 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Book Show. All right, everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show on this Thursday, March 7th. I'm coming to you from the fantastic city of London. And it's interesting. So I was walking around London today, working mostly. I did a session from a public speaking seminar, kind of the part two of my public speaking seminar was a lot of fun. But I was walking around London. And you know, when you watch the news in the US or anywhere in the world, the impression you get is that basically London is a city now overrun by Islamists. It's a little enclave dominated by Islam and Muslims, scary to walk in the streets, and so on. And I was just out and London is completely normal. I'm sure that's different on the weekends when the protests happen and thousands, tens of thousands of people are out in the streets and many of them are obnoxious and violent and the police does little to stop them. But right now, today, this evening, London was as vibrant, dynamic, exciting, fun as it always is. The restaurant scene is buzzing. The food here is amazing. I may be my favorite restaurant city in the world. And yeah, you know, it's those of you who are hesitant to come to London, don't come to have a vacation. I mean, literally, just outside my hotel, it's hard to walk down the street. It's so dense, there's so many people. It's like Times Square in terms of just a number of people that are here. So yeah, I'm sure there are areas in London you wouldn't want to go to. There is an LA in New York you wouldn't want to go to. But go there. Let's see, guys, I can't read comments on the chat. I certainly can't read long comments on the chat. If you want to engage with me directly, particularly given that the camera's here and the screen is down there, then Super Chat is the way to do it. I can glance down. It's highlighted. And of course, you also support the show while you are doing that. I'm actually going to raise the monitor just a little bit so that I don't have to look down quite as much. Let's see if there's all come on. All right, I think we got it. What fell down? My phone. All right. All right. Let us see. Yeah, tomorrow heading to Amsterdam. Another beautiful city, another amazing city. And doing the Iron Man Conference in Amsterdam, which will be a lot of fun. So I am looking forward to that. All right, what else do we want to cover before we get to the crux of the issue? Yeah, I can't keep track of the chat. And everybody's there. Anyway, it is late in London. What is it? It's 9 o'clock in London. This is high of all guys. I could be out there enjoying the night life of London, but no, I'm committed to doing these shows. And here I am doing the show. Don't forget, use the Super Chat to support the show. It's important. It's how we keep the show going and how we keep it. How we sustain it, how we fund it. This is the way it gets funded and sustained. All right, altruism and farm policy. So I noticed two articles today in the newspaper that struck me as, I don't know, maybe the best word for that is insane, crazy, if Americans are illustrative, very illustrative, of farm policy, American farm policy, American military thinking, and the complete disaster that is American farm policy in general, and in particular, under the Biden administration. But it goes right across the board. I mean, if people are concerned about money giving to Israel and Ukraine, this is crazier in many respects. OK, so the first thing that I saw was that the United States intends, the United States intends to build a port, a new port. I mean, it'll be a mobile port. It'll be a makeshift port. But in Gaza, so they intend to build a send, I guess, Marines or American troops into Gaza, or engineers, or I guess the Marine Corps can build these things, and build a temporary port. And that port will enable American ships with aid to bring aid to the Gaza Strip. Now, I don't know, this makes me furious. It just drives me nuts. The number one priority of the United States farm policy is not to defeat Hamas. It's not to destroy the enemies. It's not to allow Israel to do the job, which is to send a clear message to the Iranians and to Islamists all over the world that the West, as represented by Israel, will not tolerate the violence. The number one priority of the United States government right now is to provide efficient humanitarian aid to Gaza, even at the cost of lots of money, at the cost of American resources, and at the cost of, potentially, American lives. Do you think that sending Marines into Gaza is risk-free? Is that how Ronald Reagan thought when he sent Marines into Beirut, thinking that he was going to bring peace to a civil war-ravaged country where the Christians were fighting the Muslims, fighting the Druze, fighting each other, and where Syria had dabbled in and out of, and the United States was going to enter with a few Marines to solve all the problems right after he rescued Yasser Arafat from being killed by the Israelis? That's Ronald Reagan. And now Biden wants to send Marines to build a port and then provide food for the Gazans, for the people who embraced, supported, and many of them participated in Hamas and in the death and destruction Hamas has brought to Israel and indeed Hamas has brought to the Palestinian people themselves. This is the priority. This is what America must do. I mean, this is the epitome of altruism. This is self-sacrifice. This is about sacrificing America's real interests, about sacrificing America's real interests, about sacrificing America's wealth, sacrificing American kids, to die to help the enemy. And let there be no mistake, Hamas is an enemy of the United States. Hamas is not just an enemy of Israel. This is not just an isolated war. This is pure altruism, pure sacrifice. There's no upside. Although, you know, the Pentagon today, this is the second story I noticed, the Pentagon today issued a warning to Israel, a warning to Israel, wagged its finger at Israel, that Israel potentially faced a strategic defeat in Gaza. Ooh, you know, this caused me to pay attention. Strategic defeat. Wow, I mean, Israel is the United States urging Israel to accelerate its invasion of the last piece of territory in Gaza that is not under its control, Rafa. Is the United States urging Israel to do more to destroy the Hamas infrastructure that still survives? Is the Pentagon suggesting that Israel redouble its efforts to defeat and destroy and annihilate Hamas? And maybe