 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 Thursday, well, it's late afternoon here. Morning, I know for some of you, maybe even later for others of you. But thanks for joining me. We're going to jump right into the news. I did put a poll up. I just figured get a measure of my audience and whether I'm having any impact on them. So the poll, they should the U.S. strike Iran or just its proxies or nobody at all. So it's up there. You can participate. Feel free to do it. Let's see. What else? What else? Oh, somebody's noticed. Somebody's noticed I have many copies of OPA. I do. Yeah, I should probably give some of those out. I don't need more copies. And yeah, let's get rolling. War updates. We've got a number of war updates from three different wars, I guess. All right. So first, we'll start with the U.S. drone attack on in Baghdad. Yesterday, I think killed killed the commander of the Iranian based militia that was responsible for the deadly attack against the American troops. What is it now? Week and a half almost two weeks ago in Jordan, the commander of the he's a commander in the Iraqi militia group. Do you know what he's going to means? I don't know if you guys know what he's going to means. It means the party of God. She can have multiple his ballers. They can be multiple parties of God. This one happens to be in Iraq. The famous his baller the infamous infamous his baller is in is in Lebanon. But there are all these parties of God are basically proxies of Iran. They're basically pawns of the Iranian regime, which is the ultimate party of God. The ultimate his baller. Let's see. Three people killed. It was in the middle of Baghdad. The Iraqi government is unhappy. It's accusing the U.S. of violating the country's sovereignty. You'd expect that. The Biden administration is thumping on their chest. You know, and talking about similarities between this and Trump's assassination of Soleimani. Anyway, yeah, Biden is pretty Biden administration took their time, but has been pretty aggressive against the proxies, the Iranian proxies, particularly in Iraq, some in Syria. They bombed a lot of them. They've caused a lot of casualties. They're going after their leaders. They're acting aggressively as aggressively as any American president would probably act. I don't think they're any weaker or any more aggressive than a Bush or Trump for that matter. They are, of course, not aggressive enough. They're far from doing what is necessary and what is necessary, of course, is to take on the real nemesis, the real problem. And that is Iran, take on the Iranian regime. Whether that, I don't think that includes invasion, but that could certainly mean crippling this regime, destroying its capacity to fund itself, to fund its proxies, to fund its wars, and making it very clear to them that they better stand down otherwise the regime itself would fall. I think you can do almost all of that from the air and a lot of it with maybe special forces, but primarily from the air. Part of that would have to be taking out whatever nuclear capability they have, just bombing it into oblivion once and for all, let them start from scratch. And that is all feasible, all doable, pretty cheap, and would have dramatic, instant impact and dramatically, for the better, thugs, boots, bullies. What they really can't stand is when somebody stands up to them and they tend to retreat when somebody does stand up to them, and I think that would definitely happen. With Iran, they would make noise and they would unleash Hezbollah in Lebanon or something like that, but at the end of the day, they would stand down. So that's what's going on. The United States might continue to attack different targets of Khatib Hezbollah in Iraq and in Syria, but it's not clear how aggressive they're going to get. It partially depends on whether the Iranian proxies continue to attack the United States or continue to launch attack on American troops in the region, but I don't expect Biden to do much more than has already been done. And what has been done is pretty meager. It'll help quiet things down, maybe in the short run, the American bases in Syria in Lebanon, in Syria, Iraq and in Jordan might be a little bit more quiet in the short run. But other than that, I don't think it has any long term, makes no difference long term, what so far the Biden administration has done. All right, that is U.S. in Iraq. Second, in Israel Gaza, the Hamas has basically rejected Israel's proposal for ceasefire, which included 35 days of ceasefire, the release of many of the hostages. We know exactly how many, but many of the hostages and the release of thousands, hundreds if not thousands of terrorists from Israeli jails. The Hamas has rejected that. They're suggesting 135 day ceasefire, the release of many thousands of prisoners. And ultimately, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza completely. Israel has rejected that plan so far. There is nothing in place. There is no ceasefire. There does not seem to be much progress towards a ceasefire. There are still 136 hostages being held in Gaza. Now, of the 136, Israeli intelligence is pretty confident the 32 of them are already dead, and that another 18 are very likely to already be dead. So of the 136 hostages, probably 50, something north of 50 have already been killed or have died under captivity. And the Israeli intelligence has indications of, I think, which hostages are likely to be dead and has notified families. This is not unexpected. And as I said right at the beginning, I mean, it's tragic and horrible and sad, but it's not unexpected. And as I said at the beginning of this, Israel had to act as if this was the reality. It was the only way it would do what is necessary in order to bring Hamas, you know, to destroy Hamas, to do what the Israeli politicians have promised to do. So we will see how, you know, what the next acts are. Israeli defense minister has basically said that they will continue to clean up Hanyunas with the remnants of terrorists, but they intend to move into Rafa. Rafa is the last large Hamas stronghold. It is a large population center. Now, with all the displaced people, probably about a million people live in Rafa. It's tiny. It's very small, very dense. I'm not sure where the Israelis are going to ask the civilians to evacuate to. There's not much space left in Gaza. But there's no question that they can completely destroy Hamas without going into Rafa. Of course, what will happen is as they evacuate civilians, Hamas will evacuate with them. Hamas leadership will evacuate with them. So we will see how long this takes. Israeli commanders are still talking in terms of months. Netanyahu gave a great speech today. I don't