 Low radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Book Show. All right, everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show on this Sunday afternoon. Jim was asking me a few minutes ago what the temperatures were like in Puerto Rico. Same as they are always. Low 80s, sun is shining, wind is blowing, rain periodically, but you can easily go to the beach and the people are on the beach right now. I can see them from my window. So, yes, it's a tropical island. That's what you get in a tropical island, so a regular weather. All right, so today, Jonathan, thank you. Why aren't you on the show? What are you doing in the super chat? You should be on here and video asking me tough questions. Anyway, we have, yes, we have our hangout today with supporters of $100 or more a month. So we have right now, we have Jim, Jennifer, and Adam. We might get two or three additional who signed up, but haven't showed yet. We'll see if they join us. And of course, John, thank you for the support. And of course, we are taking super chat questions as always. So hopefully, you guys have a bunch of questions to ask. And we will go from there. Let's see, just a reminder, we'll be doing a show on Tuesday. At 8 p.m. east coast time and on Thursday at 8 p.m. east coast time. The Tuesday show will be on the title is Sam C. The BS watch, which is now going to be a regular feature. And it's this one's going to be on slavery and capitalism. And on Thursday, we're going to start a new another new feature called the Tucker Carlson BS watch, just because you know me. I'm trying to be fair. You know, if I'm going to attack somebody on the left and you got to attack somebody on the right at the same time and that one will be on this crazy monologue that Tucker Carlson had recently on a show about the number of people in the United States and how horrible it was that the population in the United States was growing so fast. And and of course, all just a pretense for his anti-immigration from certain countries stands the Tucker Carlson house. So America is great because we have great scenery. America is great because we have religion and America is not so great because our population is going fast. That's that's a good one. So we'll be watching Tucker Carlson make that argument and we'll be dismantling it, hopefully. So those will be regular features as we move into 2022. And so those that will be Thursday, Tuesday and Thursday. And then, of course, we'll have a couple of shows over the weekend. So all right, let's jump into our Q&A without panel here. And don't forget, you have an opportunity to use the super chat to ask questions. And let's start with Jim. Hello, everyone, from beautiful downtown Miami. The weather here is darn near perfect also. I wish I could say I was out there, but damn, it's a loud city. This would be an interesting challenge. Before I ask my question, you know, you your point about immigration reminded me of something that when you if you visit Miami, if you get a chance to come here, one of the things that is going to impress any of you is if you're you're like me and you're like a lot of Americans and the majority of your experience of Latinos in America is largely Mexicans all over the country, you you may well get this impression of frankly poverty largely because most of them you see are working lower lower paying jobs, working in back's kitchens, clean up and whatnot. When you come to Miami, here's where you feel poor because they're the Cubans here are very rich. So I'm not just the Cubans. Miami is a hub for wealthy Latin Americans from everywhere. They're, you know, from the Netherlands who have left Venezuela to escape the insanity there, the middle class and wealthy Venezuelans living many of them live in Miami. You've got a lot of Colombians. You've got Brazilians and Argentinians and Chileans and the, you know, and Central Americans. And it's it's it's Miami is a fun place, very vibrant, very alive. And yes, there's a lot, particularly downtown Miami is a lot of money, a lot of money. Yeah, still trying to to learn enough Spanish to be able to to communicate. I mean, if we go four years and my Spanish is grown by exactly zero. Not that. But but I it is interesting when when I being here really kind of puts a point on how conservatives draw a distinction between people coming across the border from Mexico and people coming from Cuba. They love Cubans because Cubans are more likely to vote Republican. So just goes to show that there is this unpleasant dichotomy when they talk about closing borders and whatnot, because I don't ever hear them saying Cubans go back home. It so much of this comes down to who they think different groups are going to vote for. And that's that's an underlying aspect of this. I think it's more than that. But I think you're right. There's more to it. But anyway, I'm sorry, let me get to my question here. I really appreciated your recent episode where you you decided to devote the main topic to regulation. I liked your very simple formulation. Your essential formulation was no regulation, but absolutely liability. You you you do something you're responsible for it. I love formulation that you repeat very often about the idea. And I repeated often in arguments as well. And in a true free market, we rely much more on banks and insurance companies to cover their own butts and make sure that you're building correctly, that that everything you're doing is correct. And so in the spirit of that, I think I may have brought a similar question to the following before, but I want to bring it bring it up anyway. Post mining reclamation, that is to say, we have we have this crazy mix throughout much of the world. We are by and large, mining companies to the best of my knowledge. I don't know how much this is true in America, but many others. They don't buy the land that they want, they buy mining rights. And moreover, in some countries like in the US, you're required to put money into a fund for future reclamation. But in practice, what seems to happen more is just massive taxation of mining companies. And then reclamation ends up falling to government later, especially because very often these smaller mining concerns go out of business, so they lose that responsibility. Do you have some sense? How what do you think about the idea? Again, this is regulation. Maybe you can help help me think through this of simply requiring mining to entail paying for insurance, basically having somebody take responsibility as like an underwriter for cleanup. If you go out of business later or or I don't know, some remediation funding up front or what do you what do you think about, you know, how best to deal with this? I guess I don't see the real question is, she was the victim of the mining company. So in a world in which you have private property and I have property and a mining company wants to, you know, discover something on my land and wants to pay me in order to to come and mine on my land, then I can come to a variety of different agreements with them. I could require them. And maybe that's what the market would would ultimately evolve towards require them to have insurance policy to cover them after the fact. I wonder how many mining companies really go bankrupt. I wonder how many of the bankrupt mining companies go bankrupt on purpose in order to escape the long reach of government in order to not have to do the reclamation because it's it's not a real contract. It's with the government. It's public land. It's not private property and nothing, you know. So it's hard to extrapolate from the world in which we live today and and say what it would look like. But I think it's sold by private property. If I'm the owner of the land, then I get to decide on the what terms you come in mind. And certainly one of those terms, one of those terms could be you reclaim. Or if you pay me a lot of money upfront, I'll do the reclamation. No problem. Right. So it's all negotiable. Right. There are a lot of different solutions could involve the insurance. It could involve other things. But at the end of the day, it's a private voluntary transactions that people can engage in and figure out the best way the best way to handle. There's no there's no special issue here, I think, that needs special kind of definition in the law. Yeah, I think you're right. Ultimately, especially given once there is somebody who owns that land, you know, even if it's the mining company, they're going to want to sell it. If they're going out of business, they're going to sell it so that they're going to want it to be in whatever good and if it's in bad shape, then the price they get is low and the people who come in claim the land. So I don't really don't think it's an issue in a private property environment. I think it's a big issue when most of the mining in the West and part of the United States is actually done in government land and it's all kind of government deals in terms of getting access to land and using it and paying the government royalties and cleaning it up and all of this. And then it becomes political. It doesn't become contractually economic. Agreed. Agreed. Thank you. Sure. All right, Jennifer. I know you've said before that there's more lawyers now that there really should be because they have to get around the government red tape and figure it out and stuff. But if you had a free market happen tomorrow, it just started tomorrow, would you still need like sort of related to what Jim said, would you maybe need more lawyers at least temporarily to figure out things like that and set the precedence? You know, maybe as time goes on, you wouldn't. But I mean, you suddenly always are going to need lawyers. So, you know, I'm not forgetting rid of all of them. Although there are times where I'm tempted. So suddenly you need some lawyers. It's hard to tell how many, you know, think about just how many lawyers deal with the tax code or, you know, just the numbers, the sheer numbers of lawyers who deal with the tax code is just astronomical. And I don't see any value that they provide in a free market. Suddenly you need lawyers. You need legal minds to figure out the transition, to figure out the new laws, the way those new laws are going to apply. But those are legal scholars. Those are real thinkers. Those are not just lawyers. Those are, I think, philosophers of law. The lawyers you'll need for a liability, a proper liability mechanism to come about. But even there, and even there, yes, a lot of what I say is one should rely on common law and liability mechanisms. But even liability has been really distorted and perverted in the world in which we live. And I'm going to do a show on this after reread this book called Liability, which I read, I don't know, 30 years ago. And it's brilliant. I remember it being brilliant, but I need to reread it because nobody talks about this anymore. We used to, they used to have a lot of discussion about this in the 80s and 90s, I think, about the distortion in liability law and the whole asbestos thing, which is ridiculous and all of that. And that's all gone out the window. Nobody talks about stuff like that anymore. So there needs to be real thought about restructuring a whole liability regime in this country and figuring out how to do it properly. And once you get liability rights, how many lawyers do you need? You know, a lot, lot, lot, lot less. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if we land up needing less than 50 percent of the lawyers we have, maybe less than 30 percent of the lawyers we have, and maybe even less than that. If you get smart contracts, if we can use the blockchain and to really do more smart contracts, peer-to-peer, standardized stuff, use technology to cut up middleman. I mean, think about, here's another one, right? Think about all the legal documents you sign in your life, like a mortgage and things like that. And they're typically this thick and you never read them. That wouldn't be the case in a free society. In a free society, no way are you signing a document you can't read and understand. And that is more, I wouldn't sign anything that's more than five pages long, right? So there's no way a mortgage would be five hundred pages the way they are today and you just initial everything and nobody ever reads their mortgage, at least I don't. And I've had lots of mortgages, never had one. And so think about the people who draft that, the people who, I don't know, some people probably send it to the lawyer to read because they're crazy. And, you know, multiply that across every financial instrument about everything that we do. It's just insanity. And, you know, that's going to get worse in the next few years with the with the Biden administration's control of the regulatory agencies, particularly in finance. It's going to get a lot worse. Yeah, so I don't know, 30 percent is generous, I think, of the lawyers remaining. It might be a lot less than that. Thank you. Sure. Thanks, Jennifer. All right, Adam. Yes. What happened? You got muted somehow. I don't know how that happened. Can you hear me now? Good now. Yep. OK, I need to bring in my personal situation because I'm facing a problem that I would like you to comment on. OK. And it's nasty because as a result of growing up in communist Poland, one of the things that happened to me was my triglyceride production went way up, which saved my intelligence, but led to a stroke at age 26, 50 years ago. And various other health conditions, one of which eventually became an enlarged prostate and prostate cancer. And I've had a series of surgeries to remove the prostate and then correct the three different ways in which that affected my life. For the worse, but all those were successful. I live a healthy life now. However, my prostate specific antigen, which indicates the load of remaining prostate cells, has been going up. And the doctor's recommendation for that was to participate in a dosage study of mushroom extract from agaricus bisporus mushrooms. As far as I'm concerned, that was successful. And when the government terminated the study for reasons that have not been disclosed, the government doesn't have to tell you anything about why they do stuff like that. I continued with the mushrooms, found my own way to get the mushrooms. However, it's unclear what effect this has on my immune system. The antigen staying down is likely to indicate that my prostate tissue is only growing very slowly, as slowly as the PSA indicates. But the other possibility is that it's adversely affecting my immune system, so it's making less of the antigen. Taking that into account, my oncologist's opinion, is that I should be treated as a potentially immunodeficient patient because the reduction in antigen production may indicate that my immune system has been affected. Another possible symptom of that is when I've had my three vaccine injections, I had no side effects at all. The reason people get side effects is from the immune system. Getting no side effects at all may mean that the immune system is affected. I'm not sure that's true. Just on that point, Adam, because there is a direct correlation or seems to be a direct correlation between age and side effects from the vaccines. The older you are, the fewer side effects you get. My parents, for example, who are not immunodeficient necessarily had no side effects from getting the vaccines. And they were in the fourth shot in Israel. They've now authorized a second booster over age. OK, we are now on to the substance of things. OK. My oncologist judges that I should get the fourth shot as soon as possible. However, the pharmacists have a government list of specific diagnostic classifications. Whenever you're diagnosed with something, it has a number for the government database. And the pharmacist is supposed to check the database to make sure that you have the diagnostic category for which a fourth shot is permitted. And being in a trial of a new treatment that has never been tried before and whose effects on the immune system are unknown at this point is not considered a justifiable reason to get the fourth shot. Sure. So at this point, as the pharmacists have all told me, they would not only have the Drug Enforcement Administration going after them if they gave me the fourth shot. They would also go after my oncologist and definitely after me. God. So, yeah, I mean, that's that's insane. You know, you should you should get on a flight and go to Israel and get your first shot there. I mean, they're handing it out like candy. I think so it's insane. This is socialized medicine, right? Socialized medicine is it's whatever the decree of the government is. That's the law and and everybody gets treated the same and there are no exceptions and the thresholds and they decide what the thresholds are. And it's completely it's exact opposite of what we were always promised about health care for like 30 years. I've been hearing this idea that we won. We are moving towards personalized health care, right? We would each they would they would sequence our genome and they would figure out exactly what the problem was with you and you would get customized treatment just for you and socialized medicine guarantees that that cannot ever happen because we're all treated like one big blob, you know, maybe segregated by age group and maybe segregated by some segregation that the government, you know, determines, but it's insane and and evil just horrible. Well, what they told us at the start of Obamacare is if you like your doctor, you can your doctor. And I have my doctor, but his opinion doesn't count. Yep, is the government that makes the decision in this case, that they're not allowing me to have the force shot. Yeah, that's all. The coming in to enforce that, too. That sounds very fascist to me. I just picked to these jack-o'-lantern plugs, picking down the door. I mean, I'm sure I'm overly dramatic in my mind, but no, you are not picking down the door. They do this. You know, that's oh, that is just your you're not exaggerating because I was at one point on a school board in New Jersey, and it turned out that the government schools were a source of sinecures for members of criminal gangs that have just been released from prison. That had political influence on the local and state authorities in New Jersey. And fortunately for me, that was at the time when the FBI actually got on the back of the real criminals and established FBI control over the state crime lab so that they could correct the deficiencies in the state examination of the alleged evidence. And OK, the feds freed me because they were fulfilling their correct function, which is to stop the state governments from becoming criminal organizations as New Jersey pretty much has. But when it comes to the individual and especially the drug enforcement agency, they don't actually go after popular drugs because that's dangerous. Cartel members are armed. What they really like is where there is no danger of getting hurt going after pharmacists and they might come. They might come after you for the mushrooms, Adam. Yeah, they might have a feeling the mushrooms are illegal. So they might be knocking on your door and knocking your door down on the mushrooms. Debbie, Adam actually revealed the beginning of this to just before you joined that he he grew up, I guess, in Soviet era Poland. So he's certainly seen his his his fill of this to authoritarianism is around us. All right, so I don't have any medical advice for you, Adam, but yes, it is pretty horrific. You know, if there was a black market, which I'm sure there is some way in vaccines, then I guess that's the way to go. Somebody must be providing a black market in vaccines. I don't know. It's there's money to be made. So I figured there has to be some. Well, I know that there is money to be made and I'm not all that far from the Mexican border. Here you go. There you go. But again, the feds do watch the border very closely. And I'm going to watch it for you getting a vaccine. That's not something they would do. Just get the vaccine there. Go across the border to get the vaccine. I know what I have seen from recent news coverage, especially after the January 6th insurrection. There were real violent insurrectionists there, but there were also many people who just joined the crowd to express their views. And the feds are not going after the violent insurrectionists. And even the New York Times had an article of how the feds are going after people who were not violent, who thought that they were simply joining a legitimate expression of their feeling with the constitutional right to go to a government building and express their grievances. And those are the people that the feds are going after. Yeah, low hand violence. Yeah, good. Thanks, Adam. Let's go to Debbie. Happy New Year, your own Jim Depper and Adam. Nice to be back. Hope you all had a nice holiday. I certainly did. Yep. So just a quick update on the OPA reading and discussion group. That's actually going really well. We were already almost done with chapter one. And I am really getting a lot, a lot out of those discussions. So it's been awesome. And I encourage other people to join too on Clubhouse. If you're interested, we have a club now. But what's the name of the club? How do they find you? It's called OPA reading and discussion group on Clubhouse. OK. And, you know, people are people are starting to find it. The groups have been pretty small, but the high quality discussion. And it's just I feel already so much more solid on the objectivist metaphysics and and confident about it. And I see, actually, this is a good segue into my actual topic, which is we were talking yesterday about the the metaphysically given as absolute. We went through that section and the distinction, the importance, the critical importance of distinguishing between the metaphysically given and the man made that you can lead all kinds of disastrous errors if you if you are on one side or the other. And one thing that I think people frequently mistake as metaphysically given is that we have to age. And, you know, at least that we have to age at the rate that we do. I think people take that for granted. There's a doctor at Harvard. He's a professor of genetics, I believe, at Harvard. His name is David Sinclair, Dr. David Sinclair. During the break, I heard a pod. He made an appearance on a podcast that I frequently listen to for David Huberman, who's a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford. He has a great podcast. Anyway, so there was an appearance there. Dr. David Sinclair focuses on treatments to prevent aging. And he says, we don't why do we have to age? Or why do we have to age as fast as we do? And he's actually got a protocol. He's got a book called Lifespan. And he talked about a longevity protocol that he implements in his own life. It's actually going through clinical trials. They have he's got thousands of papers that he can cite supporting that they were able to tune, basically, to control the aging process and other organisms like mice and so forth to speed it up, slow it down and reverse it. So I just wanted to basically, it's not a question so much as a PSA because he uses this protocol. I looked him up online. He's in his fifties and he looks like younger than me. So I wanted to share this information with people. I mean, I think it's pretty exciting. And it's not even like you've got to have your genome edited. It's like taking certain supplements and intermittent fasting and certain exercise routines, things like that. I mean, I'm sure there's some things you need a doctor to be involved with. I haven't gone through and learned a whole protocol, but I'm certainly implementing it as I learned it this year. So I wanted to share that with others because I think it's just exciting. I think even if it makes the difference of like, say, 5%, or even a couple of years or even a month, like who would it want to live a half a month? Well, I don't know. I'm not quite willing to fast for one month. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Maybe that's been the ROI's not there. You have to be a high ROI for that. I am fine with all of the stuff. There are two things that I don't like about these routines that they're coming up with. Fasting, I'm not big on fasting. I abandoned fasting back when I abandoned Judaism with, you know, I walked away. No, I don't like to fast. I've tried intermittent fasting. I don't like it. And then the other one that I've been reading recently is cold showers. Every morning, you're supposed to take this freezing shower before you put it on the hot water. And I don't know. I'm not a fan of that one. Yeah, that one's going to be hard. I'm waiting for more indications about the return on investment before I inflict that kind of pain on myself. But yes, I mean, that was an interesting one because there's a sense in which that was metaphysical until very recently, right? So it was metaphysical because we had no knowledge of any ability to extend life. We didn't have the knowledge. We didn't have the ability. We didn't have the, it was metaphysical for all intents and purposes. It was a given. There was nothing to think about. There was nothing to be upset about. It just was. But it is true that there's more and more research now on life extension, on ability to extend life. It's, I think, still early stages. I think Sinclair oversells. I think he's a little optimistic. But hey, that's fine. You know, it's valuable research. And it's good to see money flowing into that research. And hopefully, we can all benefit from that. I was on a board of directors of a company that had these fruit flies that they had managed to evolve into living four times the average life of a fruit fly. So these were long living fruit flies. And they used an evolutionary mechanism to do it. And then the idea was to sequence the genome of the fruit flies to live long and look at the differences between that and the fruit flies that were average and see what genes made the difference. And then maybe you could trigger similar genes in human beings so that you could get life extension. That way, a bunch of, part of the problem is we'll get to it in a minute, is there's not enough money going into these research for a reason. I'll give it a minute. But there is a huge amount of research, interesting research around this phenomena, the whole institutions. And the challenge is going to be differentiating the bullshit from the good stuff because there's a lot of bad science going on right now. Just like anything at the cutting edge, they usually some people who are publishing results that are just not legit. The other thing that it looks like real results is this research is in Israel where a day of this oxygen treatment, like I think it's eight hours of this oxygen treatment, takes off. It makes you younger, literally makes you younger by X amount of hours. So there's now a company in Florida, at the villages in Florida, which is a retirement community in Florida, that actually has one of these oxygen things, whatever. And you can pay them a bunch of money. It's quite expensive, but you can pay them a bunch of money and you go through a series of treatments that they claim will literally make you rejuvenate you, will make you younger in some way. There's at least one Objectivist biologist researcher working on this. There's a couple of doctors, Objectivist doctors that I know working on this. And then there's a bunch of wealthy Objectivist funding, a lot of work in the life extension space. So there's a lot of interest in this space. One of the big challenges is that the government is the FDA. It's the same problem Adam has. And that is the FDA explicitly has a policy of discouraging research into life extension. Most venture capitalists believe that the government wouldn't approve a life extension drug if somebody discovered it. What's that? So why invest in it? Yeah, so why invest? So there's a huge, I think, lack of capital flowing into the space. Usually what happens is people like Peter Thiel with their private capital, not capital, they've raised. So a smaller pool of their own money invests in life extension and less so from the public pool because you're investing other people's money and now you have fiduciary duty. And if you think the FDA is not going to prove these things, you don't invest in them. So there's a massive underinvestment going on in the space. And I truly believe without the FDA, we would have already extended human life. Yeah, I agree. Maybe like a decade or two. And we would be fast approaching a place where we could extend human life towards 150 or beyond that. The science is pretty advanced here. It really is the capital, the experimentation, the mind share, right? The genius share. How many geniuses can we incentivize to work on this because it's going to be a genius who solves this puzzle? When are you going to get a bureaucratic obstacles? I've cited this in the past shows, but there was a famous report during the Bush administration authored by a committee, a biotech committee whose chairman was Leon Kass, who's still a big shot at the Megan Enterprise Institute. So these conservatives who came out explicitly saying that life extension was not good for society, that this kind of research was harmful, that if it was successful, what would happen to Social Security? I mean, think about the small minds. Think about the little puny little minds that these people have. What would happen to Social Security Medicare? What would happen to divorce rates? I've said this before, right? I mean, you can imagine living with this person for 50 years, but a hundred. I mean, divorce would go through the roof. And then of course, how dare we play God? You know, one of the areas that is most prime for life extension, which I'm fascinating with and I know you in this industry is gene editing. I mean, gene editing has the potential. First of all, they eradicate many diseases and a lot of death is just death by disease. So even if we don't extend human life, just more of us will live to kind of the natural, whatever, sometime in our 90s. If we eradicate diseases, we'd all die in our 90s. We lose the people who die. People would stop dying in their 60s, 70s, 80s from diseases that can be cured through gene therapy. And then of course, there's a potential to trigger genes to reverse the process of aging. And then everything's open. And again, there's massive, massive resistance from bioethicists, so-called bioethicists, primarily, trying to encourage researchers not to go there, not to experiment, not to try because there are all these ethical problems. There are all these issues. I mean, where do some people get it? And other people won't. It'll exacerbate, it'll exacerbate quality. Some people will have the money that get the gene therapy and live long. Other people won't have the money. They won't be able to get it. And they'll have short lives. It's the same about IQ, so you could potentially, through gene therapy, increase in infants, I guess, a baby born with high intelligence. Maybe you could influence that, but only rich people could afford it. And what about poor people? And anyway, it goes on and on and on about these. And instead of thinking about creative ways to solve these problems, instead of thinking about ways in which technology always lowers the cost ultimately, so the cost might be high earlier. Like going to space is very expensive right now, so only really, really billionaires can do it right now. But the whole point is that in 20 years, anybody could go to space, right? It would be like flying to Europe. It wouldn't be that big of a deal. That's what would happen with gene therapy, but they can't think, they've got these tiny little minds and they can't imagine alternatives. They can't think about different worlds. And it's sickening. It's sickening the amount of effort being dedicated to preventing us from living long. It is, and it's like in Atlas Shrug where Don Galt talks about the morality of death. It's hard to wrap your head around that that could be, you know, that that's what it is. Yep. And much of my- Just be clear. Yeah, much of my hatred of conservatives comes from their advocacy for these kinds of things. So Leon Kass is a big shot and, you know, I hate, I despise the government and of course, I don't know that much about him, but just being the author of that report is enough to doom somebody in my book to hell for eternity. Absolutely, yeah. I am generally optimistic on this point for the reason that there's such an intense drag. There's enough, at least clearly not everyone, but there are enough people who just, people want to live, you know? There are enough billionaires out there. This is a great advantage of being billionaires, of having a lot of billionaires. There are a bunch of billionaires who want to live long. And they are the ones investing in the research. They're the ones who are not the government, not big pharma, not because they have to make a profit. The billionaires don't care about making a profit. They just want to live long. So they're pouring money into this. That's what will generate these successes and will probably burn the billionaires at the stake for discovering the fountains of youth. Okay. I do have a good piece of personal news. Tomorrow, I'm going for the intake medical for a clinical study of gene therapy for a condition that's related to aging. So if this works, it probably will work against aging also. That's great. Hey, Adam, can you get me? I have a 50-50 chance of winding up in the placebo group. Yeah. But the other 50% chance is that I'll at least get some extra good years out of life. That's awesome. That's great. And it is, gene therapy is truly a game changer. CRISPR is a game changer. And now there's CRISPR 2.0. And I'm super excited about the next few decades in terms of what they can do, both in terms of curing diseases and in terms of directly life extension. And then there's all the other thing, what they call... Enhancements. Enhancements. And then there's the whole, there's a whole area called biohacking, which is, it turns out gene therapy is not hard. You could actually do it at home. You can buy a kit online to do gene therapy. And I don't recommend it because I don't think we know enough to really do this. But it is possible to get the chemicals and to get a kit and to inject yourself. Somebody did this on stage at a conference a couple of years before COVID. This guy, he's selling these kits and he did a big demonstration where he... I don't think it had any impact. But the point is that this is because of CRISPR. This is not crazy. The real crazy stuff is, or the real difficult part is, figuring out which genes do what? Figuring out what you can and cannot do. But actually editing the genes, that's easy, relatively speaking, right? It's easy, but it's not that easy to do it with the level of safety and fidelity. Yes, yes, I'm not, I am not a pessimist on this, but right now you could, yes, you can easily edit a genome, but there's going to be some off-target mutations. And you know, like see, and of course you don't want to do that to yourself. It's like 10% of your genes are going to be edited. They're going to be combined the wrong way. This guy in China, who was condemned for this, he... Yeah, the