 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Book Show. All right everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show on this Tuesday, August 8th. Everybody's having a great week. And we are back with, well, we never left with our news roundup. So today, we've got a bunch of, a lot of stories from outside the United States, a little bit in the United States, one science story. So we're going to cover all in just a few minutes Argentina, Hong Kong, China. But okay, let's jump in. A reminder, 250 is kind of our standard for contributions for the news roundup shows. Thank you, Jonathan, for getting us started. All right, let's see. So let's start with Argentina. So the story coming out of Argentina, the big story coming out of Argentina is just the unbelievable inflation going on over there. I mean, we here in the United States are bitterly complaining about 4% inflation. But Argentina is actually suffering from over 100% inflation, annual inflation rate. This is the cost of goods. This is CPI, consumer price index. You know, CPI always hides the fact that some products are going up much faster than that. Some things are much more expensive, which means standard of living quality of life. It's just declining and deteriorating. It's difficult for people to make a living. It's difficult for people to survive. They're afraid to open up accounts in the banks in dollars because the dollar maintains its value because past governments have just confiscated those or just shut those down and didn't allow you access to them. So it's very difficult for Argentinians, those who can get their money out. But for those who are stuck in the country, it is a very, very difficult period. We're also facing an election this year. We're going to have primaries on August 13th, followed by a general election, which is going to be interesting. We have a number of different candidates running, really four candidates who have any chance here. Three of them from traditional parties and one who is, what would you call him? I guess you'd call him something like a populist libertarian, something like that, which is interesting. Javier Malai, I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that, is an interesting candidate and is polling at 20% right now. Probably better than anybody who's considered a libertarian anywhere else in the world. I'll talk about him in a minute. So Argentinian economies just have a standard of living, quality of life. And when you consider, if you visit Buenos Aires and you see the obvious wealth that existed in Argentina 120 years ago. If you look at it, Argentina was the Paris of America. It had a standard of living, quality of life that was very close to the United States up until 1914. It was a rich country, rich in natural resources. It had immigrants primarily from Germany and Italy. So it has a very rich wine country with a long tradition. It has industry and it has some incredibly fertile agricultural lands. It is a beautiful country, so it's potentially for tourism. But this is a country that was doing fantastically well in the 19th century, particularly the later part of the 19th century and early 20th century. And then basically in 1914, when it was very similar in terms of wealth to the United States, it embarked on a statist experiment, an experiment of authoritarian regimes with different variations on fascism, socialism. But fundamentally, a statist, right, government intervention, government interference, government involvement in the economy. And as a consequence, today, Argentina is a poor country. It's sad and depressing to think about it, but you know, again, you go to Buenos Aires and you see the magnificent buildings. They look like Paris, kind of the apartment condominium buildings. You see the sculptures, you see the parks, you see the wide, wide boulevards. You can tell this was an incredibly wealthy place and then you look at the actual quality of life and standard of living of people. Very, very depressing, very depressing. It shows you how things can reverse, bad policy can really reverse the economic prospects. Now, this Javier Millet is an interesting character. I haven't done a lot of research into him, but I've been to Argentina, I've talked to Argentinians about him. He has a podcast, radio show, I guess, and he's big on yelling and really getting in people's faces and being an outlier. His solution to inflation in Argentina is actually really, really good and one that I would support. If I was in Argentina, I'd probably vote for him in spite of the fact that I hear he's also religious and he's just a mixed bag, but just to get rid of inflation would be such a big deal for Argentina that I would support him just on that basis. What does he propose to get rid of inflation? Basically, to get rid of the currency. So what Javier Millet is suggesting is to get rid of the peso, burn down the central bank and get rid of the local currency. And what would you replace it with? Basically, you replace it with the dollar. So the solution to Argentinian inflation is to adopt the dollar. And you might say, but the dollar, that's being inflated and this is libertarians in the United States going, no, no, no, the dollar, it's going to die, it's going to collapse, it's the end of the world. Everybody outside the United States knows that the dollar is not going anywhere and that the dollar is a bastion of relative stability in a crazy world. And I think Argentinians would be happy to exchange the dollar's inflation rate of 4% with the peso, the Argentinian peso's