 The 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 Tuesday, September... What is it? 5th? 5th? September 5th. I hope everybody had a fantastic long weekend. You all had a great Labor Day and the weekend before that. So everybody's ready to get back to being productive. Summer's over. We're back to the fall. Lots to do. Everybody's busy, which is great. All right, let's see a few things. One, please continue to comment on the sound quality. I keep tweaking. I keep changing settings. So let me know how this compares to the way it was yesterday before we're trying to get it right. So anything you can contribute to this to help me get it right is greatly appreciated. So thanks. Just let me know if it sounds good, better, worse, same, can't tell any difference. Better today. All right, that's good. Okay, never change it, Diego says. Never change it. All right, cool. All right, second, I'm getting a lot of things from PayPal saying that, you know, they try to charge credit cards and they're not successful. And it just seems to be a flurry of them last, I'd say a couple of months. I don't know if it's an issue with PayPal. I don't know if just a bunch of you have credit cards that are expiring or something. Unless you intend to cancel your subscription, which is fine if you do, then the easiest thing is just to cancel it. I'd appreciate it if those of you who are subscribed was on PayPal, just check to see if the subscription is going through. They just seem, just over the last, I'd say a month and a half, there's just been a lot of these. We tried to charge the card and was successful. And some of that I think is just like an expiration date or something going on. Say if you still want to support the show on PayPal, please just check to make sure that it's actually working and it's actually going through as you intend. All right. Third comment and then we'll get to the topics. We're going to cover Biden. Well, you've got the title. You know what we're going to cover. I mentioned this yesterday. I'll be mentioning in the next few shows just to see if there was any interest out there. But I will be, I've got a free day in London in October and I'm thinking of putting on a seminar on public speaking. So if you're interested in improving your public speaking, if you're interested in being a public speaker, this is relevant for both the kind of public speaking I do, but also relevant for corporate presentations. Well, anytime you're going to be on stage, anytime you're going to be in front of a people in a boardroom or anything like that, you want to be as good of a public speaker as you can be. And I'll be offering a seminar for about 10 people. So it's small, intimate. You'll have lots of time to present and for me to critique and get tips and insights into how to be better if you're going to use PowerPoint, how to use PowerPoint effectively, but primarily how to just be up there and speak and how to do that well. It's, you know, I don't know exactly how much it's going to cost yet. It'll be several hundred dollars for the day, maybe up to a thousand dollars, something like that. But, you know, if you go to a public speaking coach for a day like this, easily three to five thousand dollars. So I think it's a good deal and you're getting, you know, insight from somebody who's pretty good at this and has lots of experience at it, which is me. So if you would like that, spend a day with me talking about public speaking and getting insight and getting feedback. Then email me. Email me at uran at uranbrookshow.com. Just email that you're interested. You're not committing. You can't commit until you know the exact date, time and exact location. It is in London. So this is primarily for the Brits out there and for the Europeans, but maybe also for some Americans who are interested in coming. It's a small group. So the sooner you express interest, the more likely it is that you will get in. So uran at uranbrookshow.com. Just drop an email saying, I'm interested. And then I will get back to you with details as we move forward. All right, let's jump in to our news roundup for September 5th. So this is just such a bizarre story. So it turns out that when Biden was vice president, he had several pseudonym accounts, accounts running off of his government computer. I guess. So his computers did just be using pseudonyms. Now, as vice president, all your emails are supposed to be preserved. They all go into the archives. They're all accessible ultimately. And all these pseudonym pseudo named accounts are all available. So if he used these pseudonym accounts for corruption, then he's a massive idiot because it's all there. It's all searchable. It's all available. And ultimately the press or Congress is going to get their hands on it. There's no way in which Biden can actually prevent that from happening unless he claims it's national security. But then it's bizarre that it's under pseudonyms. So slowly, but surely this is going to come out. And it's not just one