 Fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Book Show. Hello everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show. What is it? April 1st. No April 1st jokes here. No fooling. This is the real news. I forgot it was April 1. I'm looking now at the title of the show and I need to change the title for March 31st to April 1. So I will update it after the show. Apologize for that. Okay. Yeah, I'm still in Bolivia. I am actually about to, later this afternoon, fly to Lima, Peru. In Lima I've got a breakfast event tomorrow and I've got two events on Monday. I think the second of those events, which is at a university, I will try to livestream. So look for something on Monday. I will be doing, hopefully if everything pans out, a show from Lima tomorrow early afternoon and I will try to do a show as well on Monday, but I'll definitely try to livestream the event Monday night. Last night's event here in Bolivia at the university, I did livestream. The setup wasn't great. I couldn't use Wi-Fi. I had to use a cable. The cable wasn't that long. Power wasn't easily accessible. Anyway, I taped it. The sound, I think, came out okay. So hopefully you got some value out of that in spite of the challenges of just before a talk trying to set up and the equipment and livestreaming. It's so much easier when the pros do it and you just show up and speak and they stream it and they do everything. But I think as I travel more and more, it's going to be the case that I'm going to have to livestream myself if I want it livestreamed. All right, let's jump in the news. Today is going to be a pure news roundup. We're not going to go longer than an hour. I need to be done by 3.30 because I have to get to the airport. And so we'll do this fairly quickly. So a quick update. And of course, we are using Super Chat. We are doing Super Chat. I will take Super Chat questions. There should be plenty of time for that. And we do have the goal of $250 for a Super Chat of a news roundup of an hour show. So hopefully we can meet that or even exceed it. That would be great to start off April. Start off April properly. All right, first news is out of Iran. And in Iran, as you know, there were the protests. And the consequence of those protests have been, and I've talked about this on the show, the fact that many women in Iran now are not wearing the hijab or going out in public without head covering. They're going to the mall. They're going shopping, to the theater, to wherever they go. And they're not wearing a hijab. And that's become somewhat of a norm in Iran. And yet, you know, this goes against Sharia law. It goes against the official law of Iran. And Iran's judiciary chief, the chief of Iran's judiciary, has now threatened to prosecute, quote, without mercy, women who appear in public unveiled. I'm not going to pronounce this guy's name, but this threat came on the heels of a ministry, the Interior Ministry statement on Thursday that reinforces the government's commitment to mandatory hijab laws. So these women are clearly violating the law to quote, again, the supreme judge. Unveiling is tantamount to enmity with our values. Those who commit such anomalous acts will be punished and will be prosecuted without mercy, he said. He didn't say what the punishment would be, but you can imagine. People have died. People have died over this by beatings. People have spent long times in jail. People are constantly harassed over this. So while there definitely is a growing number of women who are not wearing hijab, a lot of unbelievably brave women who are going out into the streets. And so far, in the last, I'd say, couple of months, they've been able to get away with that in malls, restaurants, shops, streets, and all over the country. That might be changing and we might see another crackdown. And the question is going to be, of course, if such a crackdown comes, will we see chapter two of the protests? Will we see chapter two of kind of revolution? It is interesting, isn't it, that Saudi Arabia, one of the countries that most oppressors women in the world, is the one country that has become more friendly towards Iran post these protests. There's a kind of a normalization agreement with Iran in China with the Chinese backing. Post these protests. So you can expect the barbarians of the world to unite together during times of hardship. And yet we will continue to delude ourselves and pretend that these people are friends and our allies. Right, so that's kind of a sad and disappointing update from Iran. And of course, sad because we hoped, I hope, some of us hoped that the protests would actually result in sustained and greater freedom and ultimately a complete replacement of the regime that unfortunately does not seem to be happening at this point. Hopefully it's weakened the regime a little bit and that we will see some changes. All right, we've talked a lot about the CHIP Act. The CHIP Act, where $52 billion of the CHIP Act are going to be used to subsidize the production of advanced CHIP technology in the United States. We've talked a lot about why I think this is a bad idea and even if it was a good idea, it's just not going to happen. It's just not practical in the United States to build these things. It's practical because of our own policies, because of bad laws. And Bloomberg, the editors of Bloomberg today credit, these are not exactly laissez-faire capitalist advocates. Point out exactly the same thing, the chance that we are going to increase CHIP manufacturing in a significant way in the United States because of the CHIP Act, that case is very dubious and unlikely to actually happen. In 1990, 37% of all the CHIPs made in the world were made in the U.S. and some of the most advanced CHIPs in the world were made in the U.S. Today it's 12% and the most advanced CHIPs in the world are not made in the United States. 