she is called the missing link, which is an amazing article. I think it's, and I think it's a really, really important article to understand the world in which we live. And she talks about the fact that people out there, most of the people, a majority of the people call it the masses, are living at a preconceptual level. They're using their mind enough to survive physically, but not to thrive and not to flourish and not to achieve happiness and not to achieve a real understanding. But partially because there are people at the conceptual level who produce, who create, who innovate, who push civilization forward, the people at the preconceptual level, at the perceptual level, can in a sense free ride off of the geniuses who move civilization forward. But it's hard to reason with them because they don't reason. And you can see this in our political debates. You can see this in so much of the, and social media has given everybody a voice now. Everybody has a voice. Once upon a time, you had to, I don't know, write in an op-ed to get your opinion to mass distribution. Today you can write anything on Facebook or Twitter and anyway, and thousands of people might see it. So suddenly this preconceptual mentality has a voice out there and you can see it. And I think one of the ways in which I feel like I'm still shell shocked for, I think it's not seven years, right? Since I think Trump won the nomination and then won the election. I'm just in shell shock because it just strikes me as people are behaving in ways that seem so bizarre to me and advocating for ideas that are so bizarre to me and no reasoning matters. Reason factor reality doesn't matter. And I think that article in the missing link explains exactly why that is. So I think, Bradley, there's definitely a lot to that. We all conceptual concepts have to have a perceptual foundation and it takes effort and focus to take your procepts to a more abstract level. And some people out there don't do that. And then those of us who are integrated, who become fully integrated, we're the ones who actually do it. Oh, thank you for all your endeavors. Thank you for the answer as well. Joe, thanks, Bradley. All right, Andrew just joined us just in time. Andrew, you're up next, if you're ready. You're muted though. So unmuting is a requirement. Excellent. Thank you for having me. So I wanted to follow up on something Amesh Adulja said on your show this week. I didn't quite understand his point. I'm wondering maybe if you could clarify that he was saying that his concern with egalitarianism in medicine and that there's drugs coming up for Alzheimer's where there are voices maybe from ethicists or whomever in the field who are opposed to developing those drugs because they don't benefit everybody. Or did you get what he was saying about that? I don't remember exactly what he said about it, but this does sound very much like what I said about autism. Some people are just born with this detachment or this low IQ or whatever it happens to be and we don't want to treat it because that's the way they are and we should just embrace the way they are, any way they happen to be. I wouldn't be surprised at all if there's an attitude out there about Alzheimer's that says it's just a natural thing for some people to get to the state and why deny them the ability to be in that state by curing it. How dare we? That is very nasty, but it is and the other aspect of it is that some of the treatments generally, and this might be the other aspect, maybe this is what he was talking about, some of these treatments are going to cost a lot of money. Then there's a question of if they cost so much money and Medicare is not going to supply to everybody, then will they allow it for you to buy it privately if you can afford it? And the answer, of course, is no. Either it is made available to everybody and then Medicare covers it, but what if Medicare, as it's going to, gets into financial trouble and they say, well, Medicare has to cut, so it's not going to fund drugs that cost X amount, but we don't want only rich people to get it, so we're going to exclude everybody from getting it. I think that's true by the way of cancer treatments. I mean, there are cancer treatments out there that are coming down the road in immunotherapies that are very, very expensive to administer, particularly for rare forms of cancer where there's not a big market, so they sell very small numbers, and these potentially are cures, and they might not be covered ultimately by Medicare or by Socialized Medicine because the system won't be afforded, and therefore they won't even be allowed to be sold, and that's where egalitarianism comes in. And it's a real possibility. There are places, particularly Socialized Medicine places, where if a drug is too expensive and the system has decided it's not going to carry it, nobody can get it. There is no private option. There is no way to access it. I mean, I think in America, you'd have to probably go to Mexico or to Colombia or to medical tourism to Thailand to get it, and maybe it'll be available in those places, but you're only making it then even less accessible to most people and just to the very rich. So it's going to be very, yeah, I mean, health care, the dependence on Medicare and health care technology, there's going to be a massive conflict at some point here down the road. Got you. So it ties into Socialized Medicine, and we already have Socialized Medicine. I mean, this is the myth. The myth is that America doesn't have Socialized Medicine. It does. Most dollars spent today on health care in the United States are spent by the government, and if you're 65 and older, you live under Socialized Medicine with the option of buying private insurance to make it more effective, I guess, or to expand it. But basically, you've got Socialized Medicine in America for everybody over 65. And therefore, what Medicare chooses to cover or not to cover will ultimately decide the nature of health care, because look, most of the health care dollars you'll ever spend in your life is going to happen after 65. After 65, you have no option but to be part of Medicare. So the government is going to determine your health care no matter what. And the idea that we live in America, therefore, we are free of Socialized Medicine, is a delusion. And when you tell the Republicans, oh, we have Socialized Medicine in America, we have to get rid of Medicare, they go ballistic. Don't touch my Medicare. They love their Medicare. They love their Socialized Medicine. They become the same as the British when you tell them we're going to get rid of NHS, right? Nobody wants to get rid of Medicare, but Medicare is Socialized Medicine. It's no different than the National Health Service. Yeah, no one more clear on that on the Republican side than Donald Trump. Yeah, Trump, Trump, definitely. But all of them, I remember in the Tea Party, one of the things that really struck me in the Tea Party is I would give these talks and I would talk about the fact that Medicare was bankrupting the