to, again, bring defeat to the Palestinian people so that they know they've been defeated, which is crucial? Well, of course not. Of course not. Now, the Pentagon is warning Israel that it faces strategic defeat. And that strategic defeat is the humanitarian crisis that's unfolding in the devastated Gaza Strip. And the idea here is you might win the battle. You might beat Hamas. But if you let Palestinians starve, if you let Palestinians not gain this aid, then you're basically losing the war. How is that? If the Palestinians suffer too much, then, you know, then Hamas will resurrect itself, then hatred with Sima, and Israel will land up with the Palestinian people hating it even more than they did before. It's, yeah, it's pretty unbelievable. And this is from the Pentagon that left Afghanistan with a tail between their legs that poured billion, well, not billions, I think a trillion dollars into Afghanistan. Lost thousands, many, many more men than Israel was lost in Gaza did everything in their power to be nice and to be friendly and to be peaceful and to give them aid and to give them food and to give them water and not to kill any civilians and not to do this and not to do that. And were rewarded by being defeated, rewarded by the Taliban coming to power, rewarded by the fact that the Taliban today is host to all the terrorist organizations that the United States went to Afghanistan and wrote a kick out in order to eliminate. It was the same Pentagon. The Pentagon, the fail to win in Iraq, the fail to win in Afghanistan, the fail to win in Vietnam, the fail to win in Korea, the Pentagon that seems to care more about civilians of the enemy nation than it does of its own troops. The ties, the hands of its marines, that blindfolds them and sends them into battle as sacrificial lambs for what? For the well-being of the enemy. This Pentagon is criticizing Israel because it doesn't care enough about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza in spite of the fact that Israel counter to what I believe it should have done, counter to what it should have done objectively has been funneling aid into Gaza throughout this crisis, allowing trucks to go in. This is in fight of the fact that Israel still supplies electricity, water to Gaza in spite of the fact that they shouldn't be. Gazans don't deserve it. They don't deserve aid. They don't deserve aid from Israel. They don't deserve aid from Israel, from anyone. They have exhibited the worst kind of barbarism. They deserve whatever pain and suffering. And to some extent, for some of them, death for what has happened, for what they have inflicted upon themselves, for what they have done, for what they have launched, for what they created, for what they supported. And the only way this will change, if the Gazans realize that, and the only way the Gazans will realize that is if they are thoroughly unequivocally defeated. But every time the world goes, oh, poor Gazans, we need to support you. We need to send you food, we need to send you water. We'll hold the Israelis back. We'll tie their hands. We'll blame them for the lack of a ceasefire. We'll force them to sacrifice to you. Every time that happens, Hamas gets stronger, and Israel's ability to win basically disappears. But this is altruism. The meek shall inherit the earth. The weak are the virtuous. The strong are obviously the villains. The strong are the bad guys. Israel, by this definition, are the bad guys. And therefore they should be sacrificed for the good guys, the Palestinians, because they're weak. They don't have food, and they exhibit the most important feature of sacrifice. They're suffering. I mean, think of this in terms of leftist intersectionality, and you can see that by that definition, the Palestinians are reaching the pinnacle of virtue. The pinnacle of value, and everybody should be sacrificing for them, to them. If you think about the framework of Christianity, particularly Christianity in its pure altruistic form, then again, Palestinians have reached the ultimate virtue. They are suffering. And they're suffering, they're closest to Jesus, that they can be. And therefore they deserve sacrifice. They deserve help. They deserve the sacrifice of Israeli kids for their cause. And in this case, maybe American kids, if America goes out and build this port in Gaza. So this is the priority. The priority of the Biden administration unequivocally is humanitarian support to the Palestinians. The priority of the Biden administration is to slow down Israel, to bring Israel, to restrict Israel's ability to win this war, change people's attitude towards the issue of inequality, and try to promote the idea that they should stop, that they should stop thinking about it, they should stop obsessing about it, and that it really wasn't an issue. It really wasn't an issue. And now the economist is saying, just empirically, just as the data, globalization did not increase in equality. And of course this all lines up with the story I told you last time, I think it was last night, maybe it was a few days ago, I can't remember, about China, about the fact that Chinese manufacturing, Chinese cheap goods, this wasn't yesterday, it was the last show I did from home in Puerto Rico. The Chinese manufacturing, Chinese cheap products were not a detriment to America, but it did, were good for America, that they increased our wealth, that they increased the quality of life and standard of living particularly for the poor and the middle class. And indeed that everybody benefited from globalization, everybody benefited from these cheap goods, that the Chinese sent to the United States. I know there were people in the chat that disagreed, but the economist is saying it turns out that when you take into account everything and you adjust the numbers and you look at it properly, and you're not biased philosophically like Piketty was, that the reality is that inequality in the United States actually shrunk. Now what the economist says is they didn't look at the 1%, it's probably true that the 1%'s wealth exploded, but they looked at the 10% and the difference between the top 10% and the bottom actually shrunk. And it makes sense. Globalization actually makes things more efficient. It reduces the costs, it raises productivity globally, but it also by in a sense getting the United States to focus on where it has its competitive advantage, raises productivity, raises wages, raises wealth creation in the United States and everybody everywhere where