90% of those are made in Taiwan. The United States has national security implications because about 1.9 billion CHIPs are consumed every year by the Defense Department. Just let that sink in. 1.9 billion CHIPs are consumed every year by the Defense Department. Hopefully, they're consumed in weapons that are aimed at protecting us and not at technologies that are aimed at violating our rights. Let's assume this is for protection. If that is the case, then having a regular supply of these CHIPs is important. Not clear that in order to do that, you need to have them produced in the United States. After all, both Taiwan and South Korea and Japan, the three largest producers of CHIPs in the world are all friends of the United States. Of course, the challenge there is that if there is a war with China over Taiwan, some of those shipping lanes to the United States could be disrupted and it would be good for national defense reasons. They have some CHIP manufacturing in the Western Hemisphere, whether in Europe or in America. It doesn't have to be in the United States. That's part of the issue here if you're really thinking about strategically. It just needs to be in a friendly country that one can easily access supply chains in a time of crisis. It could be in Mexico, it could be in Canada, or it could be in Western Europe. It could even be in some more stable countries in Latin America, although now that I think about it, are they stable countries in Latin America? Good question. One of the reasons it's unlikely that we manage to make enough CHIPs in the United States in the future is that today it takes 25% longer to make a CHIP in the US and it costs 50% more than it does in Asia. Asia is faster, more efficient, more productive and cheaper. Not because primarily of labor costs, but primarily because of greater productivity. Asia is much more productive in the production of CHIPs than anywhere else. Now, there are three serious impediments today to deploy significant money in order to build FABS, CHIP manufacturing plants in the United States, three big impediments beyond the issue of the government centrally planning, the government picking winners and losers, put all that aside. Let's say we decided, let's say this was a good idea somehow and let's pretend that that was the case, but let's even pretend or let's just say that private enterprise wanted to invest heavily in CHIP manufacturing in the United States. There are three reasons why it just can't happen. Even if, you know, there was private capital, 50 billion of private capital, 100 billion of private capital to go in and build CHIP manufacturing plants in the United States, you can't do it. Why? I mean the United States is the place to build stuff, isn't it? Used to be. The number one impediment for building CHIP plants is red tape. From 1990 to 2020, the time required to construct new CHIP plants, FABS, in the United States rose by 38%. That's just the time. The Clean Air Act, just getting a permit for the Clean Air Act, takes 18 months. The National Environmental Policy Act allows for reviews that can last four and a half to five years. There are another half dozen federal laws that come into play, plus endless state and local, not in my backyard, laws, variations that just slow everything down. And of course make a lot of money for lawyers, but slow everything down. At every step, there are regulations, there are agencies, there are bureaucrats who want a piece of this, who want to establish their authority and get to give this a stamp of their permission to feel that they are powerful and they are meaningful. But of course, a delay of four and a half years to get the environmental permissions, four and a half years technology shifts in an instant, technology shifts so fast. In four and a half years, you're four and a half years behind cutting edge. And you might have to build a completely different plant. And when you have to build a completely different plant, you might have to start all over again with the stupid permits. I mean, people talk about we've lost manufacturing jobs to China, we've lost this. Yeah, when you make it so damn difficult to build in America, when you make it so damn difficult to construct anything in America, this is what happens. You want to see a renaissance of industrialization of America. You need to get rid of the red tape. You need to get rid of the stupid bureaucrats, the regulations, the controls that limit ability to build and produce. Build, build, build should be a platform for some political party. And of course, as a consequence of this, the delays, the difficulties, I mean, who's going to invest their money? This is why private money will not be invested. And even though the government is now throwing money at it, they have to have private money to match it. They have to have private interest involved. And the government is not cutting red tape even though it's a government project. The Biden administration is not reducing any of the regulatory constraints. Quite the contrary. So the US is just not going to be a serious competitor when it comes to manufacturing as long as these kind of obstacles, this kind of red tape exists. In Japan, it can take maybe to build a world-class manufacturing plant to build chips, a fab, it can take maybe 580 days. In the United States, it takes 740 days. That's a lot of time. It's a lot of time in the world of technology. Why invest the time in the US if you're going to do it? Another challenge, of course, we've talked about this before, is the US just doesn't have the labor force for it. We are probably about, you know, these new fabs that are already underway, the projects that are already underway, are going to require about 300,000 skilled laborers. The United States doesn't have one. It doesn't have them. The number of US students pursuing advanced degrees in fields that are related to chip manufacturing has stagnated for 30 years. Now, there are lots of international students enrolled. There are lots of international students studying in American universities that could be used for fabs, could be used for manufacturing advanced chips. But we make it as soon as possible for them to stay in the United States. Stay