know if you saw it. Maybe it was yesterday, 18 hours ago. So maybe it was a late night here. But today is real time. He gave a great speech and committed to wiping out Hamas, committed to all the right things, committed to reeducating, you know, Palestinian children in the future. In the post Hamas Gaza Strip, committed to Israel managing the security of Gaza Strip forever, or at least for a long, long time, all of it, good stuff, good stuff. Now, he just for once in his frigging life, he just needs to live up to his great speeches. It was a good, powerful, strong speech. Can he live up to it? Don't count on it. Don't count on it. You know, maybe, maybe after all, they've probably done better than I would have expected so far. So although those ceasefires in the middle, released 100 Dastis just so that's good, but probably prolonged this more than necessary. All right. Let's see. What else do we want to do? Yes. So that is Gaza. Israel has not taken many casualties in the last week or so. Really, almost none, which is surprising and interesting. It suggests maybe that they have been quite successful in immobilizing or neutering the Hamas fighters in Gaza. So they need to continue. They need to be more aggressive. Israeli troops are in the underground tunnels. They are hunting down Hamas leaders unsuccessfully so far. They're looking for the hostages unsuccessfully so far. But they are inside the tunnels. There is tunnel warfare going on in addition to everything else. But they are talking about expanding operation to take over basically to put under Israeli authority the entire Gaza Strip, which needs to happen if they're going to win this. All right. Moving on. I mean, there's still back and forth in Lebanon, but nothing really is evolving there yet. I think Hezbollah in Lebanon is clearly wants to avoid a war, but it doesn't want to be completely quiet. The Houthis still attacking ships, whatever the U.S. is doing to the Houthis continues to be ineffective. I will point out a new story yesterday morning about the Houthi court of the Houthis in Yemen sentencing 13 homosexuals to death for the crime of being homosexuals. Quests for Houthis are going to be challenged, maybe challenged in the support of the Houthis moving forward. But maybe not, right? Maybe not. Don't let facts and reality and your own self-interest intervene when you can hate on Jews, when you can hate on Israel. And when you can, I don't know, when you can pursue sacrifice for the greater good. All right. Let's see. One last war. Yes, we got Ukraine. A big news out of Ukraine this morning is that Zelensky, President Zelensky, basically has replaced the commander in chief of the military, the commander in chief of the military who has been responsible for the military since the Russian invasion. And by all accounts, at least in the first year and a half, did a first year, did a phenomenal job of both preventing the Russians from winning in those first few weeks and then taking back significant territory from Russia in the fall of 2022. Unfortunately, as we all know, the counter-effects offensive in 2023 failed. It failed for many reasons, but I don't think the Ukrainian military took into account the full scope of the defensive preparations or the defensive alignment of the Russian military. And as a consequence, they got bogged down and not much happened. In the meantime, Russian offensive is going on across the entire front. Ukraine is primarily in defensive mode, not a good situation for them to be in. And the Russians are making small, fairly insignificant, but small progress in certain regions, particularly in the east and the Donbass. One of the advantages it seems like the Russians now have over the Ukrainians is Ukrainians early on in the war, that a phenomenal job using drones to attack the Russians and disable Russian defensives and reach deep into behind Russian lines. They also use American-guided Hymars and other systems that use GPS in order to reach their target and destroy their target. Ukraine made a lot of progress using those weapons and did phenomenally well. The Russians have developed electronic warfare techniques and we'll get back to electronic warfare at the end of the segment to talk about China. And electronic warfare that basically disrupts the ability of these missiles and these drones to use GPS coordinates, to use GPS satellites, and that has proven incredibly successful. So what the Russians have done, developed since the beginning of the war, but mainly in the last six months, I'd say seven months, is this capacity to completely disrupt the advanced weapons systems that the Ukrainians are getting from the U.S., which I hope the U.S. is paying attention and will adjust, basically by disrupting their GPS capabilities. Ukraine, as a consequence, is developing their own drones. They're building factories and they're trying to build large numbers of drones that are immune from, that don't use GPS and therefore immune for some of these electronic interferences that the Russians are engaged in. Russia has its own drones, those drones the Ukrainians having a hard time dealing with. Anyway, so all of that is background why the war is kind of hunkered down and why Ukraine is under defensive and why, if anything, Russia is pushing forward. Of course, Ukraine is also being denied from the West weapons systems. It's being denied from the West the ability to fight with the best weapons systems. The United States is holding back. We know that, we'll talk about that in a minute, that the United States is holding a military aid back from Ukraine and the European Union is delayed because of Orban. Now they've got to approve, but that has been delayed. And of course, if you go back two years, the Biden administration has been delaying and delaying and delaying. We won't give them tanks. Then we give them tanks. We won't give them F-16s. Then we give them F-16s. F-16s still haven't arrived yet or the training hasn't finished yet, but they will enter the region soon. What else do I want to say about Ukraine? Yes, the general replacing the fire general, the new general that is stepping in his place is a Russian born in Russia. His family is originally from Ukraine, but of Russian speaking family. So it is interesting, right? Putin in much of his propaganda argues that this whole war is about liberating the ethnic Russians in Ukraine who don't want to be under Ukraine and bringing them under Mother Russia. Well, here is a Russian Ukrainian, ethnic Russian in Ukraine, educated in Russia, speaks fluent Russian. Born in Russia is now the supreme commander of Ukrainian forces fighting Russia. Yeah. So there you go. So much Putin's rationalizations, which you will hear many, much