 And then I remember when I bought my first iPhone it was 2007, 2008 and I went to the mall to buy my first iPhone and it was during the recession, right? Remember the 2008 financial crisis? And my thinking was I'm going to buy my iPhone because I want to stimulate the U.S. economy. I want to help my fellow man. I want to make sure that people don't lose their job. So I'm going to the mall to buy an iPhone. That's why you guys go shopping, right? That's why you buy your computers, your phones, your shoes, your nice clothes. You care about the salesman and you care about the economy and your economics professor has taught you that consumption drives the economy and therefore you're going to consume because you want to make sure GDP goes up because you care about your fellow man, right? Now I'm not going to ask how many of you actually shop for those reasons because I don't want to embarrass you and there's always one in the room who says yes. But no, why do you go shopping? Why do you go shopping? Because you want something. Yeah, and why do you want it? Because it'll bring you satisfaction because you want it because it'll make your life better in some way. At least you hope that, right? Yeah, I mean, some, Roger says he shops locally for some of those reasons. I don't shop locally. I will never shop locally. I shop for the best price of highest quality and I don't care where it's produced. It might be local. It might not be local, but I shop for my satisfaction, for my values. Now, if it turns out that locally is a value to me, then I would shop locally but because it's important to me. Now, I think shopping locally is bad for the locality and we can get into that in the Q&A. So I think the whole idea of shopping locally, shop national, shop Austin, shop USA is bad for national, bad for Austin and bad for the USA and we can get that to that in the Q&A. But market places are places in which we go to transact in an effort to make our lives better. The places we go to transact in order to make our lives as individuals better in pursuit of the values we have decided are good for us, both as producers and as consumers. And the beauty of the transaction is that there are win-win transactions. Nobody loses. So when I buy an iPhone for $1,000, why am I willing to pay $1,000 for the iPhone? What's the iPhone worth to me if I'm willing to pay $1,000 for it? Probably more. What's that? I think it's worth probably more. So more, right? More than $1,000. And if you really think about it, and I'm not going to go through the whole exercise, but the iPhone is worth to me, I can't put a number on it. Tens of thousands of dollars, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars. I mean, we could go through an exercise of what this thing does. Just think, to put down a list sometime on a piece of paper, all the things that this thing does, and then figure out what it would have cost you to replicate everything that this does 15 years ago, how much it would have cost you to create a thing, however big that does what this does 15 years ago. Now the answer to that is you couldn't have done it, and if you could have, it would have cost you tens of millions of dollars. Yet for $1,000, I can get unbelievable. Every piece of music ever written at a marginal cost of zero, every movie, books, a communication device that I could have only dreamt of 20 years ago in terms of video communication for anywhere in the world at a marginal cost of zero, they're like two people in this phone call or in this Zoom who probably remember long distance phone calls. Like when I moved to the United States in 1987, I never called my parents in Israel because it was so expensive. You just didn't do it today. I'll call anybody anywhere in the world without giving it one second of thought because the cost is exactly zero. I zoomed with my entire extended family the other day, you know, nephews and cousins and siblings, and we were all live on Zoom and cost me nothing. So I pay for that more than $1,000 because it's worth more than $1,000 to me. And Apple makes a profit and my life is better. We're both benefiting from the transaction. And indeed, why do you pay as much as you pay for bread at the grocery store because the bread is worth more to you than the three bucks you're paying for it. And it's worth less than the grocery store. That's why they're willing to sell it for three bucks. Every transaction you make, you win and the other party hopefully profits. And indeed, in a free market, in a healthy productive market, that is true of all transactions. They are win-win transactions where both parties benefit from engaging in them. But the whole process, the whole essence of capitalism is about the pursuit of self interest. It's about pursuing your values, your self interest, your life, what you want. How can you talk about shop local idea that was mentioned? Can you talk about shop local idea that was mentioned earlier? I mean, if somebody is producing something locally and it's a poor quality or higher price, then why are you rewarding them over somebody that might be in a neighboring state but who is producing at a higher quality and lower price? Who are you helping and who are you hurting here? You're helping the less productive, the less innovative, the less efficient, and you're hurting progress. You're hurting people who are moving us forward, which means become more efficient, which means higher quality at the lower price. So you're hurting our economy. You're hurting the best for the sake of mediocrity, the fact that the mediocrity happens to live next door to you. But the fact is that that hoots everybody, that lowers all of our standard of living. Money doesn't stay local. The whole idea of local is economically bizarre to me. I mean, if you take that to the extreme, the ideal is to grow your own food and to make your own shoes and to make your own clothes. And how rich do you think we would be if we did that? We'd be really, really, really poor. We'd be like Africa today is or like we were all, excuse me, we were all 300 years ago. We'd be really, really poor. The whole reason why we are rich today is because we live in a division of labor society in which we are free to produce and buy from the most efficient, most cost effective, most highest quality producer. No matter where they live in the world, never mind in our community. The more we bring things back to our community or even to the US of A, the poorer we will be. There is nothing more valuable today than free trade. And I don't care what the Chinese subsidize or don't subsidize. We should have free trade. We should have zero tariffs. That raises our standard of living because what it does is it gives us the benefit of the division of labor across eight billion people instead of only across 350 million people. And if you only buy local, you're only benefiting from the division of labor in your little community. Half a million people in national, I don't know how big national is. I mean, you can buy an iPhone because the iPhones are not produced in national. Now you do, but there's no value to buying local. You're not helping anybody. Indeed, you're hurting people. You're hurting the best producers out there. You're hurting the people who are investing the most in being productive. So buying, I always say buy America is un-American. Buying local is un-local, whatever the hell that means. Buying local is anti-progress. It's anti-prosperity. You want to buy from the best. And the best might be local. Like if you're buying organic vegetables, yeah, you got to buy them local because by the time they come in from somewhere else, it's taken too long and they're not quite as fresh if you value organic vegetable. But it doesn't apply to almost anything else. And if this business goes out of business, your local business, what will happen? That capital that's in that business gets deployed to better users. Right now, the reason it went out of the business is because it can't produce a value. It can't trade and win-win relationships. So that value, including the labor, the people who worked in it, will get deployed elsewhere in the economy. Some higher value activities. So bankruptcy is not a bad thing. Shutting down businesses is not a bad thing. It's a way for labor and capital to be redeployed to more efficient uses. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the stare, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist using the super chat. And I noticed yesterday when I appealed for support for the show, many of you step forward and actually supported the show for the first time. So I'll do it again. Maybe we'll get some more today. If you like what you're hearing, if you appreciate what I'm doing, then I appreciate your support. Those of you who don't yet support the show, please take this opportunity, go to Iranbrookshow.com slash support or go to subscribestar.com Iranbrookshow and make a kind of a monthly contribution to keep this going. I'm not sure when the next