CRISPR babies. Yeah, the CRISPR babies. He did that in fetuses and twin fetuses where he went in and changed one of the genes that is responsible for production of a protein that makes AIDS possible. And he turned it off in a sense. And these kids were born from a father who has AIDS and we're going to have AIDS. To my understanding, we're going to have AIDS. He managed to turn it off. And basically they now, now we don't know how they developed because it's China and they shut the whole thing to all the press about it and they put him in jail. I think they really came down on him, which is part of what's so sad about this is the topinilizing experimentation. But the potential is unbelievable. I mean, I read, I think I said, I read this book about Dowdell, Dowdell? Dowdna. Dowdna, Dowdna, who is at Berkeley and she's amazing and the science is amazing and the people around her at all these labs all over the country and all over the world are amazing. And they're doing phenomenal work and Adam's going to be guinea pig in one of their experiments and but it's, you know, this is what's going to, it's going to change lives in ways. I think that's the big new tech, right? So the internet was the last big thing and maybe there's web 3.0 or something. But I think much bigger in terms of impact on human life is going to be the potential that CRISPR has and that bioengineering has. So I'm excited about all that. Yeah, and just going back to my original point, the more as people are realizing, this is no longer, I mean, yes, the default is metaphysically given, but that it remains that way is not as people get that and more and more, and it's really getting out there, they're going to insist on this and fight for it and it will happen eventually. Like it's just not going to be stoppable. Yeah, and we're going to have to get good science on diet, good science and exercise, good science on these things. The science is still shaky on these things and it's hard to do good science here because it's hard to do experiments because people cheat, people, a lot of these studies depend on self-reporting. You can't put people in cages and test diets on them. They actually go out and they, so there's a lot that we have to learn. There's a lot of conflicting evidence out there but yes, these are the kind of hacks, the bio hacks that we can do without changing our genes, though we can just change our lifestyles, change what we eat, change how we exercise, change whether we have cold showers or not. I'm still contemplating this idea of every morning. I mean, it might be good for me because I'm not a morning person. So I don't wake up until like 10 a.m. I mean, I wake up at seven, but I'm like a brain fog and everything until about 10 when the cortisol level rises to a point where I can actually function. So maybe that cold shower would actually be good for me until it's waking me up and getting productive in the morning. I'm really productive late at night, or it used to be anyway, but mornings are not for me. All right, yes. That is now no longer metaphysical that is man-made. It is your life is in your hands in ways that it never used to be. And that's I think the most exciting development in biology, most exciting development in technology in the world right now. And I try to keep a hand on that pulse because I want to live long. I'm committed. The last time I talked to my doctor, I said, okay, you know your job is to keep me alive until 150 healthy, right? And she said, absolutely, we're working on it. So I think she was serious. All right, Roland asks, have you read Listen to Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir? I find it even more exciting than the Martian. I highly recommend the audio version. It's a work of art in its own. I have not, I have not. So thanks for the recommendation. I'm putting on my list of stuff to check out. I have a list here of stuff that you guys recommend to me to check out. So Project Hail Mary, all right, cool. All right, we've got, I don't know, nobody's asking super chat questions today. We're like at what, 40 bucks or something? This is almost embarrassing, but so $20 questions from now on, guys. I'll do these three. And then if you want to ask a question, $20. All right, somewhere related to you keeps posting about you on fence pages. It's taken one prominent objectivist off social media. Any advice besides blocking them? Block them. It's taken one prominent objectivist off social media. I have no idea what that means, but just block them. Just ignore. The best way to deal with people like that is to ignore them. In Big Back Theory TV show, they talk about Thomas Edison, like he's a cook and took credit for other people's inventions. What is your view of Edison? I think Edison was brilliant and amazing. And I've seen depictions of him of a bit of a joke. He probably was a bit of a joke as many geniuses sometimes are, but I see no reason to think that he was anything but a great inventor and entrepreneur. And you can focus on one particular invention, but think about all the inventions he was involved in. I mean, there are so many things that he touched. And in that sense, so much of that touched our lives. So so much of that is significant in all of our lives. So absolutely, I have generally positive views of him. Jose says, edlock's unborrowed vision is related to dreams. Yeah, absolutely. There are a variety of different ways one can structure this and think of this. Vision is a good word. Maybe the right way to think about it is you wanna turn your dreams into a vision. A dream is just something you want. It's vague, it's kind of floating as dreams tend to be. A vision makes it real. A vision gives it structure. A vision is, what does it look like? What does my dream look like? What are the details involved in it? And then you have a plan to get to it. So I definitely think vision is a step in the process of taking a dream and turning it into something real, turning it into a clear value and clear goal for which you can strive. So thanks, Jose. All right, so let's see. So yes, we have no super chat questions. If you're interested in asking a question, feel free to do so. I'm going back to the panel, but the floor is open. I know you guys have asked a lot of questions this month already, so maybe some of you are tapped out both financially and just in terms of ideas for what to ask. Yeah, we cover such a broad range of questions on the show. It is, I think, unique out there on the internet in terms of the scope of the issues we cover. Let's see, Jim. Welcome back to the Rational Life Extension podcast, everyone, where today we're dabbling in topics of crisper and cold showers. Absolutely. All right, Debbie, your comment about the OPAR discussion group kind of reminded me, I'm getting kind of lonely here in Miami. I know that there's a lot of people out here in South Florida in the area. If you're interested in, you know, kind of forging just kind of more of a social group, getting people together and talk in the area, feel free to, you know, hit me up on Facebook, friend me, send me an IM or whatever. I'm kind of interested in starting more of a social in-person group. Question, or yeah, I guess a broad question. There's a rather famous trial lawyer, Robert Barnes, who's been appearing on YouTube a lot lately. He's got a lot of very interesting things to say, a lot of deep insights into America's legal system. And he really got me thinking recently about something I've taken for granted and didn't give much thought to. He's really deeply bothered by how opaque trials are in our system. And one of the points that he has made that I've heard many times before, I don't have specific numbers, but he points out that most cases, most criminal cases plead out rather than actually going to trial. Overwhelming majority, overwhelming majority. That the original intention or his belief is that the intention of our founders is that trials were meant to be public, they were meant to be open, very transparent, they were supposed to not just be for victims, not just for defendants, but for the whole community to know the justice is being done. And the idea that they're pleading out that in a modern era of instant communication that federal trials are almost never broadcast and on and on and on. What's your general sense about this, about opacity and about bargaining as opposed to actually seeking justice? Well, I think that bargaining is the only, these plea deals are the only way the justice system could work today. It's overwhelmed, it's under-resourced, it has, it prosecutes way too many people for way too many crimes over way too many things. I think in the founding fathers time, there were a lot fewer trials per capita, would be my guess. Just think of how many trials today devoted to drugs and things like that. It is absurd the amount, what we've criminalized, how much we've criminalized, both in the criminalized in every realm of our lives. I mean, it really is absurd. So I think to have proper legal reform and to get to a point where trials are real, substantial, are public, the deals that are cut behind closed doors. I mean, think about the deal Jeffrey Epstein got, right? In Florida, that clearly was a result of big shots, big wigs calling the district attorney over there and encouraging him, you know, a pedophile, somebody who was obviously abusing young girls and they got him off as late as one can imagine. I mean, it's unbelievable how late his sentence was. And that was only made possible because of political pull. If he had gone to trial, you probably wouldn't have gotten that sentence, right? Because that would have brought it out into the daylight and everybody would have seen what's involved. So there's no question, but it's not doable without massive legal reform, which would basically decriminalize a significant amount of what's criminal today. All the victimless, so-called victimless crimes. Just imagine if we got rid of all the drug offenses and if we got rid of, you know, prostitution as a crime and if we got rid of a bunch of other things that are just not crimes. Was another whole aspect too. I dated a lawyer some years back and she made me aware of something that I was pitifully unaware of that most of law these days is administrative law and most of the trials that people go through aren't even criminal or civil cases. They're actually, you know, with the FDA or with whatever these administrative law courts. So it's a whole other like dark area in which that's where most of the time and money and effort is spent. Yeah, absolutely. And this goes back to the topic of regulations, right? When if the government wasn't spending so much time and so many legal resources and so many court hours on regulation, on administrative law, on preventive law, on all the stuff. And then if you decriminalized all these things or you legalized even better legalized prostitution and drugs and you dismantle the FDA you wouldn't have legal resources devoted to arresting Adam for taking a booster shot of a vaccine or taking mushrooms or whatever, right? I mean, there's no end. I mean, the amount of resources, the amount of time, the amount of energy devoted today to things that should be completely legal is just unbelievable. And as a consequence of that the legal system does not have time to function properly which is the way the founders intended it where the courts are indeed public and where there is complete transparency. And I'd make it one other general point about transparency. Government should be transparent completely. That is the burden of proof on keeping a secret should be on the government to justify it. And the only reason to keep something a secret is that keeping it a secret protects the individual rights of American