more of tonight when Tchaikovsky breaks the internet with his interview of Vladimir Putin. Instead of watching that, you should all be right here on the Iran book show where I will be interviewing somebody a hundred times more interesting. Well, no, that's an insult. A million times more interesting than Vladimir Putin and that's Jason Reigns will be talking about the rise and fall of civilizations. He is a Greek philosophy expert, but he's also taught a class on Emmanuel Kant. He is generally an expert in intellectual history, in philosophy. He knows, he's an expert on a lot of different things. We'll be talking about that. I'm sure some of his other expertise will come out. But Jason is a lot of fun and really is a great guy. So hopefully you'll tune in 7 p.m. East Coast time to my interview with him tonight on the rise and fall of civilizations, which has been a topic of our discussions here on the Iran book show for many, many months where we discuss Christianity and the Enlightenment. And we'll discuss a lot of that tonight starting with Greece, starting with Greece. Jason will be on at 7 p.m. East Coast time, 7 p.m. East Coast time. We will talk about Putin's interview with Tucker Carlson. We'll talk about that tomorrow. I will watch it. I'll hold my nose, close my eyes, have a bag to throw up in next to me. But I will watch the Putin interview so you don't have to. And whether I will use clips on that interview and comment or just comment broadly on the interview, we will see depending on how colorful the interview lands up being. All right, I should really switch topics because we're already 22 minutes in and that was supposed to only be like 10. All right, quickly on the immigration bill. So the immigration bill is dead basically in the Senate. And we know it was dead in the house. The organizers, the writers of the bill, you know, dismayed by it, you know, cinema and, and I forget the name of the senator from Oklahoma who were behind us, the Republican. And so anyway, immigration bill is dead. Republicans are trying in its stead, Democrats and Republicans are trying to create a bill that just provides aid for Ukraine and Israel. If you remember, the Republicans insisted that if you're going to provide aid to Ukraine, there has to be an immigration bill. And it has to be one that hardens the border. It has to be one that makes it more difficult to, you know, to come into the United States illegally. Such a bill was actually negotiated, a bill that should have satisfied Republicans. But because Trump is against it, and because the last thing Republicans want right now is to solve any immigration issue, the last thing Republicans want right now is to mitigate the border crisis, because that is their number one election issue. They have turned against the immigration bill and therefore won't won't even vote for a bill that is tough on immigration and illegal immigration, but allows aid for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. So that's gone. So now we're back to where we were a few months ago, which we could have saved a lot of trouble, and just voted on a bill that provides assistance to Ukraine and Israel in the wars that they're engaged in. And do immigration separately, which is kind of how legislation should work, rather than using one bill in order to blackmail everybody around another bill. But it's not how our politicians work, and certainly not how Republicans work. Republicans insist that, you know, these Democrats do the same thing, that you group these. In this case, Republicans are the villains. They insist on lumping it together. They're the ones who walked away from a deal. They're the ones who are now going to have to support Ukraine and Israel. Bill, if they have enough votes for it, not clear, they'll even bring it to the floor in the House. It will win in the House. But will Johnson, who is opposed to any aid to Ukraine, really actually bring it to the House floor? I do not know. I think it passes the Senate, and I don't know what happens to the House. It's going to be a fight, and I'm not sure how that fight gets resolved. It basically, I think, boiled down to does Donald Trump want to take a stake in this? Does he want it to have a position in this? And if so, where does he come down in it? Because Republicans will basically cave to anything Trump suggests. They are the party of Donald Trump. They're not Republicans anymore. They should call themselves Trumpists rather than Republicans. Yeah. What else did I want to say? Oh, talking about Trump, I've got to mention quickly some quote, hood arguments about the whole idea of removing him from the ballot based on the 14th Amendment. It's pretty clear that the justices were not buying into it. As I said, I did not expect them to rule for anything as disruptive as that. I don't expect it to pass. I think that it's pretty clear that Trump will be on the ballot, or it will be on, he won't be on the ballot, not because of the Constitution. If he's off the ballot, it's because of something else. I assume that we'll learn this pretty quickly because of the uncertainty relating to an election that's coming up and primaries and stuff like that. So I'm assuming they will learn it pretty quickly and they'll overturn Colorado. But I guess we'll see. We'll see how they function. But it does look like they were skeptical of the arguments. It was happening just as I started the show, so I don't have a full analysis of it, maybe tomorrow morning. Mexico trade. I'll just note this. Again, not a lot of time to discuss. But the United States bought more goods from Mexico than the United States. That's bad. I'm eating a title from a newspaper, which is wrong. Americans, American residents of America, individuals in the United States of America, bought more stuff sold by individuals and companies in Mexico than they did from individuals and companies in China. And this is for the first time, this is in 2023, for the first time in 20 years. So the number one trading partner of Americans is now Mexico. Now this will be really interesting when it comes to Trump presidency. Are we losing to Mexico? If we're losing to Mexico, how come we're losing when Trump was the one who negotiated the super best, unbelievable best, greatest deal in all of history when he re-did NAFTA. Remember that? But then we're losing to Mexico, how can that be? And if we're not losing to Mexico, how can that be? Because we do have a big trade deficit with Mexico. I thought trade deficits were losing. And then what about the re-showing of jobs? What about all those manufacturing jobs that were supposed to come in the United States? It appears that Trump's policies actually destroyed a lot of manufacturing