country. And the audience was always old people because the Tea Party movement was an old party, was a movement of old people. And I would tell them you guys are basically bankrupting your kids and grandkids. And it's immoral what you're doing to them. And they'd say, we paid into the system, which is true, but they will actually use four times more than they paid in. For every dollar you pay into Medicare, you'll use four X. Most of that, over 50% of it, in the last year of your life, which if it was your own money, you probably would say, I'm going to die now. I'm not going to basically take all my kids' money and not leave an inheritance. But it's not your money. So why not? Why not spend all that money in the last year? So it's so distorted. It's so perverse. And that, I think, is what he's getting to. Treatments are going to be driven by financial consideration in egalitarianism. Everybody treated the same. Let me do quickly some super chats. And then we'll go back to our panel. Michael asks, is the real sin of self-absorption and narcissism that they're cutting yourself from your deep connection with other people to really find happiness in a romantic partner and friendship? You have to build bonds and not be just in your head. I mean, suddenly that's a big part of the sin is that you're cutting yourself off from other people. But the more important part of the sin is that you're cutting yourself off from reality. That is, reality is outside of your head. Reality doesn't, in a sense, doesn't care about what's going on in your head. In reality, the world doesn't actually revolve around you, as a narcissist would believe. So the real sin here is you're cutting yourself from the causal relationships in reality, what's actually happening in reality, what actually are causing things. And of course, as a consequence of being cut off from reality, you'll also be cut off from other people. You'll come off as a real jerk and you'll alienate other people. And that'll cause you to be alone and not have a romantic partner and not have friendships. But it goes much beyond that. I think narcissistic people are cutting themselves off of reality. And therefore, they make poor decisions about lots of things because they're uninterested in the fact, they're interested in how the facts affect their emotions or affect their own self-evaluation, not even how they affect them in an objective way. That's just egoism. It's how they affect their emotions and how they affect their own self-image. So it's a very, very destructive attitude, narcissism or self-absorption is, depends what you mean by that. But narcissism certainly is self-destructive. Okay, quickly, James says, do you find South Korea to be more individualistic than Japan? I don't know. I don't know enough about both cultures to find it. I've watched a lot of South Korean dramas. So I know how brutally they were treated by the Japanese. So I tend to be in the South Korean side. So there's something in me that's kind of pro-South Korea and a little hesitant about Japan, a little bit in how I feel about Germany, a little bit removed and can't get excited about anything German, right, except maybe their cars. But I, you know, and particularly, and I don't like being in Germany, Japan is not as bad because it's not as personal. But there's something about how they behaved in the past that says something about the culture that worries me. And you don't get that in South Korea. South Korea is clearly was the victim. And they've done the other thing about South Korea that's so admirable is that you remember when the end of the end of the Korean War, South Korea was poorer than North Korea. And it was poorer than North Korea for quite a bit after the war. And it's only in the in the 19, I think in the 1970s, that South Korea really took a turn and started being productive. And the amount of wealth that they have created in the natural period of time is truly stunning. I think South Korea is the fifth largest economy in the world. I mean, it is it is amazing the progress they've made in such a short period of time. They're also, by every objective measure that I know, the hardest working people in the world, they work more hours in in South Korea than any place else in the world. So, you know, maybe they overdo it. But but there's something admirable there. But I don't I don't know that the more individualistic and I think I'm probably being unfair to the Japanese. Certainly, every time I go to Japan, I'm reminded by the objectivists in Japan that, you know, I'm probably being unfair to them and they're much more Japan is much more individualistic than I think. And I think that's probably true. Again, it's hard. When you go to Asia, one of the things that strikes you is how different the culture is, how everything looks different, the type, like the letters, the way they speak, it's not anything like a European language. Obviously, the way that people look. And just just the kind of the subjective vibe of the place is very different. And it takes a while to get acclimated. And there's something about Japan, but I think also South Korea that that is so far and that is it's hard to evaluate and judge objectively. So I don't know if South Korea is more individualistic. Right. LMF ask how you're on since you are since your friends with Lena Peacoff, I have a question for you. Peacoff has said that the New York Post is the only newspaper he likes and reads. Why do you think this is? I have I have a strong view of why that is, but I'm not going to share it with you guys. It's just not appropriate for me to speculate on, you know, Lena Peacoff's why he likes certain things that doesn't like certain things at the age of 89. I mean, I just don't think it's it's right of me to do that. So I'm going to I'm going to skip there. I'm going to skip answering that question. Clark, is altruism the primary form of mental conditioning implemented to gain tyrannical control? What are the types of anti-life conditioning other than altruism? Do you see propaganda? Well, it all goes together, but but a big part of it is the rejection of reason. You know, you can't have people thinking. You don't want people thinking for themselves. So educational systems that either teach people to follow and be and be good followers and and just learn things with by what and not really all educational systems that just emphasize emotions and deemphasize reason. So anything that that that makes you a worst thinker and and orient you towards the other is something that is going to benefit anybody who wants to gain authoritarian control, tyrannical control. Okay, Michael says, I'm hearing libertarians say Russia is actually winning and the media is hiding it. Why would the media hide it? 75% of libertarians are nuts and make free market people look bad. Okay, I agree with you, Michael. So look, factually on the ground by every measure of who's winning and who's losing, not only is Russia losing, Russia has already lost, period, no matter what happens from now on. Russia's lost. And I've