 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brook Show. We are here today. We're going to kind of do a kind of an overview of some of the news that came out over the week. We'll review some of the big stories, maybe some of them are small stories. But we'll go over a bunch of different stories and review them. I've scheduled this to be a normal length show, so that means, I don't know, 90 minutes or so, or longer, depending on how many questions you guys have. So I have set the goal, fundraising goal for, the Super Chat goal for 650. We will see how that goes. So hopefully that's something that is attainable. I know it's a little early for many of you, early in the day that is. But hopefully we'll get viewership, we'll get significant live viewership for this show. All right, so we can jump in. We're going to talk about a bunch of different things. We're going to talk about the abortion pill. We're going to talk about a case in Canada that tried to free up healthcare a little bit. We'll talk about, well, the abortion pill, we'll talk in the context of the United States Supreme Court. We'll talk about the Polish government refusing to import Ukrainian grain. Kind of a weird story, but there you go. Nuclear power in Germany. Marjorie Taylor Greene on the leaked documents. There's a woman you want in a position of power. And what else? We've got a bunch of other stuff. Yeah, we've got the San Francisco murder. We've got El Salvador taxes. And we've got a little bit more on the Sanctus' bill expanding school choice. Somebody asked me about this yesterday, so I figured I'd do a little bit of research on that. And get you some data on it. I don't know what Peaches by Jack Black is. I have no idea. No idea. Catherine, thank you for getting us started. I appreciate that. Anonymous user, I don't understand the comment, but thank you anyway for the support. I appreciate that. So we are off to the races on the, on the super chat side. All right, El, thank you. I appreciate it. So we've been talking a lot about the motion pill ban. Again, I think one of most significant, one of the most significant policy issues in the United States today. I mean, if you think about some of the woke stuff that's going on and how many people that impact. So, you know, the transgender stuff and how many impact people are really impacted in it and how many, how many people really suffer as a consequence of one policy or another policy or one attitude, a different attitude. And then you think about banning of ocean pills and the consequence basically to all young women, all women under 40 or women under 50 these days. This is a huge story. This is a huge story. And it also is a huge story because it ultimately reveals what Republicans, conservatives, right wingers, however you want to describe them, really think about individual rights, really think about human life. This was never about fourth trimester. You know, this was never about the third trimester. This was never about viability. This is always about a mystical religious primitive barbaric view that life begins at conception, which is, which is complete and utter nonsense. You know, cells start dividing at conception, but it's just a clump of cells in the first trimester. You know, where these pills are primarily used. And, you know, the consequence of using these pills is so much safer and so much better than using than actually going through with an abortion. You know, it's just it's just barbarism. Just it exposes the sheer unequivocal barbarism of some conservatives out there who support who support this. And I think this is to the heart and to the core of the abortion issue. The abortion issue was always about the first trimester. It's never been about the third trimester. And this exposes Republicans for what they are. I also think this is a killer issue for Republicans. As I've said, I think this is an issue that makes it very difficult for Republicans to win. To Trump's credit, there's a few words strung together that you've never heard from me, or not never, but really heard from me. To Trump's credit, there seems to be a lot of press out there that suggests that Trump in the background is trying to get Republicans to stop talking about abortion, trying to get Republicans to stop making this the issue. He recognizes, because he's a political and marketing animal, he knows, he realizes that a big reason why Republicans have been losing so much recently is because of the stance of abortion, since Roe vs. Wade was struck down. He was actually against striking down Roe vs. Wade because he thought this is what would happen. So once in a while, Trump happens to be right. And he's been trying to tell evangelicals to tone it down, to stop talking about it so much, to stop making a big deal out of abortion. It's going to be interesting to see if they listen to him. But yes, Trump gets it, but the rest of the Republican Party doesn't and certainly DeSantis hasn't. This is a disaster for them. Anyway, as you know, a Texas judge basically struck down FDA approval for this drug. One of the components in the abortion cocktail, you could call it in the abortion pill, and made it basically legal to distribute. Then a circuit court, a circuit court then went and said, no, no, no, that's too extreme. But what they did was that they basically imposed the pre-Roe vs. Wade rejection, pre-Roe vs. overturning rules on these drugs. So limited, significant limiting the access of these drugs for women by male and by other means. Anyway, Samuel Alito of the Supreme Court came in on Friday, and this is Samuel Alito, one of the most conservative judges on the Supreme Court. And basically temporarily blocked the lower court ruling that imposed title restrictions on the abortion pill. He basically has blocked it for five days. He has requested input during that period. And I guess the Supreme Court is going to decide. It looked like it was going to go to the Supreme Court anyway, but this is pretty big. The Supreme Court will decide whether to place an injunction over the Texas Court's opinion, whether to approve the Texas Court's opinion before it hears the full argument. It will decide this on Wednesday. This is a big deal. Following Wednesday, my guess is that then appeals to the court will go to resolve this case for good, or at least until the next big controversy. And this is particularly interesting given that the conservatives have a 63 majority at the Supreme Court. So it really will be decided by conservatives. And it's particularly interesting given that Republicans for decades have been complaining about the left using the courts to legislate. Well, what the Texas judge did is clearly to legislate. It wasn't an interpretation of the law. It wasn't an application to the Constitution. It was to legislate that the FDA basically didn't do a good job, which is not. Almost never. I don't think ever. The wall of the courts, and indeed it's the first example ever as far as I know of a court overturning a ruling by the FDA, particularly a ruling that's stood for 30 years by the FDA. So it's going to be really interesting whether conservatives stick to their conservative views, which is that legislation should be done by the legislature and the court should only review things that are relevant. And in that case, I think that they will overturn the Texas court decision straight out. If, on the other hand, they rule based on their ideological position, which is anti-abortion, dominantly, then they will support the Texas case. But the problem is the Texas case is so badly decided. I mean, it's so badly decided. I think even conservative judges can see that it's badly decided, that I don't know what kind of pretzel, what kind of twists and turns the Supreme Court will have to do in order to approve this. So at the end of the day, what I expect will happen, that in spite of the 63 conservative majority, I think they will overturn the Texas ruling. They will basically say this ruling is just garbage legally. We're not taking a position about the underlying factors. We're not taking a position about whether abortion should be legal, whether abortion pills should be legal. We are taking a position about how badly this decision was argued. We don't think this is within the purview of the court to make such a decision and we're overturning that. So that is my expectation of what will happen. I think that in spite of the fact that I disagree with many of the judges in the Supreme Court, there are adults in a sense that I don't think they view using the courts to nickel and dime specific issues and using whatever argument will get you there. I don't think that by the legitimacy of that. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they overturn this by a 9-0 majority. It could be an 8-1 or a 72, but it wouldn't be surprised if it was 9-0 given how badly, from my understanding, how badly the argument was made by the Texas judge. So stay tuned. This is going to be really interesting, the intersection between politics, between personal opinion and the rule of law. It will be interesting to see whether the rule of law still has any standing in the world in which we live. Tom says many opposing abortion also oppose contraception and sex education. I mean, again, what they really oppose, what the people who oppose what the men, and it's almost always men, who really oppose abortion and view life as starting a conception, what they really hate is sex, what they really want to restrain is sex, and what they really want to restrain and what they really want to put constraints on is women. And they want to control women's behavior and they want to restrain women's behavior and they want to be able to dictate to women how to run their lives and how to run their sex lives. And what they hate is sex that is done for pleasure, what they hate is sex that is done outside of marriage. What they hate and they want women, they want to have this over women that if you have sex, you're going to have to have the kid, so don't have sex because, you know, contraception is not perfect. And of course, many of them oppose contraception as well. So, and the reason to oppose contraception and the reason to oppose sex is to control women. And one of the reasons to control, that's one reason. The second reason is their opposition to pleasure and that comes from their Christian beliefs. That is the anti-man, anti-humanity, anti-woman perspective that Christianity brings to the world and why it is so antagonistic at the end of the day to liberty and freedom. There is no way to think of abortion as murder in the first trimester. No way. That is such an evasion, an evasion on a scale that it can only be true if you're being evasive, if you're being immoral, if you're rejecting reality and rejecting facts. So, no. Again, one can argue about, I don't think you'd be right, but one can argue about the third trimester. There is no argument about the first trimester. It is, it is in the