pseudonym. It's several pseudonyms. Who knows what he was doing here? Who knows what he was engaged in? Now, one possibility is, of course, he's an idiot, which is not completely unreasonable. The guy's not exactly smart. He's certainly not off the charts. The other possibility, which I think is even more likely, is that he's just arrogant. The arrogant of power. The arrogance of power. They can't touch me. They can't get to me. I can do whatever I want. Nobody's ever going to look at these. Nobody's ever going to find them. And yeah, well, I mean, his brilliant son, his intelligence runs in the family, I guess. His brilliant son actually deposited his laptop to be repaired and never went back to pick it up. So yeah, that's how they're getting to all these pseudo-accounts is through the laptop. Who knows what's going to come of this? Who knows if Biden's super corrupt, if he was hiring prostitutes as he was traveling around the world and using a White House-provided pseudo-name in order to solicit them? Who knows? I mean, anything goes. Clearly, Biden or anybody like that, they're not good people, right? They're not good people. So they're doing all kinds of weird stuff. But yeah, it's going to be interesting to get insight into this given how sloppy, stupid, arrogant clearly Biden was, is, and all this is out there available. Of course, if it does come out and if it's really, really bad, then it's also going to be interesting to see how the Democratic Party responds to it and what happens in terms of the 2024 election. Maybe, maybe, maybe the Democrats nominate somebody different than Joe Biden. That would be interesting. But yeah, a story to follow. Nobody knows. I mean, the emails are not available yet. A few were released and they were redacted. But there's both a Freedom of Information Act request by the media to get the emails and there's a request by the government to get them. So exactly what they're all going to be discovering is interesting. There's also some argument that, well, there's also, you know, some questions about Hunter Biden's use of Air Force Two and Marine Two. These are the airplanes and helicopters of the vice president during their time. How many times did he travel with his father overseas? What happened in those trips? So they're slowly gaining actual factual information about the potential real corruption of the Bidens. As I've said from the beginning, the fact that the Bidens are corrupt is not a surprise and should not be a surprise to anybody. It is my strongly held belief that pretty much everybody in Washington is corrupt to some degree or another. Some of them get caught. Most of them do not. And as I've said, you know, maybe a highlight, one of the obvious ways in which it's corrupt is these kind of deals that they make before and after leaving office. And of course, every administration is filled with this, including Trump and Trump's son-in-law. All right, let's see. So that's kind of Biden's emails, something to watch. Nothing to get too excited about yet, but something clearly to watch. The Belt and Road Initiative, which is a Chinese initiative to build infrastructure basically from China all the way into Europe, all the way really to Western Europe, part of the Belt and Road Initiative was Italy. With the idea of building a primarily transportation infrastructure, but infrastructure more broadly, so that Chinese goods can be exported easily and cheaply all over South Asia and ultimately into Europe and the rest of the world. It also was a way for China to gain influence in places like Africa and some less developed areas in Asia and in Europe. You know, a lot of being written about the Belt and Road Initiative and a lot of panic and I think exaggeration of being applied to it. This is a way for the Chinese to get everybody in debt and then they all owe money to China, but then they won't be able to pay it, but then they'll be in China's debt forever. And then China will be able to control them all. And this is a way for China to gain more influence around the world. I mean, yes, and a big no to all of that. No question that this enhances China's, China is lending all this money all over the world. And this is the Chinese government. It's all funneled through Chinese state enterprises. It's very in through state banks. It's none of this is really private companies. This is all Chinese state. There's no question that this has enhanced the reputation, enhanced the influence of China all over the world. And indeed it has. It has worked in that sense. But it has also been a massive failure. And a massive failure is exactly this issue around the debt and the fact that the fact that the that this debt could not be ultimately paid back. That many of these projects were non economical. Many of these projects were dreams that were unrealistic. Many of the projects involve projections about the future that had no relation to reality. Not all of them. Some of them turned out to be very profitable and very good. Like