talked about this, the very fact that Sweden and Finland have joined NATO means Russia has lost. The very fact that Putin is in an insecure place and not sure about where he is means Russia has lost. The very fact that Europe today can probably sustain itself without any Russian gas and and and liquid gas or or natural gas. Either way is a huge Russian loss. Europe can sustain itself without being dependent on Russia. By every one of those parents, the fact that Europe is more united than it has been in 50 years lost to Russia. The fact that Poland is going to have by the end of next year, the largest army in all of Europe and a very, very, very advanced army, a modern army with with the most modern tanks and with F 35s. Russia and China have no airplane that comes even close to an F 35. All of that means Russia's already lost. It's finished. Now it's just a question of how much land it will capture from Ukraine or not capture from Ukraine. But that is not going to that is not a determinant of whether in the strategic sense, Russia has lost or won. It's so anything suggested Russia is winning is an invasion. All right. Let's see. All right. Let's go back to our panel. Okay, Ryan. I think I've heard you say about a thousand times that the best way to get into Rand's work is through the fiction. And I didn't quite understand why until earlier this week I was listening to your interview with Amish. And he he drops Rand references like super naturally. Like he just he just pulls out references to Dagny. And I think he did it three or four times in the interview. And when he mentioned that the government response to multiple waves of COVID was like the Taggart Transcontinental Tunnel Disaster happening like three or four times in a row backing the train up and running it through again. I mean, the the imagery in my mind was so powerful and the connection to just everything that leads up to that event in the story. And so so I'm I'm fully convinced now that that accessing these ideas through the literature through the fiction is the right way to do it. I was wondering like it seems like it's it's it's easier to reach people with these ideas if they've understood the stories. It's like an access point that you can summarize extremely complex concepts in just one reference to one event in the story. What do you see as the barrier going forward to I mean, other than people just reading more, you know, making that using that as leverage to better spread the ideas? Well, I mean, I think I think people reading more people more people reading out of shock, but more than that, I think I think using using is probably not exactly the right word, but but more art, more aesthetics, more, more models, you know, you don't need another shrug, but you need more arts and more forms and more formats that project that sense of life and that, you know, that philosophy, the philosophy somehow a concretization of different elements of the values that the philosophy is driving towards. So more art, more great art, and just more of it in different realms, painting, sculpture, and certainly painting, certain painting, sculpture, literature, because it's so conceptual is very important, but art that portrays and portrays the heroic in man, you know, the enlightenment couldn't have happened without a renaissance and the renaissance was primarily an aesthetic thing. It was primarily an artistic thing, you know, there was some there was a certainly a philosophical awakening going on in parallel, but but the real achievement was an aesthetic achievement. And the enlightenment builds on that because because what happens is that the aesthetic achievement shapes the culture in a particular way that then allows the ideas to resonate. So so we need a lot more arts and then we need the other thing I think that would be incredibly helpful to legitimize, if you will, objectivism is we need super successful people, people who are culturally known as successful to start identifying Iran is the source of that success. And at some point that will happen. So somebody wins a Nobel Prize on physics and they go up and say I mean, it was I was epistemology that really got me on the track to really achieving whatever achieved somebody becoming a billionaire and saying it was it was outless shrugged and but more than that, you know, philosophically, this is what because we've got a lot of people saying, I read outless shrugged and inspired me, but we need somebody who says, no, this philosophy something about this philosophy did it. So again, role models, people, legit people, successful people saying this, then it becomes a norm in the culture and that is what really, really allows it to spread and to grow in the culture. And then art provides that concretization that effect that you had with just, you just mentioned Dagny, everybody knows what you're talking about, it's done. And you can move on I did the same thing in the, in the masculine feminine thing, I could just say Dagny and everybody has an image of Dagny and they know what I mean by that. So it's these are shortcuts to ideas and some of the shortcuts could be an art, but some of the shortcuts can be in people in real life people, you know, that we all know. I tried to think of what is the direct opposite of say an Andrew Tate and I thought of Eugene Choi from Mr. Sunshine. Yeah, I mean, that's that. Absolutely. You know, or you know, Reardon or Francisco from Atlas or how to walk from the fountain head. I mean, they're all counters to that Francisco more than any of them because he's so able physically, right? He's so physically in this world and in that sense, you know, this whole Andrew Tate thing about big muscles and being strong and you get the sense that or the pirates, you know, right? All of those guys are the epitome of masculinity and the exact opposite of Andrew Tate. They're all made up the mind and yet they're all masculine. Now, in real life, I think of but Eugene Choi is absolutely that that's part of what I loved about that because he's so, he's such a good guy. But he's also a man and he has that knowledge that he's a man. But also, you know, I use the example of Steve Jobs, who I think is quite masculine, although some people disagreed about that one. Because I mean, he commanded when he was up there on stage, when he was doing his PowerPoints or, you know, he was in command. He was a command of the world. He was he had people right there. And he just that ability to command an audience command reality command the world that I think is is very much part of the essence of masculinity. All right, Ian. So first, I just wanted to say quickly, thank you again for having a mesh on. I know it must get very tiring for both you and him talking about the same topics over and over again, with all the noise. And then something happened right around that that inspired some thoughts, which was RFK junior testifying and saying, you know, I'm not anti vaccine, which he says a lot. And I see people who are, you know, putatively on our side of things, repeating this and