 the radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brook Show. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Brook Show on this Wednesday, last day in January. Not the last show today. We will have a show at 7 p.m. East Coast time tonight. A topic to be determined. I will let you know as soon as I figure it out. In the meantime, we have another one of our news roundups, and yeah, it's all going to be outside the United States today. All right, I guess there was no worthy news in the U.S.? I don't know. All right, we'll start in. We're going to spend quite a bit of time on Europe. I guess the news is that the fourth quarter of last year in Europe, in terms of economic growth, basically was flat. The economy did not grow. For the entire year last year, the economy only grew in the European Union by 0.5%. So very, very, very low economic growth. If you exclude the COVID, the last time they had negative, last time they had worse economic growth was 2013, 2012, 2013, during the outcome of the Greek crisis. The European economy generally is growing dramatically less than the U.S. economy. In and of itself, I'd say the slow growth of the European economy is not surprising, given high interest rates. High interest rates are also in the United States, but given high interest rates in Europe, and then of course, Europe lags the United States systematically and has at least the last 15 years in terms of economic growth. And I think the corporate there is pretty obvious. The corporate is heavy regulations, heavy controls, lack of entrepreneurship. Europeans are not entrepreneurial or those who are entrepreneurial, many of them leave and come to the United States and start companies here. So the thing that holding back Europe in terms of economic growth is really high interest rates, regulations, controls, very, very rigorous regulatory environment. And just a lack of entrepreneurial spirit, a lack of entrepreneurs. And I think a lot of that has to do with the general cultural difference between the United States and Europe that has to do with risk taking. It also has to do with ambition. Americans are ambitious and are risk takers. Europeans tend to settle that they tend to settle. Part of the reason they tend to settle is because they're very risk-averse. Now again, these are broad generalizations, but that cultural level generalization, I think they're true. Europeans would rather have more vacation days than work harder and be more productive generally. They would rather have a robust safety net. I don't think they're socialist, but they would rather have a robust safety net rather than have those funds funneled into significant entrepreneurial ventures, risky activities, and so on. And that's the political systems you have in Europe. Europe is heavily regulated, but there's a strong sense in which Europe is less regulated than the United States. But Europe is much more risk-averse. And again, we're generalizing here. We're talking about cultural trends, not about individuals. And risk-averse cultures tend to produce less entrepreneurs. People as individuals are more risk-averse. But also, I think again, this is a cultural phenomena, where's in the United States, particularly in places like Silicon Valley, places some of you love to hate, but particularly in places like Silicon Valley, failure, risk-taking and failure are not viewed as negatives. That is, you can fail. You can start a company fail. And that does not inhibit you from starting again. And it doesn't inhibit you from an investor perspective, like the VCs don't hold it against you that you failed. But I think in many respects, more importantly, the culture doesn't look down on you. Your family, your friends, the people you interact with, don't look down on you if you failed in a business. The question usually is, well, when you study the next one, rather than, well, you tried, all right, now you should get it, you should get a proper job, which is the attitude I think in Europe and in many other places. The attitude is, okay, you tried something, you failed, move on, go somewhere else, do something else, right? So I think that what you get is a stagnant culture that responds less to growth opportunities. Therefore, not a lot of big technology innovations going on in Europe. There's no Elon Musk of Europe. There's no AI, well, I'm sure there are companies doing AI. There's no big AI pushes the same way in emphasis, the same way as Europe. And to the extent that they want to get into something like AI or chips, sadly, the government steps in and subsidizes much of it or tries to control it. There's a little bit more industrial planning in Europe than there's in the United States, not much, but a little bit more. And then I'd add, now there is an exception. I mean, there are always exceptions. This is why it's hard to generalize. I mean, the number one manufacturer of equipment for chip manufacturing is in the Netherlands, and it is unmatched in the world, and it is incredibly innovative. But it relies on an entire supply chain. Much of that supply chain is in the United States. Much of the innovations on the pieces it innovated and put it all together happens in the United States. So you've got an economy that's big, very sophisticated, very good at producing high quality items, think German cars, think German machinery, which is exceptionally, exceptionally good. You've got an economy where individuals are productive when they work, but they work fewer hours than the United States and certainly fewer hours than Asians, like particularly the South Koreans, who I think work the most hours of any people in the world. So they don't work a lot of hours, but they are productive when they work, and they use technology well in the work. But what they lack is entrepreneurship, and that entrepreneurship is what is necessary to produce high economic growth. I mean, really, the story of European stagnation is not much of a story unless you compare it to the United States. And again, I know this is kind of something most of you don't want to admit is happening. But the reality is the US economy, by the numbers, is doing quite well. A GDP growth last year in 2023 was 2.5%. That was higher than 2019 Donald Trump or even 2017. The only Trump year that was better than that was 2018, which was 