citizens, right? So that would make no executive privilege for the president. What he does is public and no 90% of what they keep secret today is CIA. Why don't we know about what happened to JFK, the last few files about JFK? I mean, all it does is feed conspiracy theories. Why don't we know that given that who exactly is in danger finding out something that happened 60 years ago? I mean, the whole thing is ludicrous. So all of the state secrets, all of the, all these supposed secret things, all these things that are done behind closed doors, none of that should exist. So the idea that government should find, what is it, these courts that make decisions by closed doors and we don't even know what they deliberate, what they deliberate, none of that should exist. There should be a massive, very high burden of proof on the government to prove that they need to keep something a secret because it's required in order to preserve the individual rights or protect the individual rights of Americans. So it's a whole different standard than what we have today. Every now and then our government does something right and the Freedom of Information Act is one of the only really good things I've seen. Yes, I wish they'd apply it even more so than the way it's being applied. Too many of the documents they released are redacted for reasons that have to do with political power and have nothing to do with the actual job of government. All right, let's see, Jennifer. Why do you think so many people seem to argue against free will if they don't like the idea that it exists? I mean, do you think it's because that then they have to be responsive for what they do and they don't like that, so? I think that's part of it, but I don't think, you know, so it depends who we're talking about. Like, I don't think that's the issue with somebody like Sam Howard's or any of the kind of the intellectuals who argue against free will. I don't think it's true with regard to most young people who argue against free will. I don't think what motivates them is they don't want to take responsibility for their actions. I think what they are is rationalistic. I think what they are is they hold ideas divorced from reality. I think they cannot, since they cannot conceive of an explanation in physics. These are always geeks. They're always physics and math majors or neuroscience majors. They're always scientists and they can't think themselves out of a materialistic box, right? So they put themselves into a materialistic box and then they can't imagine how free will can exist if everything is material and everything is a ping pong, not a ping pong, a billiard ball table, right? That this causes that and they have a wrong view of causality. So the reason they're wrong is deeply philosophical and has to do with rationalism and unwillingness in this case to accept the evidence that comes from introspection as real evidence, right? Because real evidence only comes from some rationalistic conception of science that has to be deduced out there, experimented on out there and anything that has to do with introspection doesn't count. It's too subjective. I think there's another motive though too. I think Marx himself and certainly a lot of socialist thinkers and status thinkers from the early 20th century right through to today have believed that humans are infinitely malleable and that their goal is to mold humans into being better somehow. I think that's misguided, but that's motivated reasoning. So you think this is a rejection of that? No, I think that if they- If you can mold humans into anything then there is free will because they can change, right? Not how I mean it in this case. Well, first off, I think that they have, this is a formulation I've been using a lot lately. I tend to think that most collectivists believe that most humans are evil and stupid, evil and stupid. Put those two together and why would you allow people to do what they want? Why would you allow people to look after their own interests? We have to have elites control them and tell them what to do. That goes back to Plato. That goes back all over the city in the cave and you need philosopher kings to guide our life. But yes, I mean malleable. So the two views of determinism that exists out there, they emerge into one, but they're two. One is that we're determined by our genes, which is Sam Harris, which is basically you're born with a genetic material and everything is then a billiard ball from that occurrence, from whatever genes you have in a response to your environment that is predetermined. And then there are those who believe that the environment shapes you and you don't have free will but it's all environmental factors and there's very little genetics that play. And the Marxists tend to be environmentally determinists and that's why they think they could shape human beings into this other being. And then the conservatives and the scientists tend to be, particularly the physical scientists, tend to be in the genetics camp. And there's constantly debate and in some of them, the more sophisticated among them believe that we're determined by both, right? So we're still determined but there's some environmental factors and there's some genetic factors. Of course, really, if you think about it, there are no environmental factors because all the environmental factors are other people, other people are all determined by their, ultimately their gene, so it's all boils down to some kind of mechanistic view of the world. So I still think that is prevalent. For Marx, it is because he negates the individual because there is no individual. So this is part of his effort to negate the existence of individuals. And for most of the modern determinists, I think it really is an issue of rationalism and unwillingness to accept introspection as a data point, as evidence for anything. Also, Harry Benzwinger's point, I think, is very useful. He said that they're rejecting something that isn't at least the objectivist definition of free will, the choice to think or not. They're not necessarily framing it that way. I don't know exactly how they are defining it except for in the case of Sam Harris, he talks about it pretty explicitly and clearly, like in order to have free will, you would have to choose your thoughts before you have your thoughts. He said that in a podcast and that's absurd because how are you gonna choose a thought you haven't had? Like you're gonna have to somehow look into the future and it makes no sense and it just breaks down. So what they're rejecting is, I don't know if it's a straw man per se, but it's not like, they're not clear on what it would be, the positive definition. They're not. And of course, they contradict themselves because Sam Harris obviously believes in choices. He believes in people changing. He believes in arguments and debating and showing evidence and all which implicitly assumes what? implicitly assumes choice. It implicitly assumes free will, but they can't define free will properly. They don't have a proper definition of it. So they straw man it. But I wonder if Harry had an opportunity to present his view to Sam Harris what Sam Harris would actually, how Sam Harris would respond. I don't think he'd accept it because I think partially because I think he's over committed to this point of view. But again, Sam Harris rejects this idea of an eye. He respects your ability to monitor and control your consciousness at all, not just in terms of the next thought, but any aspect of it. And you have to be suspicious of anybody who thinks they discover truth by being on LSD. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think there's another aspect. There's one misstatement so far. There's an idea that is in current discussions of Marxism but really originated with Friedrich Engels who was Marxist closest coworker and who had been, he came from a very evangelical Christian millennialist family and very much against his will, he was put in charge of being a businessman and managing the family's business in England. And he found much to his surprise that the work of being a businessman was very enjoyable and it was something that he would do even if he were not financially rewarded for it. And from that he got the idea of authentic individuality. Authentic individuality. Remember he was a Christian and believed in the individual soul. And the authentic individuality in that ideology is to find work that you find so rewarding that you don't need any financial incentive to do it. And so Engelsian and of course Marxist Eschaton is the so-called authentic individual who works without regard for financial reward and therefore it's perfectly okay for the financial benefits to be redistributed socially on the basis of need. But the whole Marxist political exercise is to change the existing individual who works primarily for the sake of financial reward into this new more authentic individual who works because he enjoys his work so much that the financial reward doesn't matter to him. Yeah, and that's what exists in the Marxist utopia at the end of the day is just everybody doing what they love to do without financial reward. Nobody gets a financial reward. After the dictatorship part. After the dictatorship part. Well, they don't spend a lot of time explaining how you get from A to B, it just happens. It just happens magically. We go from freedom to dictatorship back to freedom. I think it's Adam's question. Well, I didn't really have a question. I just had a comment. And the comment is that thanks to our ability to use these advanced technological tools that back before 1990, every year, everybody thought would be just instruments of government control over the individual. It turns out to be exactly the opposite. If you have six billion people, some of them are going to be doing very, very good stuff. So I gave us an example of a composer who is new to me but he writes amazingly romantic music. And I put a link in the chat. I intend to listen to more of him, but just think of that. A romantic composer whose music is played primarily in the far provinces of Russia because in the main metropolitan centers, they have the same academic dominance of post-modernism. But in faraway places, this video is from a live concert in Novosibirsk. Conductor Alim Shah, who I never heard of before. The pianist is Polina Osetnitskaya, whom I never heard of before either, but it's amazing music. No, it's, yeah. I mean, the point you're making about, once we have eight billion people, six billion however the number is, engaged in productive activity and engaged in art and engaged in these things, it's hard to imagine the kind of things that are going to be produced and created. I mean, I had experience, I went to see a performance of Vakhmaninov's third piano concerto and the pianist that somebody I've never heard of, but it was brilliant. It was truly, it was in London. It was in a magnificent performance. It was live, it was amazing. It's one of my favorite pieces of music. And where's this pianist's farm? He's from Uzbekistan. Now Uzbekistan is Muslim mostly. It's in the middle of nowhere, even though my wife's family, originally half of her family comes from there, but it literally is in the middle of nowhere. And here you have a phenomenal pianist playing Vakhmaninov's third piano concerto and that's what happens when civilization and good culture and good ideas spread across the world is that you manage to capitalize on so many more geniuses, so many more brilliant people. A prominent futurist and YouTuber named Isaac Arthur often talks about this very optimistic view and when we start colonizing our own solar system and there are trillions or even quadrillions of people and it's like, just imagine all these creative minds and all they'll come up