saying, Oh, he's not, you know, he's clearly not. And what they mean is he's literally not anti every single vaccine. That's their only literal interpretation of anti vaccine. If you if there's a vaccine out there that look good, then you're okay. And I relate this to a similar thing I see here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I live in Oakland across from San Francisco. And there are people here that, you know, nimbies get accused of anti housing. And they say we're not anti housing. And what they mean is if you proposed a housing that was 100% affordable housing, and one story tall. And, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, they might allow that in someone else's neighborhood. And so it's inspired a whole bunch of thoughts that really it's one is that these people are applying some kind of magical standard, you know. And really, when we say something like somebody is anti vaccine, or anti expert, which relates to a coincidentally relates to a super chat, which is coming up, or anti housing. What we're saying is that they are anti irrational or objective standard applied to this thing. And that they are using some other just emotional or bias based standard. And, you know, they can't give clear objective articulations of why they're like this vaccine versus that vaccine that stand up to, you know, a reasonable examination. I don't know, I'd like to hear your thoughts. Do you agree with that? I agree with it completely. I think that, yeah, I mean, you could I'm sure that you could come up with some combination of factors where he would be pro a particular vaccine. But it's probably not a combination of factors that would actually work in reality, or that anybody would ever propose, just like the example you gave the housing, I think it's the same thing. I, you know, so people don't want to be associated, they fear the generalization, because they they they get a sense that something's wrong with the generalization. So they so they make up some excuse, but it's, it's completely irrational. It's not connected to reality. It's not connected to the facts. And if you actually do a little bit of examination of in this case, Kennedy, you find him saying things like he's anti-vax, you find him saying things like stopping people in a hiking trail, and telling them if they've got a child with them, don't vaccinate that child without saying vaccinate these vaccines, but don't vaccinate those vaccines. That's not what he tells them on the trail. He says, don't vaccinate that child. And these are things he said, that you can actually quote but we literally do live in a, and this is another, I think, I think, I don't know if this has always been the case, maybe it has, but it certainly, it seems like we live in this different era over the last eight, six, seven, eight years. And that is this kind of what people call the post-truth era. And I think there's a lot of validity to using that term. There's an era where basically the people in charge have decided clearly that truth doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter. And that it's not about lying. They don't care about lying. They just don't care about the truth. It doesn't matter. And as long as you have an agenda, and this is ultimately, if you think about this, this is the ultimate manifestation of pragmatism. The ultimate manifestation of pragmatism, if it works, who cares? So you say whatever you need to say, and if it gets you elected, it gets you elected. You say whatever you need to say, if it gets you a date, you get a date. If it gets you a sex, you get a sex. Whatever your target is, you could say whatever it's okay to say, as long as it'll get you the goal. And the truth of the accuracy of what you said makes no difference. So if in order to establish myself as a politician, and in order to get people to be skeptical about vaccines, I have to say I'm not an anti-vaxa. There are certain vaccines I would approve of. Even though it's a bull face lie, it doesn't matter. As long as I achieve my goals, that's okay. And people are willing to accept that, I think for a similar reason, as long as he serves the purpose for which I like him for. He's anti-establishment. He's anti-COVID vaccine. I don't know about these other vaccines, but he's anti-COVID vaccine. I know that's good. So I'm going to support him, and I'm going to evade all the rest, or I'm going to again post-truth. It doesn't matter what the truth is. The main thing is he gets to do what I want him to do in the culture. And you see that. You see that in people's support. I think of Trump, of DeSantis, of RFK, of all these guys. The truth doesn't matter. What matters is the left loses, or the anti-COVID vaccine people lose, or whatever. And the truth, it's not even that they say, look, I know RFK is a liar. He lies all the time. He's terrible on these 100 things. He's an environmental maniac. He's crazy. He's a leftist. But you know what? He's good on this one thing. And right now, this one thing is the most important issue in the culture. And I'm supporting him because there's one thing, even though he's awful, he's evil on all these other things. If they said that, then we could have a debate. Then there's some standard by which you're setting up. But they're not saying that. They're whitewashing all this other stuff. They're making it seem like it's okay that they're accepting his lies about it in order to justify this one thing that they think is crucial in the culture. Yeah, I think part of it is that epistemologically, we've lost the ability to have standards in our culture. And then for the pragmatic reasons, people don't want to have standards. And then all you have left is emotion. Emotion versus your emotion. And that's it. All right, Adam. Yes, you may remember that in February, the San Francisco Board of Education was dismissed by the voters. They voted to recall it. And the reason for that... Not the whole board, but they were called certain members of it. The progressive members, the very progressive ones. Well, the walk members, the ones who were responsible for pulling algebra out of the middle school curriculum, which is why the recall started and why they lost and why San Francisco now has algebra back in the middle school curriculum. That was one of the issues in San Francisco because there were many issues in San Francisco, including the fact that San Francisco refused to open schools for much longer than the rest of the country. In the middle of COVID, when the schools were shut down, they started renaming the schools. Do you remember they changed all the names of the schools? They wouldn't even have a name. There was a school named after Feinstein, the Democratic Senator from California. They didn't like her. She was too right-wing. So they wanted to rename the school on Feinstein. They wanted to rename Thomas Jefferson School. So there's a lot of different things. I think it was a historical moment because it was when the walk movement started its downward trajectory. If people reject walk, even in