first trimester, literally a clump of cells. It is a potential human being. If the woman decides to carry it to birth, but it is not a human being, it is not murder, it is not. It is just like brushing off skin cells. You don't consider that murder. All of your cells in your body are alive. All of your cells in your body are alive. Lots of things are living entity. You squash a cockroach. You don't say that's murder. Lots of things are living entity and you don't consider it murder. It is not a human being and it does not have rights. It's a parasitic growth within a mother that has the potential to become a human being. I mean, look at a microscope. You know what it looks like a few days after conception. Again, you know, they might, you might some, some argument around about a, you know, the third trimester, but there's just nothing. Yeah, I'm going to get a lot of heat for the cockroach statement. I am not for context, not comparing a fetus, particularly one that a woman wants to carry to birth to a cockroach. I'm just saying a life, the fact that something alive does not make it, does not make it killing it murder. That's all I was saying. And it's certainly parasitic. There's no question it's parasitic. So, yes. And it's certainly parasitic if the mother doesn't want it. So, absolutely, absolutely, you know, there's just no argument. So, all right, and yes, this is Catherine says separation of church estate is going by the wayside. Yeah, this is pure church. This is pure religion. Even those of you who claim to be secular and who oppose abortion in the first time asked that you are religious, you know, you're buying into religious argument, you're buying into religious dogma. You're buying into Christianity, whether you know it or not, whether you are willing to acknowledge it or not. All right. So, yes, interesting. Let's see what the Supreme Court of the United States says. Well, we know what the Supreme Court of Canada has to say. So, in Canada, a BC doctor, Dr. Brian Day, brought a case to the court, basically claiming that under the Canadian social healthcare system, too many people are in line waiting for critical care. And that there should be an option for those people waiting in line for critical care to be able to hire a private doctor to address their needs, to give them the treatment. That is what he was arguing for is to create a parallel private system, but focus primarily on emergencies, primarily on people who really need care and who can get it. He based his lawsuit on the idea that the current system violates to the, I guess, Canada doesn't have a constitution as a charter, which is similar to a constitution, and it violates to charter rights. The right to life, liberty, and the security of the person. That is, it does not allow people to pursue their lives or their liberty, and it certainly doesn't allow them to secure their human well-being. This is not an attempt, unfortunately, to completely undo the Canadian universal healthcare system. This was not an attempt to completely undermine, again, unfortunately, the socialized healthcare system nature of the Canadian system. This was an attempt to add on top of it, add on top of it, and to add on top of it. And the Canadians have been caught, rejected it, and turned him down. As Dr. Day said, quote, well, the Canadians have always gone down to the United States for care. We know all those who dried down to the Mayo Clinic, not that far from the Canadian border. Well, the Canadians have always gone down to the United States for care, but what do middle income and low-income Canadians go? The answer is they're not allowed to go anywhere. They stay and suffer and die on wait lists. The Canadian Medical Protection Acts prohibits doctors from billing the government for work they do in the public system, while also earning money for private clinics as well as billing patients on their insurance companies. They argue these sections are unconstitutional because they prevent patients from accessing private medical treatment when public systems sometimes can't provide timely care. And argued patients have a constitutional right to pay for private care when wait times in the public system are too long. Of course, the Supreme Court basically, today's decision affirms our ongoing efforts to preserve and uphold our public care system and confirms the legal argument heard at the B.C. Supreme Court and B.C. Court of Appeals. You know, this is from the health minister, the British Columbia health minister. So really horrific situation in Canada where long wait lists, just like in England and just like in pretty much every socialized health care system, people wait in long lines to be treated, to get care. Nobody cares about the individual. Nobody cares about my individual life. I mean, this is what's common. What is the same about the abortion story in the United States and the story about Canada? What unites the two stories? What is the philosophical principle that you can see in play here in both of them? Well, in both of them, what you can see is altruism and collectivism. If you're a woman, you expect it to sacrifice the rest of your life for the sake of some higher cause, some higher purpose. You know, the purpose of Christian ideologues believing that your purpose in life is to bring babies into the world. You're supposed to put aside your life, your plans, your future for the sake of a fetus, for the sake of an embryo. You're supposed to become a mother even if you don't want to become a mother. The state is going to impose on you motherhood. In Canada, it's exactly the same. You're sick. You're supposed to wait in line. You're supposed to sacrifice for the sake of the system, to sacrifice for the sake of those who might be in front of the line, for the sake of those who maybe can't afford the private health care that maybe you could afford if it was made available. You're basically sacrificing for the state and the state knows best. In both cases, the state knows best for you. The state knows best about your health care. The state knows best about your status as a mother or not. The state knows best how you should engage in your life with your values, what your future should be. You do not have, in both the United States and in Canada, under these doctrines, you do not have a right to your own life. You do not have a right to liberty. You certainly do not have a right to pursue your own happiness. This is the exact negation of what the abortion laws and socialized medicine in Canada are the negation of everything the Declaration of Independence stood for. Truly sad. Okay, let's see. You guys are just chipping away slowly towards our goal at this rate. I'll be here all day answering questions because we'll have to. I encourage you if you're going to ask questions to make it $20 or more questions so we can chip away at these goals a little faster. If anybody there wants to just support the show with some dollars, that'd be great. We're still about $575 short of our $650. We've got plenty of time to do it, so just reminding you. This is kind of a strange story, but it's a story that just highlights the conflicting interests and the conflicting storylines that you get. Once you accept status premises and once you accept the role of government as allocating resources, the role of government as dictating the public good that interests economically and everywhere and everywhere else. The Polish government, it turns out, has decided to ban imports of grains and other food from Ukraine. So here's the Polish government. Maybe Ukraine's biggest supporter. It's providing them with jets, fighter jets. It's supplying them with tanks, massive amounts of ammunition. Huge support to Ukrainians who have moved to Poland to be in granted work visas. They've been encouraged to stay and work. So here's a country that clearly is massively in support of, and I think justifiably so, Poland, as compared to the American right, Poland actually understands the threat that Russia poses. Poland actually understands that Ukraine is just a stepping stone. Poland actually understands the Polish government and the Polish people actually understand what is going on in Ukraine and why this war, it is essential for Russia to not win. Ideally lose, but certainly to not win. And they're willing to support Ukraine by all means possible, but accept. They're not willing to buy food and grain from Ukraine and you have to go, why? Why would they do this? Well, because Poland has an agricultural sector and agricultural sector in Poland does not want competition. Particularly they don't want competition just before an election. And there's soon going to be an election in Poland and the government is afraid to alienate farmers by allowing large quantities of Ukrainian grain in. One of the reasons Poland has landed up with a lot of Ukrainian grain is that Poland is on the way. The Ukrainian grain is going through Poland into the European Union and distributed in other countries. The problem is that because of the bureaucracies, because of the bottlenecks, because of all the different problems, a lot of that grain can't get to its final destination. And it's basically being stuck in Poland and before it rots, it's being sold in Poland and not thus reducing grain prices in Poland, which is not making Polish farmers happy. And I'm sure the Ukrainians are not happy about this, takes away our export market. It just shows how inefficient the whole European Union's setup is that Ukrainians cannot get their grain to the final market without having a bottleneck in Poland and without getting stuck in Poland. And the Poles have made a huge list of goods. It's grain, it includes honey, and many, many, many other food stuff. It'll be interesting how Ukraine now gets the food out of Ukraine to its customers if it can do it through Poland. But again, this is the kind of pressure politics you create in a mixed economy. Everybody's kind of pushing and pulling and trying to grasp whatever they can. And Polish farmers are threatened, so they put pressure on the government. There's an election coming up. The government doesn't want to alienate the farmers, so there you go. The Poles, of course, will suffer as a consequence of this because they'll be paying higher prices. But God forbid, they'll be competition. We know this. I've said this many times. If you really wanted to help poverty in Africa, the best way to do it is basically to reduce tariffs for food stuff, particularly in Europe. If Europe lowered tariffs for food stuff coming from Africa to zero, Africa would become the bedbasket of Europe. But a lot of farmers in Europe would go out of business. Good. Europe's comparative advantage is probably not farming. Neither is the UK. UK now has Brexit. Lower tariffs to zero and food stuff. And you become a magnet for African farmers, which by the way will create wealth and jobs in Africa, which will reduce the amount of Africans leaving Africa to try to come to the