like the the the the ports in Greece, which the Chinese built, which turned out to be incredibly profitable. But much of this has turned out to be bad and there's a lot mountains of bad debt out there and it's only going to increase. There's only going to be more of this bad debt in the in the I'd say years and decades to come from all the debt that these countries have taken on from China. But this idea that this this debt is good for China is just plain wrong. They're lending these countries real money and they're not getting paid back. You know, and it's not like there are assets everywhere that are worthy of taking control in instead of this debt in some places they are, but in many places they are not. And it's not like Chinese leverage over these countries is that valuable. It's not. Many of these countries have very little to offer China ultimately. This is a much more complicated game and it's ultimately a lose lose game. China is losing and China in its current economic situation cannot afford suddenly to have lend so much money out and not be able to recoup much of it. Now, the funny thing about all of this is that many of these countries are turning to the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, to ask for a bailout. Now, much of the money that the IMF is going to provide in order to bail these countries out comes from places like the United States. And then it's given to these countries who then going to use it to pay off Chinese debt. Well, the IMF is bulking at this, of course. The IMF doesn't want its funds to be used to pay off the debt of China without China taking a significant haircut off of this money, off of these debts. China is a member of the IMF. It sits on the board of the IMF. So there's a slight conflict of interest there. But it is, you know, the IMF is going to now have a lot of leverage over China in terms of which debts get repaid and which debts don't, under what terms they get paid. And this is going to be something that the IMF and the United States in particular are going to have to do because the United States is the largest member of the IMF. And it's a lot of US money that is being devoted to this. Now, look, I don't believe the IMF should exist. I don't believe countries state should be giving loans to anybody. I don't think that the state should be in the business of lending money. I don't think the United States should be bailing other countries out. Never mind. It shouldn't even be bailing US banks out. Never mind other countries. So none of this should even exist. But the great irony is that it appears that the United States is going to be bailing out China through the IMF. Now, this is not a good scenario for anybody. It's ultimately not good for China. China is going to be squeezed and China is not going to get its money back. And China is not going to have the kind of leverage that some people thought it had over these countries because that leverage is going to shift to the IMF. The IMF will have that leverage. But it's not good for the IMF to bail out the Chinese even partially. So the United States is really going to have to figure out what role it wants to play and how much it wants to support the IMF in what it's going to be doing and is already starting to do. How tough it wants to be with China. How many of these projects does it want to see collapse? And one of the great tragedies here is that many of these countries are very poor countries. Many of these countries should have never, never devoted the resources to the kind of projects that China is funding. But instead should have been devoting these resources to building property rights infrastructure, to building legal infrastructure, to building a market economy. Instead they're building railroads all over the place, they're building ports, they're building all kinds of things and yet there's very little to transport. There's very, there's no benefits to all this massive infrastructure when there's no economy, there's no industry, there's no movement. So the real tragedy is you're going to get half-built railroads in countries that can't really afford anything. That in countries that can't afford to build these things, they can't afford the debt payments, they can't afford. And what these countries should be doing is investing heavily, maybe in education arguably, if the government is going to invest in anything. But certainly in the infrastructure to sustain, to create and sustain a market economy. And now you're going to get poor countries in Africa primarily becoming poorer, or places like Sri Lanka becoming poorer. Argentina owes a lot of money to China. It's not like China is going to get any real leverage over Argentina. Maybe because of all this debt we'll get a libertarian president of Argentina and that'll be fun to watch. Montenegro in Europe owes a lot of money. Why? Because the Chinese built a highway from which I drove on actually drove on this highway. Or maybe I drove on the Albanian version of the highway. But