jobs. And then they just moved out of China maybe to Mexico. But most of that is a combination of Trump and Biden. But they certainly didn't increase the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States. What's really increased manufacturing jobs in the United States, sadly and pathetically, is Biden's bills to subsidize manufacturing. Here's the CHIP Act and other acts similar to that. By the way, those of you here, there is a poll. You can vote on the poll. So you can go in the chat and vote on the poll. So vote. I'm just curious how big of a margin the Iran group will gain. I still see there are a number of people here who need to be educated in proper foreign policy. I'll keep working on that. By the way, between bombing proxies and doing nothing, I would do nothing and bring the troops home. Bombing proxies is probably the worst of all these alternatives. Shut down the bases, bring the troops home, do nothing is the second best to bomb Iran. So that's how I see it. All right. Another two quick stories. I think, okay, European GMO. This one's kind of interesting. So Europe in Europe, GMO is banned. You basically can't sell GMO products in Europe. You can't patent GMO in Europe. So there's really no GMO. There's no genetically modified organisms in Europe. In a sense, this makes agriculture in Europe a little bit more expensive than in some parts of the world. And it also limits the kind of agriculture and the supply and the importation you can bring into Europe because you're not allowed to bring into Europe. GMO basically in Europe, everything is non-GMO, which is primitive and barbaric and anti-science and all the rest of it, which makes, of course, everything more expensive in Europe and in some cases of less equality. Anyway, to Europe's credit now, they have carved out an exception. It turns out that there's another form of GMO called, which is basically a gene editing GMO. This is where you use CRISPR to go into the DNA of the plant itself and change the DNA of the plant. So regular GMO uses a gene sequences from outside that don't belong to the plant. They're injected in and that changes the DNA and that changes the characteristic of the plant. CRISPR takes the DNA of the plant itself, tweaks it, that is, cuts out stuff that they don't like and maybe changes the sequence of the DNA. But it's only the DNA, only the genes in the DNA of the plant itself that it's manipulating. That is called, it's called the new genomic technology. It's called gene editing and so on. Anyway, the European Union has passed a law that says that genome editing, this technique of using the genetics themselves, is okay. They're good with that. GMO is still bad because that introduces foreign, foreign's the wrong word, but anyway, foreign genes into the plant. This only manipulates the genes in the plant. Therefore, the second one must be safer than the first one. No scientific basis for that, no scientific evidence for that. But the European Union is going with that. In the past, the European Court of Justice ruled that gene editing and GMO are the same or banned. Now the European Union is doing a carve out and now maybe a little bit of respect for science and a little bit of respect for innovation in food will have reached Europe. So you Europeans out there, this is reason for celebration. Good for you. All right. Let's see. Finally, this relates to war really. Finally, where did that happen? Yeah, scientists of China in China have used something called a Stirling engine. A Stirling engine. I don't understand a Stirling engine. I don't know what that is, but anyway, Stirling engine. They use the Stirling engine to boost the strength of high powered microwave weapon. So the Chinese now have a weapon that can basically target a segment of the sky and can knock out pretty much anything that enters that segment of the sky. So we're talking about anything electronic. We're talking about jambling the planes electronics. We're talking about drones being useless. We're talking about smart missiles, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, losing the capacity to communicate with the motherboard or using GPS or anything like that, even with the capacity of taking out satellites. That's how far this can reach. This is by far potentially the most powerful microwave weapon in the world today. The United States has been working on microwave weapons but has not made any kind of real big significant breakthroughs. They've been working on it for a long time and a lot of these projects are like in limbo, don't have enough funding, have not moved forward significantly. But China, I mean, this is a game changer if it actually works as advertised. And if it can be deployed, actually deployed into a site, this is a game changer in terms of weaponry. I mean, now you have to have something that nullifies the microwave. I'm not sure if that's if you can do that. I'm not sure if I don't know the physics of it. Maybe you'd have to have low flying weapons where this cannot be used. It has to change strategy. It has to change the kind of weapons you develop. It has to change your approach in the battlefield. It has to change the way you think about combat and in a technologically advanced war. And the Chinese, significantly ahead of the Americans. And there's a reason for this. The American system of weapon procurement is broken. It's horribly broken. And it is so heavily regulated. It is so heavily controlled primarily with the goal of preventing fraud. But the consequence of this is that it's not nimble. It cannot experiment. It cannot test. It is super, super, super unbelievably expensive, much more expensive than any other army in the world. And as a consequence, while we have the capabilities to build the best weapons systems in the world by far, we are not doing it. And we're not doing it because of the bureaucracy we have created around weapons procurement. Israel is much faster than us. And Russia has just shown an ability on the battlefield to adjust pretty quickly and to create these electronic weapons that are highly effective against American-built weapons. The Chinese are pouring a lot of resources and a lot of brain power into this. And the United States is just chugging along, chugging along. It's got the strongest, biggest, mightiest military force in human history that might be completely incapacitated by weapons like this. And I don't get a sense of urgency from anybody. I don't get a sense that Congress has the capacity, the capability, the willingness to step in and reform the system so that we can bring Silicon Valley-like entrepreneurial behavior, Silicon Valley-like innovation to the buildings of weapons. We have a little bit of that in