the trade is going on. So it's great to see, it's great to see, it's great to see confirmation. And the sad thing is, the tragic thing is, that it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how much I say, it doesn't matter how many economists say, it doesn't matter that pretty much every economist really understands the principle of globalization of free trade and why they're helpful. It doesn't matter if we rewrite the history and see that, and you can see from that history that yes, globalization is beneficial and helpful. Our politicians and our political class is not interested in that story. That story actually reduces their power. If they come out and say yes, globalization turns out, globalization is good, was good, we should strive for free trade. Well, that means that markets are good, free markets are good, maybe we should deregulate, maybe we should lower taxes, maybe we should open up our markets, maybe we should lower tariffs to zero. And guess what, that means less power to the politicians in Washington. They have every incentive in the world to tell us that globalization is bad for us and they can manage the economy better. They will do a good job. And in that sense, God, it doesn't matter who wins the election. Indeed, in this sense, Trump is worse than Biden. Biden has kept all of Trump's tariffs and probably instituted a few of his own. But Trump is not committed to 10% tariffs on all goods imported into the United States. Basically expect the 10% increase in your taxes, a 10% increase in the cost of all the goods that you purchase. It'll make American industry less productive. It'll make American industry less competitive. It'll make your wages ultimately go down. Trump is also committed to a 60% tariff on Chinese goods. Why not just embargo China if you think it's an enemy? But a 60% tariff means that China will raise its tariffs. It means they forget about agricultural goods selling into China, forget American exports of Caterpillar and other companies into China. You're gonna corner China potentially into war by devastating or by eliminating the ability to trade with us. And you're gonna cripple the American economy. You're going to increase costs dramatically. In the US economy. And by doing so people will lose their jobs and the economy will suffer significantly. I mean the funny thing is that he could do all this in year two of his presidency. And by the time he's out of the presidency if he ever leaves, the economy might be fine. The consequence of all this might be longer term. Indeed the consequence of the tariffs that Trump passed in his first term are still being felt today and have played out exactly how you'd expect. Losses of jobs, loss of wealth creation and creating industries in the United States that are less productive, less efficient, less competitive. And that's gonna play out over the next decade, two decades, three decades. Trump won't be remembered as the cause except by a few economic historians and nobody pays attention to us or to them. I'm not an economic historian. So in spite of the fact, the globalization is good for us. It's good for the people selling us stuff. Trade as we know, and maybe somebody can teach Trump but I doubt they will be able to. Trade is win-win. So when we benefit, they benefit. When they benefit, we benefit. And trade does not create distortions in our economy, quite the opposite. It creates great efficiency, greater productivity and greater wealth creation. And that great efficiency, greater productivity, greater wealth creation is something that shockingly, but if you understand capitalism unsurprisingly is something that everybody benefits from. And the latest studies that are published in academic journals where they've looked at the statistics, they've looked at the empirics and they seem legit, the latest studies show that all the stories telling us about working class stagnation, all the stories telling us about wage, income, wealth, stagnation and inequality explosion are all wrong. This economy has done better than people expected, indeed much better than people expected. The working class in America have done fine in spite of how they feel and inequality is actually not grown in spite of how people feel and in spite of the stories they have been told and that they tell themselves. And this is something that's hard to convince people. It's like telling somebody, you know, New York today, as bad as you hear it is, is like a gazillion times safer than it was in the 1980s and early 90s. It's a lot cleaner and nicer and a lot everything than it was in the 1970s. New York as bad as it is, as blue as it is, as overflowing as it is with immigrants is by every dimension of well-being better than it was in the distant past. But that's not how we remember the past. And statistics, data, actual facts, motor rates, violent crime rates, things like that, nobody cares. Nobody cares. The primary focus is on demonizing the present and a longing for a mythical past that didn't really exist where everything was amazing, amazing. Globalization leads to job outsourcing, absolutely. And it leads to even more job creation locally. That's the reality. Look at how many people today are employed in the United States. Look how many people employed in the United States today. Many, many, many, many, many more people that were employed 40 years ago. The number of jobs in the United States is dramatically higher than it was 40 years ago. We've got a growing population. We've got the lowest unemployment rate in American history, pretty much. Women are working, not quite at the rates they were working just before the financial crisis. But certainly at the rates that they were working in the 1970s and 80s before globalization. And jobs, more jobs that were lost have been created. That's how markets work. And you can say, but they don't make as much money as they used to. That's just not true. They make much more. You can't survive on one income. That's just not true. You can. The data is unequivocal. Wages, wealth, income has gone up. Standard of living quality of life. How much time at work you have to spend to buy groceries? How much time at work you have to spend to buy electricity? All gone down. The only things that have really gone up in price college education and college education and the, sorry, college education, housing and what is the healthcare? All three regulated by the government, of course. Money supply has gone up as well. Your income has gone up a lot more