with. Yeah, absolutely. All right, Debbie. So I have a question about, I don't know if it's one that's really answerable with like an effectual sense, but I found it an interesting thing to ponder and maybe hear your perspective on it. It came up in the old part group a couple sessions ago when we were talking about modes of integration it was actually a bit of a digression because of course that's not an old part but the issue of whether the M2 or D2 mode of integration whether one is worse than the other from an individual perspective like harder to recover from because I was talking about my religious background and how struggled to get out of that mode and retrain my brain and someone else in the group said, well, I think that maybe religion is still better to have as your background than something more like a D2 because at least you have some kind of a methodology behind your thinking and I'm sympathetic to that but it's also, you can be like pretty airtight locked into that. Like in my case, if you have a being told things like, well, if you have a thought that's questioning about religion, that's actually Satan putting thoughts in your mind trying to pull you away from God and like, I mean, so it can really be hard to get out of and I probably still haven't fully got all the little habits of thinking completely out. So, but then D2, it's just, you can't think at all and you're just a ball of anxiety and horror all the time. And so it's really, I don't know if it even matters like if it even means it's meaningful to say one's worse than the other or one's better than the other from an individual perspective, they're both so bad but I'm just curious, what do you think about that? Do you think there's one worse or better than the other for if somebody's gonna integrate wrongly anymore? If it's truly M2 and D2, so it's not an M1 or D1 on the verge of, but it's truly a committed M2 or committed D2, then you're screwed. I mean, it's really, really gonna be really, really hard. I do think it's probably easier to get out as an M2. I wouldn't say it's better, but I think it's easier because you at least have the instruments of thought. You have the capacity to integrate. Remember, D2 is in a sense not a mode of integration because it's not integration, right? It's the negation of integration. So it's not a mode of integration. It's a mode of, it's no integration, zero. On the other hand, how many of the hippies in the 1960s went up to have pretty good careers, Wall Street, medicine, other things. I mean, so the question is how committed are the D2s to being D2s? Are they really D2s? Maybe they go through a phase where they just like to burn stuff and they like to riot and they like to break stuff and then it passes somehow. Are they really so enabled to think because they disintegrated completely? One wonders how one can even function as if you're really a D2. Even on a daily basis, maybe the real D2s go crazy. Maybe they're the schizophrenics. Maybe they're the complete nuts. They're homeless people, the people who do nothing. So it really is, I don't know. I mean, you'd have to really study the psychology of it. To what extent are people really D2s? Or to what extent are people playing at being D2s? Right? How many Antifa people think it's cool to be Antifa versus how many Antifa people think, no, this is what they should be doing in life. This is their being. This is what their whole view of the world is. How many of them don't have a view of the world and are just floating around? So how many of the people who rioted last summer are gonna go on to have a decent life in spite of that? I know a bunch of those people and they have regular jobs that they're just grumpy. Yeah, they're just grumpy and they like to go out and hate. And I think in that sense, they're more D1s than D2s. Yeah. Or at least put it this way. I don't think you can exist as a consistent D2. No. You could probably somewhat particularly exist as a consistent M1. I don't think you can exist as a completely consistent D2. So the only thing you can do is compartmentalize your life. You can act as a D2 in your Antifa persona and then you have the rest of your life or your barista or you're studying for PhD and who knows what. Or maybe you've actually got a legit jobs. I mean, one of the amazing things is how many of those hippies really did land up on Wall Street and with a me generation in the 1980s. Adam just reminded us of Steve Jobs. Yeah, I mean Steve Jobs was pretty bad. So it's, so I don't know. I mean, you'd have to really study them. And I don't know how good of a psychological understanding we have of D2M2s versus what Leonard provides us which is a philosophical understanding. And what Leonard is really providing us. And this is key because I think people misuse it in a sense. He's talking about this as cultural movements, as cultural phenomena. He indeed has said, you can't really apply this to individuals. Can't really apply this to an individual person. This is, these are cultural movements and phenomena. And not every cultural movement phenomena is reducible to an individual's life because people are compartmentalized and they do different things. So you can see people who love the opposite of romantic music, which is noise, played in a concert hall, right? And that's clearly D2. Did they love it though? Or did they just go there? Cause they think- It doesn't matter. They participate, they engage in it. They pay, they rave about it. They tell people it's wonderful. So they're engaged in a D2 activity, right? But they might be doctors and lawyers and they might have completely integrated lives elsewhere but in certain realms like art, they're completely D2s, right? In terms of how they respond or in terms of maybe they're faking that because D2 is cool. So that's why it's very, you have to be very careful from going from a philosophy to an individual, certainly from a cultural movement to an individual, from a cultural tendency to an individual. So I don't think you could say, oh, that guy's an M2 and that guy's a D2 although it's tempting and particularly when they're representatives of a culture but I don't know that there's a rule that says it's easier to become an objective or rational if you start out religious versus if you start out non-religious. It depends on how religious, how non-religious. What does non-religious express itself? What are you? It's very, you'd have to really delve into psychology and really study it. It's not something we just do off the cuff, I think. But the key takeaway for me is what you were saying there about that we're not talking about a psychological or psycho-epistemological issue here within and that's like actually maybe a misapplication of those concepts to begin with. I think it is. At least vis-a-vis what Leonard's written now might be that we have a psychologist in the future who integrates this into some kind of psychological understanding but that's not Leonard's intent in writing. It's not as far as I understand. All of this is my limited understanding of Leonard of them but it's not his intention to make psychological statements yet it's not his intention for us to go around and saying there's a D2, there's a D1 that's a misapplication of theory. I think he mentions that, I can't remember if it's in the book but he certainly talks about it in the Q and A in one of the courses on the DIM hypothesis that he did. You shouldn't stop us from making a DIM dating website in which you take a Myers-Briggs type of quiz. There you go, there you go. That's what your DIM writing is. Make some good money on that. Dating websites are very popular. All right, let's go to some super chat questions. We've got a few $20 questions here. Let's see, David asks, JRE, which I take is, what's his name? Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan recently had a guest named Michael Schellenberger who to discuss the decay of San Francisco due to progressive politics. The topic and both of their opinions on them were very similar to objective philosophy. He needs you on the show. He definitely needs me on the show. There's no question about that. He doesn't think he needs me on the show because he won't have me on the show. And he's rejected me from the show a number of times. So he obviously doesn't think it. But I do wanna disagree with you. God, Joe Rogan is no objectivist. And there's nothing in his ideas that is objectivist, right? Joe Rogan was a fan of Bernie Sanders when he ran and then he switched to Trump. And he comes up with the craziest ideas and he interviews people who are complete quacks and then he interviews people who are really, really good. There's no theme. And he always sounds like he agrees with anybody he's interviewing. So when he's interviewing somebody good, he sounds really good. When he's interviewing somebody's bad, he sounds really bad. So I don't attribute to Joe Rogan any ideology. I don't think he has one. And I certainly don't think Joe Rogan is an objectivist, a close objectivist or anywhere like an objectivist. He drifts, he has no fixed ideology at all. Now, Michael Schellenberger is an interesting guy. Michael Schellenberger writes a lot about energy. His primary focus is energy. And he's particularly, I think, become an expert on nuclear energy. And he's a really good guy. Now, what's interesting about Michael is I believe this is true. Somebody can correct me if I'm wrong. But I'm pretty sure that Michael's been influenced by Alex Epstein. That is that Michael is part of a movement out there that I think Alex Epstein has basically initiated that is pro-human. That approaches climate science, that approaches energy issues from a pro-human being perspective. And Michael Schellenberger is part of that movement. I think influenced by Alex's book is friendly with Alex. Subjectivism has had an impact on Michael. I wouldn't confuse that with Joe, with Joe Rogan. But it's certainly with regard to Michael Schellenberger, it's fantastic to see somebody like that gaining national audiences, big national audiences, because you can see the influence Alex Epstein has had on him. And that means the influence of objectivism through Alex Epstein has had on him. Even if he doesn't know it's objectivism, he probably does, because I think he's intelligent and after no weight comes from. Joe should have Alex Epstein on if he's dabbling with energy and climate change. But I'm not sure Joe wants to go there. I mean, that'll be a test of him. And again, I think if he has Alex, he'll nod and agree with Alex on a lot of things. And then when he'll have some crazy climate change scientist, Doomsday, he'll nod at a lot of things they say. I really don't think you can attribute any ideology at this point to Joe Rogan at all. All right, let's see, Bradley asks, the gig economy is the most free market model today, but is under attack. How should companies defend themselves against regulators claiming to protect the workers without lowering to their level? I mean, they have to make them all case. It's none of the government's business to be in this business. That workers can take care of themselves, that the government is hooting workers, they're not helping workers in the long run, that this is anti-man, anti-rights, but they're not going to make those cases. And indeed, if they made a proper case around individual rights, they would be ridiculed and the government would ignore them because the government is not pro-individual. There's no audience for an individual rights-based case, unfortunately. But you can certainly make the case that these companies have created a whole industry, a whole industry that is supportive of the created opportunities for people to work where they didn't have opportunities before, take an asset we all have like an