 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. All right everybody, welcome to the Iran Brookshow on this, what are we? Tuesday, May 31st. Everybody, had a fantastic Memorial Day weekend. We'll talk a little bit about Memorial Day in a minute and hopefully you had a great weekend, great beginning of your week, and hope you have a great week ahead of you. Yeah, since the last time we talked, the Boston Celtics actually did win. They're going to championship series against the Golden State Warriors. I think I'm going to Boston next week to catch a game. So yeah, things are good. Police in that world. All right, we have a lot of stuff to cover today I think, or we have some interesting stuff to cover, interesting ground to cover today. Talk about policing, talk a little bit about the history of police, about the Supreme Court ruling that police do not have a duty to protect. No legal duty to protect, interesting. We'll talk a little bit about that, maybe what the origins of that are, where does that come from, what is, if it's not to protect, what is the job of police, what it should be, how you would get there. And then I want to talk a little bit about the apparent cowardice displayed by the police in the latest school shooting. And if you read back and you look back, the same accusations were made against the police in the Parkland school shooting that they didn't react, they didn't basically act to save the kids. We'll talk about where that comes from because an influential commentator has said that the police were, this comes from a me first culture, a selfish culture, a self-interested culture, not enough of a Christian sacrifice culture. That's the problem that we face in the world today. We are told and that is why the police did not go in to save the kids. So we'll talk about that, we'll talk where cowardice comes from. And yeah, I think that in and of itself is an interesting, interesting discussion. Where does bravery, heroism, courage come from? Where does cowardice come from? So that is interesting. Well, those are the topics today. We do have a super chat. Catherine is here to encourage you and to support you and to get you excited about contributing to your own book show and supporting the show. And of course, they're asking lots and lots and lots of questions. And, you know, so listen to Catherine. You know, she is the boss and our goal today is, it's the last day of May. So today we'll determine kind of our total for May. $600 is our goal, you know, that will make May a decent month. So let's try to get to the $600. I'd really appreciate it and that I'll keep you on book show financially. Within budget. Within budget. Last month was way below budget because I traveled so much. This month is right on budget in spite of my traveling. So we're doing okay, but we need today in order to get there. I do not need Catherine to keep track of the money coming in. Because, as you know, I now have this app, amazing app that keeps track of all my super chat questions, puts them in, in columns, depending on how much money the question is involved. So there's a priority queue and a regular queue. And also, also keeps track of how much money has come in and how much money is remaining. And since the last show, I got this new button, which basically has this, I'm clicking on it now. It copies the amount of money in and copies the amount of money we need to, and that's, it generates $25 raised $575 to go. So Catherine, you don't have to do the math anymore, not only that, but the software actually does all the exchange rate conversions. So it converts the pounds, the Australian dollars, the Canadian dollars, everything is translated. But Catherine's job now, which is a much more important job than just mere calculation and mere math, which any program can do, she has to do on something now. She has to do something now that no calculator can do, that no artificial intelligence can do, that no computer can do. She has to charm you. She has to make a convincing case that you should support you on, because she has to do marketing, you know, in-person marketing. And that, she can never be replaced, right? So Catherine, I freed you up from the dull part of your job, as technology always does, and liberated, giving you more time to concentrate on the intellectual side of the job. So there we go. All right, that's the beauty of technology. Okay, quickly, I want to comment on Supreme Court ruling today, which had a, you know, I don't have the full ruling. It was like, it was kind of a ruling when a case, it's called a shadow or gray or whatever. I just saw this quickly, so I'm not going to comment on it extensively, but it is interesting, where they didn't hear arguments, but they make a ruling anyway. This is a ruling that basically, so Texas passed a law that basically said that social media cannot ban content, cannot, you know, suppress content on the platforms based on the, if it's conveying ideas based on the content. So, and there was a temporary injunction passed by a law court basically saying that Facebook and Twitter had to abide by the law while it went through courts, while it went through the appeals process, the legal process and the appeals process. What the judges did today, by a 5-4 I think majority, three conservatives and one liberal voted against this. By a 5-4 majority voted to do away with the injunction. That is prohibit Facebook and prohibit, stop the law from going into place. So, nothing has changed. Facebook and Twitter are still legit and they did it from what it looks like. It's an interim kind of ruling. What it looks like, what they did it on, is on First Amendment rights ground. So, that I thought was excellent, basically that this law would infringe on the First Amendment rights of Twitter and Facebook. So, to be continued, because it's a fascinating story, there was also, I think I told you in another show that a court overruled the law in Florida that also restricted the ability of Facebook and Twitter to restrict certain posts by politicians and they overturned that. So, the courts seem to have a proper understanding of property rights, a proper understanding of free speech and they seem to be implementing that. That is, as I've told you, I think the sanest of all the branches of the courts. So, we'll see. I mean, I don't think this is the end of it. I think there are a lot of court cases. By the way, Donald Trump's lawsuit against Twitter claiming that Twitter was influenced by the government, by the Democratic Party and by the Biden administration to kick him off of Twitter, that lawsuit was thrown out by a judge as well. So, all these attacks against social media, all these attacks to try to limit the power of social media over our expression on their platform so far have dramatically failed in the courts. Now, I think Congress is going to try to pass laws to fix that, but so far the courts have appealed the right position, good for them, and it's something we will watch and I will continue to fill you in on as we move forward. So, that is a small piece of good news. Not much of that common out there, but that is good news. All right, let's see. So, I want to talk today about policing. The motivation for this really comes from what happened at the school in Texas. We're truly horrific inaction by the police. I mean, they sat outside the building for 45 minutes an hour. Now, it's true. It's hard to tell exactly what happened, right? So, I think the evidence is still out of the police department is not cooperating with the state of Texas inquiry into this. So, I suspect that what they did was bad. But, you know, there's conflicting evidence and I don't want to condemn them until we have all the evidence. We want to be objective here, but it appears that they did not respond. They did not rush in. They did not confront the shooter. What they were doing was evacuating as many students as they could from the classrooms, evacuating as many students as they could from the school. Of course, if they had confronted the shooter right off the bat, seven policemen arrived right as the shooter entered the building. They could have gone in. They could have killed him. They could have spared the lives of many. Maybe a cop or two would have died in the process. I don't know, but they would have spared the lives of many, many of those kids. And we'll talk about the issue of courage and the issue of sacrifice and the issue of putting your life in danger as part of your job and what that entails and is that selfish or is that altruistic and all of that. We'll talk about that. We're going to get to that. But I think the more I think before we get to that, the other question, the question was raised the other day when we were talking about this is that the Supreme Court in an opinion written by Scalia ruled that the police do not have a duty to protect. They do not have a duty to protect you from violence. And there's a number of cases now that are being ruled. Indeed, in the Parkland students, Parkland school shooting, parents sued the police force and the city and the court, the U.S. District Judge, Beth Blum, citing the Supreme Court said that neither the school nor the sheriff's department nor the sheriff's department had a legal obligation to protect students from the alleged shooter who killed 17 people in the school. She said the reasoning was the students were not in state custody. So the police have an obligation to protect you only, only if you're in their custody. Now, that is bizarre. But that is, that is law as claimed by the courts. Just to cite the courts, the claim arises from the actions of crews of third party and not the state actor. Thus, the critical question the court analyzes is whether the defendants had a constitutionally constitutional duty to protect plaintiffs from the actions of crews. As previously stated, for such a duty to exist on the part of the defendants, plaintiffs would have to be considered to be in custody. Parkland is in Colorado, so this is in a Colorado lawsuit, right? And this is U.S. Federal Court. Yes, U.S. District Judge. So it's federal court. So this is based on federal law. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Anthony Scalia, ruled that police did not have a constitutional duty to protect a person from harm. Now, I am not a constitutional scholar. So I'm not going to step in and argue whether the police have such a duty or not based on the Constitution. Because I don't know. Wonder Freeman says, fact check, please. What are we fact checking here? I don't know what we're fact checking here. And I'll give you, I'll give you a case, I'll give you some examples of cases, okay? So this is, this is from a news article here. This is a case of a guy named Joseph Lozito, who got on a subway, was in a subway station in New York City, unaware that there had been a stabbing spree perpetuated by some Maxim Geldman that had been going off for 24 hours. Anyway, Geldman confronts Lozito once he's boarded the train and they are police officers right there. He turns to Lozito with the police there and he says you're going to die. They then fight. Lozito is stabbed. Ultimately, he manages to, you know, they struggle, he gets stabbed, but ultimately he manages to disarm Geldman. Only then, after he disarms Geldman, does the NYPD PD officers intervene to apprehend Geldman, right? In this case, again, I'm reading from news articles and, but I, but I try to cross, cross references. In this case, one of the cops allegedly admitted that he did not intervene in the altercation because he thought Geldman had a gun and he hid because he was afraid. This prompted Lozito to sue the city of New York, the police department, a case he lost in 2013. Because Manhattan Supreme Court judge, it wasn't because he didn't believe him. It wasn't because of lack of evidence. It wasn't he lost because he, you know, the cops didn't have a reason to intervene. But because precedent established by the US Supreme Court that the cops did not have a duty to protect you, protect you when you're under assault. Now, I don't know, maybe, maybe all these news articles are getting the interpretation wrong, but I'm not sure how you would get it right, right? So, let me just see where's this, I mean, here's the Supreme Court case, Castle Rock, Colorado. So a woman, you know, she had, she basically had a thing to the police saying that they would arrest her, that her husband was barred from seeing her children. And basically this, what is it, mandatory arrest status, statute, it was a mandatory arrest status that if he approached her daughters, he would be arrested, right? He took her daughters, three daughters, he took them, she called the police, they refused to go find him and arrest him. They refused to have anything to do with it. Ultimately, he showed up in the police station with a gun and the three daughters were found murdered in the back of his pickup truck. The woman, the wife sued the police in Colorado, Supreme Court ruled that they did not do anything wrong. You can go on and on and on, there are other cases. There's another Supreme Court case in 19, that was in 2005, there's a case, Supreme Court's case, 1989, with, you know, protective services, a child being abused by his father, he's beaten constantly. Social services knows about this, the police know about this, nothing is done. The child ultimately lands up in a vegetative state and she sues and again the court rules that the police or the state generally has no special obligation to protect the citizen against harm if it did not create the harm. Now, this sounds bizarre to me, but, and it seems like even if there's no constitutional provision, you would think that statutes, locally, you know, state statutes, statutes that may be established police forces, and we'll get to the history of policing in a minute, would mandate, would define the job of the police as protection and define malfeasance of the police when they fail to protect. But of course, that requires, and this is I think the insight that I have, my conclusion about this, and I'm open to, I'm open to this being challenged because I've only been thinking about this for a few days. It strikes me as this is what happened, this is what happens when a government loses track of its purpose, in a sense you could argue that the only purpose of government is to protect its citizens, that the only purpose of government is to help police chase down and confront criminals and get rid of them, that that is the fundamental purpose of government is to protect their individual rights, to protect them from whom, from criminals, from cooks, from gangsters. I mean, we've suddenly lost that perspective when it comes to using the military. We use the military, the nation bill to make the world a better place, to bring democracy to the world. So we've lost the perspective of individual rights when it comes to military, and it definitely seems like we have lost the perspective of individual rights when it comes to policing. I mean, what is the police there for? It's to protect the lives and property of citizens, of people in its jurisdiction, citizens are not citizens. That's the purpose. And if we lose the concept of individual rights, and if we lose the idea of the role, the purpose of government, then we lose that idea of, yeah, police are there to protect. Indeed, I would argue that the police were defaulting on their responsibility by not stopping rioters in Portland and Chicago and other places from smashing windows and stealing stuff. It is certainly an abrogation of police responsibility to not prosecute shoplifters, and you go on and on and on in terms of the kind of things where they know there's rights violation and they don't protect you from it. But then I started thinking, but look, the police are in charge of prosecuting people when they don't violate rights, victimless laws like drug laws. So the whole concept of policing has been corrupted. The whole idea of the job of the police has been corrupted. So I thought, I wonder when this happened. I wonder when police went from protecting individual rights to just, I don't know, keeping the peace, bringing calm, doing what the government wants it to do. Or just not having the responsibility, you know, rushing in and saving people when they feel like it, not rushing in and saving people when they don't feel like it, with no consequences. When did that shift happen? And in reading about the history of police, it becomes obvious to me that we've never had, and this is new to me, we've never had a proper conception of policing. Because the whole idea of police, the whole idea of a state-run agency responsible for prosecuting, for finding criminals, from protecting people from criminals, from preserving the peace, is a completely new concept. It didn't exist when the Declaration of Independence was written. It didn't exist when the Constitution was written. There's no wonder. There's not a lot about policing. There's nothing really about policing in the Constitution, because there was no police. There was no federal police. There was no state police. There was no local police. There was something called a constable, and there was some vague notion, but it was unpaid. It was not necessarily, oh, it was very low-paid. It was often volunteer. It was not necessarily under the guise of the government in any kind of sense. A defund movement didn't happen in 1989 when the Supreme Court ruled this. A defund movement is a movement that happened over the last two, three years, and yet these court cases and the inability to sue police and this lack of responsibility on the part of the police looks like it's existed for a long time. Police, based on Supreme Court rulings, it's existed for a long time. It has nothing to do with the defund movement. The defund movement only wanted to make it worse, and the defund movement in some senses is more consistent with our perspectives on what the police is, common perspectives. The police there is to be a social services agency. That's what the defund movement wants, and that's in a sense what the statutes and what the courts are telling us. They're not there to protect us. What are they there to do? So it turns out that police, as we understand it today, is a completely modern idea. It's an idea really that in the form in which it takes today, the first police force was in the 1830s in London. It was copied then in New York and Boston in major cities in the mid-19th century. But before that there was no police force, a uniformed force that went out there into the neighborhoods and actually tried to bring up our peace and then investigated crime. There was no crime investigation before this. So it's a concept. The first police forces actually were in first police, semi-modern police, were in France. Friends under I think Louis XV put together a police force. It was primarily there to be a branch of the government to make sure that its laws were followed, just laws, unjust laws, criminal laws, uncriminal laws. It was there to preserve the peace, to crush riots, to stop mayhem. But it was there as a real branch of government and indeed a lot of the opposition to creating police forces in the United States and England was a fear that this would increase the power and the force of government. So in the name of limited government, there was an idea that we don't want the government to get into the area of police. So how was disputes? We had a court system. But how did we get criminals to the court? How did we find guilty parties? Who did the investigating? Who chased down criminals? Well, bounty hunters basically. So the criminal system in the UK, if somebody stole your property, you would basically hire a bounty hunter to figure out who stole your property. And to arrest them and to bring them in front of a court. The Pinkatons were later and the Pinkatons acted side by side with the police. But yes, the advantage the Pinkatons had was the Pinkatons could cross state lines. The Pinkatons, because they were a private organization, they were not restricted by state law. So in the 19th century, the United States had a police force, but no FBI and no national police force. So you are very restricted in terms of jurisdiction. But in England, in pre-19th century, in the United States pre-19th century, everything was basically bounty hunters. And the bounty hunters often landed up being the criminals themselves. The bounty hunters often got bribed by the criminals. The system was super corrupt. Criminals would steal stuff, then negotiate its return with the authorities for the right ransom. So they would ransom goods. And there was no, so the owner of the goods would actually find it sometimes cheaper to negotiate with the person who stole his goods from him. Then to hire a thief catcher, a bounty hunter to go catch the crook. The system was very inefficient. London was, there was a lot of crime in London. There was a lot of crime in New York. And as a consequence, in the 1830s, police departments