UK. So you can either have goods or people decide. Goods are good for you. By the way, that would also reduce inflation. It would reduce the cost of living. It would raise the standard of living. Food stuff would be cheaper, probably better, and quality of life would go up. And the farmers will have to find better uses for their land, maybe fracking. The UK has a lot of frackable natural gas under their farmland. Maybe they can do that. Talk about crazy central European countries doing unbelievably stupid things. Well, I don't know. It didn't make the news, surprisingly. You remember in the fall, or maybe it was the summer last year, it made the news that Germany had decided to keep the last three nuclear power plants because they were afraid of the coming energy crisis because of the war in Ukraine. So they decided because they were showed a natural gas and they were likely to be other problems, that they were going to indeed not shut down the three nuclear plants and they ran them through the winter. And indeed, luckily for Europe, the winter was a relatively mild winter, but they also managed to get a lot of natural gas through LNG. But they also had these three nuclear power plants that kept on going. Well, the winter's over and the Germans decided to shut them down and indeed they were shut down. Germany took the three last nuclear power plants off the grid last week and Germany has now no functioning nuclear power plants in Germany. So if this energy challenge remains through next year, it'll be interesting to see how the Germans find ways during the next winter that might not be as moderate as this winter, how they find ways to compensate for now the lack of electricity coming from nuclear power plants. A lot of the Greens are saying, no, no, no, we should be investing in more wind or solar. I don't know how many of these Greens actually live in Germany and how many of you have ever been to Germany. But the reality in Germany is that it doesn't shine that much. It's not like, I don't know, Puerto Rico. It's not like Arizona or even California. It's more like London. It's not the sunniest place on the planet. And yet, here you had nuclear power plants perfectly safe producing this carbon-free electricity at a... Yeah, they weren't cheap to run, partially because they were all technology and Germany is not invested in new technology nuclear power plants, so they were relatively expensive to run. They don't comprise a big chunk of Germany's energy production. They used to, as of 2019, they were over 10% of the electricity produced in Germany. Today, before they were shut down, it's close to 5%. But still, 5% is a lot. It's unlikely that you get that 5% from wind and solar, and particularly solar. But even if you did, as we know, it's unreliable. Solar and wind are unreliable. They go out and then they need backups. You need to back up the grid when the unreliables don't go. And how do you back up the grid? Well, probably with coal, the production of electricity from coal has increased over the last few years. It was on a path downwards, and then recently has gone back on a path up. And coal is cheap. There are plenty of coal plants in Germany. So nobody thought about maybe keeping the nuclear and shutting down coal if they're concerned about climate change. They don't seem to care. They seem to have this religion around renewable. If only we had more solar panels, if only we had more wind farms, everything would be fine. Natural gas. It was a challenge this year to keep the supplies running because of the war. Hopefully next year will be a little bit easier. Maybe they can increase the amount of electricity they produce through natural gas. But coal dominates natural gas. And renewables are something like 40%, which is a real problem. Because when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine, and 40% of your electricity depends on the wind blowing and the sun shining, what do you do? You need backup. Well, maybe you import electricity from nuclear-powered France. Maybe that's what you do. Anyway, German insanity. Again, the power is to be no best. And they are much more likely to try to buy the votes of people who are just scared, petrified, irrationally terrified of nuclear power. That is easier for them than anything else. Truly, truly nutty policy. Let me just remind all the superchats to see lots of five and $10 questions. Let me remind the superchats to follow John E.'s lead and maybe engage in some $20 questions so we can make our numbers. Talk about insane people. There's a theme going thematically here. We went from altruism and the state knows best to crazy people, the Germans. And now a local crazy person. A local crazy person, of course, is Marjorie Taylor Greene. At least today. We have lots of these crazies, but this is one of them. As you know, I think it was yesterday or Thursday. Again, hard for me to tell what day is what, given all the travel. Jack Tijera was arrested for distributing classified U.S. documents about many of them about Ukraine, the Ukraine war, many of them having to do with the U.S. military intelligence community's concerns about Ukraine's ability to sustain defense systems, the ability to launch a counter offensive. Some of them disclosed the fact that there were U.S. special forces on the ground in Ukraine, not in combat, but on the ground in Ukraine. I don't think that came as a surprise to anybody who actually thinks about this stuff, but that was for the first time officially disclosed. But there was also intelligence about Israel, about the Middle East, about Iran. There was intelligence about South Korea, which made the South Koreans pretty unhappy. There was intelligence about all kinds of areas. And generally, this is a kid that in order to show off, in order to show how much of a big man, how important he was, what a cool guy he was to his accolades within his little discord community, this is a guy who revealed classified top secret information. This is not something that should be celebrated. This is a guy who clearly violated the law and potentially shouldn't be tried for treason. It's not even the case that this is a guy, that this is a kid. It's not even the case that this guy had any malevolent intent. He didn't do this because he's a spy for foreign country. He didn't do this because he's a whistleblower. I mean, this is a kid who just did it because it was cool, because he could show off. Why did he have access to it? I covered this in a previous show, that it's nuts that we give 21-year-olds. I mean, I was 21. I had access to top secret information when I was in Israeli military intelligence, but it was siloed. I had access to top secret information that I needed to do my job in my scope of expertise and my scope of analysis. I didn't have, by virtue of having top secret clearance, access to all top secret information that the US intelligence agencies had available. But he did, because here's a guy in a Massachusetts state A-God unit who had access to information about South Korea and about Ukraine and about Russia, about conflicts within the Russian government and within the Russian hierarchy, Iran and Israel. I mean, how does he get it? Is he that... Oh, you didn't know I was a spook? People didn't know I was in military intelligence? I thought that was a well-known fact. I indeed did not work for the Mossad, but, of course, that's what I would say if I did work for the Mossad. So while I completely deny I'm working for the Mossad, you guys can do whatever the hell you want with it. I did work for Israeli military intelligence in the early 1980s during the Lebanon War. That was the end of my segment. So we did a bunch of interesting things during that period. Let's see. So this is a kid who's being unbelievably irresponsible, I mean, unbelievably irresponsible, revealing state secrets on the Discord channel that he was on. There were people outside the United States. Clearly he knew that this information would get to people outside of the United States. Anybody with a bit of a brain would know that it would then leak outside of his little group of accolades on the Discord channel. Indeed, it did. And people in the intelligence community were truly stunned by the quantity of material this kid got. This is representative, you're represented, by the way, if you live in Georgia, but you're representative generally because she's the American government and she's a well-regarded Republican, one of Donald Trump's favorites. And I think she has some juicy, I think she's on a foreign affairs or intelligence committee or something like that. This is your representative. This is the quality of your government. This is the quality of your Republicans. You tell me this woman is better than AOC. This is her tweet. Jack Toshera is white, male, Christian and anti-war. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime. And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more. Ask yourself, who is the real enemy? A young low-level national guardsman or the three dots? She starts it off by saying Jack Toshera is white, male, Christian and anti-war. So, I mean, this woman is a racist bigot. She is a religious fanatic and she hates the left so much that she is willing to say, hey, guys, if you're white, male, I assume she didn't include you, but I assume she wanted to include a heterosexual and Christian, then please reveal all state secrets. If you happen to be in the military or if you happen to be in the intelligence services, please reveal all state secrets, particularly, please reveal all state secrets that might, in one way or another, based on our view where anti-war embarrassed the left. Since this guy was an enemy of the Biden administration, it's okay for him to commit treason. This is a congresswoman. But why be surprised? This is a woman who believed in, you know, in every conspiracy theory the last 10 years, who is a complete nutter, but gets gotten re-elected by a big margin. Somebody in Georgia loves this woman. It tells you a little bit about the people in Georgia who are, you know, the nutcases who actually elected this woman to be in the House of Representatives. No, none of her conspiracy theories happen to turn out right. Jews are not firing lasers from space. It turns out, I mean, at least, none of the Jews I know did that. And what was that big conspiracy theory that she was part of? I forget what it was. But anyway, I forget the name of it. But it's just absurd. And of course, it would take Scott to defend her because she's good. Why is she good? She's good because she's anti-the left and QAnon. QAnon, that's the, thank you, Mansa, for reminding me, or Ian for reminding me. QAnon is fantastic because QAnon is anti-the left. So let's embrace QAnon. Let's embrace every nutcase who's ever endorsed QAnon. You know, so that because they're anti-the left, this is good. This will save the country. This is what we're waiting for, for Marjorie Taylor Greene to run the United States of