automobile and exploit it more effectively, use it in order to create some wealth, to create some income. I mean, the problem is that if the gig companies wanted to be consistent, they would have to say, you should stop regulating workers everywhere. You should get rid of all the laws regulating workers. And of course, they don't have the balls or the philosophical standing to make that case, but that's the only consistent case they need to make. I've always argued that they should make the case that what the government should actually do is deregulate the taxi industry. And I'm not sure the gig companies would exist if taxis were deregulated. So, but that's what they should argue for, make taxi drivers completely free of government regulations that make them not wage employees and all of that. And that's the only consistent argument they can make. And it's not one you're gonna see them make, unfortunately. All right, Gene asks, are you still using health nucleus in San Diego? Did they discover anything life-saving? Yes, I am still using health nucleus in San Diego. No, luckily I'm not in a position where there's anything that is life-threatening. So they didn't have anything to discover because I basically don't have anything going on that's life-threatening. We are, talk about Debbie's case earlier about hacking, right? About biohacking in a sense, so trying to tinker with supplements and lifestyle and food and things like that to improve quality of life and maybe even improve life extension. That I am working with them on. So I'm definitely working with them. We've done a gazillion tests. We've tested every crucial part of me. We're trying to fine-tune me to be even more productive than I am, to be more energetic than I am, to sleep better, to do a bunch of stuff that I think I could do better. We're trying to fine-tune the machine that is my body. And the doctor from Health Nucleus is the doctor I said, you're working with me to get, you're working on getting me to live 150 and she was with that. So we are, yeah, so there's a bunch of things where we're trying to improve rather than prevent me from dying because I'm not in a position to die right now. I don't have anything wrong with me that would justify dying, luckily. So he didn't find anything. I don't have any cancers. It looks like my heart is okay, all of these, all those functions are fine. It's now an issue of tinkering. It's now an issue of getting better and that's fun. It's kind of interesting to work with the doctor on not just on solving problems, but also on improvement, on making you better, making you physically better. So, and that's what doctors should be about. They should be in the business of not just dealing with you when you're sick, but in preventing you from getting sick. So my whole goal in life is not to get sick. Not to have any of those diseases that then you have to have, and then the question is how do you do that? What do you have to eat, exercise, sleep, do supplements, whatever, in order to prevent diseases from occurring? And I don't know if that's possible because a lot of diseases are genetic, but you want to minimize, right? You want to minimize the potential for those things. And we're still very early in the science and of understanding this. So I have a functional medicine doctor who really helps with this. And, you know, so I like it and I like her and so far so good. So I do still highly recommend Health Nucleus. There is a Iran book show discount. It is very expensive, but there is a Iran book show discount. So if you do decide to sign up for Health Nucleus, tell them I referred you and you will get a discount. They still don't have, I still don't have sponsorship. I need a range of sponsorship on the show. I think that they've got at least three people who've taken advantage of the Iran book show discount. All right, Robert asks, oh, he says, no question, just props to Iran. Shout out to Jennifer and come on. Let's make this super chat go peeps. And another vote for more life skills and rules for life from team Nayser, not Naseer, Naseer, that's right. All right. And the reason Jennifer got a shout out is the difference. So I, you know, it's not like, he wasn't trying to distrust the panel. Right, Robert? All right, I am going to go back to the panel because that was all the $20 questions. And as you know, if you don't ask $20 questions, you don't get priority. And we'll end with the non $20 questions after we do one round, please to the panel, given that we're going late, make these ones short and comments, questions, but make them short. Go for Jim. Well, I have a question that's going to be bigger, but I'm going to save it for next time. I do want to talk. Make it big, it just has to be short. Well, okay, I'll give this try. What do you think about the idea of perpetual copyrights? Do you want me to elaborate? Yeah, I mean, I don't like them for the reason that I think Ivan articulated in her article on patents to copyrights that it doesn't make sense for it to continue once the author is dead and maybe some years after that for the sake of their estate, that it's also not practical in terms of actually managing all these copyrights. And the issue of justice goes away once the author of the actual product is deceased. So that's my view. All right, Jennifer. I'm done for today. Thank you, Eileen. Cool, thanks, Jennifer. Adam. Yes, just in case you want to see what a government can be like even without objectivism, look at Taiwan. They have a cabinet of experts in their fields. And their health minister is a real epidemiologist. Their minister of digital technologies is an advocate of total deregulation. Essentially, he has a set of policies that he's going to use in the future. Essentially, he has a staff of only 15 employees in the ministry and their only job is to tell other ministers how not to regulate the digital industry. Yeah, and it's no accident Taiwan is as rich as it is and as successful as it is. We should be calling China West Taiwan. Totally. We should move our embassy from Beijing to the capital of Taiwan and just start calling Xi the president of West Taiwan. I think he'd love that. Yeah, I've never, it's one of the countries, there are few countries in the world, but it's one of the countries I've never been to and I'd really like to visit. So Taiwan is one of those, I don't know, there's probably a handful, maybe a dozen countries I've never been to that I'd really like to go to and Taiwan is definitely high up on that list. And I should add that there's one more country that recognized Taiwan recently, it's Lithuania. Not into trouble, they got into big trouble. The Chinese really came down hard on them and I understand they're backing away from their recognition a little bit because the West wouldn't come to their side and the price that the Chinese were extracting from them was very high. So my ancestors in Lithuania, of course they're not really my ancestors because these actually the guys who were pillaged and murdered my ancestors in Lithuania because all the Jews are gone, but I'm from Lithuania pretty much, 75% of my ancestors were born in Lithuania. But yes, they poked the giants and the giant responded and it's been really tough on Lithuania the last few weeks. And I just read this morning that they're starting to soften. I haven't read into it, but a lot of that is because the US and the European Union did not support them, which is just moral treason, just moral treason and horrible. All right, Debbie. So recently, I think this week Elizabeth Holmes was convicted on three counts of wire fraud. Any thoughts? Yes, I was given an early opportunity to invest in her company. I looked at the board of directors. The board of directors consisted exclusively of government sector and nonprofit sector personalities without a single businessman, entrepreneur, or engineer. And if you're going to try to do what she was trying to do and you don't have a single industrial engineer and a single chemical engineer on your board of directors, I didn't put a cent into that. And why would she have such a board if she was really trying to do what she was saying? Well, Debbie, of course, worked for her. So Debbie has some inside information on this one. I've met those people on the board too. I know those people. So I didn't follow the trial as much as I'd like to. I would love for somebody to write a book, a good book about what happened there. And I'd like to read that, but I know there is a book out. I'm always suspicious of people who rush books to press. So I'd rather have a book post-trial because I'm sure a lot of information came out in the trial that probably wasn't available to the guy who wrote the book previously. I think it's the right verdict. I mean, it seems like she committed fraud. There's some pretty obvious cases like when they pasted drug company logos onto presentations implying that the drug companies that approved and where there was no such approval and drug companies didn't know anything about it and many others. On the other hand, I'm also glad that she wasn't found guilty of everything because there is, I think she was a combination of somebody who had that Silicon Valley spirit of pushing the envelope and pushing the envelope and pushing the envelope combined with a real fraudster and willing to compromise and cut corners and so on. Some venture capitalists gave her money. So, and it's surprising they didn't sit on the board and I don't know at what point you were offered the opportunity to invest and whether that was always the board. These are the kind of things I'd love to have more information about. But my guess is, and this is the pattern I've seen with entrepreneurs that commit fraud usually, right? Not always, but usually. They start out honest and really wanting to achieve something and they push the envelope and they drive themselves and they drive everybody around them crazy and they push everything continuously. But then at some point, it's not going their way or at some point they realize that in order to get their way they're gonna have to deal with a lot of government. So they bring in a lot of government people onto their board. The same thing by the way happened at Enron. Enron had a lot of good ideas and indeed the innovation at Enron was phenomenal. But because they were dealing with a very highly regulated industry, Ken Lay who was the CEO of Enron landed up being a schmoozer more than a businessman. He landed up dealing with politicians and regulators more than he did running a business and things got dramatically out of hand. And typically what happens is they start with just a little bit, right? Just a little small lie, right? Not a big lie, something a little. But then to cover up the little lie, you have a medium-sized lie. And then to cover up the medium-sized lie, then you have a big lie and now you're committing far. And I think that line between the lie and what was it to this Silicon Valley mentality of fake it till you make it? I don't think that's real. People I know in Silicon Valley are not fakers. They are dreamers and they push their dream and sometimes they are more optimistic than maybe the data suggests they should be. But it's not out of a sense of trying to fake reality. It's out of a sense of really believing and really striving and having a different risk tolerance than maybe others do. And I think once you cross that line, once you go into faking, it is a slippery slope. Slippery slopes do exist in reality. They're everywhere. And I think she probably went into this with all the best intentions and got herself on a slippery slope. And maybe it sounds like this guy that she was with, there was he had an affair with and everything. Maybe he helped push her along on the slippery slope. I