than the money supply. I mean, it's not even close. Not even close. You want to use M2, you want to use M1, you want to use whatever measure you want. You want to use gold, gold prices, your wages, your income, or the average wages, the average income, the mean income, the mean wages, whatever measure you want have gone up faster than the money supply. So when I tell you incomes have gone up, I mean incomes have gone up in real terms in terms of what matters, purchasing power. That's what matters. What matters for you in terms of your standard of living quality of life is the purchasing power of your money. And in terms of purchasing power of your money, you are far better off today because of globalization than you were back in the 70s and 80s before globalization. So you can challenge these facts. You can pretend that they don't exist. You can feel that they're wrong. You can buy into the Trump and right-wing rhetoric and the left-wing rhetoric. I mean, Republicans used to be the optimists. Republicans used to be the people who said, no, no, life's pretty good. What are you talking about? The economy's doing pretty well. They bought into the entire left-wing story. Trump did that, right? The end of America, the decay of America, or was it something in the streets of America, carnage in the streets of America, pretty much he said that the safest year, probably in American history, in terms of murder and violent crime. But you would rather believe Trump than believe the data. You would rather trust your emotions than trust the facts. And that's the problem in America today. You know, the problem in America today is that Americans have lost sight of reality and are focused today purely on emotion, and making America great again when you don't know what America is is not optimistic. It's just delusional. And the reality is that Trump didn't make America great again. He didn't do anything sustainable, anything permanent, anything that would make America great again, not anything. I mean, in terms of making America great again, maybe lowering the corporate tax, but even that kind of pretty small when you think about making America great again. All right, Hopper Campbell, do you think a few hundred years from now when Objectivism is the norm, they will look back at our time and realize Iron Man missed something in her method on how to change a culture? That's why our movement is so slow. I don't know that Iron Man said a lot about the method of how to change a culture. I mean, she says very little about it. She was not an advocate for an Objectivist movement, so maybe to that extent she chimed in, but really she didn't talk about how to change a culture. She talked about ideas, ideas shape the world. And that's, but in terms of what programs to do, what kind of activities to do, all she really said is speak out, speak out. Don't let injustice pass without speaking out. Don't let the bad guys win without you fighting back and right speak. That's really the only advice she gave us. Now, will we look back at some point and realize Iron Man missed something? I'll just ask the general question, sure. I mean, she's not omniscient and omnipotent. She is not infallible and know everything. So one day some genius be able to find something we could have done better? Sure. What implication that has for cultural change I don't know and why our movement is moving so slow. I don't think it's a mystery at all, but it's frustrating, but it's not a mystery. And that is that ideas are radical. Ideas are radical. Somebody's asking what camera I use. I use a Sony, a Sony something 100 with a Zeiss camera, with a Zeiss lens. So Sony 100, it's a compact camera, very good compact camera that is the camera I use. That's what I use on the road. It's not what I use at home. At home I use a bigger camera, Sony Alpha 660000. You know, I have to comment on Ken just because Ken, you don't know what you're talking about. I mean, that's just generally true. But on globalization, globalization is the only application to portray the objectives we can stand by. Indeed, there's too little globalization. What should be happening is the United States should implement zero tariffs across all products. It should lower taxes on trade to zero. Using coercion in order to restrict trade, using coercion in order to manipulate trade, using coercion in order to stop me from buying something from somebody in Thailand is a violation of rights. So the only position anybody who's an advocate of free markets can take, anybody who wants to move in the direction of free markets is zero tariffs in the United States. And the result of zero tariffs in the United States is going to be globalization, because other people can make stuff better than we can. And any other position, any position that does not involve basically zero tariffs is an anti-freedom position. It's an anti-individual rights position. It's an anti, I think, an anti-objectivist position. Now again, if there's an enemy, then have an embargo. But tariffs are never legitimate, never legitimate. Not if you understand objectivism, not if you understand individual rights, not if you understand what freedom actually means. So the fact that China subsidizes their goods and they're not playing fair is not relevant to this discussion. The fact that they're subsidized, okay, they subsidize. Who's going to suffer from Chinese subsidies to their companies? Chinese, the Chinese are wasting their money. The Chinese are inefficient, the Chinese are unproductive. To deny me the ability to benefit from that is a violation of my rights. Now you could argue that the Chinese are all fine, but then I have to make the decision as an individual, objectivism, right, as an individual about who to trade with and who not to trade with. And it could be completely legitimate for an individual to say I'm not buying anything from China because China is a bad country, I don't like them. Great, you have every moral right to do that. The government does not have any right to impose that on you unless the government declares China as an enemy and then you don't put tariffs on them then you don't allow any trade with them, you embargo them completely. This is the way these people think. I mean, I've got to do this, sorry, I know I shouldn't interact with the chat, but you got to do this because this is, you got to get the way that people think. He says tariffs are bad, which isn't consistent with what he said before when he said globalization is bad. Tariffs