2.9%, not that much more. And yet, if you remember, the Trump years were the greatest economy human beings have ever seen anywhere in the world. And the Biden economy is a horrible, terrible, disastrous economy. The economy is growing at 2.5%. Not great, not great, but the average for the same average as for the pre-Covid Trump years, and really kind of what the US has been doing since the great financial crisis, and given the level of regulations, given the complexity of taxation, given everything else, hard to get higher than 2.5% on an annual basis, on a steady, regular basis. I mean, you could have once in a while a year that's better than that. It didn't matter what Trump did, you know, Biden's doing is bad and it doesn't matter. The US economy seems to produce this kind of rate of return unless you really interfere with it. And primarily because of the entrepreneurial talent and skill, primarily because of the energy, but primarily because of the relatively flexible markets in spite of the heavy, heavy regulations and all of that. So Europe is stagnating. And really, if you look at since COVID, Europe has done badly. I mean, Europe shrunk dramatically during COVID, 6.1%. It recovered in 2021, but the recovery has slowed to the point where it now basically basically zero. Europe also, of course, had a very bad early 20 teens post financial crisis. So Europe has become significantly poorer than the United States over the last 15 years. And part of this is creating, I think, some of the real angst that is going on in Europe right now. When you have an economy that's not growing, it's much more likely that you're going to see kind of winners and losers. It's much more likely. And given the level of redistribution, given the level of regulation, given the level of state control, in Europe, you're seeing much more of a zero sum, a zero sum world, a zero sum economy, zero sum politics. You're seeing much more, I mean, you see some of that in the United States, and you're seeing the economic and political consequence of that, political consequence of that, apparently the rise of populism and the rise of kind of Donald Trump or the MAGA movement is a result of the kind of the zero sum world which is created by low economic growth. And that's been going on for a while now. And you're seeing a lot of that in Europe, even more because I think in Europe, you have much more of this because there isn't that dynamism that still exists in the United States, particularly when you bring in Silicon Valley and technology and all the other Silicon Valleys around the country, kind of the entrepreneurial growing economy which tends to create much more of at least a sense of win-win. Although again, even in the United States, there's a real sense of lose-win of zero sum thinking. And in Europe, that has become dominant. And I think you're seeing that frustration, that angst among people who don't quite understand what is going on, who don't know why this is happening and what is happening. You're seeing that all over Europe. And I think the latest manifestation of that, we'll talk about two manifestations of that. One is the growing farmer's strikes really all across Europe. Right now, what's making the headlines in the United States is primarily the strikes in France. I think the latest headlines were something like French farmers are basically surrounded Paris and Paris is on the siege. But that's just histurionics. But there is Paris farms aren't so clean the capital. I think police are preventing them from actually blocking in and out of Paris. But they are out there, tractors all over the place. And they're protesting, but it's not just in Paris. A few weeks ago, the same phenomena was happening in Germany. If you remember last year, we had a big uprising of farmers in the Netherlands that led to a major political win for them last year. You're also seeing farmers take out the tractors and go out into the roads in Greece, in Romania, and I think in much of Europe. So this is now Spain. This is a European phenomenon where farmers are protesting. And you can see kind of the thinking and the zero-sum thinking and the distorted thinking in what they're protesting about because what you get is a mixture of things that are true and right and things that are wrong and distorted. So what are they protesting against? On the good side, much of the protest, and this goes back to the Netherlands, much of the protest is about environmental regulations that are making it more and more and more expensive for the farmers to actually produce their crops. So they're protesting against the climate change regulations, the environmental regulations, the regulations regarding all of that stuff. They are upset about and they want the government to reduce those. That's good. Generally, they're upset about bureaucracy and growing bureaucracy and growing difficulties for them to be able to grow what they want, sell what they want, get to market what they want. So just the bureaucracy is bad. And then in addition, on the good side, you would add, they're protesting inflation. As most of us would want, they're protesting the fact that a lot of what is going into raising crops and to growing agricultural products, all the inputs have risen in price and they're complaining about that. And of course, they can also sell for more expensive. Food in the grocery stores is more expensive. They're selling food to the grocery stores more expensively. So farmers in Europe are passing on the cost of inflation to consumers. There's no doubt about that. But why not complain about that, what the hell throw it in there with everything else? I don't think the profit margins have gone down because of inflation. Businesses typically pass on the cost of inflation to consumers. Inflation is a cost born almost exclusively by consumers. Unless the government is putting price controls. On the negative side, the other two things that they're complaining about, one is reductions in the EU on subsidies. They want more subsidies. They want to be subsidized to a greater degree. They want some of the zero sum thinking, some of the zero sum dividing up of the welfare state to come to them. So they want to be subsidized. The French farming industry has been subsidized for many, many, many, many decades. And they only want