America. Finding fathers. I mean, this is the complete destruction of the Republican Party as people like this. Now, I guess there's always been nutcases in the Republican Party. There's always been nutcases in the Democratic Party. But she is respected by potentially the future president of the United States. She is respected by the House majority leader who has given a juicy committee appointments. She is now a significant spokesman for the Republican Party. Again, this is a woman who is defending a man, a young man who has distributed top secret documents. Why? Because she thinks that when Ukraine is a Biden thing. And she thinks that, I guess, she thinks that Russia should be supported and not Ukraine because she, who was actually the treasonous one, would like to support Putin and not Zelensky. All right, crazy stuff. I mean, I wouldn't have believed that you would find somebody. Again, Jack Tejera is white, male, Christian and anti-war. And therefore, it's okay what he did. It's actually not just Ukraine. It's good. The real enemy, the real enemy. The enemy of the United States is the Biden administration. The enemy of the United States is the left. They should be the one who should be bombing and destroying and putting behind bars. This is the state of political discourse in America. You know, sometimes I try to be optimistic like yesterday about the state of America and then at times where I go, God, how can this country survive? How can this country actually survive? She does not have the best interest of the United States. It's hard. She hates the United States because she has no clue what the United States is. She has no interest in the land of the free, the home of the brave. She has no interest in individual rights. She has no interest in, oh, sorry, I guess Bonnie was kidding. I get carried away. All right, I want to make a correction, right? Sometimes when you say stuff that turns out to be false, you need to step in and say there was one. So I used as an example of the decline of San Francisco. I used the murder of Bob Lee, who was a well-known entrepreneur, a very successful founder in Silicon Valley who was murdered in the street at 2 a.m., stabbed to death in San Francisco. And like I think many people, I assumed that this was a random act and a suggestive of how dangerous San Francisco has become where even in the relatively safe part of San Francisco, in the South of Madison, what's called South of Madison, where a lot of the high-tech community lives and works, that he was murdered and this was a really bad sight about the city. Well, it turned out that he was actually murdered by somebody he knew. It turned out that he'd had a fight with somebody potentially about a woman, about somebody's sister. I haven't read the story. I'm not that interested in the story. But the point is that his murder is not a reflection of South of Market. Sorry, I thought it was South of Market, yes. This is not a reflection of San Francisco. The San Francisco is in deep, deep trouble. This is actually just a murder, a horrific event where two men argued and one chose the murder. The other is a consequence of they arrested the murderer and he is now being charged with murder. I don't want to say San Francisco is not as bad as I claimed it was or I said it was or they argued it was. It's really bad, but at least this story did not, was not, I shouldn't have used this story. We shouldn't have used the story in support of the idea that San Francisco is in bad shape. All right, just another quick reminder to people. Please use the $20 or $50 or $100 worth way behind on the, on the Super Chat. We've, we've got $500 to go. Hopefully there's some whales out there who are willing to put significant money towards supporting the Iran Book Show and getting us to our target. All right, this is the story that Christian has been waiting for for, I don't know, weeks now. It turns out that the president of El Salvador has announced that El Salvador will eliminate taxes on technology innovations with the goal of fostering economic growth. And of course the question is, you know, does this turn El Salvador and potential Hong Kong? Does this change dramatically the future of El Salvador? And I'd say this by itself. No, I think the much more important story going on in El Salvador is the story I covered extensively a while back. And I don't know why you can't donate from Spain. I mean, you can donate from lots of other countries. Lots of other countries step in. So I wonder if it's because the card is from the U.S. and you're in Spain, maybe you have to reside in the place where your card is or something like that. Who knows what the requirements are for YouTube. Anyway, so El Salvador, the real news about El Salvador is what they've done to eliminate crime. You know, and there's the potential they've gone overboard to do it, but here's the point. You're not going to have any economic success. You're not going to establish real markets. You're not going to have production and wealth creation until you eliminate or you significantly eliminate physical force until you make the country safe. Safe to transact, safe to interact, safe to live in, safe to produce in, safe to create in. That is safety, safety in the physical sense, safety from violent force, safety from crooks and criminals and murderers and gangs and cartels. That is the number one job of government. And only once you establish that safety can you then start talking about production and creation and building and wealth and all the rest of it. Now, until El Salvador's credit, that's exactly what's been done in El Salvador over the last year and a half. Now, one could argue about the cost of this, but there's no question El Salvador motor rates have plummeted. Crime generally has come down significantly. El Salvador now is as violent as, you know, let's say a medium to bad American city, but it used to be the most violent place on planet Earth and is clearly trending in a positive direction in terms of the violence. The first thing to remember about El Salvador is they've cut crime dramatically, which has created a situation where it's a much more livable place than it was before. It's a place where people will now consider investing and building, creating. In that context, starting to eliminate taxes on particular industries might make sense, but I think the problem, there's been a lot of problem here, and that is the attempt to pick and choose the industries that you want to eliminate taxes on. Ideally, what El Salvador would do is create a structure of robust protection of property rights, robust protection of, you know, contract law and business, you know, business transactions and then dramatically cut taxes on all business sectors and let, in a sense, the market decide on what the comparative advantage is of El Salvador. It might be that El Salvador's comparative advantage is technology, but it might not be. It might not be because it doesn't have the talent. It might not be because the talent doesn't have the talent doesn't necessarily want to move to El Salvador to live. It might be for a lot of reasons. So why not let the market figure out what the comparative advantage is by just making El Salvador an amazing place to invest money? Cut taxes, but first, cut regulations, cut constraints of starting businesses. That will also benefit Salvadorians, never mind immigrants, eliminate restrictions on immigration, allow people to come in to the country, whether in technology or anything else, allow immigration in. And, you know, then also, if you want to add to that an elimination of taxes on a particular sector, but see, that's not how Hong Kong became rich. Hong Kong became rich by not trying to pick winners and losers. Hong Kong became rich not by choosing the sector that was going to do well. It became rich by making the rule of law, you know, and no very little regulations at all, a stable money, we'll get the money in a minute, and that's what every country needs, and that's what El Salvador needs. And again, this idea that they will pick and choose and they will decide and they will, is probably not going to result in a positive outcome, a positive outcome. Now, when it comes to money, El Salvador is really interesting because it has two things. One is El Salvador uses the dollar as basically its currency, that's the U.S. dollars, it's a dollar-wise economy, it does not have a central bank that issues its own currency. So that gives us an advantage, the extent that the Federal Reserve is as bad as it is, is better than most third world countries' central banks. It has an advantage of the stability of the dollar. But the other thing that, you know, El Salvador did a few, two years ago, I think, was made a Bitcoin legal tender in El Salvador. So you could buy and sell stuff in Bitcoin in El Salvador. The problem there, of course, is Bitcoin. The price fluctuation of the last few years of Bitcoin from 15,000 to 60,000 back to 15,000 to now 30,000, does not exactly reassure one or does not exactly position Bitcoin as a good money to be used, given how volatile it is. So El Salvador has real potential. It's moving in the right direction. I think the main issue is the crime issue. If they can really continue to make headway in terms of crime and eliminating violent crime and eliminating property crime, and they can then institute real protection for contracts and property rights and profits and from businesses, and then, you know, they've now got to eliminate taxes and technology, but if they can then eliminate or reduce taxes on all businesses, there's no reason not to just eliminate taxes on all businesses. It's not like the Salvadoran government spends a lot of money on a lot of things. It can be pretty small. Yeah, El Salvador could become a real bastion of freedom in Central America. It could really change the dynamic of the region, but it would have to be consistent, and my fear is that this is not consistency. This is just a play, a play to be cool, a play to a certain constituency, an attempt to pick winners and losers again. Does El Salvador have local talent to facilitate a technological, a major technological center? Does it have the infrastructure? Instead of that, just allow capital to flow in, allow people to come in, allow them to do that with very low taxation and very low burden on regulation. And then let's see what happens. Let's see what evolves. Let's see what's ideal. Okay, finally, let's talk about some good news from a person who I don't like. And that's some good news from Juan DeSantis. DeSantis did sign at the end of last month a bill that dramatically expanded school choice in Florida. It's not the bill I would have wanted. It's not the bill, it's not an education saving account. It's not the kind of bill that is, that I think was signed in Arizona and in Nevada, though I think it's stuck in the court still in Nevada. So it's not yet the kind of all out real move towards real choice for