there's a magnificent highway that goes from a port in Montenegro towards into Serbia. This has increased debt. Montenegro's I'm going to be in Montenegro soon. But this is going to increase the debt of the Montenegro government by gazillions of dollars. For what? Exactly. What is the benefit? Exactly. I'll be in Montenegro. I'll ask them when I'm there. I'm giving a talk in Montenegro in October. Anyway, again, something to watch could have profound impact on the global economy as this debt collapses. As these economies go into recession, well, worst of the recession, depressions, maybe they're already, in a sense, these economies are already depressed. They get worse, puts a lot of pressure on their own populations, increases migration pressure, but also just decreases economic growth in the world. A lot of this debt doesn't get paid back to China. That is more negative impact on the Chinese economy. China is already weak, going to get weaker. If IMF starts lending money here, that brings in the West into this crisis. The West is already part of it. A lot is going to have to happen with this debt crisis that China has instigated by lending money to projects that cannot sustain the debt. There's a whole domino effect here, and it's not the domino effect that China wanted. A lot of these countries resent China now. A lot of these countries view China very negatively now because China's put them in this situation, so it does not work to China's benefit at all in any dimension. But it's not, nobody's benefiting here. This is a lose, lose, lose, lose situation, as most losing transactions happen to be. The only people who benefit it would be my guess. The only people who walk away from these deals better off than they started are local politicians. And a lot of these are autocrats who funneled a lot of that Chinese money into their own pockets. That money is now sitting in Swiss or Cayman Islands or Singapore bank accounts. And yeah, the countries can't pay off the debt. Tough. They're not going to dip into that money. They've already put their share aside. And the rest of the countries themselves, they are doomed, as is the rest of the global economy in terms of dealing with this. So massive failure of Chinese central planning, Chinese central planning of country to country debt, which shouldn't exist, period. Shouldn't be lending money to other countries. China lends a lot of money to the US. But it does so in very liquid markets. It does so by buying US treasuries. The least offensive way. Pretty distorted. Pretty something again to watch in terms of global economics. All right, here's a, I don't know, a story I hesitate about, right? A story I really hesitate. Richard, thank you for the support. $100. Really, really appreciate that. That's fantastic. Ragnar. I assume that's Ragnar of the desert under a new name. Now Ragnar desert. Thank you, Ragnar desert for the sticker. Thank you, Taze and thank you, Jonathan Honing. Thanks to all you guys really appreciate the support. All right, let's see. So yeah, so this is this is a weird story. So Saudi Arabia, MBS, Muhammad, what's his name? Muhammad Bid Salaman. Is that that his name? Muhammad Bid Salaman. Yes, Muhammad Bid Salaman, who is the crown prince, but the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. He's 37 years old. He basically runs the country, runs the investment. He's building this modernist city, a long, a long city, which is weird and not very efficient. But anyway, trying to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil and gas and trying to bring in other industries, but also diversifying the investment of this sovereign wealth fund. They've got this massive amount of money, gazillions of dollars sitting there to and they invest it. Well, they've just announced that they will be creating a new foundation. The foundation is called the evolution foundation, revolution, but instead of the R at the beginning of the word, it's an H. So it's evolution foundation. So they're creating this new evolution foundation and the foundation is going to be distributing. One billion dollars, billion, one billion dollars to research into anti-aging into longevity. Now this is massive. This takes the amount of money available for research into longevity. It puts it in a whole new ballpark. Today there's a lot less money spent on aging, on life extension than there is on disease research and stuff like that. And almost all the money spent today on anti-aging comes from the US. What is it? It's a government entity. It's not the National Institute for Health. I think it's the National Institute for Aging. American Federation for Aging Research. A lot of money goes from there and that comes from the US National Institute on Aging. So National Institute for Aging and they give money to the American Federation for Aging Research and it gets distributed. But we're now talking about suddenly a billion dollars available. Now this could be a game changer. And it's not like the Saudis intend to