more. They don't want less. And this is, of course, again, the kind of thinking there's a pie out there. The government has all these revenues. They decide who the winners and losers are. We're not getting enough of that pie. We need more of that pie allocated to us. And then finally, in what I think at the end of the day, they fear the most and causes the most discontent. And again, zero sum thinking is the protesting against competition. Competition from outside the European Union. The competition from Ukraine. Ukraine is selling a lot of its agricultural products into Europe because it's much more difficult to Ukraine to sell by shipping through the Black Sea. They still do, but it's much harder with the Russians there. And the EU has loosened up a lot of the import controls from Ukraine because of the war. So there's a lot of agricultural product flowing in from Ukraine that didn't flow in before the war started. And then the rest of the world. I mean, there's a lot of producers out there in the world that produce food a lot cheaper than Europeans do. The Americans are somewhat limited because the Europeans will not allow in GMO, which is another thing that keeps them backward, if you will, European farmers, they're not allowed to use GMO, generically modified organism, generically modified food stuff. In the US, of course, you're allowed to. In Asia, they use it a lot. And of course, it increases yields. It produces, in some ways, better crops. And it's a huge cost advantage, which the Europeans don't have. But look, they also have massive food production going on in Africa and in non-EU parts of Europe, which they have to contend with. And for that, there are massive tariffs in place. There are very large restrictions on importation of food into Europe. But the challenge, of course, there is that keeps costs up of food in Europe. Your food costs are very high. And some food comes in anyway, because it's so much cheaper to grow it overseas that even with the tariffs and restrictions, some of the food still makes it in. So tariffs are going to be, and trade is going to be a big issue for farmers moving forward. I mean, look, one of the great travesties today are the other tariffs that Europe places on food and on agricultural products. Imagine if those tariffs went away. A lot of French farmers would lose their jobs. There's no question about that. But France, France, one of the most advanced, richest, freest countries in the world, is really way too agricultural. There are way too many farmers in France. Usually developed, advanced, technologically sophisticated, relatively wealthy countries are not doing agriculture. France does do agriculture. Continues to do agriculture. It's not its comparative advantage. Imagine, and I've said this in Europe, when I do my European tours, I say this to audiences, imagine how much cheaper food would be in Europe if they dropped the tariffs, if they actually competed on 11 playing field with Africa and with the rest of the world in food stuff. First of all, it would provide Africans with huge amount of income. It would probably drive Africans out of poverty. There's a massive ability to bring industrial farming into Africa. There are vast areas that could produce huge quantities of food and grains for consumption in not only in Africa, it would lower the prices in Africa itself, reduce the problems of food shortages in Africa, but it would also reduce the price of food dramatically in Europe and raise the standard of living by reducing cost. Many farmers would lose their jobs and they would have to find more productive activities, but there are more productive activities. That's the beauty of comparative advantage to which the Africans have. That's the beauty of trade. That's the beauty of specialization. Europe does not have, given the cost of land, given the cost of capital, given the cost of everything, Europe does not have a comparative advantage in food. Maybe wine in France and Italy and Spain, I don't know, Portugal. Europeans do make great wine, but that's about it. The farmers will go out there and I'm all with them on the regulation stuff. I wish they didn't advocate for more subsidies and more tariffs. If they just advocate for doing away with the regulations, that would be great. Ultimately, what we all should be advocating for is to get rid of all government involvement in agriculture, get rid of all government intervention in the growing of food and let the markets work and let the global markets work. Imagine how much richer we would be if we actually had free trade, free trade, not selectively, not when we choose to, not once in a while, but really free trade. Isn't it interesting that the European Union means free trade, zero tariffs inside Europe? It's good for the Europeans to trade with one another with zero tariffs. Why not extend that to the rest of the world? Wouldn't we all be benefited, be better off if that was extended to the rest of the world? But it's not. And indeed, the movement is going in the opposite direction. So Europe is stagnating. Its farmers are striking and protesting in the streets. And other groups, I think, including the farmers, but other groups in Europe who are frustrated by a stagnant economy, stagnant wages, standard of living, ever-growing government, but with the people not seeing consequences, not seeing results. But also Europeans frustrated with their level of immigration as they experience stagnant economies. It's very easy to blame the immigrants for that. It's the immigrants that are causing the stagnant economies. Many Europeans are saying that. And of course, the consequence of all that is a rise in a populist, primarily right-wing, but generally populist, political parties. And you're seeing that across all of Europe. You're sort of with Goodwill does victory in the Netherlands. But you're seeing it probably most dramatically in Germany. German politics are being dominated by a center-left and a center-right political party. And they have been dominated forever from those parties, including after the reunification of East and West Germany. It's a center-left, center-right. The Greens were this new party, and they came about. But even the Greens and most of the policies are kind of center-left. They're not crazy left, like you'd expect. Now, they are crazy