found it. But again, they didn't have a clear mandate as far as I can tell. And again, I'm curious if there's anybody who knows this history better than I do. They didn't have a clear mandate by then because with regard to individual rights, they didn't have a clear mandate in terms of their job was to protect individual rights, their job was to protect the lives and property of the people living under their jurisdiction. So their job was mainly to, in broader terms, kind of vaguely describe to keep the peace and it changed over time. For example, in the beginning, they didn't do much investigative stuff. They were in the communities, they prevented crime, but they didn't investigate and try to find criminals after the fact. It took a while before the first kind of detective bureaus were established that actually went and investigated crimes and tried to find a criminal after the fact and bring him to justice. So it turns out the police is a very, very, as we know it today, is a very modern phenomena. It's a very new phenomena that the state does it is new. It is amazingly open to corruption and the number, you know, it's primarily corrupted during periods in which the police have to prosecute non, prosecute victimless crimes like during a prohibition and now during the drug era. But it also turns out that local police forces are super influenced by local politics, have super have over the years, you know, swayed from being social services departments to having no cops on the beat, but just being tough and being investigative. Back to like broken window enforcement like there was in New York in the 1990s and then spread to the rest of the country. So policing is all over the place and there is no one kind of view of what a policeman is and what he does and what his responsibilities are and what his legal duties are. We have a lot of thinking, a lot of literature about the responsibilities of the police towards criminals. We have very little about the responsibilities of police towards the people they're supposed to be protecting. We don't really have a theory of policing. And as a consequence, the Supreme Court doesn't get it and it doesn't surprise me with Scalia who wrote the opinion, Scalia who claimed that individual rights were nonsense and stilt. It doesn't surprise me that police are so weak. It doesn't surprise me that police are so badly trained. It doesn't surprise me that police are not physically strong and not required to have the kind of training like you would in the military because then I expected to do military stuff. They're supposed to, you know, much of the policing is supposed to be to walk around the neighborhoods and chat with the neighbors and have good relations and have snitches and cultivate good relations and keep the peace. And it's very rare and unexpected that the police have to get engaged in a gunfight and they're not expected, I guess, to really, really rise to the occasion. So while I definitely think that police is a legit function of government, I don't think it's really been thought through about how to deal with the police, how you would deal with it constitutionally. How, if you rewrote the constitution, would you now have a provision defining the policing function of the state and what that entailed and what the responsibility of the police was? I think you would. I think you would and I think the founders realized how important policing would become. They would. I mean, the whole idea of a police confiscating property, the whole idea of police funding themselves through the tickets that they issue you, a parking ticket, speeding tickets, all of that. I mean, it really is horrific and there don't seem to be any proper guidelines for the police. And the police, of course, is the police as a state issue when the police are state police. It's often a city issue because the police are city police. They're not state police. So they're governed by city laws. But there's also federal police agencies. There are lots of them from the FBI to the, what do you call it, the agency, the firearm, tobacco and something, right? That are big, the Treasury Department, the Secret Service. There are many policing now functions at the federal level that go way beyond what I think a police should really do. But I'm not sure the principles of policing should be a state issue. It strikes me that they should be a federal issue. And the fact is that these were all ruled based on constitutional principles. So should this be some principles guiding the functioning and the proper relationship between the citizens and the police force? I think so. Counties have sheriffs. Sheriffs are police. Sheriffs is a term that goes back to ancient England where there were constables and what became known as sheriffs. It's Shire Eve, something like that that turned into sheriffs. It comes from the word shire, which is a, I guess, a little area, community, like in what that fantasy thinks, the shire. There's a lot of thinking that has to go into this. But there's no question in my mind that given the importance of policing, given the police wagons, given the police have a monopoly over the use of force, and they're supposed to only use it in retaliation, given that they're an agency of the state, that they are much, much too important for a proper constitution not to have something in principle to say about them, to stay about them. So while police today, because of the way they've evolved, they've evolved out of cities, it started at the city level. State police agencies were a much later development. First, it started as city agencies. I think the Texas Rangers and there were a few other states that had their state policing agencies, but those were primarily late 19th century developments, and then the modern state police entities were 20th century developments, whereas city policing is something that started in the mid 19th century. So there's been an evolution since the mid 19th century, and it is worth to consider. Whether that evolution has been a proper evolution, whether that evolution has been governed by the proper constitutional principles, all of that I think is something that needs to be worked out and really thought about. I've just thought about it for the last few days because of what I noticed. The police inaction and the fact that people's response are, well, they don't have a duty. They don't have a legal duty, legal responsibility, which just seems bizarre to me. We'll see what happens in Texas. Maybe Texas law is different, maybe the laws in Texas do place a responsibility on them. It does seem like the Texas state authorities are looking into what happened at the school. They are concerned about what happened in the school, and they're looking at the behavior of the cops. If nothing else, they should be shamed, and I'll get to that in a second. Okay, Wes, thank you. Thank you for the support. Really, really appreciate it. Let me give you guys a quick update on how we're doing on the super chat. I'll just put that in the chat so I don't have to bother you with it, but there we go. That doesn't seem right. Oops, doesn't seem right. Doesn't seem like it updated right. Let's see. Let's try this again. Yeah, that's better. That one's the right one. All right. All right, let's see. I'm going to look quickly at... Let me just see ones that relate to this particular thing. I often half-joke at least say that if you ask someone what you think a criminal is, and they reply, a criminal is someone who breaks the law, then you should run the other way. Properly, a criminal is someone who violates individual rights. Yes, but notice that there's no such conception in the world. Individual rights, nobody talks about. Nobody talks about. Nobody thinks about. Nobody is engaged with. It's about the law. And of course, the fact that there's no conception of individual rights, both is misguiding for the police in terms of what they should be doing and what they should be focused on and what the effort should be organized around. And it opens it up to the kind of corruption that I think police forces engage in today relating to drugs and other victimless crimes. Free Trade says, CODIS sounds thoroughly corrupt vis-a-vis the Constitution. Who are the justers voting for these ridiculous judgments? I mean, as I said, one of them was written by Scalia, and they had a majority. So I'm not sure who the other persons were voting for it, but they had a majority. Corey says, hearing these examples, you would think that others, judges, politicians, et cetera, believe that the job of the government is to ensure its own survival at the expense of everything, everyone else. I mean, there's a sense in which that's exactly what they think. You know, the police is there to secure the status quo. The police is there to ensure that things don't get too bad, but, you know, they can get bad. You saw that in Oregon, in Portland, Oregon, in the summer of 2020, when the city was basically burning, when looters and rioters were attacking buildings, breaking stores, rioting all through the city, committing acts of vandalism on a massive scale, and you would have to argue that the police did very little, very little. And when they did do something, they were lambasted. Oh, because those are only property crimes. Nobody cares about property. Property is not a crime. But no, even when the people rioting in the streets, there's no law and order. There's no peace. The status quo is going. Police are not expected to do anything if there's a smidgen of politics involved in it. So when one does, in our modern conception, our current conception of police, what are they there for? What are they doing? Why do we have police? I mean, we need police. I'm a big supporter of the police, but their job needs to be to find. And when the state grows so much as to have so many laws that are so complex that criminalize so many things, the police become ineffective, corrupt, and beside the point. Simon asked, do you know that police ever prevented mass shooting? Only cases I know of actual attempts at protecting individuals with intervention, they were outgunned by bank robbers. I think they have been. I think some shootings, the bad guys were killed by the police. I think in Buffalo, the guy was apprehended by the police. They rushed in. They were too late for a lot of people. A lot of people were killed. But they rushed in and they confronted the shooter. I think in many cases, they have confronted the shooter and stopped the shooting, where the