companies like Plantier, and there's some in Silicon Valley that are eager to enter the space. And it's not an issue of military spending. We spend a gazillion dollars on military, much more than anybody else in the world by far. It's not a question of the quantity. It's a question of the quality. And it's a question of how do we do it in a way that emboldens competition? How do we do it in a way that encourages risk-taking and failure and testing and trying and doing different things? That is not right now in the culture of a military procurement system, and it better become. So we need to bring those habits, those characteristics of Silicon Valley to the military, to its design and deployment, development and deployment of weapons systems. And we need to do it quickly before we are shown to be a second-rate military power. All right, that is what I have. That is the news for February 8th. All right, I've got a bunch of announcements. Please stay with me, and then I'll go to Super Chat. And please consider doing what Mary Aline just did or what Niloufar, sorry, I have a penargi name, Rahman, have done, which is a sticker, $199 and $5. And we've had a bunch of other stickers. Chile did $20. Savannah did $20. Cook did $199. Maryland did $399. I mean, we could easily make our target with $199 stickers. So if a bunch of you just stepped in right now and did $199, $299, $399 stickers, we would get to our target very, very quickly. So I appreciate that. All right, a few announcements. One, I am going to be doing a public speaking seminar in Amsterdam after the INRAND conference. Now, you don't have to attend INRAND conference in order to come to my seminar. So if you're in Europe, particularly if you're in the Netherlands, it's not even a travel day for you. And interested, it is the day after the conference. So it is the Monday after the conference ends. And it will be in downtown Amsterdam. It will be in the middle of Amsterdam. And, you know, I've got a number of people already signed up. So I don't need many to make this happen. But there is a cap. The cap is 10. And I won't take more than 10. So please consider doing it. It's not cheap. I know it's $750. But if you care about your public speaking abilities, if you're interested in investing in those abilities, this, I think, is about as good as it gets. And you will get one-on-one with me. And you will get time to actually deliver maybe even, I'll try to structure it so you can deliver twice during the day. And, yeah, I think it's going to be fun. It's March 11th. So if you're in Sweden, if you're in Denmark, if you're in Germany, it's really close to Germany. If you're in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, UK, and you'd like to participate, please join us. It is March 11th. We'll probably go from 9 to 4, something like that, right to me as soon as possible. Because if I don't get enough people, I cancel it. If I get too many people, you'll be knocked out. So now's the time to do it. It's Iran at youronbrookshow.com. Iran at youronbrookshow.com. Would love to have you. Would love to be able to do this. And then I'm thinking of doing one in the United States for Americans, either right before or right after Ocon. So if you're an American and you're interested, this will be in California. If you're interested in participating in a public speaking seminar in California in June, just before, just after Ocon, drop me an e-mail. And I will put you on the mailing list to get information about it once I have it figured out. All right, let's see. What else do I need to do? Other announcements. Remember that INRAN conference in Amsterdam? You can still apply for a, well, no, that I think is done. The INRAN conference in Austin, you can still apply for a scholarship. Please do so, INRAN.org slash start here. Oh, big one. My essay with Don Watkins, I co-authored with Don Watkins on anarchy. Why I'm against it? Why anarchy is incompatible with freedom and liberty? In a sense of response to Brian Kaplan and the debate with Brian Kaplan, that is now on Brian Kaplan's website. It's on Brian Kaplan's website. Please go read it. If there are comments, please comment. Share it. Get a white circulation. I'm sure it's going to be just ripped to shreds by the libertarians, by the Anarchy. So please, I'd appreciate any support you guys could provide it. It's on the Brian Kaplan's website. Bet on it, I think it's called. And it's by me and Don Watkins. I've got the link on Twitter. Maybe I can find the link here for you, but I'll put it in a chat. But please consider going and reading it. Hopefully you like it. Hopefully you enjoy it. And then sharing it and commenting on it and doing everything else. You know, we do and we support something on social media. It really, really, really helps in that context. Please, if you're not a subscriber to the show, subscribe to the show now. Please subscribe. Those of you who are subscribers, when you watch some of those one minute shorts that might come through your short feed on YouTube and you like them. Please share them. Those are easy to share. Please share them. The number one source of subscribers right now to the Iran book show are those shorts. And those shorts, the wider the distribution, the bigger the show will get, the more growth we have. So please support those short videos with a share. All right, there it is. Miroslav did the work for me and he's put it up on the chat so you can get it. It's basically www bet on it's one word bet on it.ai. And it'll be the first article on the site because it just went up this morning and part two. That is only part one. Part two will come out tomorrow. Brian is already complaining about how long it is. It is long. We're trying to make kind of a definitive argument. We're trying to make, we're trying to just write something and not have to rewrite and comment and keep going back to it. I'm hoping that works. So it is a long article, but it's also good and deep and thorough and go, go read it. All right, any other, any other, any other things? No, I think that's it. I think that's it for now. All right. Let's see. Remo. Remo says, what are your favorite works from Rachmaninoff? Well, that's easy. Second and third piano concertos by far sit at the top. Rachmaninoff's piano trio also up there with the, that's with the piano concertos. And then I'd say, I don't know, Symphony number two, quite a few of the chamber music, piano pieces, all good. I mean, pretty much anything Rachmaninoff did was good. But my favorites by far are those three pieces, the two piano concertos, number two and number three, and the piano trio, the piano trio. Symphonic dances is amazing. What is it on Paganini something? I, you know, all