in terms of shutting down nuclear power. But that was the conservatives and the left, and all of them agreed on that one. But what we're seeing now is a real rise of Germans who are fed up with the center-left and center-right, fed up with the state of Germany, while Europe is stagnating. The German economy actually shrank last year. The German economy is actually in a recession. Now zero-sum thinking is really accelerating. Germany is also really, really, really afraid that the world-class auto industry is going to be overtaken by the Chinese. It's a real issue. I mean, a significant portion, I guess, of the German economy is automobiles. And given the shift in the European Union towards electric cars, the Chinese are way ahead, and the Chinese are going to bring those electric cars into Europe. So Europeans are feeling the angst, they're feeling the challenges, they're worried, and they are looking for alternative political answers. It really does look like in the next German election, the center-left party is going to be wiped out. The center-right party will probably win, but it might very well be that the second largest political party in Germany is going to be the SDF, which is a radical, right-wing, really ugly, ugly, ugly political party, a status through and through that is actually now considering rounding up immigrants, including immigrants who have German citizenship and sending them back home. In response to this, I think politicians have recognized an opportunity, an opportunity to present a right-wing populist political party, or at least the political party that is, if not right-wing, how would we say it, that is anti-immigration, that is anti-immigration, but that is more moderate than the AFD, which everybody really thinks of a pariah. So what we're seeing is trying to fill in the gap between the center-right party, which is much more center than right on pretty much every issue, and the AFD, which is status, proto-fascist, horrible, horrible, horrible political party with elements of neo-Nazis going in and out of the party. And what we've seen now is two new political parties in Germany being established in order to fill that gap. One of them is Bundesshauer Wagenknecht, something like that. This political party was founded by a woman coming from the left, and what the political party is embracing. It's embracing far-left economic policies. I mean real government industrial policy, real government involvement in economy, redistribution of wealth, I mean even for Germany leftist policies economically, with a strong anti-immigration bent, freezing immigration, and I think sending some immigrants home, some people who haven't got citizenship yet back home. So this is a political party that is trying to capture the people who support AFD but think it's a little too far, and it's a little too aggressive, and it's a little too maybe fascist. And what they want is, and a lot of those people they know, are friendly to the AFD only because of the immigration issue, but really deep down they're actually socialists. They're actually leftist economically. So trying to capture the leftist branch of the kind of anti-immigration wing within Germany. And now there's a third political, a second new political party that looks like it's going to be formed, you know, by a guy named Hans Georg Mauben, Mauben, something like that. I'm pronouncing it wrong, but something like that, who's a former president of Germany's National Security Services, an office that's supposed to protect the Constitution. He is leaving the center right party, not the left, but he's leaving the center right party, and he is forming what they're going to call a national conservative party. So this is the national conservative movement. And again, his feeling is that people who support the AFD because they're nationalists and because they're anti-immigration, but they probably don't really like the AFD because they're too far to the right. They're too proto-fascist, they're too nationalist. And what we want is a little softer. We want to be maybe more traditional conservative Germans. We want to be nationalists. And we want to be what maybe they think the center right party used to be. So what we're seeing is people trying to grab as much share of the AFD's votes as possible, taking advantage of the economic and cultural angst that exists in Germany. The economic angst because of the stagnation, the zero-sum mentality, the redistribution of wealth, and the lack of entrepreneurship. And just in Germany, the shrinking of the economy and the fear, particularly over the auto industry, but over other industries, how are we going to ever grow this economy again, I think, is what's going on in German mines. If our auto industry is not catching up on the electric vehicle side, we've committed to electric energy costs all through the roof. And we've shut down all nuclear. How do we ever grow again? And it's quite possible they never, you know, they really have a hard time growing. And people are looking for solutions. The current left of Senate government is failing and it risk being wiped out in the next election. The Senate right is all old solutions. Somebody needs something new, they say. God forbid we had a political party that picks up Millet's mantle of individualism and freedom. After all, this is Germany. So what we're getting is more and more political parties picking up the mantle of state intervention in the name of the workers leftist, in the name of the state, in the name of, almost in the name of the audience, but they won't quite say it. And those three political parties, right, who are trying to capture the cultural angst, and the cultural angst is basically this, and this is a cultural angst that exists throughout Europe. And this affects economic growth, by the way, particularly in a country like Germany, but also in the rest of Europe. Germans are not having babies, a little bit more babies than Italians, but generally Europeans are not having babies. The French are doing the best, French and Swedes, I think, but generally Europeans are not having babies. Population's shrinking. Population's getting older. They had a baby boom too, and that baby boom is getting old. They have no workers to pay for all the benefits they profits these old people. We think we have a