don't know his problem. Or maybe she helped him. I don't know. What do you think? In my experience, Sonny was not the brains behind that operation. Sonny was kind of like the Attila to her witch doctor. Yeah, Sonny was definitely a thug. I mean, he kept samurai swords on his desk. And he was very explicitly like, he was the enforcer of things. If somebody had to be disappeared, he'd be the one that would do it and not literally disappeared, of course, but just from the company. I don't buy it. I don't buy it. And she didn't even bring him in until something like 2009, I think. So she had already been pretty deep in and had a track record of antics by the time. He was, I looked at him more like a dude, exactly. Yeah, she did. She's now presenting it as she was his victim. Oh, I know. She started throwing him under the bus not too long after all the stories started to break. And she got rid of him and started doing the woe is me. Like, oh, I had no idea what was going on. And Sonny was just, but now he's gone and we're all, this is a company we're gonna make things better. But that was absolute BS, absolute BS. Yeah, no way. Sonny couldn't have done that stuff without her. And do you think she was always committed a fraud? Or do you think that's something that she slipped into? I don't think, I don't know if anyone starts out with just a pure intention of deep fraud. I mean, maybe some little con artist type thing. She was never just some con artist. She wanted to make something. She, I don't think that she had any strong ethical resistance to the fraud even from the very outset. Yeah. I think for her, the priority was being someone, so to speak, you know, like making money and being seen by the public. It was a kind of hero and being seen specifically as similar to Steve Jobs. She was the second hand from day one. Yeah, and I do think she wanted to actually make something but I don't think that that was what was really driving her to create. And I think that's the difference. So the fake it till you make it is, I agree. That's a terrible phrase. And I think what they're trying to really get at it is act as if, you know, what is it that I would have to do and like how to present myself and think about the world in order to make this dream a reality? What would that look like? And then, you know, it's more of a confidence and a believing that something can be done. Yeah. Not faking, yeah. And it's a really interesting psychology she had. That's why I'm looking forward to somebody writing a good book on this and delving into kind of the sequence of what happened. And that's right. I mean, if you go into these things with a second-handed mentality, if you're not going into something like this full of stress, full of difficulty without the right motivation, then again, bad things, you're likely to do bad things. Bad things are gonna likely happen to you. And if you're not willing to accept reality and accept failure, which is, if you're second-handed, failure is devastating. Yeah. Right? And here's what other people think of you, that when you fail, it's us shattering. It's devastating. You're gone. If you're first-handed, if you committed to your own judgment, then failure is just something you learn from and you keep on going. It's sad. It's not, you know, nobody's happy about failing, but you learn from it and you move on. And you grow and you get better at it. But that's a first-handed, individualistic kind of mentality which a lot of people don't have. It's why people have so much difficulty with failure. Okay, we've got five super chat questions. There's still some time to submit questions if you want, but they should be $20 or more. Gene says, Jim is right. Jim, you're right. Sam Harris says, if we're material, then there's hope for science to make appeal to cure murderers. Yeah. I mean, I think he thinks we can manipulate our genes, our wiring in any way we want. I mean, it's a little scary. Because if that were true, then we could all be the automatons running around doing what the philosopher King's dictated. And if we didn't, they could just tinker with our genes. Michael asks, what percentage of people actually like their jobs and look forward to going to work every morning in response to having been swearing as assertion that life is easy? I don't know. I think unfortunately not a very high percentage. I think it probably depends on the profession. One of the things I love about Silicon Valley, and I know I'm not supposed to like Silicon Valley, but one of the things I love about Silicon Valley and about technology and about biotech and about these companies is my sense of that place, and I lived in Silicon Valley for years, is that people love their jobs and that people work unbelievably long hours and hard and invest a huge amount of their energy and their being into those jobs because they love them, that it's, and that's what makes the place buzz and that's why it's so exciting and fun to be there. And so I think it depends on the profession, but it really depends on the attitude of people. People engaged in things that are changing the world, that are moving things forward, that are really, that are producing new things, that are being ingenuous, that are innovating. Those are kind of people who love their jobs and I think you get some of that a little bit in New York with finance, you get that, but much more in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is super exciting because of that and why I love the place in spite of the politics. I wish everybody had that feeling. Michael asks, Western Europe has very short prison sentences and lenient policing policies, yet their recidivism rates are two thirds less than ours. Yes, crime rates are also way lower than ours. So you're gonna have to find a cause for why crime is lower. Maybe that's why recidivism is lower, it might not be related to short prison sentences or you have to find the cause. So you have found a correlation, but correlation is not causation. And in other places in the United States, for example, short prison sentences don't always correlate and haven't correlated with low rates of recidivism. So there needs to be a real theory and a real study of causes of crime, of crime as a cultural phenomena, why Europe generally has lower crime rates in the US, things like that before we come to two big of a conclusions about these things. Generally, I think our sentences are probably too long for some crimes and too short for others. I mean, I think there's certain crimes where you throw away the keys and murder being one, certainly violent rape and there are a few others where I think prison sentences, I mean, you wouldn't have recidivism if you never released the prisoners, right? So that's another way to lower recidivism is just not to let them go. And some crimes, they shouldn't be let go. Arguably failing to prosecute many lesser crimes leads criminals to do greater crimes over time. Maybe, I mean, all this needs to be studied and the data is mixed on these things, but getting rid of non-victim crimes is the beginning of any kind of change in agenda. Adam points out that Europeans also have much longer training for police and they deal with mentally ill, the mentally ill with professionals, not with police. That's a huge difference. I've talked about this since the George Floyd case. We don't train police enough. We don't treat the police training seriously enough. I mean, you see these out of shape cops everywhere. They've got to have low self-esteem, which can't help them dealing with criminals who are much better shaped than they are. We have police deal with mentally ill in ways that we shouldn't. We should have professionals deal with them. There are a lot of problems with policing in the United States. A lot of problems that have to do with this. Whether Europe has cured that problem, I don't know. Also, because Europe has fewer drug, not drug, gun crimes, much fewer gun crimes, then shorter sentences make sense. Because they're less violent, they're less murderous and so on. It's unclear to me that drug, that gun, I don't know why I'm replacing guns with drugs. My subconscious is going haywire. It might make sense to have lower sentences in Europe because the kind of crimes are not equivalent. So are you measuring apples to apples, in other words, in terms of the kind of crimes? Okay, IcePick is asking, I heard that one early phone presentation by Steve Jobs was basically fake. The product was not ready, but they were confident that they would get there when the product shipped and it worked. Is that fake till you make it? Yes, but there's nothing wrong with that. And it's just saying you can get one tomorrow, right? But if you're saying you'll get one in a month and they actually delivered in a month, then that's fine. There's a great scene in the movie Taka, which I highly recommend. It's a wonderful movie, a depressing movie, but a really wonderful movie about a real story, a real true story, Taka, who came up with the Taka automobile. You can find pictures of the Taka automobile online because a few of them were produced. And there's a point in the movie where he rolls it out onto the stage and it's not running and it's leaking oil and it's all this stuff and he's presenting this brand new automobile to the world. But then when the deadline to delivery is met and that's what matters. So you might wanna look up the movie Taka if you wanna see kind of a fake till you make it in a positive sense, in the confidence, I will do it, I will make it, it will happen. It's hard, super hard, but I will make it happen. A kind of way Taka is a great example of that and a tragic example of that because you see what the combination of big business and government does, somebody like that. Okay, final question. Let me just call that vaporware. Final question from Michael. What did you think of the series Band of Brothers? The complexity of emotions experienced by the soldiers between the scale of war and the Holocaust was unfathomable. Yeah, I thought it was very well made, very naturalistic. So not a particularly romantic show, very naturalistic show but naturalism can be good. And I thought the Band of Brothers was very good in its depiction of World War II. It was a combination of at some level an aesthetic experience, but a deep down but a huge historical experience. It really depicted what it was like. And so I think it's still on PBS or was it HBO? It was an HBO show, it was an HBO show. So I highly recommend it if you can find it on HBO or wherever, watch it Band of Brothers about, I think it was the 101 airborne. It was a depiction of soldiers in the 101st airborne and followed them through the Normandy invasion and through the defeat of Germany, including the liberation of the concentration camps and kind of the experience of walking into concentration camp that they had as soldiers being the first one in. All right, that we will call that a day. Thanks guys, thanks Jim, thanks Adam, thanks Debbie, thanks Jennifer, really appreciate it. Thanks for all the support. Panelists today are all monthly supporters of the Iran Brook show at $100 or more. You can become a supporter of the Iran Brook show on a monthly basis at youranbrookshow.com slash support, Patreon, a subscribe star, that is my preferred method of support for the show. Super Chat is fun and we raise a lot of money there, but the nice thing about the Monty support is it's predictable, it's consistent and I can really plan long-term based on it. So thank you for everybody who's a Monty supporter. Thanks all the Super Chatists today. We'll be back on Tuesday and on Thursday for your on book shows and have a great rest of your Sunday. I will see you all on Tuesday. Bye guys. Thank you as always for your outreach. Bye Iran.