San Francisco, that means that in the long run, it's over and done with with one set of exceptions, which are schools of education. And unfortunately, to be a school administrator who gives orders to the teachers in most states, to get that certification, one must graduate from one of those schools of education. And in the case of Cambridge, there's Harvard School of Education and a city where people look for expertise and trust these anti-educators as the experts on education. But I think that may have a very bad long-term effect. But in terms of the next few years, at least, I see the walk movement as being past its peak and mostly being used as a scarecrow so that the people who consider themselves on the right have something to complain about. And in fact, one remarkable aspect of the discussion of San Francisco dropping algebra out of the middle school curriculum is that most of the so-called right-wing commentary on that does not mention the fact that the board of education members responsible for that were recalled and dismissed and the policy was backtracked. Yes, I mostly agree with you, but not completely because I think so walk I think has peaked and is in decline. Although I think what will happen is it'll change its name and it'll come back in other ways. The other thing I think that's really important is the damage that it's done that is permanent or at least permanent for a long time, not permanent forever, but for a long time. And that damages things like DEI, things like the standards by which companies and universities and others are hiring people, you know, DEI offices in most major corporations. It's going to take a long time to get rid of those if they ever will get rid of those. And again, they'll change their names that pretend to get rid of them. So a lot of the woke stuff is being already institutionalized. You know, the California math problem is it's a big problem. So California passed this California mathematics framework, which has a 900 page document. And a part of that document recommends not teaching algebra, not offering algebra in eighth grade. And what there was a huge backlash against this. And as a consequence, they came back and said, look, it's unmandated, but it's still a recommendation all bit all based on work of this woman in of this not woman is a man in Stanford University. But that's 900 pages. The the algebra thing is one aspect of it. There's a lot of bad stuff in this. You know, I've seen some other stuff about how they're teaching this what they call it, what I think should be called new new math. It's really bad. And while it's not mandated, it's recommended. And as you said, everybody goes through the teacher colleges, and the math teachers go through the colleges. And this will come to dominate because this is the state of the art from the state of California. And so it goes way beyond just, unfortunately, the whole progressive woke agenda goes way beyond algebra to the fact that the, you know, most schools don't teach phonics or don't teach phonics rights. And most schools are teaching new math. And now they want to teach new new math, which is even worse. The the impact of these woke ideas is going to be felt in us for a long, long time. But I agree with you politically. I think the turning point was Virginia. That was the first big election that was held over schools and over woke and and Democrats lost. And then it happened in San Francisco. And it's happened in Minnesota around defund the police, right, the defund the police movement got got hit badly in Minneapolis when they all their candid is lost. You know, because people in Minneapolis want police. And so a lot of the agenda of the woke left, you know, has been slowly defeated even in the bastions of the progressive left. But the damage that they have done and the fact that there's no alternative, unfortunately, is going to is going to continue to hurt us all. Well, there is an alternative, which is run for the school board put in Singapore math. And the rest of the available good curricula and they are available. And by the way, these are not recommendations by law in California. The State Department of Education is not allowed to recommend. It is not allowed to set guidelines. It is not even allowed to suggest it. It's calling this a framework because it sounds neutral. And nobody can go to court and say they're pressuring us to do these things. Yeah, but you know, whatever the law says that they're not allowed to do the reality is that this is out there as the state of the art. And most school boards don't have you on them and don't have our listeners on them. Most school boards are going to accept the state of the art. And and that's what what's dangerous about it, whether whether they impose it or not. It's going to affect a lot of the education in California, which is tragic, because, you know, the best, the thing that will rebel against it are Asian mothers. I mean, I hope the hope in California is Asian mothers who will not tolerate this BS, right? Because they want their moms. Yeah, they're tiger moms. Of course, a lot of those Asians, what they do is they send their kids to after school, tutoring anyway, but they will not let the kids waste their time in school. So and this is what happened in the school district in California in San Francisco is Asians are typically vote progressive for a variety of reasons in this election voted oust all of them out because what they care about is education, what they care about is their kids, and they won't tolerate this ideology in their schools. So any place dominated by Asians, culturally, that's a huge advantage. And luckily, California has a lot of a large Asian population that will rebel against this. Thank you, Adam. Peany. I wanted to ask many, many years ago when I first read Iran. So then I was looking for anything related to Iran or reason and so on and so on. And I came upon a book. And that's why I wanted to know if you know him. And then I'll put my two questions to direction. Dr. Moshe Kroy. Tell you something? Yeah. So, so his first book, to my opinion, at least at the time was amazing because he took an Iran philosophy, and he show in pretty simple language and pretty how rational country will function with all the description where there was government and everyday life and so on and I found it was amazing because it was without too heavy philosophy if I could use the term for every day and every person. And so the first question is, A, why Iran Institute either translated or write something similar because I think it will be so much helpful for everyday people that they don't want to get too deep to philosophy. They read Iran, but they say, but how does it apply to me? How I can do it everyday life? So I think it was amazing book. So that was one direction, one question. The other one going completely the opposite. So he wrote other books after, which I'm sure you know. And he kind of followed the language, but he got to some kind of first he wrote a book about logic, logical proof for the existence of