invest this money in Saudi Arabia because there is no aging research or nothing significant in Saudi Arabia. They tend to sprinkle this all around the world to labs and they already have started to different universities, to different researchers. I mean this really could change the world. I mean this is the first time I think I've ever thought of, well maybe this massive accumulation of wealth in the hands of the Saudis will turn out to have a positive impact. I don't know but there's a real chance. So first of all if you are doing aging research, if you're doing longevity research, you should look into this. Evolution foundation, Saudis are giving away money like crazy. Now it makes sense. MBS is a dictator. He's a totalitarian, not even authoritarian, a totalitarian. But he perceives himself as a benevolent dictator who wants to bring the Saudi nation into the 21st century. He wants to make the world a better place for the Saudis at least. He's modernizing and diversifying and he's got a lot of money to do it with. He engaged in a bunch of wars with Iran but has backed off of that and now is an ambassador of peace. Who knows what this guy actually wants. Yeah I mean it makes sense. He's 37 years old. He probably wants to live forever and rule Saudi Arabia forever that he would massively invest in this. The guy running the foundation is a former scientist who worked for Pepsi for over a decade. And yeah they're handing out gazillions of dollars. Gazillions of dollars and very diversified. So a lot of small bits. A few million here, a few hundred thousands here. A few tens of millions over there. And now I'm trying to think of what's the downside. Could they corner the market and all the longevity drugs go to Saudi Arabia? Probably not. Probably not able. If they make discoveries, if this money actually goes and actually leads to some major discoveries, will all of us benefit from it? Probably. So I'm curious what the downsides are. They might be some downsides. Certainly this helps legitimize one of the most brutal and horrific regimes on the planet. It helps make them appear civilized and worthwhile, which they are not. It gives them a certain sanction, which is sad. I think last week we had the story about this guy just being sentenced to death because he criticized MBS, the royal family, on Twitter. So he's being sentenced to death. I wonder what Elon Musk thinks about that. So the Saudi regime is still a brutal regime. It still sends people to death or to long sentences in jail over expressions of speech. They flogged people for being atheists. I mean, it's a brutal, horrible regime. And maybe they're doing something at the margin that we will all benefit from. It seems just horrible that this is possible. But they've got all these billions. It's better they spend it on this than the other options that they have, like buying more weapons systems from the United States, which we continuously sell to them. They've got some of the most advanced weapons systems in the world. I don't know if they know how to use them, but they have some of the most advanced weapons systems in the world. All right, oh God, I always do this. I set up too many stories. There's too much to say about them each. All right, this is a bigger story to be discussed at some point, but just an indication here. We've talked a lot about the U.S. Navy on the Iran Book Show to a large extent because I've highlighted the fact that as the United States, from a national security perspective, pivots towards the Pacific and pivots towards China, that the whole defensive mechanism of the United States, in that sense, or big chunk of it, becomes the Navy. The Navy becomes the most important branch in the military. If we're talking about the Pacific, China is far away. Any conflict with China would probably be at sea. We're unlikely to land troops on the Chinese coast, though we might land troops in Taiwan, but unlikely we'd probably be primarily supporting any kind of war with China from the sea, supporting Taiwan from the sea, which means it's a Navy. The U.S. Navy is by far the best Navy in the world. It's the most sophisticated. It has the best submarines. It's the only Navy that field vast numbers of aircraft carriers. It has massive destroyers. It has unbelievable high-tech. We have now a new generation of aircraft carriers and a new generation of submarines, both by the way, way behind in terms of the number that should be out there on the seas. The building is going very slowly. And we're building, but we are building. We're building big ships. But there is a real movement within the Navy. There's a significant portion of the Navy and thinkers within the Navy that are raising concerns that, A, can we afford to build these massive ships and maintain them and run them? They cost a fortune just to run them. And are they the best platforms from which to defend the United States, given how susceptible they are to long-range missiles coming from China and hypersonic missiles and other