number of people killed could have been much larger. No, I'm not questioning the ability of the police to do it. Wes says, oh, God, no one was killed while being confronted by New York police selling cigarettes. Whose rights was he violating? Did the police have proof he stole those cigarettes? No, but the law said the police should confront him. Yes, and that's how you get corrupt police doing corrupt things. And bad stuff happens as a consequence. And then, you know, Free Trade says, is there a correlation between the corruption of law enforcement and the average BMI of cops, body mass index out of fat police? But that also elates to it, right? I've said there should be no fat policemen. They should be fired or put at desk jobs. That is, the police in the streets should be fit, should be trained in hand-to-hand combat, should be trained, well trained in use of weapons so they don't confuse the taser for the gun. God, you believe that policewoman who shot the guy because she thought it was a taser? They should be super trained in using a gun. They should be super trained in confronting armed perpetrators. They should be super trained in hand-to-hand combat so that if the guy in front of them does not have a gun, they don't have to kill him. They can subdue him without that. And they should be able to run down a bad guy without having a heart attack. So police should generally be young, strong and fit and unbelievable be trained. They should be paid well. Yeah, I mean, it would be great if all cops were like Jason Bourne. They're not going to be, but they could be a lot better than they are today. But then if you think about it, if you think that the cop is just there to be a nice guy in the neighborhood and drive around in this police car just to show a presence and to eat donuts and to hang out and he's not expected to actually confront bad guys to protect citizens, then yeah, why does he need to be fit? So, my whole critique of the state of the physical state, the physical physique state of police is out the window if they're not expected to actually confront criminals. If they're not actually going to get into the fight, then they don't need to be fit. But if you're not fit, you should have a desk job. Police should be able to subdue a criminal without shooting them. Assuming that the criminal does not have a gun. All right, Corey says, do you think it's proper to hold the idea that I quote, that I support the concept of police, policing, but I do not support the police today as such? Currently, this is my view. I cannot get behind the police today, but I do not dismiss the need for police. I think it's okay to hold that as long as you also recognize that at least the significant amount of time of the police is dedicated to protecting you, whether they know it, whether you know it, right? So, they do for the most part go after murderers and people who steal and burglar, bank robbers and other stuff. So, your property is being protected by the police. Your life is, at least to some extent, being protected by the police. So, they're not completely out of the protection game. It's just that out of the protection game, when it requires courage, when it requires confrontation, but they are chasing down murderers, they are chasing down, they are trying to restrict gangs to certain neighborhoods and preventing them from coming into your nice neighborhood and shooting it up. So, as long as you appreciate the good work that they do and you don't support the really bad stuff that they do, I think you can have a mixed view of the police and be very supportive of policing as it should and could be done. Alright, let's see. So, let's talk about this idea, put aside the law, put aside their obligation, which I think they have. But let's talk about why the police didn't rush into the school. Assuming the stories are right, assuming the interpretation we have right now is the correct one. So, I read an essay over the weekend by David French. I don't know if you know who David French was, but David French was the former editor at the National Review. He's an anti-Trump, never-Trumpist conservative, and he writes for a new conservative publication called Something. Somebody who was in the chat will remind me the name of it. The Dispatch, sorry, the Dispatch, he writes for the Dispatch, he founded the Dispatch, and he and Jonah Goldberg and a bunch of others who are kind of anti-Trump conservatives write for the Dispatch, and I think they do a good job mostly at the Dispatch. He also once in a while writes for Barry Weiss. The Dispatch, by the way, is a substack, and Barry Weiss, of course, has a substack. And over the weekend, he published, David French published an article on Barry Weiss' substack about the school shooting. And specifically in the context of Memorial Day, about the cowardice of the police not going in, not actually going in and defending the kids, not putting their lives at risk to defend the kids. He writes, so some of this, I think it's very good, some of it is really, really bad, and I think it's interesting what makes it bad, and what the appropriate, if you will, objectivist, if you will, self-interested response to this would and should be. You know, he says, when a man or woman puts on a uniform and straps on a gun, whether they're a police officer or a soldier, they should be making a profound declaration. They're willing to die to protect their community and their nation. They don't want to die, of course, but they're willing to pay the last full measure of devotion if that moment arrives. Now, I think that fundamentally is right. It's part of the job. Now, I wouldn't put it that way. I wouldn't say they're willing to die. I'd say they're willing to risk their lives. They're willing to put their lives in danger. Nobody's asking them to perform suicide missions. But when they strap on the gun, when they put on the badge, when they put on the uniform, they are committing themselves. To protecting those they are charged with protecting. They are taking on the responsibility of often or not often, really, whatever the case may be, depending on where they are, putting their lives in danger, putting their lives at risk in order to protect those that they are committed to protecting. And that's the job. That's the definition. That's what it means to be a soldier. That's what it means to be a policewoman. That's why it's so important that these jobs be voluntary, that nobody be constricted, nobody be forced to take on these responsibilities. Now, he goes on to say that's why we respect men and women in uniform. In some cultures, the uniform is a symbol of authority, not of sacrifice. And those who wear uniforms are feared more than they are respected. And that is all true. I don't particularly like the word sacrifice here, but if you understand the word sacrifice as willing to risk your life in the performance of your job, then okay, we'll see that he's going to want to use the word sacrifice differently. I mean the same goes for firefighters. Even though firefighters might not be in the same exact category, because they might not be agents of the state, they could be private, they could be volunteers, they could be a lot of different things, but firefighters are expected to risk their lives on occasion to save people in a burning house. I mean not to commit suicide, not to go on a suicide mission, but to risk their lives. This is why, and this is amazing to me, firefighters are expected to be in amazing physical shape. And it's surprising when police are not, but firefighters are certainly expected to be in amazing physical shape, so that they can fulfill the responsibilities of their job, which means doing physical things, going into burning homes, you know, carrying those heavy hoses, but also carrying people out, if you have to. But in Texas, the police did not rush in. They did not put themselves in danger. At 11.35 a.m., there were seven police officers there when the shooter walked into the school. They should have had only one, only one choice, and that is to enter the school, chase him down, fight him, and kill him as quickly and as efficiently as possible, while not getting themselves killed and protecting the children at the same time. That is their job. I don't care what the Supreme Court says, that is their job. And yet, they didn't. They waited and waited and waited, and the stories are horrific. Young girls called up 911 begging for help. Children, young children lying on the ground bleeding out as other children were watching, kids dying, and the police knew this, and they waited. The first 911 call came in at 12.03. The same go-call back at 12.10. Where are you? Why aren't you saving our lives? 12.10, 12.13, 12.16, a different go-call at 12.19, then another call at 12.36, an hour after the police had shown up, an hour after the gunmen had gone in, families were coming in, families, family members who wanted to rush in and try to save their kids anyway, not allowed to do it. They were blocked, the police knew how to do one thing, block people from entering the school. Finally at 12.50, the police finally opened the door with a key, charged into the room and killed the shooter. No police died at that point, right? Why didn't they do that at 11.35? One hour, 15 minutes. It took for the first police contact with the shooter. It's unbelievable, how pathetic, how cowardly. Now the same thing happened in Parkland, that was in Florida. I said Parkland earlier was Colorado, it's in Florida, I apologize. Same thing happened in Parkland, Florida, where the police, Sheriff's Deputy Scott Peterson notoriously stayed outside the school as a killer rampage through the halls shooting people, and he didn't go in and confront him. Seven other Sheriff's deputies who reached the school heard gunshots but stayed outside the building. What the hell are they doing? Why are they getting paid for? What did they put the uniform on? Where importantly is their pride? And this is the key, where is their pride? Pride of doing a good job, the pride of taking responsibility. Seriously, the pride of living up to the moment. I mean, kids would have died anyway. Maybe a police or two would have got shot, maybe who knows, maybe not. But there's only one way to confront great evil and that is with great courage. And what we're seeing today is a culture of cowardice, certainly from these policemen, but I think more broadly in the culture. Now what is causing this? What is causing cowardice in our culture? Cowardice in