inflation rate of 116%. So he would dollarize the economy, which I would 100% support. I think that would be a great way to deal with it. But I deal like a gold standard. But Argentina is a relatively small economy to independently go on a gold standard and to build up the infrastructure that that would require. Too difficult, whereas the dollarized economy is a five minute process. It's so simple, it's so easy, it's so quick. And by doing that, the market would now set interest rates because there wouldn't be any Argentinian banks, they wouldn't have to borrow and lend from the American Central Bank. Interest rates would be set in the marketplace and Argentina could get on a proper monetary footing. And then beyond that, somebody like Javier I think Millet would deregulate, would shut down, would really completely change the framework, change the debate within Argentina. And I think we can put aside some of the more nutty religious oriented policies that he might have just because it's an emergency. You got to get in there, you got to make big changes, you got to shake things up. So I'm excited about the prospect. I don't think it's likely that he wins. You know, ultimately, he's only getting 20% of the polls and I think more conventional candidates have a bigger chance of winning, whether of the existing regime in spite of the fact that the inflation is so high, or the previous regime that started out inflation in Argentina. And it's now promising to tackle it, but how they're going to, you know, they've not shown any evidence they're capable of doing that. They're going to cut spending, they're going to cut this, they're going to cut that. It's easy to say those things when you're on the campaign trail, it's much more difficult to do them. Actually, dollar rising economy is brilliant. It was actually proposed in Israel in the mid-1980s when Israel had 1,000% inflation, close to 1,000% inflation. And the Treasury Secretary came out and suggested dollar rising economy. At the time I was a huge supporter of this. He had to resign the following day. The Israeli nationalist freaked out over this. The idea that Israel's currency would be controlled if you will, determined by what was going on in Washington D.C. was anathema to them. He had to resign and that idea got buried. But it is a good idea and I wish more embraced it. Let's see. Thank you, Stephen Hopper. Thank you, Michael Dale. Thank you, Robert. And again, thank you, Jonathan. Those of all stickers are showing of support. Well, because of Sylvanos who came in with $100 and said, what is happening? Who said, hi, Iran. This is for missing the last few shows live. I appreciate that. Sylvanos came in with $100, so that has moved us forward significantly. So we're only $100 short, so hopefully five $20 questions and we're there. So feel free to use that feature. All right. That is Argentina. Now let's move to another kind of depressing place, which is Hong Kong. So if you remember Hong Kong, the Chinese used COVID basically as a guise to enter Hong Kong, impose the national security law because of both fear of the virus and also because of all the regulations, anti-COVID regulations, the demonstrations that were prevalent in 2019, died in 2020 and 2021, and basically China got control over Hong Kong and got control over the radicals and imposed its national security law over the territory. Many, many hundreds of people were arrested and thousands of people have left Hong Kong. So the Hong Kong population, the working population is actually shrunk by 5% for the first time in decades, maybe ever. The working population of Hong Kong is actually shrunk because so many people have left Hong Kong because of the clampdown by the Chinese. But what's interesting is that the clampdown of Chinese is still not at the level that it is in China. So it's still true. For example, in Hong Kong, you can get Facebook and YouTube and Twitter. There's no firewall. There's no great Chinese firewall blocking you. Now the reality is even in China, you can get access to some of these things. But it's certainly in Hong Kong, there's no attempt to block it. At the margins, there's still some free speech in Hong Kong. There's a lot less monitoring. I'll give you an example. The local government banned the sharing and singing of the song Glory to Hong Kong, which was a protest song that was used by the protesters in 2019. Well, a court just decided that the outlawing the song was illegal and they made it legal again to be able to share online and to be able to go out and sing the song Glory to Hong Kong. The Chinese authorities are appealing this, but that could never happen in China. If they decided to ban a song, it would be banned. The song would be banned. There's no legal recourse. There's no process like this. There's still a lot more, for example, hundreds of democracy activists or activists against China are being tried right now, including at least one billionaire, and again, horrific sentences. And these are show trials in the tradition of Stalin and Mao, but this is the difference. The showtiles in China don't have press coverage and you can't sit in on them. And yet all these trials for all these Hong Kong dissidents are open to the public and open to the press. And the press is actually covering these trials. They have no juries. It's just in front of a judge and the depressing and the horrific. But at least they're being witnessed. Evidence is going out about them and people can keep track of what's going on and partially keep track of their loved ones and keep track