and work here. And as a consequence, companies like Intel, TSMC, who are trying to build in the United States, they can't find workers. They're literally struggling to find workers. If you look at the main degrees that are associated with chip manufacturing, electrical engineering, 74% of electrical engineering graduate students are foreign-born. Of computer information sciences, 72% are foreign-born. Industrial manufacturing engineering, 71% are foreign-born. Chemical engineering, 54%. Material science, 52%. We educate them. We subsidize their education often. We get them at an advanced degree, a master's or even a PhD, and we kick them out of the country. I mean, is there a single policy that is dumber than that one in terms of just shoot economics and want to be successful? I don't know of one if there is. And then finally, a final obstacle to the United States actually producing chips is political. It's all the rules that the Biden administration has placed on companies that receive this subsidy. They have to advantage labor unions, which only raises the costs. And again, skilled laborers, they're going to be members of unions. They have to favor demographics. They have to be diverse. They have to empower community partners. They have to offer community investment. They have to give all kinds of benefits to employees, including affordable, accessible, reliable, and high quality childcare determined by, I guess, the common bureaucrat. Basically, we've just allocated $50 billion to subsidize an industry that we cannot compete in, because we, America has created obstacles to our own competition, our own ability to compete. We have a ridiculous, you can't build anything in America attitude, we have a ridiculous attitude towards immigration, and we have an absurd attitude within this law that is trying to establish social policies while trying to, you know, in the name of national defense, establish a significant chip industry in the U.S. And it really is insane. It really is crazy. And as usual with crazy and sane things, nobody seems to care. Nobody seems to care. And if all these Republicans who talked about bringing jobs back to America and industrialization in the middle class, and, okay, well, here's an opportunity. You know, I haven't seen anybody in the house. The house has passed all these bills that are meaningless and stupid and do nothing. Why don't they pass a bill, even if it's just symbolic, eliminating a lot of these environmental regulations, streamlining the process of building things in the United States, you know, telling local and state governments that they can intervene in these projects. But getting the EPA out, pass a bill. Biden won't sign it, grant it. But then we can blame the Democrats. Then it's clear. Republicans have pro-dissed Democrats against it. Cool. Where's this bill? Republicans passed it? Republicans offered it? Any Republican? Any Republican? Even talking about it? There is no pro-growth, pro-market political party in the United States anymore. Suddenly no pro-build, build, build, which is what we need, an attitude towards best building. All right. Another one of our big problems in the United States is we have this ridiculous pyramid scheme called, a forced pyramid scheme, a co-host pyramid scheme called Social Security. And numbers just came out from about Social Security, and it looks like Social Security will actually go bankrupt one year earlier. Let's say instead of 2034, it's going to go bankrupt 2033. Now, what does it mean that it goes bankrupt? Well, as you know, what happens every year is, you know, paywall taxes are collected, and then they're used to pay off existing Social Security payments. And if there's anything left that is given to the government to spend on other stuff, and in exchange for giving it to the government, the Social Security thing gets a bond, a government bond, a government IOU. And in the past, what has happened is the money coming in, particularly when the baby boomers with the peak employment level, the money coming in was substantially larger than the money going out because the number of retirees was small. So the money going out was small, the money coming in was big, and the surplus was given to the government to spend. But the Social Security fund got these bonds from the government, and that's called the trust fund. The trust fund is not full of money. It doesn't have a checking account, a savings account, a Silicon Valley bank. It has instead a bunch of bonds, government bonds, where the government is committed to paying the Social Security fund. Now in 2021 was the first year in which the amount of money coming into the Social Security fund was less than the amount of money going out. And therefore, the Social Security fund had in a sense to sell some of its bonds. They had to collect from the government on some of these bonds. So there was $2.9 trillion in the trust fund in 2020. By 2022, there was only $2.8 trillion. By 2033, that number will go to zero. And yet, many of those baby boomers will still be alive. Many of those baby boomers will still be collecting Social Security, me being one of them. And where's the money going to come from? Every year, the amount of money coming in because of birth rates, because there's so few children, because the economy is growing so slowly, because productivity is advancing so slowly, there's less and less money coming in. Where's the gap going to happen? And by their calculation, the only way to fix this is to reduce Social Security benefits today by 80%. Sorry, by 20%. So you only get 80% of the money. It's not good for me, but what can you do? So here we have a situation where clearly in 10 years, the system is bankrupt. That is, the amount in the trust fund is zero. The commitments exceed the tax money coming in. So what needs to go out is far bigger than what comes in. So Social Security is negative. And put aside Medicare, which the hospital insurance of Medicare runs out in 2031, two years earlier than Social Security, and this is where we are. Now you'd think that given that there's only 10 years to fix it, and the sooner you fix it, the less painful it is, the longer you wait, the more you're going to have to cut benefits, or the more you're going to have to increase taxes, or the more you're going to have to extend retirement age. I mean, I'm not even considering the idea of phasing it out or privatizing it or anything like that, because that's not politically realistic. So you'd think that 10 years before this happened, Republicans and Democrats would get together and have, I don't know, a commission or have some kind of bill in Congress to fix this, whether it's phasing out Social Security, whether it's increasing taxes or whether it's decreasing benefits. One way or the other, there's a reality out there, bankruptcy. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. There's a big issue now about refunding the government and increasing the debt limit. Are Republicans demanding that Social Security be fixed? No. Do the Democrats, I mean, at least Biden has suggested increased taxes on the very rich to fund Social Security for everybody. So at least he's recognizing there's a problem. What do Republicans do? Well, they follow the lead of their guru. They follow the lead of Donald Trump. And Donald Trump has said that Social Security is off the table. Social Security cannot be touched. So the Republican Party has become the party of evasion, the party that ignores the issues, ignores the problems. And it has said, okay, we're not going to touch Social Security. We're not going to touch Medicare. Medicare's hospital plan at least is going to go bankrupt to 2031. We're not going to deal with them. We're going to pretend everything's fine. We're going to pretend there's no problem. We'll kick the can down the road some more. It's been kicked down the road for decades now. Some more. We're not going to propose any kind of original, crazy solutions because Donald Trump doesn't approve. This is the political party you guys get excited about. This is a travesty. You know, at least the opposition party should be the one raising these kind of issues. At least in the days of Paul Ryan, I know he's considered the worst right no possible. In the days of Paul Ryan, when the Republicans were in the House of Representatives but didn't have the White House under Obama, Paul Ryan passed some of the best budgets ever. Budgets that shrank spending significantly. Budgets that converted Medicaid into a voucher program. Where is a Republican with the balls, with the guts to take on Social Security and Medicaid? Where's Rand Paul right now? Where's anybody in the Republican? Where's the Liberty Caucus? Where's the Liberty Caucus? You'd think that they would be concerned about the bankruptcy of the Social Security Fund. Yeah, nobody cares. Again, nobody cares. Just like to chip back. Just to squander money, just spend it. Just pretend there's no tomorrow. Pretend there are no issues. Pretend there's no problems. And just keep pretending. Evasion. Evasion, evasion, evasion, evasion. Alright, let's see. We've got a couple of more issues. One more issue around Dominion. You remember we talked about Dominion. We've talked about this before. The fact that Dominion is suing Fox News for defamation over the claim of Dominion voting machines and over the claim made by Fox News and Fox News people that Dominion voting machines were rigged to favor the Democrats and to lose Donald Trump the election. A judge just ruled. Fox asked for summary judgment to throw away the case, throw out the case. $1.6 billion is a defamation lawsuit. The judge just ruled on Friday that he will not throw out the case. Indeed, not only didn't he throw out the case, but he actually legitimized the case and made it clear that Fox News was lying and that the only issue in the court in front of a jury is going to be did they do this knowingly and on purpose? That is, and did it constitute defamation? That is, does this rise to the level of defamation? Defamation is very difficult to prove. It requires malice and requires knowledge. And the question is, did they have the knowledge and did they have the malice when they did this? Again, defamation is very hard to prove, but the reality is Fox is in a deep hole here. The judge clearly came out in favor of the Dominion lawsuit. This is more of the consequences, more of the consequences to people who, I mean, Fox knew that the election was fair and the election was fine and that Donald Trump clearly lost it. And yet they, and you get that in the emails and the texts that they were sending to one another. And yet they continued to lie to the audience in order to keep the audience, in order to sustain their position within Trump's world. And they gave up all integrity, every last shred of integrity they might have had they gave up. And now they might also suffer some serious, 1.6 billion dollars is a lot of money even for Fox, serious economic damage as a consequence of the deception and lying and lack of integrity. So it will be very, very interesting to see when this actually goes to trial. If it goes to trial, the rumor right now is that Fox will do everything it can to try to settle. And the Dominion probably wants to settle because 1.6 billion dollars is a lot of money, but you can offer them a few hundred million. Dominion is a small company. You can offer them a few hundred million and they'll probably be super happy about it. All right, let's see. Yeah. Okay. Just wanted to say something quick about a US-China war. You know, first of all, there's more and more talk about this. It's almost like the more people talk about it, the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This seems to be both among Democrats and among Republicans a real desire. As I've said this before, and I'll say this again and maybe do a whole show about this, a real desire for a new Cold War. But what is starting to really sink in is the possibility of a hot war, a real possibility of a war over Taiwan. And the United States is