our police. And you could argue, oh, it's defund the police, but that was 2020. And Parkland was 2018 or 2018. So no, this is more than that. And the lack of courage is a cultural white phenomenon. It's not limited to police. It's a lack of courage for people to stand up to cancel culture. It's a lack of courage for people to speak out against massive injustices happening all over the country, the world. It's a lack of courage to eject conformity, to eject the popular view. It's just there's a lack of courage in our society that's just prevalent everywhere. Why is that? Now here is David French's explanation. It's a simple fact that when men and women face mortal danger, every single molecule in their body screams at them to seek shelter and safety. It takes immense effort to overcome the desire for self-preservation. That's all true. Training can help, but it isn't enough. True. What's required is a fundamental, deeply embedded ethos, a core understanding that love requires their lives. Now there's so much true here. It is about an ethos. It is about love. But its love may require their lives. He's leading us somewhere. And here it is. Again, I quote David French, At the root of a failure of courage is often a failure of love. C.S. Lewis wrote that courage is, quote, not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. It's true. Jesus said, No one is greater love than this to lay down his life for his friend, unquote. What we witnessed from the police in Uvalde was the triumph of self-love over love of others, including of young kids bleeding in that room. So the problem is selfishness. The problem is self-interest. The problem is self-love. These policemen love themselves too much. They respect their own lives too much. That's the problem we are told. Again, David French, at the testing point, the officers were confronted with a question, Whom do you love? I love me, they responded, and they stood down. That declaration, I love me, is endemic to our nation. And it's not just endemic when lives are on the line. And he goes on about how it's love of self, love of profit in the end, love of institutions. It's self-interest. He doesn't say this, but it's self-interest destroying this country. Now my view is the exact opposite. I agree that it's an ethos issue. I agree that it's a self-love issue. These people don't love themselves enough. They have no self-respect. They have no pride. They have no ambition. They have no conception of what their profession requires of them and demands of them. Yes, I don't think they have the training. Yes, I don't think we have a proper understanding of policing, but they know when they put on that uniform what that means and what that represents and what doing a good job is. And they don't want to live up to it because they don't have self-love. They don't respect themselves enough. They don't respect their lives enough. These men and women, I assume, are going to live with the thought, live with the idea that they could have acted, could have saved young kids from dying and didn't. And it's not just random people off the street who didn't. That would be bad enough for somebody just on the street to ignore killings going on all around them. But these are people whose responsibility, whose job, who are committed supposedly to a job that requires them to protect those kids. It's the idea that somehow doing your job badly is a result of self-interest. No! Self-interest acquires that you do your job well, that you only do a job, that you're committed to doing well, that you're committed to be excellent at. What these policemen lack is pride, a commitment to living. What these policemen lack is integrity. Not just wearing a badge but living up to that badge. Not just having a uniform but living up to that uniform, taking that responsibility seriously. What these policemen lack is self-interest, is self-esteem. They don't like themselves, they don't value themselves, they don't respect themselves, they don't believe in themselves. It's not that they love their life too much, it's that they love their life too little. No! It's not that they are eager altruists and ready to jump on the grenades so that people won't die. No! Most of our culture are not the Mother Teresa type altruists. They're not willing to give up the comforts of ordinary life in order to go and save people from certain death. That's not how altruism works in the modern world. That's not how altruism works on 99% of the people. The way altruism primarily is destroying our culture is not by committing people to acts of sacrifice. The way it destroys our culture is by preventing people from living up to their potential of human beings. It works to prevent people from living up to achieving self-esteem. It prevents people from living up to their self-interest. It prevents people from being selfish. That's the evil of altruism, that it doesn't allow you to think in terms of pride, in terms of integrity. And what are you left with? You're left with a rejection of morality, because altruism nobody wants to do, live that way. Selfishness, well, I don't want to do that. That's ridiculous. So what they're left with is emotionalism. What they're left with is the middle of the road, cowardice, unprincipled, neither here nor there, nothingness, passivity. Who wants to take a stand? I don't know what's right and what's wrong. What we have is a world full of mush. It's not that we have a world full of Mother Teresa. We don't. We have a world full of people claiming you should be Mother Teresa. But we don't actually literally have a bunch of people volunteering to be Mother Teresa. Nobody wants that. Neither do we have a world of self-respecting people with great self-esteem, rising to the challenge of living the best life that they can live. We have a world in Wonder Freeman's terminology of, Chandler's terminology of mush, nothing, gooey, nothingness. And that's scary. And that's the sense in which altruism is destroying the world. It's destroying the world by destroying people's self-esteem. It's destroying the world by eliminating people's ability to live up and be the best that they can be, to live up to what they should be, to live up to what they're capable of being. And then you have conservatives, like French, who want many issues I like. But of course when it comes to the fundamental issues, you can't avoid it. What's he proposing here? That the police should not love themselves and therefore run in because they don't really care about life, their own life. Well, if they don't care about their own life, why should they care about the kids' lives? It's only in the context of their own life can they care about the kids' lives. So what should they say when asked whom do you love? Well, not me, I love the kids. What world do they love the kids and not themselves? I don't respect myself, so I'm going to jump in and be a hero. Why? It's exactly those self-interested motivations is why the best fighters fight, why the most people with the most courage have the most courage. Indeed, French somewhat recognizes this when he says about, he says this about the military. He says in the military, because we know that it's hard to hold an abstract concept as something that I'm willing to risk my life for. So what the military cultivates is, you know, the idea of brothers-in-arms, the idea of closeness units, the idea of your fighting for the guy next to you. Why? Because it's more self-interested. It's something I can really connect to. It's something related to me. It's something that's more related to myself love directly. This guy, this guy who I know, who I have who weed out of the same, you know, ration meal. If he's under attack, I need to protect him. The military understands this. It's harder to have soldiers just fight for concepts like liberty. They do. But in the trenches, what you want them is to be fighting for their brothers-in-arms. Brothers. Brothers as close to them, important to them. People they love. Not love because they don't love themselves. Not love because they love them more than they love themselves. Love because they love themselves. Love because of the value they represent for themselves. So no, the last thing we need is more David French sacrifices, calling for more sacrifice. In the name of what? In the name of Jesus Christ? In the name of God? Why should we sacrifice? Because God said you should love your neighbor like yourself. But nobody loves their neighbor like themselves. And most people don't love themselves. So they don't love their neighbor either. That's the problem. When you don't love yourself, when you don't have real self-esteem, you don't really care about your neighbor. You don't really care about your neighbor's kids. But a people of self-respecting, self-loving people, they are the ones who fight for their values. They're the ones who risk it. They're the ones who love their neighbors and love their friends. Jane Nicolini, thank you. Jian. Jian. I think Jian. Jian Nicolini. Thank you. John, thank you. Appreciate it. Anyway, that's my rant for today. What we need is more self-esteem, which means more self-interest, more selfishness. And then we'll get more courage. Self-interest is about having integrity. And I agree with the CS Lewis quote actually. They are courage. Courage is where the rubber hits the road. Courage is when you take your principles, your abstract principles, and now you have to apply them in life. Now actually you have to live up to them. Courage is a virtue on the integrity, right? It is a feature of integrity. It means living your principles, living your ideals, living your morality. And to be self-interested means to have courage. It means to have integrity. And it should be something that police understand when they put it on the uniform. And they should understand that that is the expectation. That's an issue of management. You have to set right expectations. And you have to incentivize the right behavior. And you incentivize it by creating that expectation. You are taking on a massive responsibility when you put on that badge. Live up to it. Live up to it. And sometimes living up to it means putting your life at risk. And if you don't want to do that, don't become a policeman. That's fine. Just don't. Go do something else. All right. Let's go to the super chat. Yeah, these things infuriate me because I think they... It infuriates me too when smart people make stupid arguments like what David French does. But that's what Christianity does to you. It