of their friends. So there is some small element of freedom and people are really wondering right now in Hong Kong, how long will this survive? Because the Chinese are clearly not happy with it. And lately there's a new phrase being used by the authorities regarding all of this. And it's called, they're constantly warning against what they call, quote, soft resistance. Soft resistance is this. It's what is being done on the internet. It's singing. It's allowing the song to be sung. It's people sharing the stuff. It's media still thinking at least to some extent it's independent. It's criticism maybe in private of the Chinese regime that would not be allowed in China, in the mainland China. You know, there's the controls on speech, news media, books, culture are far less sweeping than they are in China. And there's a real fear now in Hong Kong that they're going to become more and more and more sweeping, more and more and more totalitarian. So again, one of the great tragedies of this century so far was the Chinese takeover in Hong Kong. And one of the great demerits that the Trump administration gets, I mean significant demerits, is the lack of support that it showed the demonstrators in 2019, almost nothing. And then when China did take over Hong Kong, basically zero out of the Trump administration in terms of protest. And the Trump administration was not the only one. Generally the West, with exception maybe of the United Kingdom a little bit, even there, pretty mild, were pretty silent about, you know, the takeover of what was by economic standards, the freest country in the world, what was a thriving culture, what was a bastion of finance, wealth, creation and just great people. Canada and the United Kingdom have at least granted Hong Kong citizens, and I think Australia, granted Hong Kong residents an easy path to move to those countries. I wish the United States had done the same, but of course given the attitudes of American, American politicians these days to immigration, it's not a surprise, but Hong Kong is restricted. Anyway, it appears that China is starting to prepare the ground for even more authoritarianism in Hong Kong. I feel bad for the people of Hong Kong. I hope more of them leave. And what I really hope, I mean, what would be really good is if a lot of the financial industry that is in Hong Kong started leaving Hong Kong, you know, and making it less valuable to the Chinese. I mean, one of the reasons Chinese always wanted Hong Kong is because it is this financial and production hub. It is a pool of immense talent, and if that talent leaves, then there are less people there sanctioning the Chinese, there are less people there supporting the Chinese authoritarian government. And I wish the world opened up its ability to take those people in. All right, so I hope more Chinese leave, and I hope the fears that China climbs down even harsher on Hong Kong ultimately don't become a reality. We could see more protests in Hong Kong. That would be interesting. It would be interesting if we saw more protests in Hong Kong. All right, talking about China, a lot of news out of China. God, so much stuff out of China. So first, I don't know if you noticed a couple of days ago, a Chinese and Russian, you know, was attend ships, sailed very, very close to the US, what is it, you know, the US line out there in the ocean. There was still international waters, but they came pretty close and for warships to sail that close to a country's sovereign line. It's pretty unusual and pretty rare and usually meant to send a signal. The US deployed for US warships, a P-8 Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft to kind of escort the Chinese and Russian ships away. But the fact that the Chinese were coordinating this with the Russians, the fact that it was a joint mission, if you will, not a good sign and suddenly an attempt by China to push us to see where our boundaries are and to see what we would do. Also, to get a sense of our fleet capability in that part of the world. You know, certainly if they invade Taiwan and if the United States tries to defend Taiwan, you could imagine the Chinese, particularly if the US attacked targets in mainland China. You can imagine a Chinese fleet trying to do something in Alaska or even on the US West Coast. They'd like to see what our capabilities are in terms of deterring that. Lots of other news in terms of defense in China. We've just discovered that the Chinese, I mean, we've just discovered that Americans have known this for a while. The Chinese have infiltrated Japanese, hacked into Japanese servers and probably national security, probably government. Quite extensive, quite damaging. Of course, we know the Chinese have hacked into the US. We know that the Microsoft leak, the Microsoft story a few months ago where the Chinese used some kind of flaw in the Microsoft system to basically plant these malware spying software in basically, you know, computers across the United States, including Defense Department and military. And I assume we're doing the same thing to Chinese but we know about what they're doing. You know, part of the challenge of incursions like what we saw with the fleet is that there are no talks between US military and Chinese military. The Chinese have cut those talks off since Nancy Pelosi was in Taiwan a year ago. China is just pushing. It's pushing and it's testing us and it wants to see how far it can get. And it's just, you know, we had the balloon. We had the secret police outpost in Manhattan. We've got the listening station we talked about on the show in Cuba. We've got training in Cuba. We've got pilots and sailors kind of pilots primarily pushing the boundaries of, again, international airspace and kind of harassing US reconnaissance. We've got planes over the streets of Taiwan. There's just a lot of kind of tricky, dangerous activity going on. To some extent, I think this is all a sign of Chinese weakness. When you think about what's going on right now in China, you have to, you know, you have to look at the Chinese economy. The Chinese economy is struggling. Struggling may be the most struggled since it's pivot away from Maoism in the late 1970s. You've got a sharp drop in Chinese exports and imports. So trade decline exports declined by 14.5%. This is an economy largely dependent on exports. 