trying to shift resources to the Pacific. We've talked about that. We've talked about the Navy. We've talked about submarines and aircraft carriers. But I did see a story in foreign affairs yesterday or today that basically documents the war games that the United States has played, assuming a war in Taiwan and assuming the United States gets involved and assuming even that South Korea and Japan and maybe Australia get involved. The reality is that the United States, and this is a problem that has become evident with the war in Ukraine, the United States no longer has the manufacturing capacity, weapons manufacturing capacity to meet the demand of a war. In the war games, the United States runs out of smart ballistic missiles, anti-ship missiles, which are going to be crucial because one of the key aims of the United States is to knock out the ships that are moving troops and supplies and ammunition and tanks and whatever from mainland China to Taiwan. And the goal of the US Navy will be to knock out as many of those ships before they reach Taiwan as possible. Well, the United States runs out of ammunition for anti-ship smart ballistic missiles within a week. And given that the arena of war is 5,000 miles away from California, maybe 7,000 miles away from California. Anyway, some ridiculous amount of miles away from California. Not only would these new bombs have to be built very, very fast. They then would have to be shipped to, I guess, Hawaii or moved to Hawaii very, very quickly, put it up again on submarines, on destroyers, aircraft carriers, or the kind of ships that carry these kind of missiles, and then moved closer to the arena and deployed. Just saying that takes a long time. I mean, imagine what actually doing it, and of course the bottleneck right now, beyond the distance, is manufacturing capabilities. And this is what hooks me, and again, this is where I'll go after Congress. Instead of talking about industrial policy and micromanaging, and why doesn't the United States focus on its national, truly national defense, and build industrial capacity, build the kind of capacity to build the weapon systems that we actually need to defend ourselves. The Chinese have, and are doing so, even though the defense budget is something like 20% of what ours is of the United States, is they have the capacity to build large numbers of missiles, they have the capacity to build weapons very, very fast. It seems that we don't. Now, I suspect that in actual war, it'll turn out that we have a massive technological advantage, that maybe we don't have the numbers, but we have the effectiveness. There's a lot of talk about the fact that, you know, China has a lot of air defense systems, and it'll prevent American airplanes from being useful in the Taiwan Straits. I don't believe that. I think the United States probably has the capabilities to dismantle and to make it effective, the Chinese air defense systems, and I think very quickly the United States could command the air above the Taiwanese Straits. I think the Chinese technology is overrated. But I do worry just about sheer quantity of weaponry, sheer quantity of missiles and other weapons. And I do worry about Chinese hypersonic missiles. I do worry about the fact that this is very close to China and very far from the U.S., the delivery of weapons, supply chain management, all of that is going to be very, very difficult. And I worry about the fact that I'm primary worry, my number one worry, is the fact that I don't get a sense that there is real strategic thinking going on and that there is a commitment to acting on that strategic thinking. I mean, the defense budget is bloated. We spend way too much money on nonsense, among other things. We spend a lot of money on all kind of political correct BS of being awoken to the military. We need to get rid of all of that. We need to focus our efforts on what is actually, absolutely, unequivocally necessary for national defense. We need to get troops home from the hundreds, from the dozens and dozens and dozens of countries we have troops in. We need to refocus our efforts to what a war over Taiwan would look like. I think that a war over Taiwan is for now in our strategic national interest to defend Taiwan, not to go to war for Taiwan, but to defend Taiwan. Because of chip technology. So we need to be able to do that. If that's our strategic national interest, we need to be able to do that. To do that, we need to orient all of our efforts around that. We need to be able to contain Russia in Europe. And I think we do that by shifting the burden to our European allies and demanding that they bear most of the burden of the Ukraine war. And by shifting our resources, our thinking, our efforts, our navy and our weapons production to the Pacific area. And boosting our productive capabilities for weapons that we believe would be necessary, not for the last war, but for the next war, for war in the Pacific. And that would require a robust navy and it's going to require long-distance ballistic missiles. And it's going to require both hypersonic weapons, but even more important than hypersonic weapons. It's going to require weapons that can defend against hypersonic missiles that both the Russians and the Chinese have. Alright, that's my spiel for today. Let's move on to the super chat. Thank you for all the superchatters who've done stickers. I really, really appreciate that. Let me just see what's going on here for a second. We have about 70 people watching live. We're still about 200 short of our goal. So just to remind you, you fund this program. This program exists because of the funding I get in the super chat and of course in the multi-contributions. I've set these numbers 250 for a new show because these are the kind of numbers that are necessary for me to be able to do these shows and continue doing these shows. We almost always meet our target. So that's the challenge for all of you 70 or watching right now to step in and chip in and help us meet our targets today. Almost all the questions are five and $10 questions. We don't have any $20 questions from today. So if you'd like to ask a question, do it at $20, $10, $20 questions and we get to 200. Or if there's anybody out there who's willing to do 50 or 100 or 200, please do that. I did see Andrew your $20 question from yesterday and I will answer that. I will answer that. So let's start with that. Andrew asked yesterday, could you envision it becoming easier to convert Israeli subjectivism than Americans? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's easier today to convert Israeli subjectivism. I mean, it's clearly the more objectivists in Israel per capita than they are in the United States. So there are many more people per capita in Israel interested in the ideas of objectivism, studying the ideas of objectivism, influenced by the idea of objectivism on a per capita basis than they are in the U.S. And that's always been the case. I'd go back to the 1960s. There was an active group of people interested in active around the objectivism in the 70s. I was involved in Israel in the 1980s. So Israel probably has one of the highest percentages of objectivists in the world per capita. I mean, I'm sure there are others that have pretty high, but higher than the United States. I think there are a lot of places around the world that have higher than the United States, particularly of serious students of objectivism. Look at, you know, just look at how many people within the Iron Rain Institute are Israelis, or former Israelis, Americans today, but former Israelis. You know, a significant number. I think there are at least four of us in just in the Iron Rain Institute. And that includes the chairman of the board and the CEO. So Israel, you know, bats way, way, way above. Well, how do you, what's the phrase, bat, way ahead of something? Anyway, in terms of objectivism, the population of Israel is not indicative of, I mean, Israelis read a lot, which is something Americans don't do anymore. You know, and Israelis are interested in intellectual debate. Israelis are trained in disagreement and debate and argumentation. We do that around the dining room table every dinner. And so I think Israel is indeed ripe for radical ideas. All right, so we have, why is this, all right, I need to kill that. All right. Yeah, as I said, we had about 70 people watching live, you know, basically $3 from everybody, $5 from everybody gets us to the goal easily, $10 from a few of you, you know, 40 of you from half of you gets us to the goal. So please consider supporting the World Book Show value for value. I really, really appreciate all those who support. Jonathan Honing, thank you. Jonathan has done a number of contributions here. He says, the hardest-working philosopher in show business. Thank you. It is kind of show business, isn't it? And Ryan asked, kudos for continuing to cover Iran, absolutely. And their barbaric regime where no one else will. Iran is at war with the West and no one cares, bizarre. Yeah, I mean, I've said a lot no one cares today because no one does care. I mean, it really is, we're so, you know, we're so consumed by drag queen shows that who cares if Social Security's going bankrupt? Who cares if the Iranians at war with the West? Who cares what happens to little girls or young girls in Iran? You know, who cares with what happens in our own country to our ability to produce and build and create? We're obsessed with a few cultural issues. The cultural issues dominate and consume everything that we do. Everything that we do is consumed by these cultural issues and nothing else seems to matter. And the world, to a large extent, the world of liberty in the U.S. is falling apart. It's falling to the wayside. And, you know, you guys want to argue about Donald Trump who did nothing, to make America a better place in any significant way around any of these issues. Didn't confront Iran, not in any significant way. You know, didn't reform Medicare and Social Security, didn't cut government spending, didn't reduce regulations in any meaningful, substantial way. All the regulations that he reduced were easily, easily reversed. And the American people, they're just living their lives and accepting mediocrity and accepting this slow collapse of liberty and freedom. Bradley, 24 euros, really, really appreciate that. Thank you. He says thank you, Iran. Let's see, that was Ryan. Thank you, Ryan. Daniel says you mentioned chewing gum in Singapore, in Singapore and Colombia. Yes, in Colombia. You can chew gum in Singapore, but you can't purchase gum. Yes. You can also bring gum from anywhere, not Singapore. Yes, I remember because I tried to buy gum in Singapore. It used to be, when I traveled east, to chew a lot of gum, helped me with flying. I don't anymore. Actually, I think maybe feel worse, not better. I remember getting to Singapore and looking for gum. I wanted gum for the flight, couldn't find. You can't buy chewing gum in Singapore. Now you can, as he said, you could chew gum in Singapore. But if you spit the gum out into the street or something, which you shouldn't do. It's horrible. You get flogged, from my understanding, you can get flogged in Singapore. I'm not sure that the, what do you call it, the punishment fits the crime. So, no gum in Singapore, not even at the airport. Not even at the airport leaving. Then you say, it's like Leonard Peacock. Iran speaks clearly no A's and O's. Well, thank you. Anytime anybody compares me to Leonard Peacock, that is a massive compliment. So I really appreciate that. But yes, getting rid of the A's and O's is part of becoming a professional speaker. It's part of what you have to do to be good at your profession. And suddenly, I have invested in that. Oh, Jennifer is a $20 question. Jennifer says, do you think all of the scary movies about AI contributes to some people being afraid of it? Yeah, I mean, I think, look, most of us, and I include myself in it, don't completely understand what AI actually does. I mean, I have some inkling, because I know something about