problem in the United States with Medicaid and Medicaid, and so security, they have that in spades, although they have less of a deficits. They need to pay for healthcare. It's all socialized. They need a pool of young workers to pay into the system to be able to redistribute wealth. The young workers that they've been bringing into Europe over the last 50, 60 years since World War II really have a different culture, look differently, different colors of skin than the Europeans. And particularly the Muslim immigration in 2015 brought in a completely different culture that is creating real angst in some places justifiably, like in Sweden where crime rates have gone through the roof and other places may be less justifiably, but still, it's a challenge. So everybody's anti-immigration, even though one could argue that from economic perspective they have to have immigrants. They better figure out how to get more immigrants because how do they grow economically if they don't? Who's going to do the work? Particularly if they're not willing to take on risk, particularly if they resist failure, particularly if they're not entrepreneurial and not risky takers. So what you're seeing is a political realignment in Europe. And that political realignment is, to a large extent, wiping out the traditional left. I mean, you'll see that in France in the next election, the traditional left, I mean, we already saw in the last election, traditional left played no role. It was basically between Macron and the right. And there were some other candidates who also to the right who lost, but it was Macron, it was kind of a center, center, center right even, and a right-wing party. You saw this in the Dutch election now. The left has become relatively irrelevant. And the real, you know, the real hustle is trying to capture kind of a populist right. Obviously in Italy, a populist right-wing party is governing, but you're seeing that across Europe. Europeans, just like Americans, fed up with immigrants, it's their number one issue. And they're fed up with the feeling that they are stagnating. In Europe, they really are. In America, it's more of a feeling than a reality. But whatever it is, they feel it and they're fed up with it and they want change. Again, that's what got Donald Trump elected. That's what could get Donald Trump elected a second time. And it's what's creating all this angst in Europe. All right, you can't lock, you can't close the border. You'll never have a closed border. It's like a one immigration is just like the one drugs. Yeah, you'll lower the number of immigrants, but they'll find ways to come in because their job's here. There's money here. There's money to be made. Whenever you have jobs and money to be made, a black market will exist that facilitates the making of money and the jobs to be had. They'll drill under the fence, they'll fly, and you know that most illegal immigrants traditionally have just come in with tourist visas and just stayed. All right, two other topics quickly. A fascinating story I read this morning about Mexico. So, you know, a big chunk of Mexico's territory today is really governed by cartels. It's much, much worse today than it was when Andre Manuel Lopez Obrado, the president of Mexico, the current president of Mexico came into power in 2018. Much worse today than it was back then. They literally, these cartels are running the country or running big chunks of the country. You know, violence continues to be horrific. Sometimes it's down because there's a ceasefire between the cartels. Sometimes it accelerates. And there really has been a sense over the last few years that the Mexican government is basically not doing anything about it. Indeed, Obrado came into power in Mexico under the slogan of no guns, more hugs, no guns or something like that. You know, we want to hug you. We don't want to shoot you. Hugs, not bullets. That was his slogan. Hugs, not bullets. And indeed, the Mexican authorities have done very little about the drug cartels in the last five years. It's now being revealed, and this is, I think this is a huge story. It's not being revealed that the drug cartels basically paid a lot of money into Obrado's campaign going back to when the first time he ran, which I think was in 2010, 28, you know, a long time ago, almost, you know, 15 years ago, there's strong evidence of $2 million payment to Obrado with the understanding that if he came to power, he would subdue the war on the cartels, the war on drugs, and not fight it anywhere near as aggressively as his predecessor. It is suspected that that support continued through the second campaign that he ran in 2018. Senior advisors of the Obrado campaigns have been implicated in all of this. It's coming out now, today, yesterday. It's well documented, and this is something that's been known for quite a while by DEA officials in the U.S. government and certain media people and others in the media officials and others in Mexico itself. It shouldn't surprise anybody, but we've got now official confirmation that the Mexican regime is thoroughly corrupted and that the cartels basically run the place and have protection, if you will, bought protection from the government of Mexico. Now, look, this is the same issue as immigration. Drugs, you will not end drug cartels through police action. The only way, ultimately, to end the drug trade and drug cartels as a consequence are legalized drugs, and maybe Mexico should do that and force America's hand to take a stand. But the only way to really eliminate the violence from America, the number one consumer of these drugs, to legalize that unless the profit motive eliminate the high profit, which induces higher levels of risk taking, including violence that these cartels engage in. But yes, the Mexican government, it appears, is on the dole and is being paid by the cartels. I am not, unlike Vivek, I do not believe we should go to war with Mexico to crush these cartels. What we should do is just legalize drugs. That would get rid of the cartels, that would get rid of the gangs in the US, that would use violence across the entire Western Hemisphere, including in the United States, dramatically and save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. All right, we've got one more topic, but let me just thank Silvanos, thank you, MJ Davis, thank you, Steven Hopper, Ryan Ward, Mary Alene, and John Parker. All right, those are stickers people who support the show using a sticker. The final topic is a positive topic. I'm trying to do as many of these as possible. This is a great story. So the human genome was sequenced, I think for the first time in 2003. And it sequenced 90% of the human genome, of the human DNA. The cost of doing that, the cost of doing that, back then in 2003, when it was first, when they first sequenced the human DNA was well over a million dollars for a sequence, right? It was well over a million dollars. It was just announced that a new machine that can sequence the entire human DNA, all 20,000 human genomes. No, sorry, not 20,000. It can sequence the entire DNA for $100, for $100. So you can go in for $100. That is the cost. I'm not sure they probably have profit margins on that. So they might take a little bit on top of that. But basically for $100, you should be able to get a complete genetic sequence of your DNA down from well over a million dollars, not that long ago, 20 years ago. I mean, the price is just plummeted. The technology is just amazing and stunning. And of course, this is part of this general revolution in biotech that this is going to make possible. If you take this and you add AI and you add the ability to create proteins and the ability to screen drugs and the screen proteins to look at massive quantity of evidence about the effects of different drugs, and you can now, AI can help you now using big data to look at the covalent between DNA and between certain diseases and between drugs and between everything else. I expect this to lead to what we should already have, but I think it's coming, particularly if the feds and the regulators can keep their hands off of it, which is a real personalized medicine. I already get genome sequence once a year. Every year, they are new. They can do more with it. They find more correlations. They can already tell me what diseases I'm susceptible to, what cancers I'm more likely to get, more cancers I'm less likely to get. Am I likely to have Alzheimer's, not likely to have Alzheimer's? Anything that is related to a genetic disease, they can now tell you and you can prepare. There's a lot they don't know. There's a lot they haven't figured out yet, but they are going to, every year they know more. Every year when I do this, more stuff is discovered, more knowledge is found, and this ability to do it so cheaply means we can all do it. And of course, the more we all do it, the more we all sequence our DNA, the more data they will have to cross-reference and to be able to now see the relationships between different diseases, different drugs, different human behavior, different foods, different whatever, level of exercise, all of that, your genetic code, the relationship between all that and be able to customize hopefully in the not too distant future. A regime for you specifically targeting your particular DNA. And again, that's going to be something that evolves over time. It's not going to be one day when we have it, but getting this sequencing this cheap is a big step in that direction. If you're young, if you're under 30, I think you should be disappointed if you don't live to be 150. In good health, I think the technology is there. The only thing that could stop you from being 150 is government. But in the marketplace, given what the scientists are doing, given what the entrepreneurs are doing, there's nothing to stop that. It could happen, and it could happen fairly quickly. So super exciting, super exciting. Greg Venetier was the guy who sequenced the human genome for the first time. All right, quick reminder, this show exists, continues, thrives, because of support from listeners like you. You make it possible for me to do these two shows a day. Both those of you who do the super chat and those of you who contribute on a monthly basis, on Patreon, on SubscribeStar, on www.uranbrookshow.com.com membership, which is PayPal. All of you make it possible. So thank you, really, really appreciate it. I also want to remind you that if you want to apply for scholarship for the INRAND conferences in Austin or in Amsterdam, now is the time to apply. Quickly, do it now. I mean, they're going to be fabulous, they're going to be fun. The Institute is giving our money for you to attend. Hotel flights, everything for a limited number of people who are serious about the study of objectivism, who know objectivism pretty well. So this is not an introductory conference. Please sign up and apply for scholarship. You can do so at INRAND.org slash start here. INRAND.org slash start here. All right, RIMO. RIMO is a big reason why we've passed our goal for today. RIMO did 119 euros or 130 euros, 119 dollars. He said, I have just sent you an email with a question because I need some more words to explain myself. You can answer in a future show or whenever you like. Let me see if I got it already. And we can try and answer it now if my email will open. There it is. And let's see if you can find the question. Let me start with Michael in the meantime while I wait for that one for RIMO's question. Michael says, despite all the statism and lack of entrepreneurial spirit in Europe, haven't Europeans still gotten a lot of wealth over the last 30 years? They've gotten wealthier. No question. A lot less wealthy than Americans. The gap has really increased dramatically between America and Europe over the last 30 years in particular. But yeah, so I'm looking for that email RIMO. I don't see it. I don't see it. So yes, the economies have gone, but way below the potential, way below what they could, and overall, it's a relatively stagnant economy over the long run, over the long run. All right, RIMO, I will keep checking. And if I don't answer it today, I'll answer maybe tonight on a future show. Thank you, RIMO. Thank you, Michael. Liam, what supplement do you take feel like you've made a significant difference in your life? I mean, it's hard to tell. I don't know that any supplement has made a significant difference in my life. You know, it's very hard to do A-B testing on stuff like this. I do take vitamin D. I was vitamin when I tested. Somebody encouraged me to test. And I do take vitamin D, and I think everybody, most people, are