the pieces don't come to me, but it's really good stuff. So, so listen, listen to Rachmaninoff, listen to those in particular. All right. Hopper Campbell says, people always talk about trauma, how to process and heal trauma. They never ask why are we hurting each other? What the philosophical roots are to this widespread abuse? I mean, I think people ask why we're hurting each other, why people engage in violence, why all of this is, is why all of this is going on. I think people have, I think people do ask the question. I don't think they look at the right place for the answer and the right place is philosophy, the right place is ideas. Some of them maybe recognize psychological issues, maybe they recognize some bad ideas, but then they don't have a positive alternative. And that's really what's missing is a debate about a real legitimate positive alternative to war, which is individualism. War will only disappear from the world when we reject collectivism. Michael says, you say it's difficult to resurrect the Enlightenment, but the Enlightenment was resurrected after a thousand dark ages. So I am still fairly optimistic. Yes. Ultimately, the Enlightenment will be resurrected. No question about it. It's a question of when it's so hard. It's not impossible. And it will happen. I'm certain of that. At some point, the question is when and how quickly will we see it in our lifetime? That's the question. And the evolution of how the Enlightenment was resurrected after a thousand years is interesting. And there are a lot of heroes involved in that. We'll talk about that today with Jason. So don't forget today, Jason Reigns at 7 p.m. East Coast time. Rise and fall of civilizations. We'll talk about how the Enlightenment happened, where it came from, and what can we learn from it? Oyvind. Hi, Johan. I'm thinking of learning myself calculus as an economist. What do you know of it? And has it helped you with fundamental understanding? Have a good day, Johan. I like calculus. Calculus was always fun, and it wasn't. I didn't find it that hard. I studied calculus in high school, and then I studied calculus at university. Advanced calculus was, I can't remember, multivariable. Whatever the advanced calculus is, oh, I studied and I found them interesting and fun. Have I found it very useful? Not really. You know, if I'd gone into mathematical economics, then sure, you'd have to have calculus to do mathematical economics. But I don't believe in mathematical economics. The little I've seen of it at that level is dubious. Some, I mean, okay, so John Cochran does a lot of calculus in his analysis, and he's good, and I think there's legitimacy there. So you have to, you know, you could, if you want to go, so I'm not saying it's illegitimate, but, you know, you have to go in that direction. I think calculus is valuable for your thinking. I think it presents some interesting ideas, theoretical ideas about the world, about, you know, phenomena and how they act. I think you'll gain understanding of certain things. Directly useful only if you do mathematical economics. What do you do? If you do what do you call it, mathematical finance, right? And finance, it's all over the place in, you know, an option pricing. It can be in, you know, in risk analysis. All over the place are you going to find calculus. So anytime you are going to do anything with mathematics, applied mathematics, applying mathematics to the world, calculus is, I mean, it's hard to understand Newton without calculus. Even though some of what he did, he developed without calculus. He developed calculus, of course, and liveness developed calculus to a large extent to understand the world. So it's very useful in that sense. It isn't hugely useful in most economics unless you're going for kind of a mathematical modeling and then you have to be very careful not to be rationalistic and to actually be doing something real, something of value. So much mathematical economics. It's not valuable. That microwave weapon would be powerless to prevent attacks from a real gun. The payload has no electronics. All right. I believe you. I don't know, I don't exactly what a rail gun is, but, but yeah, but I don't think the US military structured around rail guns. It's structured around smart bombs. And that's a problem. Andrew, God, Andrew asked these questions and like the end of the show and love you, Andrew. What is the link between skepticism and libertarianism? You know, there's no necessary link. Like certainly most skeptics are not libertarian. But most libertarians are, I think to some extent, skeptics. So they fear certainty. They associate certainty with central planning. They think that certainly certainty means somebody is going to guide the economy. Somebody will guide your life. Somebody knows everything. You don't know anything. They embrace skepticism as partially as a defense of free markets. Who knows? Who knows what will happen? Who knows what's true? Who knows what's false? Often it, it, it trips into, it becomes also a moral subjectivism, right? Skepticism turns into a moral subjectivism. Certainly that was the case with Rothbard and many other, I think libertarian philosophers. So skepticism is a big part of, I think libertarianism, even though libertarianism is a small part of skepticism. But certainly is something, certainty is something libertarians worry about, a skeptical about, right? Because of the implication they think. I don't think it has that implication at all. But the implication they think certainly has with regard to central planning and others running your life for you. Having certainty does not necessitate violating rights. I do know, Bonnie, do you prefer Starbucks or Pete's coffee? God, I don't know. I don't know. I can't remember Pete's coffee well enough. It's been a long time. James, as I analyze the world, I tend to agree with Plato that most people are unthinking idiots. But that doesn't mean they should be controlled. Even idiots are best left free. I think that's right. But this is the difference with Plato. I think they can be better. I agree that most of my idiots, I mean called an elitist as a consequence. But I think Plato kind of almost views that as their metaphysical state of being. That that is inevitable. I don't think so. I think that people can be a lot better than they are with the right philosophy, with the right culture, with the right cultural environment. They can be a lot better than what they are today. Charlie, the idea of intersectionality is often used to break up people into struggle groups, oppress oppressed. Yes. But if you keep breaking down until only the individual is left, can it be useful against itself, i.e. asking why stop at the group level? But