individuals and parents in education. This is more of a voucher system. But Florida had a voucher system, but the voucher system was limited to kids with disabilities, learning disabilities, physical disabilities, and for very poor kids. What this voucher system is now is eliminated the restraints, it's available to anyone. It is capped in terms of the amount of money available every year. And given altruism, it will be given primarily or priority will be given to low income kids. And so it's not clear that it is indeed available. If every kid in Florida wanted this, it's not there. They haven't funded it with enough money to make it available for every kid in the state. So it's a step in that right direction. But the problem with the voucher system is always being that the government decides who can accept the voucher. For example, you can't use a voucher for homeschooling. You can't use a voucher for every private school. So under this program, participating private schools will have to abide by certain requirements in order to get this voucher. And one of those requirements, for example, is administering certain state approved standardized tests. The state still wants control over what you learn. The state still wants control over these standardized tests that I'm opposed to completely. So as long as your private school is willing to teach what the state wants you to teach, as long as they're willing to administer the test that the state chooses to administer, you're okay. But if your real school choice, real school choice would eliminate those strings and would let you as a consumer, as a parent, decide how to allocate that money to any educational establishment. Even an educational establishment, one the Santus and the Education Department doesn't like. So it's a step in the right direction. It's better than nothing, I guess. But it's just not a move in the right direction. It's not enough of a move in the right direction, particularly given the Santus, of course, signed the Individual Freedom Act, which is the Stop Woke Act. Will the Stop Woke Act apply to these participating schools? What if parents want their kids to be woke? It's just, it's not freedom. But it's a move in the, a small move in the right direction. So I guess it's good news. And as I said, I think there are better bills out there. We had one. And the Education Savings Account is still the way to go. And letting parents use the money for homeschooling is still the way to go. Letting parents use it for any kind of private school, whether the state approves of it or not is the way to go. But that's still going to take a revolution. That's still in our future. It's not in our present. All right, we, let's move to our Super Chat questions. We've only got two $20 ones. We've got a bunch of like five and $10 quans and a few $2 ones. I do want to remind everybody that this show is funded through your support, support partially through Super Chat, partially through monthly support. If you don't want to do Super Chat, that is fine. You have the ability to support the show with Patreon or Subscribestar or Paypal on youronbrookshow.com slash support or Venmo or Zell or anywhere you want. We'll figure it out and we'll figure out how to do it. So let me know. But you know, the shows cost money. The main money is my time. So I dedicate a lot of time to these and you are compensating me for that time. You can also, by the way, become a member of YouTube and that's another way in which you can support. So please consider supporting the show. Right now the best way to do so is by $20 or more questions. Let's hold off on the $5, $10, $2 questions and I'm encouraging you guys to do... This is not about bandwidth. This is not about expenses. This is about my time. And this is also about the time of Christian's time for editing the short videos if you value those. It's about the work that goes into it. But it's really about my time. It's about the value you get. Maybe you don't get any value. That's fine. But it's not to pay my bandwidth, Bill. Thank you, Chandler. John asks, Have you read Compromised Clinton Bush and the CIA by Terry Reid? I have not. It's an inside exposé of Iran contra, you know, cocaine, the whole Barry Seal cocaine connection. From Menah, Arkansas to the White House, how the presidency was co-opted by the CIA. Yeah, I mean, look, I get that whole thing. I find that often these books are a massive exaggeration about kind of the conspiratorial nature, but there's no question that what was going on with drugs, the CIA was involved in the drug trade, you know, guns for the Central American guerrillas. And I mean, you can go back to the hostage crisis in Iran and the Iran Contra affair. And the Iran Contra affair is linked to all of this Clinton stuff and that goes back to the Iran Contra, goes back to Reagan, and it goes back to Jimmy Carter. I mean, Agamem does a lot of really, really, really stupid things. Stupid things. All in the name of, you know, having really no strategy, having no real strategy for the country, no foreign policy strategy for the country, and having no long-term perspective. And the CIA has been an incompetent organization for a long time. I mean, I like the fact that some of these documents about Ukraine were saying how Ukraine's going to fare badly and how the Russians have an advantage. I mean, from day one, most experts thought Ukraine was lost and the Russians would overwhelm it very quickly. I'm sure that was the CIA's estimate when the war broke out. And it was the estimate of most retired generals and most commentators. Almost everybody thought Russia's going to win this and win this fast. And they all got it wrong. Remember the CIA in the 1970s was claiming that Russia's GDP was growing faster than the United States and that Russia was a real threat to the U.S. economically and militarily. What a joke. I mean, CIA analysts as good as, I guess, the education that they get. They don't get that great of an hour. And then they come up with this headbrained excuse. I think I saw a movie about Barry Seal and the whole cocaine connection. They come up with these insane headbrained ideas and nobody stops them. Nobody controls it. There's no adults in the room. It's kind of spooky. All right, Stephen Harper says, please answer my Greta Thunberg and her possible support for nuclear power. Where is it? Oh, so you added $20 to $10? Yeah, I answer all the $10 questions. I just give them less priority. So Stephen asks, I read something about Greta Thunberg coming out for nuclear power. It is hard to believe. You know, it is hard to believe and I don't really believe it. But so I'd have to go out and research it. Maybe she's come to her senses in one little aspect of her life. That would be cool. But it is hard to believe that she'd come to her senses in this aspect of her life. But I'll have to research it and get back to you because I don't actually, you know, there's things I just don't actually know. And I do actually have to research to figure them out. So I will look into it and get back to you once I find out what is going on. All right, Martin says, do you think escaping or attempting to escape imprisonment should be a criminal offense that's punishable with an added prison time sentence? Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think it is a criminal offense to, you know, violate, you're violating the law. You know, the law has incarcerated you. So I don't think we should just accept the fact that people are going to try to break out of jail and that's okay. Let them try. No, I mean, it's another law that they are violating and their prison terms should be extended. Absolutely. I don't see what the logic would be to not do that. What is the whole point of, you know, the whole point of imposing the law on you is to punish you, to penalize you for something that you've done and that needs to be enforced. You can't legitimize by not making it illegal, not enforcing it. All right, Michael says, was that Tony Grilled you on the witness stand rational or dishonest and obnoxious trying to score points with the jury and the judge? There was no jury. But yeah, I didn't know. I mean, it clearly, you know, it's trying to score points, trying to get catch me at contradictions, trying to catch me at minutia, knowing that he is doing something deceptive and not caring and not allowing me to show that it was deceptive, not allowing me the opportunity to, you know, so whenever they do, they do this in Congress too and I think it should be ruled illegitimate. I don't think you should allow this. Whenever they say, you have to answer the question yes or no and only yes or no, you can't add anything, you can't say anything. You have to answer yes or no. Do you understand? That's illegitimate because, and then they ask you questions where you need context and they don't allow you and the judge won't allow you to provide context and that to me is just inherently dishonest. And it's a tactic that judges should not allow. They just should not allow. There's yes, no nonsense is just non-objective and it's not about the truth anymore. It's about gotcha. Code says, finishing my report on Montessori for my professional research and reporting class, also any update on Ukraine, also MTG sucks. Yes, she does. Ukraine, you know, Ukraine is holding on to Bakhmut. But in spite of the fact that the Russians are throwing everything they have seemingly at Bakhmut, the Ukrainians are holding on probably not for very long now. My expectation is that at some point they will just retreat out of Bakhmut and leave it to the Russians. But I think my guess is that they are coordinating that with their so-called spring offensive. They're waiting for the right opportunity to do that and launch an offensive somewhere else and catch the Russians by surprise somewhere. I have my theories as to where that might be. But so far Bakhmut holds as of last night. It could change any minute now because clearly the Russians are gaining ground. But look, we've been talking about Bakhmut since July of last year. So it's been nine months. Russia's thrown the Wagner Group, their regular forces on it. They have expended thousands and thousands and thousands of troops. At some point it appeared that the Russians were losing a thousand troops every day in that battle. Two months ago everybody expected Bakhmut to fall. Since then they've been expecting Bakhmut to fall any day now. This includes US intelligence. So that's why I don't completely think US intelligence necessarily knows what the hell is going on. They have a lot of data whether they can analyze the data is a good question. Bakhmut is meaningless. By this point it's completely flattened. There used to be a town of 70,000 people. Now it's completely flat. It's gone. The buildings are completely flattened. There's nothing there. It's not particularly strategic. But I think the Ukrainians have decided that it was a great place to kill a lot of Russians. And I think