creates mush in your mind. A guy with a good mind gets mushy as soon as these kind of issues come up. Okay, so here's the thing, guys. That was a great rant. But we're only at about halfway from where we need to be. We're at $328 when... So we need another $270, $270 to get to $600. It's really important that we get to $600. It is the last day of the month we need to get. We need to reach our monthly goals. And today, as it turns out, the monthly goal and the daily goal are consistent. That is to reach the monthly goal. We have to reach the daily goal. I hope in the next half an hour or so you can continue to support the show and we can get another $271 in so we can make our numbers for the month. And you'll make Catherine really, really happy. And yeah, that's really important. Make Catherine really, really happy. Ooh, Catherine has a different number than my auto calculator. That's interesting. All right. It must be what you're using at a conversion rate. We've got a lot of money from Australia today and we have a lot of money from Canada today. And a little bit from the UK. So I don't know. Americans, shame on you. You're way behind. Way behind. Canadians, the Australians and the Brits all beating you to the punch. All right. A theme asked, talk about Brits is asking, as a socialist, you accept altruism because you saw no alternative. If you had accepted it without reason, do you think you would have been able to change after eating out of the struct? I literally remember asking myself, walking down the street, used to have all these weird thoughts while I was walking, or in a school or walking away from school. And thinking you got to sacrifice to other people, that's what morality demands. And the question came to me is, why? Why is the well-being of other people what I should be aiming towards? Why is that morally right? And literally my answer to that was, well, what's alternative? I mean, that's interesting to me and I in red. You know, one of the many, many differences. You know, she would have said, well, of course she shouldn't. I think she would have said there's a little ghost. She would have said, maybe I don't know exactly the answer. Maybe I don't know exactly what a proper morality constitutes, but it can't be that. But my response was, well, what else is there? This must be it. And that's the difference between a completely original mind, somebody you can think completely out of the box and challenge everything. And so you can't, right? So I don't know, I don't know to what extent if I just accepted it, well, you know, and I ain't even thought it through and I just wasn't out to it because that's what everybody else was, but I didn't even think about it. Or if I'd accepted some religious explanation for it, I don't know then, you know, where we would, what impact that Lashok would have had on me. It's really hard to tell. Richard says, 20 bucks for the rant, the daily goal, the monthly goal and extra emojis for Catherine Mendes. So Catherine, the emojis are getting people, are getting people to contribute. Thank you, Richard, really appreciate it. Michael says, I watched a Buffalo shooting video that the shooter posted live on Twitch while he was carrying out Damasca in the supermarket. At first I thought it was a video game. It's the most disturbing thing I've ever seen. Yeah, I mean, the sheer evil of it, the wanton destruction, the unjust desire to destroy human life for the sake of the destruction of human life is unimaginable to anybody who's half decent. Never mind somebody who's actually thought and understands and appreciates the value of human life. Stephen, thank you, really appreciate the support. All right, let's go through some of these. Jeff says we've remembered Ali and we are inspired by Catherine. Thank you, Jeff. Let's see if there's any other police related. Michael says, I can never be a police officer today. I could never extract people from society and throw them in a cage for years over victimless crimes. Yeah, I mean, I couldn't do it either. I'm with you, Michael. Jennifer, thank you, I appreciate it. She says great rant. Why do people, James asks, why do people see property crimes, theft, and victimless crimes as not crimes? What made people disconnect as a crime, time equals money and time equals life? Well, you say you add in there victimless crimes. Victimless crimes, indeed not crimes. Shouldn't be crimes. Victimless crimes are victimless. Crimes have to have a victim. That's what it means to have a crime. Crime equals victim. So victimless crimes are not crimes. The reason people don't have an appreciation for property crimes and theft is, you know, this is all kind of leftist stuff. It comes from the fact that they believe that property is unearned, that property is in and of itself theft. This is kind of a socialist doctrine that the capitalist steal the property, that there shouldn't be property rights. It's a rejection of capitalism and freedom and markets and trade as legitimate, which is consistent with kind of the leftist view of the world. To them, as a stole property, big deal. I mean, property comes and goes. I mean, it didn't belong to you to begin with. You didn't build that. You didn't build it. So if you didn't build it, who cares? Why you will need to fight for it? Michael, Michael Dowell, $50. Thank you. Really appreciate that. Thanks, Michael. All right, we're making progress towards that goal. I love this. Okay, Rutha says, don't stay and fight this losing battle. The corruption in the U.S. is irreversible and it's not changing anytime soon. Go where you are treated best. Look forward to you debating nomad capitalist. Am I debating nomad capitalist? I have no idea. Maybe I am. I've got all kinds of stuff scheduled. I have no idea what I'm doing. But yeah, I mean, if you think the U.S. is too far gone, then fine. You should look for the best place to live. The best place to live might be the United States in spite of it because everywhere else is further gone than the U.S. has gone. So, you know, I live in Puerto Rico. So, you know, I'm constantly looking for the best place possible to live. And I'm not going to debate. Nomad capitalist helps people find, go live in the best place they can live around the world. I'm not going to debate that. I mean, you should all, based on your values, decide where the best place to live is. And there shouldn't just be monetary values. It should be the whole scope of values that you hold. The value you have in good weather, the value you have in being close to family, the value you have in being close to civilization and being close to opera and whatever. Whatever your values are, you should decide on where you live based on those values. There is no one answer that is the same for all human beings. All right, Adam, for 50 bucks. How did the country of the best founding principles wind up with the worst native philosophy, pragmatism, in the world? The worst schooling, the worst law enforcement, the stupidest politicians, and except for immigrants, the worst average people person. Adam's on a rant. God, you're down in America today. I don't know if we have the worst of everything, right? In spite of how bad pragmatism is, we did not commit, we have not yet committed the kind of genocide, holocaust that the Nazis did. So I do think there have been cultures far worse. In spite of how bad America is, we did not succumb to communism. So in spite of our philosophy, maybe they're all philosophers, philosophies that are actually worse. They played themselves out maybe, at least in some regions of the world, but I'd still rather live in America than most other places. Not partially, that is the momentum of those founding principles that are incredibly powerful. But do we have the worst schooling? I don't know. We have bad schooling. I don't think we have the worst schooling. The worst schools in America are maybe among the worst in the world, but there are bad schools everywhere, and I'm not sure the American system is that much worse than so many others. But yeah, it is bad. We have bad law enforcement. I'm not sure if it's the worst. You go to third world countries, much worse, much more corrupt, much worse than what we have. We suddenly have the stupidest politicians in the world. That I'm with you. But then I think probably every country in the world has the stupidest politicians in the world. So I'm not sure that's unique to America. I think generally when it comes to the stupidity of politicians, all the children in the United States are below average. All the politicians in the United States are below, all the politicians in the world are below average. So it's a joke, guys. It's a joke, Scott. And yeah, immigrants are the best people. I think that's absolutely true. All right. Thank you, Adam, for that wonderful example of shining optimism. Okay, Flutatious says, hello, Yuan. Have you ever thought about making a few flow charts with all the principles of non-objective arguments that would do the arguing for you with pre-made responses? Would it work for the information of 21 from the Olympia, Washington? I don't think it would work because that strikes me as super detached from reality and examples. The most important part of all of this is, the most important part of arguing is not just to have your principles and the sequence and what argument comes after what, but to have good examples and to be able to respond when somebody asks you a question that is not anticipated by a flow chart and be able to come back with good examples and concrets and connected not just with other things in the flow chart that go downwards but also across. But there is software now that is being designed for argumentation. There are people out there working on developing better kind of flow charts of arguments and principles. I'm just wary of that because it's massive rationalism, which means a detachment from reality that is dealing in floating abstractions without dealing with the concrete examples, without dealing with actual reality. So it's very dangerous. People who've tried to do that, I think, have lost the plot most of the time. So I've seen it done. I've seen people try to do it, but it's almost never very good. But if you can come up with something better, I don't know that the software I'm thinking of is readily available. If you find a way to get in touch with Greg Salamieri, I know that he is working on something that is very non-rationalistic. It's primarily a teaching tool that would help you make arguments like that in at least teaching, in the context of teaching. So I definitely would do that. Flitesha says, I recently watched Leonard Peakeff's Thinking in Essentials and gave me the idea. Yes, I think, I'm not sure the idea is completely wrong, but it can be badly applied. So beware, the main downfall, the main danger is rationalism. All right, let's see. What happened to Ali from Venezuela? We're worried about here. I don't know. We'll have to ask Ashton Jackson. She actually worked for him. I'm not sure. At some point she lost the internet. And I think there is reason to worry about her. Matt says, thank you for your effort, Iran. Much love. Thank you, Matt. Chandler, $5.00 as USA-USA. You're going to have to do better, $5.00 for that. So let's say we're short $61.00. $61.00, some American should be able to fill in the $61.00 to get us the $600.00 goes. Michael asked, how are the police in Israel? More laid back, easier to bribe? I don't know. I doubt it. They're pretty tough, I think. I think more laid back. I don't know. Didn't have much dealings with the police in Israel, and I don't know. I will say that school shootings that we've had in Israel usually terrorist attacks, and they're usually handed by special forces very quickly. A lot of times individual citizens take down an offender. So a lot of the knife attacks in Israel, some of the knife attacks in Israel, are being stopped by just citizens, armed citizens, not necessarily police. Israelis are generally better trained because almost everybody in Israel goes to the army. But anyway, I don't know the answer with regard to Israel. Alright, we are $59.00 short. $59.00 short. Come on guys, we can make it. Don't forget the like button. We've only got 65 likes. We've had hundreds of people watching the show and only 65 likes. If you liked the show, if you thought my rent was good, not only contribute some money, but like the show. Well, we're down to $49.00, so we're getting very close. Thank you, John. Thank you, Matt, for Team USA. Let's see. What do you see happening in the next 10 years with cowardice in all aspects of your society? No mad capitalist recommends leaving the West. Will you? Where do you go? You go to the non-West. The non-West, it's not like there's great value there, great vote you there. What's the point? So where are you going? I'm happy to go anywhere. If there's truly a better place to be, I'm just not convinced that no mad capitalist has a better place for us to hang out. West just put us over the top with $50.00. Thank you, West. Do it. Really appreciate it. He got us over $600.00, so it's $605.69. I've still got a bunch of super chat questions I'm going to go over, but thank you, West, for getting us to our target. And by the way, that probably put the US on top. So it's not like there's some amazing place out there that if you go there, you're going to live a wonderful life, your rights will be protected, everybody is courageous and has self-esteem and is self-interested and capitalist and wonderful. And we're just not going there because we have this irrational love of America and the West. We're not going there because there is no such place. There is no such place. I moved to Puerto Rico because Puerto Rico is marginally better than where I was living. I moved somewhere else if it gets marginally better than where I am. I'm not doing this. I'm not living where I'm living out of some false sense of patriotism, a commitment to, I don't know, Western countries or something. All right, let's see. Ooh, money's still coming in. This is great. Matt, thank you. You're an unbroken American hero. Appreciate that a lot. Let's see. Free Trade asks, do gun rights be a tiered system? That is, with more training, higher proficiency and more stringent security clearances, you could own more powerful firearms. Yes, I think it could be. I don't know what the answer is, but I definitely think that could be part of the answer. Chandler says, beating Australia once super chat at a time. Thank you. Free Trade says, do you have a favorite business valuation model? I think it's economic value, which is basically, you know, a present value valuation on cash flows. But real cash flows after tax cash flows, that is the amount of economic value that you're creating. So it's the EV model. That is my preferred business valuation model. All right, Colt Savage with 20 bucks. The other day I saw a tweet from someone on the new right saying we should end legal immigration altogether, despite there themselves being descendant from immigrants who came here recently. How do you get to that point? It's crazy. Yeah, I mean, that's the new right. I keep telling people the new right is anti-immigration. They said, no, no, no, just illegal immigration. I said, no, Trump was not only anti-illegal immigration, despite as the fact his wife is an immigrant, it doesn't matter. They get to that because that's what placates fear. This goes to courage, right? Courage. What's the flip side of courage? It's fear. It's cowardice. Americans have become fearful, fearful of the other, fearful of people coming here changing the culture. Fear of people coming here, quote, taking our jobs, their jobs, somebody's job. Fear of difference, fear of change. People are now, what do you call them, what do you call them? Armchair. No, porch, something porch conservatives. They just want to sit on their porch in the afternoon, watch the sunset, drink a beer in the evening. They have no ambition, no motivation. That's America. That's America. We don't want immigrants, immigrants. They might force me to have to be ambitious, to actually work hard at my job. I just want to relax, just want to take it easy. I don't want to try too hard. That's what America's become. That's the image of America. That's what Andrew Sullivan, a never-Trump conservative, was arguing when I debated him at Clemson University. That's what America is. Rocking chair, porch, on the porch, conservatism. The conservatism of the average guy, the guy who's not ambitious, the guy who doesn't want too much from life, just wants to be left alone in the calm, doesn't want competition, doesn't want to be challenged, doesn't want to be a cop and rush into schools and risk his life. That would be terrible. Navin says, a great and pathetic state of the police, both with regard to training and integrity. The issue with SC ruling, Supreme Court ruling, I think, is that these volunteers cannot be obligated to ensure safety just like army or firemen thought. I don't see why not. That is, I don't... I mean, the obligation is in the legal responsibility. If the military can be obliged, why can't they be obliged? And they're not ensuring safety. They're committed to acting to the best of their ability to achieve safety, to achieve lack of loss of life, to achieve protection, which is what they're hired for. It's both a moral aspect, but there is a legal aspect that by law, this is what they're obliged to do. So maybe it's not criminal law, but this is why they're being sued civilly under the idea that they're not living up to their responsibilities. So maybe this is not a legal issue. Maybe this is only a moral issue. Maybe it is, maybe this Supreme Court ruling is right. But I don't know that you would hold that ruling for a doctor. Let's say you're an emergency room doctor. That's what you do. That's your job. And somebody rushes in and comes in and they're bleeding and you're like, too much blood. I don't like blood. And you walk away. Can you be sued for that? Should you be fired for that? So it is a question of now the doctor is not a state employee. So I mean, that's part of the problem is the police are a part of the state. This is why you should be able to sue them. They taken on a certain responsibility. They're not living up to their responsibility. They violated it. They have to be consequences to that. So I'm not sure I have the answer, but I think these are all good questions to be asking and trying to think about how to answer. All right, let's go through these quickly. You've got a bunch of $5, $10 questions. Liam says, if you always hated school, when did you find the motivation to get a PhD and become a professor? Yeah, I mean, by that point, I think I was enjoying my university. I didn't like primary school and high school. So when I said I always hated school, I don't think I included university in that. So I did enjoy my university time, both my undergraduate and my graduate, not everything about it, not always, but generally I did enjoy it. It's the primary school and high school that I was talking about. Quent Wiccans asked, offenders being traveling in Europe, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Spain. He said, American people are universally looked down upon as arrogant fools. How can the greatest nation ever have this rap? It's not surprising. Americans conduct themselves in Europe like arrogant fools, and many Americans are indeed arrogant fools. And Europeans disdain the kind of confidence, the kind of self-esteem that many Americans actually have. You know, you can see that in, what was the movie? That TV show about the American coming in to coach the soccer team. It's kind of silly but fun. You guys know what it is. It was on Apple TV. It was very successful. Quite funny, quite entertaining. And you can see that the attitude, you know, Americans are deemed to be idealistic, detached from reality. Europeans are cynical, therefore they're more sophisticated because they don't believe in absolutes. Now, I don't think Americans are quite that good anymore. Ted Lasso, thank you. Ted Lasso was a series. And you can see the difference between Americans and Europeans and Ted Lasso. You can see Emily or something like that was a show about this American girl who goes to France. You can see the difference between French culture and American culture. Again, the same kind of thing. Americans think out of the box. They're loud. They're obnoxious. They're often rude. The French are snobs, but who can't think out of the box if they're life dependent on it? So that contrast in culture. And then when you have Trump as president, and before that when you have Bush who wasn't particularly intelligent and who said a lot of pretty stupid things and then got the whole of Europe involved in a stupid war. Yeah, I mean, we get a bad reputation. Then we add the fact that Europeans are statists and they perceive America as capitalist. I would actually take it as a point of honor that Europeans don't like Americans. Many