the whole methodology of how oppressed are you, how miserable are you, even if it's broken down to individual leads you nowhere. And indeed, this is why I think intersectionality is a D2 in Lenin-Pikov's dim categorization. It is an ideology of disintegration. You're absolutely right. At the end of the day, it's this particular person. They're ugly, they're black, they're not bi. Well, they could be bi and have, I don't know, gender dysphoria or whatever. You can go on and on and on and on, characterizing all the things that this particular person has that in the hierarchy of things supposedly make them oppressed. And it breaks down. Who do you form alliances with? Who has alliance with whom? Nobody has alliances with anybody. And it just breaks up. And that's what happens to work. That's exactly what happens to it. Charlize, you're absolutely right. And this is why I think at the end of the day, it is not the threat. The threat is the ideology that steps in and says, this is destructive. This is suicidal. This is crazy. I've got the answers. And I've got the answers. And M2, which is a misintegration, an integrated view of the world, but integrated around the false premise that is by definition authoritarian. That is the real danger. All right. I'm curious who the 14% are that don't think we should be attacking Iran. And those who think we should attack in the proxies is if that's going to do anything one way or the other. That one I don't get. I get to do nothing, particularly if it involves bringing the troops home. I don't get the attack to proxies. That seems to me just a waste of bombs. Liam says, if Netanyahu gets voted in again, what does that say about the Israeli population? That it would say, similar to what it says, if Trump gets elected again, that they're sheep and they've got a personality worship problem. The problem is that in a coalition system like Israel, a majority of Israelis, an overwhelming majority of Israelis could vote against Netanyahu. And he could still somehow maintain power just because of the way the coalition, the way the political parties are arrayed. That's how it's happened in the past. He's never won complete control and his supporters declined over the years. And yet he still maintains power because his coalition, the coalition of those he's willing to deal with, is big enough for him. Clark, are people better at avoiding taxes than the IRS is extorting them? You don't probably, but not completely, right? You still pay a lot of taxes, even if many people are avoiding them. You still pay a lot. So no, I think that at the end of the day, the extortion has the upper hand by a big shot, by a long shot. Kathy says, me and my family have been considering moving to Puerto Rico, but I noticed the IRS is cracking down on expats trying to keep more of their own money. Yeah, I mean, if you move to Puerto Rico, you have to move legit. You have to follow the law. You have to do it on the up and up. You have to spend the right amount of days here. Your income has to be real income that's not taxable in Puerto Rico. So it has to be legit. And if it's completely legit, the IRS can't do anything to you. It's the law. What they're really trying to crack down on is people who are not spending the appropriate number of days here. Their income is not really the kind of income that does not get taxed. So it's people who are trying to cut corners. If you come to Puerto Rico, here's my advice. Don't cut corners. The deal they're offering you here in Puerto Rico is pretty amazing. Don't double up by cutting corners. Just do it straight out. Do it the way it's supposed to be done. And then I don't think you have to worry about the IRS. Vandy says, what is your routine for gathering and keeping up with the news and preparing for the show are some of your favorite sources? I mean, it's just reading a lot. It's getting up in the morning. I get a bunch of emails with news headlines, scanning them, figuring out what is interesting and then clicking on them, reading up on them, seeing does this look shady and then kind of trying to track down other news sources to either reinforce or contradict what I've read. I get everything from, there's a service by a guy named John Ellis who sends a bunch of news sources. He often has positive stories that I use like science stuff. There's the dispatch. There's Barry Weiss. Then there's Google News, which is just basically the news as the media is reporting it. And it has a lot of stuff on it. Once in a while, I'll peek into maybe Daily Wire or just to see what's hot. Not so much because I think they have any value to offer. But just in terms of what's hot, what are at least the right talking about and just scan some other news sites to see what's going on. I tend not to pick up on some of the fringe stories. So the stories that I know interest a lot of anti-woke people just because they don't tend to come up on my news feeds. I do get some MAGA news feeds, but most of the stuff on that is just BS. It's just not stories. And verifying it often is really, really difficult. So a lot of the crazy stuff I just skip because I don't get their sources. But I do get a lot of MAGA stuff, but I almost never use anything in them because it's usually just crazy, batched, crazy stuff. So I try to scan right-wing media, left-wing media, centrist media, and then try to pick up the stories that I think are important and then read widely about the stories to see what I think is true. Liam, why does Las Vegas get such a bad rap? It's a very entrepreneurial, exciting city with no stating context. I don't know why it gets a bad rap. I like Las Vegas. I think it gets a bad rap because it's full of neon and it's flashy, but you can be off-strip and you can do, you know, be entrepreneurial and business-oriented and do great things. It doesn't have a state income tax. I mean, I think one of the reasons I couldn't live in Las Vegas is it's too damn hard in the summer and it's actually too cold for me in the winter. It gets very cold in Vegas in the winter, so I don't like the weather. Other than that, you know, Vegas is an exciting place to visit, certainly. Michael says, Milet's economic reforms keep getting stalled by the Argentinian legislature in his first year is when he's supposed to have the most political capital. No bueno. It's difficult. I'll try to do a story on Milet tomorrow, but yes, the legislature, you know, basically rejected his latest reforms that he's proposed. They first approved it, then they rejected it. He's land-blasting them. There's a lot of back-and-forth. And we'll see what he manages to get through. It's not going to be easy. Not going to be easy. Still going Argentina. Still trying to meet