they've achieved that and succeeded that. It's also a place where they've allowed the Russians to exhaust themselves. And I think again, if I were them, I would be looking at, okay, as the Russians keep exhausting troops there, where are they moving those troops from? Where's the weak point in the Russian front? How can we take advantage of that weak shot? And I expect that they will do that in, you know, whether it's later this month or whether it's in May or June. I expect that at some point you will see either an opening of a new front in the south. Towards Mariupol. Mariupol, maybe not Mariupol. Maybe something within them. But in the south, to cut off kind of the forces in the Koms-teria from direct link to Russia and make them dependent completely in Crimea. Or maybe in addition to another attempt in the north, in the Luhansk area to kick the Russians out of the risk of Luhansk. But that is, so that's I think the status quo. I think Ukraine has received, started to receive a lot of the tanks that the West has promised. Supposedly they need about 250 tanks before they launch the spring offensive. They're looking, these are Leopard 1 and some Leopard 2s, some British tanks. They won't get American tanks, the Abrams tanks until the fall. So whatever they do, they're going to do before they get the American tanks. But yeah, I think the Ukrainians have set it up so that they could spend the late spring and summer in a significant counter-offensive against the Russians. And hopefully, hopefully it'll be successful and they'll be able to regain significant amount of land both in the northeast and in the south. Alright, thank you Colt. Richard, how much do you think Iran and North Korea bandits are helping the Russian barbarians? Do you think the material armed support is making a major difference and why should the U.S. do about it? No, I absolutely think that they're supporting them. We know that the Iranians supplying the Russians with drones. We know that they've actually started producing Iranian-made drones in Russia. The Iranians' experts were actually flying the drones and teaching the Russians how to fly the drones from Crimea and other places around Russia. We know that in exchange Russia has promised to supply certain weapons systems to Iran. Iran is probably supplying the Russians with other weapons systems that they are short of. North Korea probably less just because North Korea has less capabilities. North Korea can probably help the Russians with things like ammunition and maybe certain missiles, but not much. I mean, North Korea is a pretty weak country to begin with. It has this robust army that has a lot of sophisticated weapons, that has very primitive weapons. But so does Russia, so it can probably back it up. Look, I mean, the United States should have dealt with Iran a long, long time ago. I mean, I think it's a great shortcut of wiping the Iranian regime out quickly and thoroughly and have been for 21 years or actually longer than that since 1979. I mean, in terms of me for probably 30 years. So I think what the United States should do about it, irrespective of Russia, is get rid of the Iranians and get rid of an Iranian threat, eliminate the Iranian military. And you can do that, I think, quite effectively without having to put significant American troops on the ground and putting a lot of Americans in danger. There's not much there there with Iran and the United States could easily get the help of the Israelis and they could do quite a job on the Iranians if they were given the green light. Richard Osas, what would have happened if the U.S. bombed Iran after 9-11 without sending in ground troops? Do you think this would be an improvement from nation building? Yeah, I definitely think so, but it also depends what we bombed and how we bombed and what was the goal of the bombing. I think the goal has to be in Iran regime change. I can't be anything short of that and I don't know that you can achieve that by just bombing. Suddenly you could probably achieve it if you bombed, but then you would incur significant civilian casualties. You would have to do more than just bomb. But yes, the Iranians were the enemy in the Middle East. There were the enemy in the Middle East and now the regime needs to go. So is the United States willing, for example, to bomb homes, the spiritual hotland of the Iranian regime? Are they willing to bomb regime buildings? Are they willing to assassinate the supreme leader of Iran, or bomb him into oblivion? Are they willing to go after the centers that's real, centers of power? And if they were willing to do that, then I think the world would be a very, very different place today. But of course, the world would have to be already a very, very different place for America to even do that. But you wouldn't have had ISIS, you wouldn't have had al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda would have collapsed. You would have had a lot less terrorism since then and America would have had a lot less fewer troops around the world. Because of it, the world would generally be a safer place. There would be more admiration for the United States. I mean, it's hard to tell because that's just one action in a vacuum. But nothing good came from nation building or very little good and a lot of bad and very little bad and a lot of good would come from the correct kind of foreign policy and the correct kind of actions. All right, we are still $400 short, so that would require everybody on the chat to do $5. Not that crazy, five bucks and we're there. All right, Harper Campbell says, do you think Putin knows he's screwed up on some level or is he a thoroughly delusional megalomaniac? No, I think he knows he's screwed up. I think he knows. I think he lives in this incredible anxiety. He feels the world closing in on him. If he doesn't know he's screwed up, I have a feeling the chief of China kind of told him he's screwed up. So I think this is closing in on him. He's constantly looking for exit strategies. He knows this did not go the way he wanted. Now he's delusional in a sense that he thinks he can get out, but he is backed into a corner. I don't think that means he'll launch nuclear weapons, at least not beyond tactical. But you know, the guy is a combination of delusional megalomaniac and he knows he's screwed up. Suppose you're a, this is not your average algorithm. Suppose you're a German during World War II, you always opposed the regime. Do you have a moral duty to escape? Do you have a moral duty? And if you don't, you deserve whatever happens to you. I think you have a moral responsibility to yourself. I hate the term moral duty. You don't have a moral duty to do anything. You have a moral responsibility to yourself to your own happiness to escape. And absolutely, if you don't escape, if you're there in Germany, you deserve whatever happens to you. Whatever happens to you, you happen to you. You know, you're part of Germany. And when Dresden is flattened and you're killed in Dresden, then you are part of Germany. And therefore you went. It doesn't mean anything to say you didn't deserve it. So absolutely, you know, get out. Your life depends on it. In every sense of the term life, it depends on getting out. So absolutely, your moral responsibility to your own happiness is to escape. And if not, to fight the regime and to try to protect yourself so you don't get hurt in the process, but to fight the regime. And there were brave Germans who fought against Hitler locally. I mean, not very successfully, but they did try. What would the world look like if the US adopted Reagan style rhetoric about freedom and actually took a few meaningful steps to practice it at home? Did his rhetoric have a major impact on Eastern Europe in the 1980s to help end the Cold War? Yes, it did. I've said this many times. Lech Walensa has said many times that Reagan's rhetoric inspired the solidarity movement in Poland, inspired the rise up against communism in Poland, that really kind of led off all these other movements that ultimately brought the Berlin War crumbling down. It inspired, I think ultimately, the people in Prague, the people in Budapest and the people in East Germany who ultimately walked to the wall and knocked it down. And Reagan says, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Word of that got to the East Germans. Word of that got to the people, particularly in Eastern Europe. And they were inspired by it. It gave them a moral backbone. It gave them a sense that they were on the right side of history and that they had, and there was somebody over there that appreciated their fight, and that recognized the fight that they were engaged in, recognized its importance, recognized its value, and was willing to support it, even if that support was only expressed in terms of words. Gale says, a Canada Supreme Court refuses to listen to opposition by Dr. Brian Day and patients. Yes, sad, sad day for Canada. Apollo Zeus, you'll take on panipassi, I don't know what it is, panpsychism. Panpsychism? Panpsychism? I'm copying and pasting it so I can look into what the hell it is because I have no idea. So my take is, I don't know. Richard, Richard's being very generous today, thank you Richard. Richard says, Richard's doing multiple $50 questions. Slowly itching us towards our goal, but much faster than before Richard showed up. I sometimes have a problem knowing when to move on from relationships and when it's time to cut some out of my life. I tend to see the best in people and find it difficult to walk away from someone I admire. When is it time to move on? God, I mean, that's an almost impossible question to answer because it depends on so many factors. But if you know you have a problem, if you know you tend to delay, if you know you tend to give them too much credit, then it's up to you then to be on the lookout and to figure it out. Your life depends on it, literally your life depends on it. Every day you waste on a relationship that is destructive to you is a day you're not building yourself up. It's a day you're not making your life better. So it's incumbent upon you to think about the relationships you're in, in the context of your knowledge that you tend to give people too much credit, that you tend to have too benevolent an approach to people that you have a relationship with. And you have to really evaluate yourself. But when is it time to move on? Whenever you are convinced it's time to move on. Whenever you rationally know that the time you're spending with this person is a net negative. So it's always about positive and negative. It's always about either you're moving towards life or towards death. And if the relationship is not moving you towards life, if the relationship is not a positive and you can't say to yourself it is a positive, then it's time to walk away from it. Because what you want are positives, what you want are win-wins, what you want are in every aspect of your life. You want to be moving