soul, if I can translate it. And then he went farther and farther. I think then he commit suicide like to follow his thing. So where do you think like in his second book, where did he got off track? Yeah. So just to give everybody the context here, Moshe Koy was a philosopher who had received his PhD, I think at Tel Aviv University and was a philosophy professor at Tel Aviv University in the late 1960s and I'd say early to mid 1970s. He was an incredibly popular philosopher. He would give lectures at Tel Aviv University attended by hundreds of people. And he was from very early on considered himself an objectivist. He talked about Iran. He wrote about Iran. He did tell interviews about Iran. I mean, he was Israeli culture because of him had Iran pretty much everywhere. Unfortunately, when I discovered, I think by the time I discovered Iran, he was already off the scene. I'll tell you where he went in a minute. I mean, he was literally, he was a significant cultural figure during that period. And some of the older Israeli objectivists that I know, and maybe some of you guys know came to objectivism because of him. That is, he was motivated and he inspired people to read Iran. I think Koy was, and I think his first book, well, good in some respects was problematic in other respects. And he generally was problematic even from the beginning, even when he seemed really good. He had a very what I call rationalistic view of perspective on objectivism. It was very much floating. It wasn't really tied to reality and wasn't really, you know, it wasn't really reducible to the facts of reality. It was more, I think, for him. He was very smart. It kind of a game he played in his head. And I think the book comes out, and I don't remember it enough to really comment, but I think the book comes out of very, in spite of the fact that he's trying to tell you how it works in the real world, it's very, a lot of it is still very abstract. And it's kind of formulaic. It doesn't have, and I should read it again to see, but it doesn't have the kind of, I think the nuance that real life would actually involve. And I think that's the problem that led him to go astray in the end. So for example, you know, he did a lot of radio interviews. And one of the interviews he said something like, he just had a baby. And he said, when the baby cries at night, I don't go to him. I'm selfish, and I'm busy, and I'm doing other stuff. And I don't go to, I don't, I don't, you know, I don't pay attention to the crying baby. I mean, the reasons why you might not want to pay attention to crying baby, you're training it to sleep or something like that. But I'm too busy, or I'm, that's a little nuts, right? And it's not egoism. It's not our understanding of egoism. It's not our Iran's egoism. And then at some point, he said, I'm fed up with Israel, Israel, any, any, oh, he threw his mother-in-law out of the house. Now I can understand not wanting to live with your mother-in-law, but he had, again, some nasty explanation for it. But then he said, Israel's a horrible place to live, which I kind of agree with, at least in those days. And I'm leaving and he left for Australia. And it's in Australia that he went off on, and he got, what happened to him was he got caught up in Eastern mysticism. And now why did he get caught up in Eastern mysticism? I think because fundamentally he wasn't happy. I think fundamentally, objectivism wasn't working for him. It wasn't actually giving him what he, what Iran said it would give him, right? Happiness and, and, and, and a certain self-esteem and all these things. So he started searching for other ways in which to gain it. I think it didn't give it to him because he held it as a, as a rationalist word, not, not a fully integrated, fully integrated. And he started dabbling with Eastern mysticism in an attempt to try to capture that kind of spiritual, if you will, happiness or, and he lost his way somewhere along there. And what's interesting is the book you mentioned, logical proofs for the existence of a soul is a dialogue. It's structured as a platonic dialogue between Socrates and, and is it Francisco? I think it's Francisco. Yeah. Yeah. Francisco, Danconia, right? So he's literally, and of course, Socrates wins at the end, right? And Socrates represents kind of East. And if you think about Eastern philosophy and Socrates, there's a lot of similarities. You know, and, and the book is filled with errors in terms of how Francisco would answer Socrates. So you get the sense that he never fully understood objectivism. He never really integrated fully and understood and then he went off the deep end. And he really became crazy. And weird stuff happened in his life is his wife and children were murdered in Australia. And it was never solved in terms of who murdered him. He then showed up in Israel in the late 1980s. No, the early 1990s. And then was found dead on the side of the road, suspected suicide, but there are all kinds of conspiracy theories about murder and whatever. So his life went really off the tray off the tracks and completely was destroyed. And yeah, that that's that's part of a history of I did when I was in Israel last time, I actually recorded a about a two hour thing on the history of objectivism in Israel. And there's a whole segment of Michelle Coy in there, but there's a little bit about before Coy and some about after my experiences in the 1980s in Israel, which were also full of drama. So objectivism in Israel has always been filled with drama, put it that way. So it is interesting. But a book like that that actually took objectivism and showed its application in day to day life, I think would be really valuable. You need to find the right person to write such a book with the right sense of life, because it has to be written has to be written right, not in a dogmatic way, which I think the the Coy book is a little dogmatic. And I think that's part of the rationalism. I agree, I agree. I think it's it'll be amazing, especially for young people that just finding the right reading about some Atlas ragd or another book of Iron Run, and they want to how does it apply and to read something that it's structured. But like you said, not dogmatic, it will be amazing. I agree. I agree. All right, Andrew, thanks, Pini. That was fascinating. I got most stories like that. So one day, especially the connection between rationalism and mysticism, they do go together well. Yeah. I'm going to borrow a question that I ran once asked somebody to get to know someone intellectually, which is what issue makes you indignant? And I know there's a lot of them, but like what issue what is what is an example of an issue that really, really makes you indignant going on in the culture today? That's hard, because there's so many of them. I mean, when I think about what I get indignant about, it's when people who seem to be rational in their lives, just completely irrational on a particular issue, I don't know, could be COVID vaccines, it could be Russia, it could be, I don't know, it seems like every