computers and I've done some programming in my life. And I understand something about what AI technology is doing. But 95, 99% of Americans have no clue. I mean, literally have no clue. I don't really have a clue, but normally I've done some thinking, done some reading. I've tried to keep up, and it's hard. So imagine people who don't read up and don't keep up on it and they're not thinking about it and not really investing in it. It sounds spooky and it sounds scary. And they referent for it is 2001 Space Odyssey, or they referent to it is some of the other dystopian movies about artificial intelligence and destructive. They referent to it is James Cameron's Terminator. So I completely understand the common person. I think this is why it's so sad and so tragic that somebody like Elon Musk jumps on the Luddite bandwagon for some reason and gives voice to this because if you're ignorant, you want to be able to trust the experts. And then when the experts betray you, that's the real betrayal. And when the movie is betray you, I mean, you know, one of the beauties of Asimov. And, you know, I'm not having read a huge amount of Asimov. But one of the great things about Asimov is that he basically said, look, there's going to be AI. There's going to be these robots. They're going to do all these things. They're going to be dangerous. How do we deal with that? And he proposed the three laws of robotics. I can't remember them, but the three laws of robotics. And he built a whole universe around these three laws of robotics and what happens and so on. But the vision is an optimistic vision. The vision is, yeah, there are issues. Of course there are going to be issues, but the solution, but we can't solve them. Human beings can't solve them. Now granted, looking at our political class and looking at our intellectual class right now, it's hard to believe human beings can solve anything. But this is why it's so disappointing. This is why it's so horrific. Our political class is betraying us, stabbing us in the back. And this is not a model for human behavior. We can't solve any challenge we get in AI. And it would be good if more of our fiction presented solutions rather than presented the problems. Len, thank you. Really appreciate the support. Thanks. We're getting, you know, we're only $100 short now of our goal. So five $20 questions and we're right there. So let's see if we can make it, guys. Andrew says a conservative writer for the Hill was asked about AI and ranted about negatives, including interruptions to job market and loss of personal relationship. She didn't highlight one benefit. Yeah, I mean, this is why you can't trust conservatives. This is why conservatives are bankrupt. Conservatism is bankrupt. And why so many people are anti-AI? Because these are intellectuals. These are our political and intellectual leaders. And all they can think of are all the negatives for AI. And they have this stupid view of the job market, which is just God. I mean, who would have thought that the Luddites would win in the 21st century, not in the 19th century, when there was some plausibility to what they said. No, they would have to wait to win in the 21st century when there's zero plausibility to what they say. But that's because we refuse to defend free will. We refuse to defend self-interest. We refuse to defend freedom and capitalism. On this topic, Tom says, people fear AI more than government intervention and economy, especially money. Yep, they do. It's amazing how much they fear AI. I don't. When is your next long format show? So I have time to ask a ton of real questions. Maybe tomorrow. We had one yesterday. I don't know. A lot of these shows are long format. Today, we only have another 10 minutes, but you can ask a couple of $20 questions in the next 10 minutes, and I will actually answer them because we're running out of questions. So there's always an opportunity to ask questions until we run out of time. And even then, I pass them on further. Jonathan says, cigars and jai alai. I don't know what jai alai is for Ocon 2032, 2023. What am I talking about 2023? I hope Jonathan is going to be at Ocon 2023. I'll buy him a cigar. I don't know what a jai alai is. I'm not committing to buying a jai alai because I have no idea what it is. But I'll buy you a cigar, Jonathan, in Ocon in 2023. Just remind me because I'm sure I'll forget. Thank you for the support. Frank has the last question. So if anybody wants to chime in and give us a little bit of support, we're $100 short of our $250 goal. So we still need $520 questions to get there. Or, I don't know, $10, $10 questions or $25 questions. But we do, it would be good to get there. Apollo Zoo says jai alai is a ballgame played a lot in Miami. Weird. Alright, never heard of it. You can live to wipe old age like I have and still not have heard of jai alai. Wow. Alright, last question, guys. Last opportunity to jump in and support the show. Frank says Schultz, this is how Schultz of Starbucks told Sanders, quote, I came from nothing. Yes, I have billions of dollars. I earned it. No one gave it to me. I've shared it with Starbucks people. He doesn't share it with Starbucks people. I mean, there's a sense in which he said it with Starbucks people, but, you know, he took them along for the ride and they benefited massively and they have earned a fortune and they've had jobs and many of them have stock options and many people at Starbucks have become, I'm sure, very, very wealthy as a consequence of the success of Starbucks as a business. So good for Schultz for saying, I quoted again, I came from nothing. Yes, I have billions of dollars. I earned it. No one gave it to me. And then I've shared it with Starbucks people. It's a little bit of a letdown, but okay. Johannes says, how would a handicap adult's lives be different in a free world? Oh, God, it would be dramatically different. I mean, the main difference is that a free world would be a far more technologically advanced world. Fewer people would be handicapped because they'd be curious