are bad, but not as bad as what Biden did with energy, the dislocation caused by tariffs is difficult to know. No, we know exactly what the dislocation of tariffs is. The studies have been published already. The damage done by Trump tariffs is well documented. Indeed, they've actually boiled it down to a number in terms of the damage it's done to the US economy. So the economic literature is pretty clear and very explicit and very definitive about the damage the tariffs have done, but more important to this, watch how they change the subject, right? I contradicted Ken on the tariffs. He says, yeah, I guess he runs right on tariffs, but Biden's worse. Like who was talking about Biden? Who cares about Biden? Why is Biden relevant to anything? So I didn't talk about Biden, I just talked about globalization, globalization is good. Not relevant to Trump, not relevant to Biden, globalization is good. Biden has kept all of Trump's tariffs, he's just as bad on tariffs, but and let's think about what Biden's done with energy. Since Ken is being this up. And this is the stunning, literally cognitive challenges here, right? So first irrelevant, right? Biden energy, different topic. Why are you switching topics on me when the topic was tariffs and globalization? Because in their mind, this is the Trump mindlessness syndrome, Trump mindlessness syndrome, which people have even people who claim they don't like Donald Trump, they have it. And that is Biden bad, Trump, not Biden, Trump good. So always shift the conversation to Biden worse. So yeah, Trump tariffs probably were bad, but Biden's worse. Maybe, what's the point? Why don't you get on my side and fight against tariffs and maybe convince Trump and his followers not to have tariffs instead of jumping on, oh, but it's Biden, which is every single Trump supported does exactly the same thing, but Biden. Trump did this and this and this, but Biden. Come on, people. It's not it, we're not in the race. We're not talking about voting. We're talking about facts. We're talking about reality. We're talking about what we, I should advocate for. And you guys are either being dishonest or can't think or both. That's, I mean, that was a great reality. And then what was Ken's original thing was, you know, globalization is globalism. What the hell is globalism? Globalism is an anti-concept. It's a complete and utter package deal. It doesn't mean anything. It means globalization and world government. Nobody really believes in world government except a few nuts at the world economic forum, right? So all you've got left is globalization criticizing it. Globalism is an anti-concept. It is a classic definition of an anti-concept. It means nothing. Globalization is good, world government bad. Put them in the same concept, what do you get? An anti-concept, a package deal. That's what globalism is. But, you know, keep doing what you're doing. Keep doing what you're doing. Keep deceiving, lying, manipulating, it just to get Biden out of his office just to let Trump win. Anything is okay. We're not objectivist anymore. We're pragwits now. Anything we say. The only dimension that matters is getting Biden out of office. Well, I for one hope Trump loses. And I've said that many times. I think he's gonna win though, which is tragic for me, but there you go. Well, actually, it'll be a lot of fun if he wins because we'll have a lot to talk about. Lots of stuff to talk about. All right, Michael asks, a negative view of humanity can become a rationale for regulation. And as everyone hates and distrusts one another more and more, they'll vote to regulate and knock each other down more and more until Millay saves the world. Yes, I mean, well, other than Millay saving the world, which I think he won't. I think he's, anyway, we'll get to that another time. But yeah, and the negative view of humanity is a consequence of altruism. You know, think about the fact that if I have to sacrifice for you, if I have to sacrifice for humanity, I don't like people I make me worse off through my sacrifice. So the more altruism we have, the more resentment you have, the more hate and distrust you have, the more I'm expected to sacrifice to other people, the more I resent them, the more I don't trust them, the more I hate them. Therefore, the more regulations there will be. And the more I think, ooh, they're deceiving me, they're crooks, they're bad, and I need regulations in order to control them. Altruism is the source of the regulatory state. Altruism is the source of the welfare state. Altruism is what's killing this world, killing this culture. Richard said, seed money for you on mobile equipment upgrade, God. I mean, it's not even an issue of money. It's probably an issue of space and getting equipment that, you know, fits into a travel bag and everything. But it's finding equipment you can trust. I mean, again, I bought this. It's top of the line. It's number one rated converter thing. And as you saw, it kept freezing. I don't know. I have to surround it with ice so it doesn't get hot. I mean, it's working. It's getting hot from working, but that's its function. So I don't understand unless these things are designed for short videos and not for long videos, I just don't get it. But yeah, I will buy a more expensive, different one that is more bulky and bigger and more difficult to carry around. But so be it, we can't have this freezing all the time. So when I get back home before the Latin America trip, I'll have to buy a new video converter. All right, let's see. Not a lot of super chats in the second session. I don't know. We got all the anti-Iran books show people here dominating the viewership. All right. Oh, but we got good numbers. A lot of people watching live. That's good. All right, Neocon. Since the US military has a recruitment crisis. Yeah, no kidding. What do you think about establishing the US foreign legion made on the model of the French foreign legion? No, no, no. Why? I mean, it solved the recruiting problem. And the recruiting problem was simple to solve. Stop sending kids, stop sending American troops to fight for things that either are never specified, ill-defined and that do not promote American interest. Stop sending them with rules of engagement that basically get them killed. And if you came to me and asked me, should I volunteer and go serve in the US military today? I would say no. I'd say you're crazy. The military today, which is focused on civilian casualties of the enemy more than on your life. I wouldn't