14.5% in dollar terms. Imports declined 12.4%, which indicates Chinese are buying less foreign goods, which probably means a decline in standard of living within China. Standard of living is often measured by the amount of imports you bring in, the wealth of your people to be able to afford stuff from outside of the country. But it also, imports would also include oil and natural resources for production, which means maybe production, manufacturing is hooding in China. So this far exceeds anything economists predicted. So this suggests again, real problems that this problem that they've had in the property sector, the problems that they had with local government state, regional governments, is probably broader than just property and local states government. Foreign investment is way down in China. It's the lowest quarterly level of a net foreign investment in two decades, in 20 years. That's huge. Foreign investment to a large extent has fueled Chinese manufacturing, Chinese technology, Chinese economic growth. So it was 4.9 billion. That's down 87% year on year and 76% quarter on quarter. So it's just a plummeting of the amount of money being invested by foreigners in the Chinese economy. I think a big driver really from the days of Deng Chao Pang of Chinese economic growth. So a really, you know, really real warning sign in terms of the prospects of China. And then if you remember, there's a lot of talk about Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, how they're going to take over the world with this and how we should be afraid of it. And generally fear of China has been out, what do you call it, exaggerated like everything else. Well, part of that Belt and Road Initiative led all the way to Europe four or five years ago. Italy signed up for it as one of the European countries involved in this. Well, Italy just announced that it is basically withdrawing from the Belt and Road Initiative. This is by far the biggest European economy that signed up for it. And it basically cuts this Belt and Road Initiative from an alternative trading route and the whole idea of increasing Europe's dependency on trade with China. Of course, trade is not dependent. Trade is a good thing generally. But this is a way, and this is a way to, you know, people blamed, people accused China of using this to get countries to become indebted to China and then China to control them and so on. But the whole Belt and Road Initiative is way behind in terms of the timescale. It's way behind in terms of its actual solidity. And again, you know, Italy is walking away from it four years after it. You know, Chinese firms have put $2.8 billion into infrastructure, including for Italian ports. But Italy feels like, you know, thinks it hasn't gotten that much out of it. Exactly what getting out of it means is hard to tell. But Italy is going to be a lot less inclined to encourage Chinese investment in Italy. So again, whether it's good for Italy or bad for Italy, it's not good for China and it's not good for their ambitions overall. Back at home, it's one year ago since the CHIP Act was passed. I know I talk a lot about this and there's a reason for it. I think these kind of things are a crucial to understanding the future of the US economy and understand the future of what's going to happen from the perspective of economic liberty in the United States. The CHIP Act is a bipartisan, central planning, industrial policy type of act. Its success and its flourishing will only encourage the government to do more of it. But not to worry, you know, the success is unlikely because reality is what it is and central planning doesn't work. Anyway, there's a lot of hype about this, a lot of money flowing in. 200 billion worth of investment in the United States all hoping to grab the government's 50 billion dollars of subsidies. The problem of course with all of this is they're investing 200 billion. We're not getting much for that 200 billion because it's super expensive to build manufacturing plants in the United States. It takes much longer to build about 50% longer, so 650 days to build a semiconductor plant in China and Taiwan. 