for many of the problems or they'd be artificial limbs or they'd be all kinds of ways in which so-called handicap people could get fixed. You know, you'd have, I mean, just think about the fact that autonomous cars, cars that drive themselves, how much that helps handicap people. So I think handicap people benefit when we become super rich. And if we become super rich, the lives of handicap people become much, much, much easier and much, much, much better. And so that's what we're kind of striving towards. We're striving towards a world in which we're super rich and that requires freedom. So that's what a free world would do, create the wealth to make it easy, relatively easy to be handicapped or to cure many handicaps and replace many of our limbs when appropriate with artificial limbs that function just as well, if not better. Mr. Muffin says, you should get on Mario New Falls live on For More Exposure. You have expertise on a lot of their topics. Well, I mean, the best way for me to get on people's shows is for you to recommend that they invite me. I can't get on somebody's show unless they invite me. But if you go and you ask them and you polite in a polite way, in a nice way, not in an arrogant way, not as, you know, the greatest, just he is a guy who has a lot of expertise in a lot of areas that your listeners will benefit from. I highly recommend that you invite your on-broker on your show, you know, something polite and nice and friendly and supportive. I'd be listening to you a lot. I think this would be, you would be a great guest. Whatever, right? If you can do that, I think you can be successful. But the point is that I can't do it myself, right? It's very difficult to do it yourself. Tom asks, any chance of gift membership? I'm not sure what gift memberships would be. So you would pay for somebody else to become a member. Is this, are you asking about YouTube or are you asking about subscriptions more broadly? Yeah, if you have an idea of what kind of gift membership you would want, send it, send me an email. And I can try to make it happen that way. Alright, Andrew asks, another thing about the Hill conservative was she was opposed to the strict act because it gives the federal government too much power but was for the government banning TikTok because it degrades the minds of the young. Yeah, I mean, you know, conservatives are filled with contradictions and they don't have any problem with contradictions because logic and reason are not their standards. It's, unfortunately, their own particular whims. They're just like the left, they just have different whims. And they hate TikTok and of course if they ban TikTok because of what it does to the minds of the young why not ban Facebook, why not ban Twitter or why not have the government run the social media so that it can guarantee that young people are only fed what the government believes is nutritionist content. And there's no end to it. You know, this is like many conservatives but also many people who claim affinity to Iran, right? We want small government, we want limited government, the federal government has too much power, but build a wall and give the government more authority to kick people out of the country and give them a government. And I don't want the police to militarize but let's militarize the border patrol and let's militarize the people, ICE, the people who find illegal immigrants and kick them out of the country. As if illegal immigration is like a crime that is beyond any other crime that is out there. So we need to really militarize those people and we need to really increase the role of government when it comes to immigration when we don't trust the government in any other field. But immigration, oh yeah, that's it. So yeah, I mean conservatives are constantly, you know, we believe in free market they will tell you but we need a chip axe. We need a little bit of industrial policy. Free market needs a little bit of help in areas that we, the conservatives, our conservatives, our emotions tell us that it needs help. You know, where our particular whims indicate that the government needs help, that's where we should intervene in the market. All right, well done. Thank you guys. Thanks to all the superchatters. Thanks to all the monthly supporters. Thank you to everybody who participate in the chat and participates in the comments section. Please like the show before you leave. The like numbers help a lot with the algorithm. Just press that like thing. It's very easy. Please subscribe. Please subscribe to the show. I see Tom wants a YouTube gift membership. Let me find out if that's possible. You know, it's a YouTube feature. I don't know how you would actually execute on that, how you would make it happen. So I'll look into it. And so yes, thanks to everybody. If we're about $66 short, we went over yesterday. So I guess it all balances out. But if somebody wants to chip in at the last minute, a little bit of funding to make the gap a little smaller, that would be great. Oh, Miroslav says it is a feature. There is such a thing as a gift membership. And where do you do that, Miroslav? You go into the membership tab, into the membership feature join, and you can gift it to somebody else. Is that how it works? If you email me and Miroslav answers, we could probably... In other words, it looks like YouTube has solved the problem. You can go to YouTube and create it there. So if anybody wants to be gifted a membership by Tom, write to Tom. Miroslav says he doesn't know exactly, but he knows he's seen it being used. I think the question is how did YouTube implement that? And I think you just have to dig a little bit in YouTube in the feature, in the membership feature to figure it out. I don't have any insight into that. Thank you guys. I have to pack up and run to the airport. I will see you all more than likely tomorrow. I definitely think we'll do a show tomorrow. And Michael, who wants to ask long questions, I expect tomorrow will be a show where you can do that. Thanks, everybody. See you.