missile technology? They are sitting ducks in a sense. They're big. They can't hide. They're not stealth. Some of the submarines are stealth, but they're ships. So there are Navy officers and Navy strategists that are saying, wait a minute, what we really should be thinking about is a different kind of Navy. A Navy that deploys small boats. A Navy that deploys boats that are unmanned. A Navy that deploys drones and unmanned boats and small man boats. A Navy that is a lot more mobile, a lot faster, a lot more nimble, and that doesn't present a target. Doesn't present the target because of the size of the ships themselves. Such a coordinated, small boat, heavily reliant on unmanned is now being deployed in the Arabian Gulf to try to stop Iranians from hijacking ships and for Iranians to use their speedboats. So something is there. But the idea of deploying that on scale in the Pacific is still very new. And its meaning was significant resistance from conservative Navy hybrars. Kind of, there's a real aversion to risk-taking. There's a real aversion to breaking with tradition after all the tradition of the Navy, the U.S. Navy is big, aircraft carriers, that's what the U.S. Navy is known for. There is a real aversion to while we want new technology, we want big new technology and not necessarily changes in strategy. As Lawrence Selby, who just recently retired as a rear admiral and chief of naval research, 36 years in the Navy, says, the U.S. Navy is arrogant. We have an arrogance about we've got these aircraft carriers, we've got these amazing submarines. We don't know anything else. We don't need anything else. He's arguing we do and we need a shift, we need a change. But it's more than that. It's more than that. And it's the fact that we have embedded interest groups that are now committed to building big boats. The whole leadership in Congress that approves budgets, if you look at who the congressmen are, the congressmen are all from districts that have boat building facilities, Navy ports, Navy shipyards. They don't want to see small boats. They don't want to see drones. They don't want to see small unmanned boats. They don't want to see big aircraft carriers that to build them requires the employment of thousands of people. Congress doesn't even want to retire old ships that don't provide any real benefit in the battlefield. Just because those ships have to dock somewhere and the people in the Navy, if you live at one of these Navy towns, you don't want to see all that go away. I mean, tens of millions of dollars of shipbuilding profits are directed as campaign contribution to key lawmakers. And there are massive lobbying campaigns around the Navy. So our choices about how to deploy the Navy, what kind of ships to deploy, are not being made based on what is the best strategic interest of the United States. What is the best Navy to deploy in order to protect American interests on the high seas, to protect the shipping lanes, to protect free trade? No. Our budgets are being allocated, our defense budgets are being spent on the basis of political expediency, on the basis of whose pocket we can line. And how much and what kind of influence can they have in Congress? And that's the reality. The reality is that our congressmen, senators, presidents are not interested in what's good for America. They're interested in lining their pockets. They're interested in increasing their power. They're interested in helping their friends and buddies wherever they may be. I mean, one of the great tragedies in America is how corrupt and how rich we are. And of course, the richer we become, the more money there is to corrupt. And we're seeing that all over the place. And the Navy, I mean, how tragic is this, right? This is the Navy to a large extent won us World War II. Certainly in the Pacific, but also made it possible to win in the Atlantic. This Navy is now corrupt by politicians who have no foresight, no strategy, no forward thinking about what's really in the best interest of the United States. And returning Donald Trump to the presidency is not going to solve that problem. It's not like he's a strategic thinker. God help us. All right, this one I'll just do very quickly. But this is a headline in the Financial Times that struck me as, wow, people are starting to say things that I've been saying for the last 20 years. That's pretty cool. Here's the title from the Financial Times. In other words, the world is starting to panic. The title says the world will need to stop piggybacking on U.S. farmer. Basically, the story says, look, Americans have been paying these massive amounts of money for drugs two to three times more than Europeans and others. But by doing so, they're basically subsidizing R&D. They're basically subsidizing the rest of the world. I've been saying that forever. You can find me in debates talking about this. The United States has subsidized drug development for the rest of the world, healthcare generally for the rest of the world. And the