Europeans, because they have this cynical, skeptical, snobbish attitude towards the world. And Americans at their best are the opposite of that. James says, why do people make Texas seem great economically when they have higher taxes than Massachusetts and many other liberal states? What do you think about Boston? I don't know. Does Texas have higher taxes than Massachusetts? Not individual corporate taxes, because individual income taxes, because Texas has no individual income taxes. So in what way does Texas have higher taxes than Massachusetts? Massachusetts has relatively high personal income tax rates. So I don't know in what way Texas has that. I mean, what I think about Boston. I mean, I love Boston. I spent a couple of years in high school in Boston. I love the Celtics. I love the Red Sox. So my sports affiliation is in Boston. Boston's a really pretty city. It's particularly pretty now. It's been modernized. The downtown is beautiful. The skyscrapers, the area by the bay is really beautiful. Yeah, Boston's a great city. Massachusetts is the wealthiest state on a per capita GDP basis. So people are relatively rich in Boston. Property taxes might be higher, but other taxes are lower. It has very high cost and energy. And so it's very mixed, right? Texas has high property taxes, but it has no income taxes. So I don't know which state has the lowest taxes. It's not taxes when you add it all up in spite of the high property taxes. So Texas also has less regulations than Massachusetts. But yeah, generally, I like Boston. I'm going to be there next week. It's a pretty city when the weather's nice. Unfortunately, the weather's not nice a lot there. Michael says the courts are by far the best of the three branches. They are going to bias the most time against tyrannical takeover. Yeah, I think that's right. James says, why do some states have liberal senators and Republican governors and vice versa? Do you think states are becoming more polarized and long-term impact? The reason they have liberal senators and Republican governors, things like that, is because most people in the country are, if you will, in the center. Most people in the country, or significant number of people in the country, are what used to be called conservative, financially, physically conservative, and socially liberal. And you can see that split between the governor and the legislature often, because they can't make up their mind what they care more about. And they say, okay, we'll do a socially liberal here and physically conservative here. And they split government. Of course, the Republican governors in a state like that are usually quite leftists. They're not particularly conservative, or they're certainly not very free market oriented. But, you know, very few of the states out there are, California is an example. California, Illinois are so committed to leftist policies that they'll just go across the board left. And I think a non-democrat could win the governorship in California and has. Schwarzenegger, for example. Because, even in California, you know, if you have a candidate who's reasonable from their perspective, who's middle of the road, who's not considered out there crazy, he can get a lot of the centrist democratic votes and the independents. I think we are getting more polarized. I think if they do away with Roe versus Wade, we'll even be more polarized. And it is going to get worse and worse and worse. I mean, Arnold didn't get elected first time as a rhino. He became a rhino. When he got elected for the first time, he got elected as a free market Republican. He was calling up Milton Friedman for economic advice. He was friendly with Milton Friedman at the time. And he was touting Milton Friedman as his economic advisor. It's only after he lost a referendum, and I forget the referendum that he lost. He lost the kind of free market referendum by a pretty significant margin. And then he said, I'm not going to fight the people. I'm just going to go with the people. And then he completely flipped and became worse than a rhino, became a left-wing Democrat, basically. And he was terrible. Do you see crime rising massively over the next few decades? Do you give Giuliani any credit for cleaning up New York? Yeah, if you give fascist credit for cleaning up whatever city they occupy, I mean, Giuliani used fascist methods to clean up New York. He did succeed in cleaning it up, but by violating property rights left and right, telling businesses what they could and couldn't do, or who they could and couldn't rent to, it was awful. And then the policing strategy was not a policing strategy he came up with. He hired a good chief of police. I forget his name. He had a very good chief of police. And the chief police followed a paper, the broken window paper that was published in the city journal, and did a good job. How much credit to go to Giuliani? I don't know. But look, Giuliani might have done some good things, just like Trump did a few good things. But overall, judge him as a person, judge his actions that led up to him becoming a mayor, judge his total actions as mayor, and I would say he was always one of the worst scoundrels in this country. Again, what he did to Wall Street in the 1980s is unforgivable. James says, do you think Europe will continue to be half in with Russia in terms of helping Ukraine? Do you consider them cowards in this war? Absolutely. I mean, the French and the Germans are unbelievable cowards. You've got to get credit for Poland and some of the other smaller countries. Even Finland and Sweden, you know, applying to become members of NATO is very courageous. But Germany and France are unbelievably cowardice. They want compromise. They want the Ukrainians to sell out. And look, there's no guarantee that Ukraine is going to win this war. The Russians right now are making real progress in the East. I don't think it's major. I still think the Russians are going to find themselves depleted. But they are making progress right now. There's certainly no guarantee that the Ukrainians can win. I don't think the Russians can win, but maybe a stalemate. But the Russians want Ukrainians to sell out. They want appeasement. That is, their philosophical commitment is to appeasement. And that is sickening and cowardly. And I think it will continue. I don't see that changing at all. All right. What's your best book recommendation on investment strategy? I mean, it depends. You know, for a non-professional investor, you know, a book like Random Walkdown Wall Street, while I don't agree with all the analysis there, I think the conclusion is the right conclusion. Diversify and forget about it. In terms of a professional investing, I think a lot of the material and value investing, I think a lot of the material analyzing investment in classical finance books, but I think that Dodd, not Dodd, what do you call him? I can't remember names. But I think some of the classical investment ideas around value investing, about investing in things you know, things you understand, cash flows you understand, is right. And then, yes, I think that is my recommendations. What's your opinion on NFTs? I mean, actually, I'm positive about NFTs. I'm not sure the NFTs that are distributed right now are worth anything because I'm not sure they actually represent art or actually anything value. But look, NFT is just a collectible. People collect lots of crazy things. NFTs could be a collectible that represents art. That's always a good thing. Why, you know, more art is better than less art. And if artists can use NFTs to fund their art, but then you need good art. And that would be a great thing if we had good art. Right now, I don't see the good art, but maybe this will be a mechanism by which good artists can sell and distribute and make a living creating good art. So I'm not dismissive of it. Generally, I'm not dismissive of crypto as much as maybe I used to be. I think it's too many smart people investing in this technology. And there's something there. I don't think we've seen what's there. I don't think we have the Amazon or the Google of crypto of Web 3, but they will emerge and we will see. I don't think it's always zero. What are you doing in Boston next week? I'm basically going to the Celtics game. I'm going to watch the Celtics and Warriors. Maybe I'll take some fundraising meetings from my hedge fund, but other than that, I'm just going to see the game. Nothing else. Colts, what are your thoughts on North Carolina's economy and how they regulate in tax in the state? I think our state's pretty cool for doing business. Generally, it's one of the more friendly states to do business in. It's also relatively, at least the triangle is a very educated place, a high quality labor. It's got a good Silicon Valley type of vibe in the triangle. So a lot of positives, a lot of good things in North Carolina. I don't know much about the tax regime, but I think on regulation, North Carolina scores relatively high as compared to other states. Florida is the best state vis-a-vis regulations and one of the best vis-a-vis taxes. New York City is best in the U.S. for young adults. Agree? No, I mean context, context, context. For what? For dating? Maybe. For probably not though. For startups? Maybe. Maybe not. For restaurants? Maybe, but San Francisco's pretty good. Chicago? For what? I don't know. It's super expensive for a young adult. So I don't know, it depends on your values. So there is no one best place in the world for a generic human being because there's no such thing as a generic human being. But it says 90% of the problem in the U.S. and conflict the U.S. has will be resolved if the policy would be promigration. Agree? No, 90%? No, you can have promigration policies and bad policies everywhere else. But immigration would help a lot. So I'm very promigration. All right guys, thank you. 700 bucks, we just crossed the 700 bucks mark. 701, maybe we just got James gave another two bucks. Boston or Austin, which do you like the most? Austin, Austin. I love Austin. Austin's got an energy and a vibe to it that is difficult to surpass. Boston has the history. Austin has the presence. Plus the weather's better. Boston's unlivable for a significant part of the year. Too cold, too wet. All right guys, have a great night. Have a great rest of your week. We've gone for two hours. I will see you all today's Tuesday. So I'll see you on Thursday. Not sure what the topic will be for show in June. I'm excited about it. See you then. Bye everybody. Thanks.