forward. You never want to be moving backwards. And you have to take into all the factors that are involved and morality is one of those and the extent to which this person is moral or not, the extent to which this person is rational or not, the extent to which this person is open to change or not. Because you can't give up if people are open to change and maybe it's worth holding out for that change. But are they really? Are you being honest with yourself about whether they are or not? So it's really about you asking all those questions and you evaluating and introspecting about and observing this person and introspecting about your own values. Is this person helping me move forward or are they holding me back? I hope that was helpful. Alright, James says, Is Kant the reason destruction is celebrated? Or does ugliness naturally have to bubble to the surface without an advanced presentation of a proper alternative? I mean, look, there was nihilism before Kant. There was destruction before Kant. What Kant did is make it sophisticated and provide a sophisticated philosophy for those who ultimately wanted to engage in that destruction. So I think the ugliness is there whenever people choose to evade. But even people who might not have the right philosophy, might not be completely convinced of the right philosophy, might not be able to defend or articulate the right philosophy, they might still be decent enough to be able to say, well, but I'm not for destruction. I don't believe in killing people. I don't believe in burning stuff down. I don't believe in this or that. But in the absence of a good philosophy, in the absence of a good solid philosophy, there will be more people who are eager to destroy. It's not that everybody will be eager to destroy. There will be more of them. And particularly given that they will encounter less opposition because those who are the good people might not have the tools, the cognitive tools, the argument, the conviction to challenge them and to question them and to oppose them, to oppose the destructive elements. James says, we need to create a large segment of the population with a massively strong mindset and undeniable clarity. I don't know how you create that. We've got to find those people and help them get the philosophical tools that make it possible for them to stick to that. I think Richard is trying to get us our goal single-handedly. It would be nice if somebody gave me my hand, but Richard has gotten us over the hump. We're just $255 short of the goal we want to get to. All right, Richard says, extremely helpful. Thank you, Iran. Also, I'm not sure if you saw my email, I sent you about a consulting Zoom meeting a few weeks ago. I had dollars for meeting to discuss private school in the subject line. No, well, no, I don't think so. At least it's not jumping to my recollection. Let me, if you can send it again, I'll also look for it. Let me copy-paste this so I remember to look for it. But if you can send it again, that'd be really helpful, and I will promise to get back to you. It could have just slipped through while I was traveling and I missed it. George, thank you, George. Really appreciate the support. George is jumping in to help Richard. We're now only $200 away from our goal. George says, why is it they're more objective of scholarship and discussion of Aristotle versus Kant? Is there too much to focus on the negative? No, I mean, there's not enough objective of scholarship on a lot of things. But there is, right now, an iron-rand university course being taught on Kant's philosophy. So, you know, taught by Jason Rines, who is a philosopher, who was a philosopher and used to teach philosophy at university level and a PhD philosophy and really, really smart guy, if you don't know Jason. And he's teaching this course on philosophy of Kant. I think other than Leonard's treatment of Kant in his history of philosophy, it's the first time where there's a thorough, comprehensive kind of analysis of Kant's ideas. So, I think as we grow as a movement, as there are more objectivist intellectuals out there, there's more, if you will, division of labor, there's more people interested in a variety of different things. There's just no bodies to do the work. We will see much more of this kind of stuff. We will see much more of Aristotle versus Kant, but deeper discussion of Kant, deeper discussion of Hegel maybe, of Housseau, of the key, you know, philosophers that have screwed up the modern world. But also some analysis of some of the better philosophers, John Locke maybe, and of course all in the context of kind of Aristotle. So, we need just more philosophers to do the work. I think there's no reason not to do it. It's not about focusing on the negative. It's more about who's going to do the work. And, you know, I think Leonard's primary priority was to teach us objectivism, to do the positive work, to teach us what objectivism is and how to apply it and how to understand it and how to inductively derive it if you will, right? And I think he did, that was his work and that's his life work. He did a lot of other things on top of that, but that was the primary. Teach us objectivism. And now that that is done in a sense, and we've got a lot, you know, there's more work to be done, but that big chunk is done. Now a lot of our philosophers need to do a bunch of other stuff, apply it to life and politics and ethics and all kinds of other things, but also apply it to the history of philosophy and this thinker versus that thinker and trying to explain common trends in the context of that. So I think the work is going to get done now that we have more people to do it. Hope that answers your question, George. Thank you for the support. Al says, Illinois is looking to lift the ban on construction of nuclear plants. That's good. I'm not sure, good and surprising given how democratic Illinois is, but good and surprising, but you know, ultimately nuclear power plants need federal approval and the federal regulatory agency is still as destructive and as slow and as anti-nuclear as ever. And this is the agency responsible for nuclear power. I remember now, I promised yesterday to say something about Dr. Peacoff and about Leonard Peacoff and I never did. So I just wanted to say, I'm not going to say much about this. I just want to say that I talked to him Friday night. Had a long conversation with him Friday night and I just want to say he sounded great. Sharp and energized and excited and we hadn't talked in a long time and so it was great to catch up and he was full of energy and it was great to, you know, and it was kind of late in the evening even for him. Certainly late in the evening for me. And it was just a lot of fun to hear from him and I thought you would want to know just that he sounds like he's doing fantastic. I mean, he's almost 90. He'll be 90 in October. He's going to have his 90th birthday in October. And so he's an 89-year-old and he's doing well. He's falling and he gets into trouble and he shouldn't live alone and a lot of issues. But health-wise, but fundamentally, his mind is still there and he's still living. That capital L living. So that is all good and it always amazes me how, I mean, this is the thing. One of the great things to learn from Leonard Peacoff is he's always productive. He's always looking for things to do. He's always looking for projects. Or projects find him and he embraces them and when he gets a project like that, he goes all in in spite of the health problem, in spite of the lack of energy, in spite of the age, in spite of everything. He just jumps into the project and he does it and I've always, I mean, he keeps retiring from philosophy and then doing other stuff. But he never retires, retires. He's tried sculpture, he's tried writing novels, he's tried writing poetry, he's tried writing songs, he's tried so many different things and failed at most of them. But the point is he's always active and always trying and always pursuing values. And even when you don't attain them because you might be older because you just don't have the energy because you're too old to pick up the skills, the trying is so amazing. It's the pursuit of values, that pursuit. I have huge, huge, huge amount of admiration for him for just that, for living every year in pursuit of values, constant pursuit of values. Michael says, he has $5 more from a loyal monthly supporter. Enjoy the show and daily updates. Thank you, Michael. Anonymous user says, did you see the woman calling Alex Epstein a racist white supremacist in Congress? Absolutely despicable. Yes, I did. I thought Alex handled it well. Daniel says, thank you. Thanks Daniel. Viva Yorani says, Chandler says, for so much more than bad with thanks for the show, it's made working on the weekend way better for me. Thank you, Chandler. I appreciate it. Sorry, I lashed out but I didn't get the context. Phillip says, what's the chain of reasoning to establish that the right of life purely from facts of reality? I mean, that's a big answer. That's a very big answer. But the right to life, the facts of reality, you start with God. I mean, it's never easy to do the induction. So I'm just going to, it's a $10 question and it's late. So I'll just give you kind of a very big outline. You start with what is life and the requirements for human life. The requirements for human life. And you have to come at this from the perspective of human life is a value. You want to live. Indeed, it's the value that creates all other values. It's the context in which all other values are created. You have to be alive. Survival is the standard. And then you have to observe facts of reality. What allows for human beings to live? What are the facts of reality that makes human life possible? And hopefully you come to the conclusion that the fact of reality that makes human life possible is the use of the human mind, human reason. And you can see that in the world. Human reason applied is what makes human life possible. Alright, so now you've got that and okay, but then you have to ask the question, okay, what is, what is, what endangers human life? Right? We know what makes it possible or what endangers the means for human life? What endangers reason? And again, you can discover facts in the world that will show you that the real danger to human life, the real danger to reason is force and coercion. And if you combine that, life requires reason. Reason must be free from coercion in order to provide for human life. That's the right to life. The right to life is the right to pursue the actions using your own mind in pursuit of your own values to achieve your life. That's what the right to life means. And those are the things you have to induce, right? Life is the standard and then what facilitates life is reason. Reason is man's basic means of survival. And what makes it possible for reason to promote human life is freedom, the absence of coercion. And if you combine that, that's what rights mean. I think