him. Phil, hi, Iran. I have a deep and profound love of music, but can't seem to derive any value from viewing painting, sculpture, et cetera. Do you have any advice on how to develop an appreciation for visual arts? Yeah, I mean, I would take a straight class, just a class offered out there in visual arts. Just don't do modern art. Just don't do 20th century art or get to late 19th century and stop, and even the late 19th century is questionable what they will tell you. But I would definitely get a review, an art history kind of course on, I don't know, YouTube or... You can develop those skills and they're worth it. But it's good to have a context. A lot of this has to do with context. And then the other thing I would do is try not to... Don't give up on it. Try not to gain appreciation and not appreciation through pictures. Try to go to the actual art source. Try to go to museums and go to sculpture and actually look at it in three dimensions. Go to see actual paintings, real size. And when you go into a museum and have a lot of advice in terms of how to do museums, but one thing to know is don't feel like you have to see everything in the museum. Don't think you have to do the famous stuff in a museum. Go to a museum and scan the room and see if anything attracts you. If anything resonates you, do you get an emotional response from anything in it, right? And go to that painting and just focus on those paintings that resonate with you. And then build on that over time. A lot of people are recommending Luke Travers, touching the art or stories and paint. Yeah, I mean, I haven't read them, but Luke is very, very knowledgeable about art. He's very passionate about it and he does a lot of tours of museums. And he's definitely a good resource for developing your aesthetic toolkit. You've got to keep trying and you've got to try in different ways. I think Luke is probably really good, particularly in painting, I think. All right, apologies. Do you think you should employ more people to unburden your workload? Yeah, if I could afford it, I'd love to. I can't afford it. You guys do not provide me with enough income yet. We have to, I don't know, we really have to double the income of the show somehow. I'm thinking about different options. We're going to change the background. We're going to make it more lively and more exciting and more interesting. We are going to create a website. For those of you who are interested in doing the website, I found somebody that I think is going to do it. So I appreciate all of you who expressed interest, but I think I'm going to go with this person who's going to do this. But yeah, I mean, unless you're willing to work for me for free, I just don't have the resources. Everything I do for the show, all my speaking engagements, all of that, is the income off of which I live. And the reality is I spend a lot of money every year, so I need to bring in a lot of money. And that's, so I'm just working to make that happen. At some point, there'll be excess, happy to invest that excess in making the show smoother and employing people. Avitiki, something like that. You mentioned before needing help with a new website designed. Do you have any need? Oh, there it is. Do you have any need for website analysis? If so, I'd be happy to help you set it up. It might be. Once we set up the new website, we'll need website analysis, and that'd be great and SEO and all of that. So I will definitely let you know. If anybody is an expert on YouTube analytics and how to read them and how to understand them and how to derive from them, what is it? Actionable improvements. I'd be very interested in that. We've got a lot of stats on this show on YouTube with a history going back six years. There's a ton of data. Can we use that data to get more subscribers? Can we use that data to get more income, more super chats, whatever? That is really interesting to me. Anything right now that will increase revenue is interesting to me. That is my priority right now over the next year. It's basically to increase revenue from this show by at least 50% or speaking, show or speaking. So I'm doing a lot of strategic thinking, talking to a lot of people, hiring people, all of that. We'll see what happens, right? Rafael says, why Grover Cleveland is one of your favorite president in U.S. history? Basically because he was anti-statist. He was very pro-free markets. He basically vetoed more bills than any other president in history. He objected to government intervention in the markets, in the economy. That is the primary reason. He basically viewed government as very narrow and focused on those protections of individual rights and not intervening in people's personal lives. I'm in the beginning of a biography of his. I've got distracted by other books. So I'm not there yet. So I'm not yet finished with it. Once I finish with it, I'll do a show maybe in Grover Cleveland and explain in more detail. Silvanos, I can hear the mic stand intermittently with something you do in your desk. Not a big deal, but it's there. Yeah, all right. Some stuff here needs to get better. So I am curious what you think about the sound. I mean, I haven't acoustically treated the room and maybe I will also acoustically treat the room as part of my movement towards improving everything about the show. Maybe I'll even sit delivering the show instead of delivering the show standing up. Maybe that'll change. It'll certainly change the background. Maybe that'll change the dynamic as well. I'm trying to get to that 100,000 and trying to get to that 100,000 and trying to grow revenue with as we grow to that 100,000. Savendi says there's an echo, but everybody else says, no, sound is great. This is the problem. It's hard to rely on you guys. Mike says, sound is satisfactory. I don't want sound to be satisfactory. I want to be great. And I think just a few, maybe a little bit of acoustic treatment to the room would get me to a great sound and acoustic treatment is not that expensive. I don't know about doing the ceiling. We can do the ceiling even, but certainly we can do the wall in front of me where I think a bunch of the sound probably bounces off. Vendi says it's clear that there are room workers. Okay, we will do acoustic treatment. All right, guys, thank you. We reached our target, exceeded it. I really appreciate that on the super chat and it's great to do that without really anybody bringing in $100 or something like that. A lot of good solid 20s and a lot of support from you guys with the stickers as well. So it's great. Thank you. We'll see you all tonight, which is in Ryan's, and then tomorrow for another one of these news roundups. Bye, everybody, and have a great rest of your Thursday.