volunteer for that kind of army. But if the army fixed itself and only engaged in wars, the wars of self-defense and stopped worrying about enemy casualties and worried about victory instead, then absolutely serving in the military is rational and makes sense for the Americans. And that's what needs to be solved, not the foreign legion, you know. And what difference does it make if the foreigners, if you still are not dedicated to victory? So the real problem with America, the real problem with America is its foreign policy, not this particular crisis or that particular crisis. So you don't solve that by just bringing in foreign mercenaries. Michael, he who has a why to live can bear almost anyhow. Yeah, I think that's right. The why is what's important. Why do you want to live? In other words, purpose, meaning. Purpose is the key to having a good life. You have to have purpose in life. And if you have purpose in life, yes, you can sustain almost anything. Liam, there are a lot of useful idiots at the cause against civilization. Yeah, some of them are even here on the chat. James, would you say restaurants and street food are better in London than New York City? You know, I don't know, I have to admit, I've probably eaten more, I've probably eaten more restaurants of my choosing in London than in New York City. So London, I usually am here alone and I usually get to choose what restaurants to go to. And in New York City, it's usually a business dinner or something like that. And then, yeah, you get great steakhouses and you get, but the standard American food, they are great restaurants in New York. But in terms of variety and diversity, I think London's better. I think the food scene in London, I don't know about street food, I'm not big on street food, but in terms of restaurants, I think the restaurants are better in London. I mean, you've got a two-star Michelin African restaurant in London. I don't know that there's another two-star Michelin African restaurant anyway in the world. And then you've got a one-star Michelin African restaurant, both are phenomenal, right? Just phenomenal, you don't have that anyway. You have a two-star Chinese restaurant in London. I don't know where else there's a two-star Chinese restaurant. I don't know if there's one in New York. And then you've got a bunch of just good restaurants that are not. I think right now, I follow this list, the top 50 restaurants in the world, I think right now there are more London restaurants in the top 50 than New York. I think even if you go to the top 100, I think they're more in London than New York. So I would have to say right now, and that doesn't even include all the little places that don't have Michelin stars are not listed, but it's just phenomenal food. Now, again, that exists in New York, but I have a sense that it's even more so in London. And a lot of that is because of something some of you dislike, and a lot of that is because of immigrants. The variety of immigrants, the variety of places they're coming from has enhanced the food scene in London dramatically. So you, as I said, you get great African restaurants. There's a big immigrant population from Western Africa in London, a lot of Nigerians, but from other parts of Africa as well. But typically West Africa, not East Africa. And then you've got obviously Middle Eastern food, which is phenomenal, but a lot of Asian food. I mean, my hotel here is right in Chinatown. And just within a radius of five-minute walk, there are probably hundreds of restaurants, every type of Asian food you can imagine and most of them really, really good. Then there's Spanish restaurants, French restaurants. There's just everything. And as I said yesterday, I think, even British food has gotten better. Clark, is it time to admit the GOP has morphed into a quasi-Nazi party? No, I think that is still an exaggeration. I don't think it's quite there. It's certainly moving in that direction, but it's not quite there. I think that the GOP is morphing into a fascist party, but so is the Democratic party. I think both parties ultimately are fascists. It's just different orientations. But no, Nazis were bad in a unique, they were uniquely evil in a way that I know. I don't think the Republican party has morphed into it yet. And I don't know that it will. Maybe part of the reason is we just don't have the kind of charismatic leader that Hitler was in America, yet who found a way to unify Germany around a cause. The United States seems more fragmented than ever because of its leaders not unified around some dictator. Uhren Son, greetings from Germany. Thank you for all your content. Thanks for watching from Germany. Really, really appreciate it. I'm glad you're enjoying the content. All right, guys, we're almost out of super chat questions. So if you're free to ask anything you want, if you're interested in asking, now's the time. Clark says, Tucker Carlson reminds me a lot of Richard Spencer, same haircut, same dress. They both inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from a WASP family. I didn't know that about Richard Spencer and seek to be white nationalist philosophers for kings. Yeah, I mean, Richard Spencer's nastier and more evil and more explicitly racist. Tucker Carlson is much, if I don't know how racist he really is, I think Tucker Carlson is second-handed and seeks popularity and knows what his audience is looking for and feeds the audience what they want. I don't think, I think Richard Spencer is an ideologue. I don't think Tucker Carlson is. I don't think he's, I think he wants power. I think he wants popularity. And I think he's pretty stupid. I mean, I thought once he was smart, but he'd become stupid. Or maybe it's an act because his audience is stupid that he's trying to capture the audience by doing stupid things. I mean, what he did in Moscow with the fast food chain, what he did in Moscow with the grocery store is stupid. It doesn't take much to figure out that you should think about exchange rates. You can just think about the percentage of how much people spend on their food, of their income that they spend on food that you're buying in a grocery store that's particularly nice because you're in a rich neighborhood. So is he dishonest? And yeah, he's dishonest and dishonesty makes you stupid. Tucker Carlson's a great example of that. So if you, Tucker Carlson was a power lust is not quite yet on the white nationalist side, although he's obviously implicitly supporting that position. Robert