Financial Times now is running scared. Why? Because Biden now, by letting Medicare squeeze drug companies, is going to stop that subsidy. Basically, what's going to happen is drug companies are not going to have the money to do the R&D. They're not going to have the money to buy biotech startups to distribute and do trials on their drugs. The whole industry is going to shrink in terms of future prospects. And the drug companies won't be able to cut a suite of deals with Europe because they'll be cutting suite deals with Medicare. And suddenly, the Financial Times are realizing, hey, maybe we should have paid more of our share towards drug company profitability so that we weren't as dependent on the United States that we want as parasitic, not dependent parasitic on the U.S. But yes, one of the reasons the United States has the highest cost of healthcare in the world is because we basically subsidize healthcare for the rest of the world. Well over two-thirds of innovation in healthcare, drugs, and other innovation happening in the United States. It's because we still have a little bit of private property applied to healthcare in the U.S. The rest of the world is just parasitic over our healthcare system. All right, did that quickly? Let's jump to the questions. Oh, we've already reached our target. Thank you guys. In particular, Richard, thank you. We got some stickers from Stephen, from no one, from Shelley. Yes, great. All right, let's jump in. Jeffrey says, maybe a connection between pragmatism and the likelihood of being corrupted. I think pragmatism is something our politicians have in common. Yeah, pragmatism is. It corrupts people in business, but it also corrupts people in politics. Pragmatism basically says that there are no principles or morality. You can't have a principle. You can't have something guiding you your entire life. And what happens both in politics and in business is that if you want to be moral, then you're told to be altruistic. But altruism sucks. Nobody wants to be altruistic. And indeed, you cannot run a business on the principles of altruism. If you want a business on the principle of altruism, you'll run it into the ground. So what happens is you reject morality completely, completely. And instead of that, what happens is you adopt pragmatism. If I can get away with it, then it's good. And that's true. Unfortunately, if you look at all the cases of business fraud, it's almost always from the perspective not of somebody scheming to try to steal, but somebody trying to get away, trying to cut corners. Because hey, it's a little bit better. And we can get away with this. It's no big deal. And most of the corruption in politics is the same way. And it's the same thing. Pragmatism will always lead to corruption because it abandons any kind of principle. And the only way you can hold on to morality is with principles. It's way too complicated to try to hold on to morality without moral principles. Applejack says the best analysis on the interweb was. I don't understand what that question or answer or what that is. Sorry, Applejack. Maybe you're saying this is the best. I don't know. Maybe this is the best analysis on the web, something like that. I don't have no idea. All right. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Applejack. Ryan Milkat says, Carthage was history's first naval superpower. And then Rome happened. Please don't be too arrogant and maintain a big army, too. Yeah, but Carthage was more than just a naval power, right? Because Hannibal could actually deploy an army and actually attack Rome and almost destroyed Rome. It almost was the Carthaginian Empire, not the Roman Empire. So I don't know that it was the arrogance around only having a navy, which actually got them. I don't know enough history, but I do know that they had a mighty military army force. But when I look at China, it's primarily, if we're going to defend ourselves, what we really need is a superior military, sorry, navy, that's the emphasis has to be there. All right. Paul says, what kind of missile defense do these aircraft carriers have? And do you think we should have a naval base in the Taiwan Straits? They have the equivalent, I think, of Patriot missiles. They have very, the most sophisticated Patriot missiles in Ukraine have shown that they could hit supersonic, or at least the Russian supersonic. We know that the navy is developing or working on a laser system. Laser systems are difficult to deploy. They require huge amounts of energy. Now, luckily, a lot of these ships have nuclear power plants on them, so they can use that. But it's not going to be simple, and the laser technology is not done yet. There's still a lot of work. Israel has now designed and is selling a anti-missile system that can shoot down the hypersonic missiles. They've just announced it recently, and I think they were showing it off at the Paris Air Show. So that's available. So there are systems available. But there's a lot of new technology out there