probably vitamin D deficient. So I definitely think vitamin D is a good one. Again, I'm not a doctor. I'm not giving you advice or anything like that. Somebody says there's volatil. I don't take there's volatil. Primarily because the science behind it is questionable, and pediatrics doesn't believe in there's volatil. I noticed that, yeah, so that's the main reason I don't take it. I take a bunch of others. I take some stuff for supplements that's supposed to help with prostate. I take some, but I don't know if they do. I take some immunity. Oh, you know what I'm doing now? New. This is new, which is kind of like a multivitamin. But what I take every morning is I drink a glass of what's called athletic greens, AG1. It's called athletic green one, which is this green powder that you put in water and shake and drink it. And it has a lot of the vitamins. So it acts like a multivitamin, but it also has a whole lot of kind of, I don't know, vegetable stuff in it. So a lot of stuff that a lot of supplements have. I take a few other things, but again, I don't know that any of them have made a significant difference in my life. I don't can't see the difference if they have. Maybe they have, but I haven't run kind of the test on myself. Maybe I'm not alert enough to my own body to be able to tell differences in it. When you exercise, you're either stronger or you're not stronger. You add what you think of muscles. It looks like muscles. So you have a direct thing, but in terms of the supplement, it's very hard. I mean, when a female is zinc, magnesium, I take D3 and K2. I take those together, but zinc and magnesium and selenium and all these other stuff. All of those, the nice thing is all of that is an athletic greens. Athletic greens has more than enough of all of those. I also take one other immune pill by Elysium. I take some of the Elysium product and I take a lot of immune stuff because I travel a lot and I want to avoid getting a cold and getting stuff like that. Has it helped? I don't know. I have a sense that when I started taking vitamin D, I got sick less often of all the things that I've taken. But if you look at the literature, vitamin D doesn't help your immune system that much. So it's all still, that whole science is still in its infancy. Dave says, what did you think about the elevator scene in the department? A brilliant twist over the top. I did not think it was over the top. I didn't think it was a brilliant twist. I thought it was a good twist. I thought it was suspenseful, surprising. And then he explains it and it's like, oh, okay, yeah. So the explanation I kind of buy. One of the things they always do in these kind of thrillers where a lot of people die is they didn't explain what happens when all these people die. I mean, the police come, they investigate, they capture anybody. It's like the police don't really exist at that level. Here the police and the mafia are going out and killing each other. And there doesn't seem to be any concern in the broader police. But that's true in all thrillers. So I like the elevator scene because it added just a punch to it, which was good. Typical Scorsese, I'd say. That doodle bunny, if you had six months left to live, what would you do? How would you spend your money? Oh, God. Yeah, I don't know. I'd probably go travel. I'd probably go spend some time with friends and family, my son and friends. But I wouldn't do that much different. Life's pretty sweet. So I spend my time with my wife and spend time with people that a lot of times you're saying, okay, I'll see that person in a year. I'll see them sometime. And just accelerate the scene, the people. It's not like the things in my life that I don't have that big of a bucket list. Most of the stuff that I wanted to do, most of the stuff that I'm intrigued about doing, even the crazy stuff I've done. And sometimes I regret it. Sometimes I don't. But I've done it all. And there's not, I don't have a lot of regrets in the sense that if only I'd done that, if only I'd been there. I mean, there's still some places I'd like to visit, but none of them is like bucket list desperate. So you wouldn't live that differently than I live now. Dave, do you prefer Matt Damon to Mark Wahlberg as an actor? I think Matt Damon. I think mainly because he's been in better movies. I don't know that I have a sense which one's a better actor overall. Michael says, should the Mossad bomb the New October 7th restaurant they opened up in Jordan? Certainly somebody should vandalize it. No question about that. But you got to be careful because if you bomb it and people die, you're going to piss off the Jordanians. And there's not clear what benefit that is. But yeah, Israel should do something about that. It's such a slap in Israel's face. Something should be done about it. Christian Klein, what do you think about European defense? Poland promised a real great army, but other countries failed to fulfill NATO requirements. We hide behind the US, but how to rebuild without conscription? I don't think you need conscription. What you need is a budget, particularly in a technologically advanced economies, which I think most Europe is, you can get a lot done through technology and investment and smart money for defensive systems, primarily defensive systems. I think Europe has to spend more money. It needs to spend more money. The Germans have promised, but they probably don't have the money to do it. Poland is certainly ramping up its spending. It realizes the Russian threat is right there, and they have no choice. I think the rest of Europe, they should have some way in order to mandate it. If you're going to be a member of NATO, you have to pay up. And if you're not going to be a member of NATO, fine, goodbye. But if you're going to be a member of NATO, you have to pony up. And it might be that you pony up money. They might be that you pony up troops. And then I think without conscription, they just need more robust volunteer armies. And that requires paying better and better marketing and trying to get more young people to sign up to participate in the military. But yes, Europe should beef it up under the assumption that the United States will not always be there to defend them. They might be a multi-front war in which the United States can cope with two fronts. Imagine Russia