Spencer is, Richard Spencer, sorry, Richard Spencer is out and out a white nationalist. He's out there, he says it, he supports it, he writes about it, he's not embarrassed by it, he doesn't retract it, that's who he is. Tucker's not, Tucker's still playing this game. All right. Paulo says, have you had pie and mash and jellied eels? No, and I'm not going to, I mean, I've had it in the past but I don't like British food, classic British food is horrible and pretty disgusting. And so, so no. That doodle bunny, the incompetence is becoming next level. I assume you're talking about me. Well, you know, what can I say? You're still here for some reason. I don't know what you're doing here if you think I'm incompetent. Thank you. Y'all, Frank says, Spain's soldiers changing their gender for benefits. That takes a pretty sick mind, changing their gender. They're claiming to be a different gender, they're actually having operation, they're mutilating their own bodies for benefits. What exactly is going on there? I'll have to research that, it sounds a little radical other than maybe they're saying, oh, I'm a different gender then, you know, then it's easy to get the benefits by changing that in that sense. Batalbina says, great point on globalization trade and right wing, what aboutism, all the best. Batalb, thank you, really appreciate it. It's great to know that people are listening. Paul Azuz says, have you any stories about visiting London now? I said earlier, I think in the previous show, I said how normal London looks. It looks like it looked before COVID. It's packed with people, it's hustling, bustling. And this perspective of, you know, it's overrun by Muslims and it's unsafe and it's scary. I mean, maybe that's somewhere in the periphery and maybe that's on Saturdays or Sundays whenever it is that they protest, maybe that's what it's like, you know, it probably is. But I was pleasantly surprised this evening walking around Soho and walking around the center of London by just how many people are here. I mean, literally, it was hard to squeeze between the crowds and how normal it all looks and how bustling the restaurants are and how many restaurants there are and just London the way it was. And it has been for the last couple of years. So Islam is a real problem here and certain parts of the city are, you know, in a sense, devastated by this. The weekend protests are horrific and the fact, I mean, it all boils down ultimately. It really boils down ultimately to the fact that the police won't abide by the laws. There's no rule of law anymore. And this has always been the case, right? This has always been the case that if you don't apply the laws to new immigrants, if you let immigrants get away with bad stuff, then guess what they will do? They will do bad stuff. They will learn from that that they don't have to assimilate to the rule of law in a Western country, that they can keep the traditions of violence and badly treated women and all of that and somehow get away with that. And there are no consequences to that and that the new society that they've got will tolerate that. And that is 100% the wrong message to send people. So I mean, London is, as I've said many times in the past, one of my favorite cities in the world, it's a walkable city. You can, you can't walk everywhere but you can walk out big chunks of it. You can take an Uber places and then walk there. Every neighborhood is a little different. It has this beautiful mixture of architecture, old and new and middle. Every neighborhood has very much its own characteristics. It's similar in that sense to New York. But in some ways more so partially because it's oldest and there's more variety. Little alleys in some places, white streets in other places, beautiful parks, beautiful parks, more parks than I think any other city I know, really, really magnificent. And yeah, just a fantastic place to visit. I don't know what it's like to live here. I wouldn't want to drive here. And I'm not sure I want to start a business here but in terms of visiting, yeah. It's fantastic and I encourage you guys to travel and I encourage you guys to travel all over and make London a part of those travels. What do you think of ChatGPT's poem writing skills? I think the mediocre. I mean, I'm not an expert on poetry and I haven't done a deep dive into ChatGPT poetry but what I've seen is pretty mediocre. There's no Tennyson, there's no Shakespeare, there's no Milton in any of those poems. So yeah, it's a pretty, it's really cool. It's really cool. Scott, is there any news about your April May project yet? No, I mean, I have news but I'm not telling you. I'm not sharing it with you. Contracts have been signed, things are ready to go but I will share information with you. I will share information with you once I need to. So on a need to know basis. So probably early April, probably early April because I'll need people who live in the Miami area. I might need some help from people in Miami area. All right, let's see. How protectionist is Great Britain? More than they should be. Significantly more than they should be. More than they promised they would be. Remember when Brexit happened, the promise was that they would basically become a free trade island. That they would sign trade agreements with the rest of the world, which the EU did not allow them to do independently of the EU. They would have a trade deal with the United States and they tried. Neither the Trump administration or the Biden administration actually wanted a trade deal with the UK that freed up trade. They've got trade deals, I think with Australia and some of the old British colonies but not the United States. But they lost the free trade deal they had with Europe which was amazing, right? And I don't think they've compensated. I don't think they've compensated for that in any kind of way. So they haven't made up for the fact that they lost free movement of capital goods and people. There's still, in spite of the increased immigration in the UK, there's still a massive shortage of labor here just like there was in the United States. And they used to, it was very easy for Spaniards and Portuguese and Poles and Ukrainians less but for Poles because Ukrainians aren't part of the EU. But all the participants in the Schengen, the free immigration portion of the EU, to come to the UK and to work and it was great. It was great for the UK. It was great for these people and jobs were filled and now there's massive shortages of positions