two weeks, there's something where this is not hard, guys. What are you doing? What are you thinking? And I get most indignant with my own people, with people who supposedly on my side. If you're a leftist and you have crazy ideas, well, of course you have crazy ideas. You're a leftist. So there's no, I don't get indignant about that because it's completely expected. It's completely, if you're fascist and you have crazy ideas, well, of course, it's people who present as rational and then have what I think are completely crazy rational ideas. And people I think who listen to my show often probably get this, this is why is your hand getting so upset about this? Why isn't he getting upset about the latest walk thing? And the reason I don't get upset about the latest walk thing is because I expect the latest walk thing. Of course, I'm going to have another walk thing. I mean, walk is part of the culture. It's out there. It's crazy people. They're going to do crazy things and it's going to be more and more of this stuff. Yeah, you're not surprised. I'm not surprised. It's when somebody surprises me that getting indignant. When people I think should know better do stuff that is crazy, that's what makes me most indignant. And it's the lack of thinking. It's the lack of actually looking at the data's there and being able to analyze reality, analyze data. It's very, I find that super frustrating. Yeah, true. All right. So we got a few superchatters and I think we'll call it a day. Daniel says, what are some historical figures of events that are under-emphasized or ignored on history of the United States? What books would you recommend, if any? What are some historical figures of events that are under-emphasized? By whom? I mean, this is a tough one because by whom is it being under-emphasized? I mean, I generally would say I think that enough with studying the founders. Like everybody who's an objectivist historian wants to study the founders. We get the founders, I think. Enough, right? The founders are great. They were fantastic. But historically, I think we've milked that one. I think there's less new, interesting things you're going to discover about the founders. The interesting part of American history, in my view, is what happens after, right? The first 50 years, maybe really the first 100 years, all the way to World War I, of what happens in the United States. You know, the issue of slavery again, we've studied that, written about that. Everybody knows about that. There's certain dimensions of the issue of slavery, which I don't think have been studied enough. For example, the dramatic economic superiority of the north to the south, how the south was, in a sense, stagnated because of slavery. The slavery was a negative economically. But there's so much happening in the north, particularly during the 19th century, capitalism, and in the west, right? So the whole dynamic of the American government, the way in which it defends individual rights, the way in which the courts function, and then the way in which capitalism institutionalized in the north, the way industrialization happens. We know some of the industrialists, but we only know the big names. There were so many of them. And that includes the push to the west. Somebody needs to do a proper economic history of the United States. That would be fascinating. We don't have a lot of economic histories that are not written from a kind of a Marxist perspective. A proper understanding of the railroads and how they developed. So all of that, everything that happened in the 19th century is fascinating, in my view. And then another segment of history would be, I'd say 1914, the election of Woodrow Wilson, maybe even the election of Teddy Roosevelt, all the way to the end of the New Deal. So the establishment of progressivism, as it was understood then, in American politics, and how that came to dominate, and what impact did it have on America and everything else. So the really the presidencies of Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, and frankly Delano Roosevelt, those are the pivotal presidencies that shift the United States toward statism. And that needs to be studied and understood and how did it happen, what happened. And then the other part is the pre-revolutionary period. I just saw a presentation by a young student yesterday. He only gave the first five minutes, this is in the public speaking course that I'm doing. And it was a really, really good motivation for a talk. And he told the story in 1663, the colonies were places of barbarism. People were being burnt as witches and there was awful stuff going on. How did we get from 1663 to 1776? How did that happen? That to me is like the most interesting thing. And then all of that I think is, I think the most important and interesting thing about history is the two errors, 1500, 1800, 1700, if you will, that is the transition from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and then the Enlightenment through the Industrial Revolution. So those 400 years are everything that historians just studied. There's very little relevant in history. I'm exaggerating, but there's very little relevant in history other than those 400 years. Like everything happened then, everything of importance happens then. And to understand what happened and how it happened would be such a boom to our advocacy for the future. Because if you don't understand the past, you won't understand the future. So if we could really dominate the study of the 400 years from 1500 to 1900, we dominate the understanding of the future. Because that's the most important error in human history. Because everything happened, intellectually, materially. All right, we've got a few more questions. Justice. I wanted to toss one in here that I would love to see, which is something about the history of black Americans, post-Civil War, up until like say the 50s, that isn't from a leftist framework. Because there's lots of those, they talk about Marcus Garvey and they talk about these guys that were explicit communists. And at the same time, there's these entrepreneurs, there's these business people that are building up these incredible communities and stuff like that that were hurt by Jim Crow and stuff like that. And it's an untold history that could be really interesting. Yes. And I think that we have somebody who plans to do work like that. God, what's his name? He was on my show, I interviewed him. Ibis. Ibis. Ibis is really interested in this and hopefully he'll be, he's now, I think, a junior fellow at the Institute or doing work at the Institute. So I think he's now on an intellectual career and this is the kind of work he wants to do in the future. So I'm super excited about that. Okay, so Justin says, I enjoyed your video on masculinity, but masculinity, femininity or social constructs, are they not? What does that mean in the sense that the concepts, masculine and feminine concepts that relate to something real in reality? That's not a social construct. The social construct is a concept that relate, that