900 days in the United States even though in the United States the plants are typically smaller. It costs more, about 40% more just to build these plants. So these companies spending 200 billion, in the hope of getting 50 billion but the 200 billion is being spent gets less than if they spend it elsewhere. Exactly what they're getting out of this, the subsidies is not clear. And then operating expenses, once the facilities start running are 30% higher in the United States than in Asia. I think what these companies are hoping for is that these subsidies are not one time that ultimately their production will continue to be subsidized in the United States, which means every chip made in the U.S. is going to be significantly more expensive than the chips made overseas. And of course a big chunk of those operating costs being 30% higher means because labor costs are higher because salaries, not so much salaries but benefits and everything else that goes along with hiring in the United States is more expensive. And of course that is if you can find the workers for the chip manufacturers. But manufacturing is going to be small at the end of all of this. There's not going to be that much being produced and it's not going to effect, it's not going to even supply the needs of the kind of the United States industry for chips. It's also an interesting time for chip manufacturers to be investing in chips. Right now chip demand is low, so the expectation as we come out of this cycle and chip demand will be high again. Not obvious that will happen. It's still true that TSMC and Samsung, the big foreign investors in these chip plants, are still primarily investing overseas. They're putting some money into chip manufacturing in the United States but not anywhere near what they're investing in elsewhere. There are lots of other unintended consequences. One big unintended consequence of this is that China is actually increasing its production of chips. Now the chips are not state-of-the-art but what China plans to do is flood the market with non-state-of-the-art chips and substitute volume for, so you can have one chip that's super fast and can do a lot of things or you can have five chips do the same thing the one chip does. And if these five chips are super cheap, some companies might prefer to invest in the five chips than in the one chip and China is investing heavily in that partially because of the sanctions it can't get. The very sophisticated chips cannot be exported to China and the equipment to produce them cannot be exported so they're investing in building what are called trailing edge chips, last-generation chips and they're going to do that heavily. Overall, we will see what happens with this. You know, government could get lucky and it could turn out to be a good move but I think the probabilities are that, I mean, again, it's a broken window fallacy but the probabilities are that in every respect this will turn out to be a bad move. Again, the small probability there is a positive probability that it'll look like a good move even though we all know whenever you get central planning, whenever you get government involvement in the new area, it's ultimately not good. All right, let's see. Finally, so in March we had scientists announced that they have figured out a new semiconductor material that using a rare earth metal that became a superconductor not at… So anyway, let's backtrack a second. Superconducting is this amazing ability of electricity to flow through a material with no friction, no friction, so no loss of energy as it flow through a material which is revolutionary in terms of delivering electricity, in terms of chips, in terms of electric motors. It would revolutionize. It would be one of the greatest discoveries ever. Now, in a sense, semiconductors or the usefulness of it would be… Superconducting is already was discovered 100 years ago, but it was discovered in materials that were frozen to close to minus 272 degrees Fahrenheit or celsius, which is the coldest theoretically you can get to. So only close to that do some materials become superconductors. At those temperatures, electricity flows through them without any loss of energy. In March, a group of scientists proposed, wrote a paper saying that they could replicate superconductivity with a rare earth material and hydrogen without super cold, but in order to do it, you would have to compress the material under pressure of at 144,000 pounds per square inch. Now, right, it says 10 times the pressure that's exerted at the bottom of the ocean's deeper trenches. That's great temperature. But it's only, it's less than one hundredth of what the past, in the past, the kind of pressure that was required in order to achieve this in the past. So this was considered a big step forward. Anyway, was it last week or two weeks ago? It was like a few days ago. South Korean scientists have claimed that they have a material now, that they have dubbed LK99, that without pressure and in room temperature is a superconductor. Now this would change the world if this was true. This would mean you could carry electricity hundreds of miles, thousands of miles with no loss or almost no loss. It means much more efficient, faster computers and more efficient computers, more efficient electric motors. It would change, you know, I think electric car technologies, but anything that used electricity would be changed forever. And we can't even imagine the kind of the benefits medical scanners would become cheaper and more effective. Gazillion things would change. And there were a lot of people who say, wait a minute, this cannot be. Physics won't allow it. This isn't an impossibility. South Korean scientists are standing by this, and I think they were about to hand over samples to the Korean authorities to check this. In the meantime, the journal, one of the top academic journals in the field, is examining materials, examining materials, the material from them to see if this is credible, if this is realistic. The world is kind of, I think the scientific world in many respects, you know, this is in some ways bigger than fusion even in the sense that this I don't think anybody expected would happen. Fusion, people could imagine what's happening soon. This came out of nowhere. It came completely out of nowhere. If you can mass produce superconductors, it would truly change everything. So we'll say, we'll keep track of this. So the Korean Society of Superconductivity and Cryogenics is about to get, but to get this material from the Quantum Energy Research Center, which is the Korean research institute that did this. So we will know probably in a few weeks and a few months if they can replicate this result, if they can, and if this material is, you know, if this material can be mass produced. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, but from everything I read, this is a real revolution. Whether it's real or not, I have no opinion, I'm not a scientist. It is a big stretch given that just everybody was astounded and skeptical about creating superconductivity under 145,000 pounds of pressure. Now we don't need pressure. We don't need temperature. Just room temperature. Wow. Nobody saw this coming. All right. So we will see. We will see. Let's hope it's true. All right. We're only $30 short of our goal. Let's jump in with Lewis. Lewis says, thoughts on the Library of Congress forcefully taking Lenin to pick up frame pages of the fountain head. God, I don't remember everything that was going on there. God, I really shouldn't comment on it because I can't remember. I mean, it was a complicated deal. Obviously, Lenin felt that this was a significant injustice and that this was wrong. And it was certainly within his rights. But he had given them some opening in the way he had contributed the originals of the fountain head. And from their perspective, that excluded him keeping the couple of pages. So, you know, this is a long time ago and I remember Lenin taping kind of his response and being very upset by it. But yes, I think it was unjust and unnecessary. He committed to giving those pages to the Library of Congress once he passed away. So it was probably unjust and, you know, an injustice towards Lenin and towards his, you know, the fact that he had done something he didn't have to do, which is provide those manuscripts to the Library of Congress. That's the best I can do given my recollection of it. It's a long time ago. Colleen, do you think there is a defense benefit in or argument to having chip production in the United States? Is there a different model we could use in the case to ensure our self-sufficiency in regard to chips in this case? So I don't think we could guarantee self-sufficiency because, you know, we just consume so many chips in the United States that I don't think. And then, of course, we consume like iPhones. You know, iPhones consume chips, but the chips never come to the United States. The chips are made by TSMC and then they're sent to China where they're assembled into iPhones that are then sent around the world. And these, the new iPhone 15, which will come out in September, is going to have the three nanometer, the latest and greatest chips. It'll be the first product in the world that will carry three nanometer chips, which will make it super fast and super efficient and super energy and all of that. So I'm looking forward to upgrading my phone in September. But so I don't think we can be self-sufficient. I don't think that's a possibility and I don't think it makes any sense. I do think it makes sense for the United States to figure out how to incentivize or how to encourage chip manufacturers, particularly TSMC and Samsung, to diversify manufacturing out of East Asia. That is, if you think about where 90% of all chips, really almost 100% of all high-end chips, are all within reach of the Chinese. They're all within reach of a Chinese blockade. Never mind a war if they just blockade South Korea and Taiwan. Now, you could argue that's an act of war, but yeah. So we need to be able to produce chips. We need to be able to have access to chips that is not dependent on access to East Asia, which could easily be dominated by China, if not today in five years, ten years. Now, I don't think the solution is to build chip manufacturing in the United States. How does one incentivize? Well, for example, my assumption is that Pentagon is a big buyer of these kind of chips. Well, we could say to TSMC and to Samsung is, look, we're going to buy your chips. The Pentagon is going to buy your chips, but we'll pay you a small premium on those chips. And in exchange, what we want is within five years, those chip manufacturing plants to be in South America, Europe, Mexico, Canada, U.S. We don't care. We're agnostic as to where you place these chips, but not in Taiwan and South Korea. Now, I don't think they would build it in the United States. It's stupid to build it in the United States. And I don't think the United States government outside of the Defense Department should subsidize it. And by subsidies, you have to manufacture it here, you have to export controls, you have labor controls, you have all this bullshit. No, all I need, all we need is to diversify to get some of the capacity out of East Asia. That's all. But to put it in the United States is stupid and unnecessary. We don't, you know, China cannot blockade Mexico, cannot blockade South America, cannot blockade Europe. So put it somewhere wherever these companies can best invest the money. And the best way to do that is just to guarantee them a profit, a higher profit off of the chips that we must have. And the chips that we must have are those that the Pentagon requires. Now, if you're really worried about it, then build enough capacity