and there's still a lot of immigration coming in it's now immigration from places like Nigeria and Pakistan and India and places like that rather than from Europe. And I don't think the Brits prefer this immigration. Now, I have no problem with it but as much as there has been and in spite of the fact that UK is in a recession, although you can't tell in London, there's still a shortage of labor for places like restaurants and places like that. So, you know, it's, it is clearly, it is clearly, protectionism is strong in the UK unfortunately and there was a movement right after Brexit to bring about free trade. But I think the right in the UK is basically finished. The Conservative Party is gonna suffer massive losses at the polls and the left is the left is anti-trade and the new right is anti-trade and the old Conservatives who are pro-trade are gonna be kicked out and they've done nothing. They've done nothing in support of trade. So, I don't think tariffs are terrible in the UK. I think generally it's relatively open for trade but it's far, far less than what they promised when they did Brexit and indeed they've done nothing that they promised when they left Brexit. They said they would deregulate. They said they would, they said they would lower, they would increase trade. They would increase globalization and trade. They said all these things and they didn't do it and I think that they wrecked result from that. I mean, literally they wrecked result from that is a recession. The UK economy is not, not, not doing well. And that's a direct result from Brexit and a direct result from the fact that they haven't done the things that they promised they would do were all good things. Were all good things that they haven't done the things that they would do in terms of free trade and in terms of deregulation to bring it about. To bring about great economic growth. So instead they have a horrible recession. All right, Lee says, Hi Iran, any ideas on thought experiments to help sort one's values into hierarchy? Wow, thought experiments. I mean, what you really need to do is introspect, right? And thought experiments are part of that, can be part of that. But yes, I mean, imagine yourself in different situations. Think about what's valuable to you or not. Make lists of values. Make lists of things that you get excited about, that you're passionate about. Cross-reference those lists with, are these values pro-life? Are they rational? Do they make sense? So don't just accept something as a value because you quote value it, because you want it. But cross-reference it with reason, right? Is it a rational value for me to hold? Is it pro-life? Is it pro-living my life? Is it the best use of my time? So emotions are a guide to forming these lists but they're not a guide for what values you should pursue. What values you should pursue, it should be a product of your reason. It should be a product of figuring out what is consistent with your life, what is good for your life in the long run, all right? So I think just imagining yourself in different situations, imagine, you know, so I want a sports car. So imagine getting the sports car. What am I gonna do with it? How is my life gonna change? Is my life dramatically better because I have the sports car? I want a sports car. It's cool to have a sports car. But is the coolness come from the joy that you get from driving it? Can you drive it? Are the roads such that you can actually drive it and get the enjoyment out of it? Or is the cool come from the way other people look at you and the way other people, well, that's second-handed. We don't like second-handed values. We don't think they're good for you in objectivism. Put that one aside, I'll have to deal with, I still have to deal with second-handed issues in my life. So imagine getting the thing, achieving that value, and then think about all the things that, all the implications of that and how it impacts your life and does it further your life. Does it make your life better in any kind of substantive way? All right, I'm looking at the chat. I shouldn't, I shouldn't look at the chat. All right, you guys need some econ lessons and some just basic lessons about facts. The UK never had the Euro, even though it was part of the European Union. It had nothing to do with the Euro. The Euro's actually really good. The Euro's good for the countries who use it. It's far superior to the local currencies. Most of the countries that use the Euro to accept the Germans. Almost every other country has a tendency to inflate if they had their own currency. So the Euro's good. The European Union's good. It's just not as good as it could be. The Euro should be gold and the European Union should move towards a lesbic capitalism and get rid of all the regulations. But as compared to the alternative, the Euro and the European Union are pretty damn good and the UK could have had it better than the European Union, could have left the European Union and created something even better, but they didn't. They didn't make anything better. They made things worse because they basically rejected the, the one fundamental value of the European Union is free trade. There are no trade barriers between members of the European Union. So there's one big trading block and that in and of itself is a massive wealth creator. And the UK used to be part of that and it is no longer. So today between the UK and Europe, there are massive trade barriers, capital barriers and immigration barriers. And that makes the UK poorer and it makes the EU slightly poorer, right? It makes both poorer. Now the UK could have overcome that by liberalizing its own markets, by getting rid of all the regulations that the EU imposed on them, by getting rid of the controls, by getting rid of the tariffs with other countries around the world. But the UK didn't do that. It didn't do that. It didn't get rid of the regulations and it didn't get rid of the tariffs and as a consequence the UK is getting poorer. And Europe is doing better than the UK. And I think pretty much everybody agrees that Brexit has been a disaster. If it was up for a vote today, it would fail by a big margin, big margin. All right everybody, thank you. It's getting late over here. It's already what, 11 o'clock. I'm gonna call it a night. I'll see you all. I don't think tomorrow, but I'll see you all sometime maybe from Amsterdam. I'll do a show from Amsterdam, but if not, I'll see you again in London next week. Bye everybody. Have a great night.