that's right. And you can always, the best way to do this is to sign up and take online, YouTube somewhere, Leonard Peacuff's lecture series on Objectivism through Induction, where I think he induces, he goes through this chain inducing the right to life. Richard is still around. Richard asks, okay, I send it again to your YBS address. Email. Thanks. Awesome to hear that Leonard's doing well. I also think he needs someone to apply Alex's framework to data privacy issues. There's so many fallacies in data privacy. Yes, but that's true of any field. Any field you enter, you've got to take Alex's framework and put it in there. This could be the best clip ever. Which one? Which clip is that? That was the best clip ever. Bonnie, you have to tell me I'm in super suspense now. I don't know which clip she's referring to. Is it the chain of reasoning to establish the right of life? That's the best clip ever. I don't know. All right. Jennifer says, love the show. Thank you, Jennifer. Mark, Thomas, what is your schedule for the rest of April, May? I'll be doing shows pretty much every day from now until April 25th, April 26th. I'm going to be in Israel. And I'm not sure what the schedule is then. And then after Israel, I'm going to be in London. I'll be in Spain. I'll be in Italy. And I'll be in the Netherlands. By the way, if anybody wants to organize a talk for me in any of those places, Spain, Netherlands, London, and, you know, if it's then, if you can organize a talk for me, you know, good group 50 plus, we can maybe arrange for that. But that's where I'll be. I'm sure I'll have already got a couple of talks already aligned. Stephen Hopper, excellent show today. Thank you. Okay. Richard says, people need to pitch in more. I'll get us there myself if I have to. We're down 175 bucks, Richard. I don't know if you want to do all that yourself. I've been missing you on shows. My quality of life went down, not having them. I appreciate that. Thank you, Richard. All right, guys, $175 short. We've got 82 people watching live. Basically two bucks from everybody gets us there. Five bucks from a bunch of people gets us there. Don't let Richard do it all himself. But chime in. Bonnie just did by giving $2 for this could be the best clip ever. I'm not sure again. Oh, the clip on induction. She's saying that's the best clip ever. But jump in with $2, $5, $10, anything you want, anything you can, anything that you think is commensurate to the value you get from the Iran Book Show. I'll spend one night in Barcelona. I'll be in Valencia in Spain for three nights. Valencia, Spain, visiting a friend. And yeah, Richard is truly committed to getting us there all by himself. So Richard just did $100. All right, Richard says, when you contemplate having children, was there an ideal number you had in mind? Do you think having a second child greatly increased those values you gained from parenthood as compared to only having one child? Look, I think this is very much a question that varies from people. It depends on your values. It depends on your experience with the first child and your experience with the second child. It depends on your approach and how important being a parent is to you and how many children you want going in. I have to say that going into parenthood, I think both my wife and I wanted four kids. I think that was, she came from a family with four siblings. I came from a family with four siblings. It seemed about right. It seemed like a great challenge. It seemed really cool. And so we went into it wanting four kids. We also said, we're going to wait. We're not going to have kids right away. We were married seven years before we had our first son. But then when you have a child, all the plans that you had before become meaningless because the experience is so overwhelming, overwhelmingly positive, but overwhelmingly difficult as well. It's a massive challenge. It's a massive amount of work. It completely re-orient your life. It re-focuses in a way that I don't think you can expect and you can anticipate. And suddenly, for us at least, like having four was like, whoa, there's just no way that could happen. I mean, given them out of time that we invested in our kids, there would be no time to do anything else. And it was really all consuming. And particularly the first few years, you put a huge amount of effort into it, a huge amount of work. I mean, it's rewarding. It's worth it. But once you have that experience, it's not clear that you want to keep repeating it. So we ended up having two, and I think that was the right number for us. But I can understand people who want more. I can understand people who want one and just have one. And I understand people who don't want to have kids. But it really depends on you and particularly your experience with that first kid or your second kid. Certainly after a second kid, we said, no more. I mean, with one kid, you can kind of god them. You know, it's two on one. And you can play zone defense. When it's two kids, it's man, man, you know, one on one with three kids, they outnumber you. And it's just, yeah, I couldn't imagine it. And I admire immensely people who have twins and triplets and how they manage. It's so much work. I think Leonard once said in a Q&A, he said, evolution screwed it up. We shouldn't have monogamy. You know, children should be a product of an orgy so that every child has more than one father and one mother. So because you need more than one father and one mother just to stay alive, you know, managing the first kid, right? I mean, he was kidding. But that was an expression of him when he had a cure of how much work and how surprising it was to him how much work it actually entailed. By the way, we're only $44 short. Thanks to a large extent to Richard, but also Andrew just chipped in 20 bucks. So we're very close. And I think we're going to, I think we're going to make it. Matthew just chipped in with 20. There's a clip of an earnest little boy asking any mom about Ramadan. He cries about sacrifices and that many died that month. It seems a non sequitur until you realize that he bears their death as a personal burden. Tragic. Yeah. I mean, it becomes a personal burden because it's a consequence of your faith and you believe in this. And I mean, this is what religion does to it. This is how it creates guilt and it embeds guilt into you and it institutionalizes it. And it's a horror story. Religion generally is a horror story. I know some of you are religious, but the more seriously you take it, the more of a horror it becomes. And I think those of you who survive with religion is because you don't really take it that seriously. And that's a good example in Muslim communities where they do take it seriously. It's unbelievable destructive to human life and human values. Matthew Afonso Durant says, a show on personal finance and investing would be useful. Maybe an appendix to your wars for life. Sadly, my finance is such that I can't sponsor it. I mean, I did a show like that. If you go to YouTube and you search personal finance, you'll find it. And it's been a while. I should probably do another one just just just for fun. And because there were a lot of you who are new and maybe didn't hear it the last time. I'll say a lot of things I said last time, but I'll probably say some new stuff just because new stuff will occur to me as I do this. All right, we are $24 short. And I'm out of questions. Thank you, Bonnie. Thank you, Daniel Daniel says happy anniversary. You're on have a fun trip time in Israel. I appreciate that the real anniversary kind of trip is the one to Italy. We're going to spend seven, six days basically in Rome. We've got a private tour of the city chapel lined up and the Vatican Museum. We're going to go to the go to the one of my favorite museums in the world, which is the World Vatican Museum. And then the other one of my favorites is the Bogeze Gallery. We're going to do a tour of Caravaggio. I love Caravaggio paintings. And we're going to go and see different Caravaggio paintings and different museums and different churches. So it's going to be a blast. We're going to do all the things that my wife and I love doing, seeing art, eating great food. We've got restaurants, reservations already and just just relaxing and having a good time and just wandering around the city of Rome. And I've never really spent quality time at Rome. It's always been quick in and out touristy stuff. And I'd like to have a little bit more of a relaxed time in Rome. Richard, thank you. Richard got us over our goal. He promised he would. And he did. I did an ex-Havadi girl and she was one of five. They said that the family was small compared to friends. Yes, it is. 8, 10 is typical. They, the biggest challenge was the first and each next kid came with decreasing marginal difficulty. Is this true? I assume religion impacted this. No. I mean, for us, the second child was much more difficult just in terms of organizing and coping because the first child was still young. But one of the things they do, the Harididu, is particularly this is true of girls is that the girls at a very, very young age start helping out with housework and we're taking care of the baby. And you can see five, six year olds cooking and, you know, so they get them working in the house very, very young and taking care of the siblings very, very young. So they've got this down. They've got a whole mechanism of how to do this. Not something I would want to do with my kids. I wouldn't want to, you know, put them through that as part of them growing up is this responsibility to take care of their siblings. So anyway, that's yes, but the holidays have lots of kids. And I guess it gets easier because they put the kids to work in that way. Thank you, Richard. And thank you for getting us over. I don't know how much money you contributed here, but it's more than a couple of hundred dollars. So thank you. Really, really appreciate it. Derek says I'm 17 and I learned a lot watching. Thank you, Derek. I really appreciate you telling me that. I mean, to a large extent, I do these shows for people like you. And it's great to hear of new people. It's great to hear of young people discovering these ideas and engaging with these ideas. And I hope that you've either read Iron Rand already or going to read Iron Rand. But that's the most important thing to get out of my show is ultimately read Rand, read Alashrug, read The Found Head, read The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism, and the rest of it. All right, everybody. Thank you. Another show tomorrow, probably at... I don't know exactly, but I'll let you know. Three o'clock Pacific time, East Coast time. I'm going to watch The Celtics. It's playoff seasons. That's the other complication that we now have with these shows is it's playoff seasons. The Celtics are playing. I think the game started 20 minutes ago. I'll go catch it. I will see you all tomorrow, probably 3 p.m. East Coast time, and...