doesn't relate to something real in reality. It relates to a fantasy created by a particular political agenda or political social movement. But masculine and feminine relate to something that's real in reality. That is, it relates to certain traits that tend to be more adopted by men and some traits that tend to be more observable among females. I think race is a social contract because I don't think race exists. Race doesn't relate to anything in reality. It doesn't relate to anything specific out there. Feminine masculinity do indeed relate to something out there. There is a there there. And that's, I think, that I think is the difference and why they're not social constructs. Okay, Scott says, can it be a bit of a strawman to say some people are against all experts? No one is rejecting gravity just because we think Fauci and company put politics first. But you are. Of course, you're rejecting gravity. You're rejecting a bunch of science that doesn't fit because the scientists happen to be on a political side that you disagree with. You're evaluating science based on politics, based on predetermined conclusions, rather than based on logic and reason and rationality. Yes, you are. And you gave lots of examples of that, Scott, on the show with Amish when you were making fun of experts and authorities. But that's exactly the attitude. You're perpetuating whether you don't agree with that conclusion or not, then don't take that attitude. But that's exactly the attitude you are perpetuating. And there is a whole attitude in many people against experts and the fact that you have a PhD is a negative or if the elites, I mean, the problem is not that we have elites that some people know stuff. The problem is that the elites happen to be that certain parts of the elites are corrupt. It's not a strawman. You expressed that attitude exactly that attitude on the show. You should go read the chat from the show. Yeah, you don't reject gravity, I'm sure. And when life and when push comes to shove and you get cancer, you will probably go to the world expert on cancer, on that particular cancer to get treatment, even if he's a leftist, I hope. But that is the attitude you exude. That is the attitude you project. That is what people who are less intelligent than you are going to pick up. That is the attitude that exists today and much of the new right with regard to much science. And again, it's not just the vaccines, COVID, it's also climate change. Yes, there's a certain reason to be suspicious of science when it gets mixed in with politics. But all that means is you got to be more discerning and be able to tell when science is being politicized and when it's not, but not to reject science with it, which is what you imply in the way you talk about experts and in the way you talk about scientists. Frank says, can you comment on masculinity in the Godfather? God, when Don Vito yells, you can be a man. And in lust for life, beefy, Paul Gauguin versus whiny Van Gogh. Yeah, I mean, there's elements of masculinity in the Godfather in the sense that, yeah, I mean, some of the characters are a man who is waning and complaining and weak and folds. Obviously, those are all the opposite of kind of characteristic masculinity, which is strength and decisiveness and action-oriented and all of that. So most movies have characters that are non-masculine, and certainly the Godfather does, the one brother is clearly a whiner and his brother has to kill him in the end for whining so much. But I think it's also a mistake to view the Godfather as some kind of symbolic of masculinity in terms of the more tougher characters. Just because you're violent and willing to engage in violence doesn't make you afraid, or is the name of, and that's right. Just because your violent doesn't make you masculine. Violence is usually a sign of weakness. And it's very difficult to be properly masculine, as I understand it, in the context of a mafia. Because think about it, if part of masculinity is the wanting to protect your family and to provide protection for your family, well, how well does anybody in the Godfather movies do that? The tough guys don't do that. They can't protect their family. As part of the theme of the movies is you cannot do it if you're engaged in a life of crime. Your life will collapse one way or the other. Everybody will suffer. Everybody will suffer around you. In terms of Paul Gauguin, and I don't remember lust for life enough to be able to make that difference. But yeah, I mean, I don't go around evaluating characters in movie or anywhere else masculine, not masculine. I mean, good guy, bad guy is much more prevalent, admirable, not admirable, is much more likely maybe because I'm not a woman. There is a sense in which I probably do that with female characters in a movie, feminine, not feminine, much more than I do it with male characters. But I still owe you a show on femininity. So I will do a show sometime on femininity. I have less personal experience with that one. Bradley says, my theory, the left and right are collectivist, collectivized, feminine and masculine, collectivized, feminine and masculine needs that would be rational and healthy and an individualistic expression, but instead irrational as a result of a democratic structure of society. I think that's probably right, if I understand you right, that I think they're both capturing certain aspects of femininity and masculinity that when viewed properly and understood properly from an individualist perspective, they would be right, but destructive when they're associated with a political view and associated with a particular structure of society today. So I think I agree with that to the extent I understand it. All right, everybody. Thank you. Thank you to our panel. Thanks for all the support. Thanks to all the superchatters. I will see you guys. Oh, I will have a member's only show tomorrow. I'm still yet to decide on a topic, but I will have a member show tomorrow. It might be on the topic, Pini, that you just mentioned of Croy. Somebody asked me to lay out, what would a lozifist city look like? How would it function? How would the land and development and city planning, I mean, how would that happen in a totally free society? So just one aspect of living under the lozific capitalism. So I might do that. I think that could be a lot of fun just to do that. By the way, what we do with a member's only show is about two months afterwards, I premiere them for like 24 hours. I make them public. So you guys can catch it right now. The member's only show for two months ago is up How to Live a Rational Life in an Irrational World. I'll probably take that back into the member's section tomorrow morning. So you've got a few more hours to watch it. And the same will happen with the other members show. I'll show them periodically for short periods of time. But they are primarily from members. All right. Thanks, everybody. I will see you all tomorrow if you're members and if not Monday morning for the news roundup. Thanks, guys. Bye. Have a great