invading NATO and China invading Taiwan, and the US has to do both. Europe better start as the world deteriorates into greater and greater authoritarianism. Of course, who in Europe is moving to kind of a populist right? It's not clear to me that Europe wants to defend itself. Maybe Europe wants to become a satellite of Putin. A lot of these right wingers, I think, would like that. Although, you know, some claim to be nationalists. Or maybe not. Oh, what happened here? All right. James asked, is Christianity the reason Americans are so superficial and phony? Or is it just because we are a young and immature nation with no culture? I think it's a combination. There's certainly Christianity has a lot to do with it. I also think that it is true that the country is young. It's been focused on growing and building and creating stuff. It hasn't built a proper culture. It hasn't built except at the at the university level, proper educational institutions. And at the university level, the people who benefit most from those institutions are foreigners, you know, to the extent the way of great STEM schools. Most of the students in the STEM schools are foreigners, not Americans. So I think it's a combination of Christianity and newness and a certain American attitude, which I don't think is healthy, but a certain American attitude that says what matters is doing, not thinking, what matters is doing, not education, not not figuring stuff out, not and a focus on that, which is unfortunately crippled a lot of Americans because they're ignorant and they stay so and they're proud of it even. Philosophicals, zombie hunter, US versus EU, cowboy capitalism versus guilt capitalism. There's no cowboy capitalism in America, you know, so and there's no guilt. There's no such thing as guilt capitalism. So but there's certainly no any resembling this. Europe has a mixed economy. America has a mixed economy. There's not a big difference. As I said, generally, the US regulates more, redistributes less and less efficiently. Europe regulates less and redistributes more and redistributes more efficiently. And I think those are the main differences, but the more hardcore differences is a cultural difference, which has to do with the attitude towards risk the attitude towards a failure, the attitude towards entrepreneurs. Europe has shifted away from any kind of respect they had for entrepreneurs, maybe 100 years ago, maybe in the 19th century. America still has remnants of that. And that is what keeps America going. All right. Who do we have? I am Mirkat. Why is this? All right, there we go. I'm Mirkat. I'd reduce AGI agriculture tariffs to zero on like 1-1-20-30. So Africans have time to prepare and don't experience famine due to an abrupt spike in prices. PS Gaza should be flattened. I mean, yeah, I think 20-30 is way too far in the future. I think you could do it 1-1-20-26. Or maybe you can phase them out and every year drop them by 10% so that they're phased out to zero by 20-30 or 20-28 or 20-27. I'd rather do faster. It's not just Africa has to adjust, but also Europe has to adjust. That is the people in farming need to start looking for jobs, need to start realizing that their future is not informing. And they better get on board in the 21st century economy and find something else to do. And capital needs to flow to their comparative advantage that Europe has. Paul, do you see any relationship between the destruction of the European left and the Israeli left? Yes, I mean, I think in both cases, the economic policies of the left failed. And in both cases, they were confronted by, oh, I mean, here's the big difference. Let me start with the difference. The big difference is once the Berlin Wall came down, Germany in particular, but Europe more broadly, suddenly had a huge influx of people who did not want to be left, right? Particularly young people who had experienced communism, knew that was wrong. They didn't want to have anything to do with socialism. They want capitalists, but they knew socialism was out. So they had that impact. And that Israel did not have. So Europe has a big population, particularly coming from the south, from the east, that does not want socialism. They don't want capitalism, but they don't want socialism. So that's part of it. And indeed, the AFD and most of these populist parties in Germany are primarily in the east. That's a stronghold. But I think the confrontation with Islamic terrorism for Israel, certainly the second Intifada basically blew away all remnants of leftists in Israel. That was in the early 2000s. And I think the ISIS, al-Qaeda ISIS terrorism of the 2000s and 20 teens in Europe, the mass immigration of Europe in 2015 into Europe in 2015 of Muslims, I think those shook up Europeans, of course, Israelis, dramatically and kind of eradicated a lot of the left. So there are parallels there. Adam says, I think the 401k, IRA, HSA investment will greatly increase the difference in wealth between the USA and EU in the coming decades. I don't know why. I don't know how that you mean the US will get poorer or that Europe will get richer. I don't see it because at the end of the day, what matters is production. What matters is productivity. And I think the United States will continue to have slow economic growth. But I think it's likely that the Europe will. I don't think it's because of 401k, IRA, and HSA. I think it's more HSA in particular, it's very small. I think it's primarily because because capital will flow outside of the country if it can't find investment opportunities. I just think that as long as the United States sustains Silicon Valley and a mentality of Silicon Valley, it will grow and become wealthier. And I don't see any significant cultural changes happening in Europe, which will get rid of the anti-risk taking, anti-failure mentality that Europeans have. And so I agree, Europe gets richer, but maybe not because of the capital, but because of people's behavior and attitude. All right, everybody. I will see you tonight at 7 p.m. East Coast time. Topic to be determined for another news roundup. I'll see you all tomorrow. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did like the show before you leave, please like, like, like. It does cost you anything. It's very easy to do. And yeah, I'll see you tonight or tomorrow.