in the United States, build enough capacity, let's say Intel, to build enough capacity in the United States for Pentagon use and nothing else. So in other words, you want to be able to do whatever you do while minimizing the impact on the market. While minimizing subsidies, while minimizing the impact on the ability of companies to do what they think is in their best interest to do. And if you want them to diversify, then pay them to diversify. But don't tell them how and what. Tell them we want leading-edge chips, best chips in the world that we need to put into our ballistic missiles and into our planes and into our ships and into our submarines. We want those chips, you know, we're going to buy 100,000 of these chips, a million of these chips, two billions of these chips, I don't know how many. But in five years, it has to be from somewhere that is not East Asia, right? So somewhere on this side of the Pacific or somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic. Or even India would be better, right? Diversify to India because India can always ship out the other side and India has a strong interest in a significant military to be able to at least stand up to China and prevent it from blockading it completely. So I do think you have to do something about dependence on Taiwan. And I said this when I did my review of the book, The Chip Wars. We have to do something about our dependence on Taiwan. The question is what, and I think the Chip Act is 100% the wrong thing to do and represents this kind of industrial planning mentality that both Democrats and Republicans now have, which is unbelievably going to be long-term destructive to the US economy. All right, Lewis, what would the world look like if the Soviets and Nazis developed nukes before the United States and why the billionaires must be thus not built skyscrapers like they used to Rockefellers? Well, the world would be, you know, unfree. I think the Soviet Union would have, I don't think there would have been a Western Europe. I think the Soviets or the Nazis would have dominated Europe for a long time. The world would be poor. The United States would be dramatically crippled. But you know what I'm doing a show tonight on exactly kind of related to this topic and the whole issue of Oppenheimer and the development of the nuke. It's a good question to ask me again tonight during that show. All right, Phil says, you're on. I sometimes think you overlook the UK had an end of term lease agreement on Hong Kong that was internationally acknowledged. It doesn't mean the UK dumped Hong Kong. Of course it does. I mean, look, I don't acknowledge treaties with monstrous regimes. That is, I don't think that morally or politically the UK was obliged to just hand over Hong Kong with almost no guarantees of its continued freedom. As I've said many times in the past, I do not acknowledge the sovereignty of authoritarian dictatorial regimes. And as such, I don't acknowledge the sovereignty and therefore any deal that was written in the past with some government that one has to execute. The fundamental here is the striving for liberty, not the striving to do acknowledge the international. I don't like international entities like the UN. I don't like treaties that involve non-free countries. And if a country was free and it goes non-free, none of that I think matters. The free world needs to stand up to authoritarianism and tell them they don't count. And I know politically that would have been almost impossible for Thatcher to do. But there's got to be a way to have done it that was more effective than the way she ultimately did it. And Mikot says, if they can mass produce superconductors, renewables will become reliable. Well, you still need to solve the battery problem, but yes, it will make the whole process. The whole process of moving the electricity and probably a battery technology itself dramatically better and renewables become a lot better. Frank says, can you make a separate video for your art-framed store story? Why? It's a personal story. Why would anybody? I don't know that people have that much interest in it. I topped out every word of your response and posted it, and many people are impressed. I don't know why they're impressed. If they're that story impressed them, they should look at some of my other stories. I've got a lot of stories. Maybe we should do an autobiography sometime. But yeah, we can ask Christian if he wants to post it. Alright, thanks everybody. I really appreciate the support. Thank you, Mary-Eline. Thank you, Keeber. Thank you, John. Thank you, Catherine. Thank you, Gale. Thank you, Finn Hopper. I think Stephen's already been thanked. Thank you to all the people asking questions. We did make our goal. We're scoring 2 for 2 this week. Let's keep this going. And I'll see you all tonight. Tonight we're talking about Oppenheimer. We're talking about an atomic bomb and when to use it. If it's appropriate to use it with Shuman Nagasaki. We'll talk about Ayn Rand's meeting with Oppenheimer. She met him at least twice. Her meetings with Oppenheimer, what she thought of the bomb, what she thought of Oppenheimer himself. And then also, what about the movie? Was the movie any good? Is it any good? Is it worth seeing? All of that we will cover tonight. I'll also give you a quick update tonight on Richard Hananya's apology post or clarification post. We'll talk about that a little bit. But we'll mainly spend our time talking about the movie Oppenheimer and everything peripheral relating to it. Have a great rest of your week, people.