that is not clear how you deal with. There's something called drone swarms, where your ship is swarmed by explosive, by suicide drones. It's hard to shoot them all down. A hypersonic, maybe, can shoot some of them down? Can you shoot all of them down? If they shoot a barrage at you in large numbers, the Chinese are investing heavily in land to see hypersonic missiles. And with a range, I can't remember if that's 1,000 miles, I think, so they want to be able to protect 1,000 miles out, which is a big chunk of the Pacific. And we need to get close because we need to be able to launch aircraft. We need to be able to actually get close to Taiwan and to the shore. Should we have a naval base in Taiwan Straits? I mean, that would be pretty provocative. But we have naval bases in Japan, which is not that far. We have naval bases, I think, in South Korea, which is not that far, in the Philippines, which is not that far. I don't think we literally need to be there. What we should be doing on a massive scale right now, we are doing a little bit of this. The Biden administration is doing some of this, but we should be doing even more, is supplying weapons systems to the Taiwanese. That is, we should be selling sophisticated, advanced weapons systems to the Taiwanese for them to be able to defend themselves. The better the weapons the Taiwanese have, the more robust the weapons they have, the more expensive the Chinese believe they will be to invade Taiwan, the less likely a war is. Don't wait for the war to start to give the weapons. It might be too late at that point. Give them the weapons in advance. Give them the most advanced and most sophisticated weapons to destroy ships that are coming in from China, to destroy missile launching pads in China, so weapons that can reach China. Give them the capacity to make a war over Taiwan so costly for the Chinese that they would never think of doing it, and therefore the United States never has to be involved. This is the whole point about giving weapons to Ukraine. If Ukraine can defeat Russia, then NATO won't have to. And as long as we're a member of NATO, we don't want NATO to get involved, because that would require American kids. So let the Ukrainians do the fighting. If we can defeat Russia through Ukraine, that is a massive advantage over emboldening Putin, and that would lead to go after NATO itself. Michael says, if we don't have enough capitalism today, capitalism can't solve the problem. True. We need more capitalism. Michael says, in what ways does Singapore nudge people? What kind of ways? I don't know. I can't remember offhand. They incentivize, for example, they want people to eat healthy. So they are subsidizing food stalls in food courts to both provide healthy alternatives and to have signage that says healthy food available here. So to bring to consciousness the idea of healthy food and to emphasize that. But, yeah, I mean, so, or things like that, right? They incentivize healthy behavior. So if you engage in healthy behavior, the government taxes you less, let's say, or you get to keep more of your money. Those are the kind of nudges that they do. So it's not like penalizing you if you don't. It is, in a sense. It's more rewarding you if you do. Rewarding positive behavior. And Mirkat says, Honeywell did not get reinforcement due to politically fighting at home. Marla, the story, don't sell America to the Russians or Chinese to own the Libs. Don't sell America to the Russians. No, don't sell America to the Russians. All right. Or Chinese to own the Libs. I'm not sure who the Chinese and the Libs are. But anyway, yes, don't, you know, the problem in the United States is we have the infighting independent of Russia and China. So it's likely we have infighting here no matter what. Michael says, do people evade because they're weak? They can't handle unpleasant emotions. That's part of it. But part of it is the flip side. They just don't engage in the kind of energy expenditure and the kind of focus that is required in order to, you know, in order to do the positive, which is to focus, to think, to use your own mind. So they have a quite energy. They have a quite focus. They have a quite initiation. And it doesn't happen. Why doesn't it happen? We don't really know. We just know it doesn't happen. Some of it is fear. Some of it is laziness. Some of it is just choice. Pure choice that you can't really, you can't really find a predecessor cause because choice is the cause. All right, everybody. Thank you. We made our target again today. That's fantastic. Thank you for everybody who listens. Don't forget, if you're interested in my public speaking course, live 10 people small in London in October, then please drop me an email. You're on at your on BigShow.com. And I'll keep you updated about that. Thanks everybody. I'll see you all tonight. Not sure what the topic is going to be, but 8 p.m. East Coast time. 8 p.m. East Coast time tonight. I will be doing my regular Tuesday evening show. Bye everybody.