 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brook Show. All right everybody, welcome to Iran Brook Show on this Wednesday, July 12th. Glad you guys could join me for another news roundup. Thank you, Jonathan, for stepping in to support the show, really, really appreciate it. Jonathan often gets the day going with that support. You can too, using the super chat or the sticker feature here on YouTube. All right, today we've got a bunch of stuff to talk about. We'll talk about inflation. That'll be the main thing we talk about, I think. Microsoft to antitrust, FTC, School of Choice in Pennsylvania, anti-racism in New York, and, you know, a little bit about Poland beefing up its armed forces a little bit. Before that, just quickly, inadvertently, I guess, I didn't mean to, I swear, I kicked a hornet's nest, what was it, a couple of days ago, I guess, when I talk about Putin and Zelensky. Not surprising, I knew I would get in trouble with that show, but it turns out I kicked a hornet's nest. It all has come to, you know, to sting me back, I guess, today on Twitter. If you go to Twitter and you search my name, you'll see that basically the, Tom Wood tweeted that I said that he was, I said a bunch of things, but the two he focused on, because the rest he doesn't challenge, is a more subjectivist and anti-American. I stand by both of those. Anyway, he posted that today on Twitter, calling me names. Of course, he started this by responding to my Putin posts with some insult back then. So, of course, that nobody remembers and nobody cares about, but it doesn't really matter. Anyway, a bunch of people, anarchists mostly, are just insulting me left and right. I mean, big time. I mean, it really hurts. I'm struggling. You know, maybe I should apologize. I don't know, but, you know, I mean, all of them, it's like, it's great, it's wonderful to watch. In the meantime, a number of people following him on Twitter is increasing, you know, so maybe that's why, you know, maybe that it's helping me, I don't know. But anyway, yes, the anarchists are apoplectic or mad and out to get me. And I am petrified and shocked that this could happen. I mean, why would they do that to a little old me? This of course has been an issue between me and them really since 9-11 when they called me a bloodthirsty murderer, I think, and much more than that, not just that. And a lot of that is continuing. Much of their hatred towards me has to do with my views on foreign policy. Much of their hatred has to do with my views on how to fight a war and win it. And of course, much of my, much of the views have to do with the fact that I don't, that I think anarcho-capitalism is nuts, crazy, illegitimate. All right. Anyway, if you want to be entertained, if you, if you enter the stuff, then go to Twitter and you can experience it. All right. We got inflation numbers. When was it? This morning? I can't, I can't even keep track, right? This morning we got inflation numbers. CPI, remember, these are price inflations. This is not the inflating the money supply. This is just the effect on consumer prices. Numbers came below lower than expectations, market expectations. The consumer price inflation is at an annual rate of 3%, there's last 12 months, which is significantly lower than it's been. It's been as high as 9%. So 3% is pretty low and heading in the direction that the Fed wants it to, the Fed for whatever reason wants inflation to be at 2% kind of nuts, but there you go. The, what they call, if you take out food and energy, which are very volatile, and energy in particular has been going down quite a bit, I don't know why, because Jordan Peterson guaranteed us that we, if we didn't, if we didn't be friend and grovel and appease Vladimir Putin, oil was going to $300 a barrel, yet it's around 70 and, and generally energy costs are going down in spite of the war. If you take that out, it's still a significant 4.8%, so almost 5%. So inflation is still out there, there's no question. Most of that inflation is now focused in on what you call services versus goods. Early on in this inflationary cycle, it's primarily goods, now services are caught up. I expect services inflation to start coming down, that is price increases. A good, inflation of goods has already come down significantly. Energy is negative inflation, that it is pushing inflation down. And food is pretty low now from the highs that it was late last year. Rent is still going up, housing is still, is still going up, so there's still some pressure from rent. And overall I think it does appear like we are heading towards where the, kind of the 2% that the Fed has targeted and, and, and that's kind of where we're going. Interesting that the Fed on the one hand looks at these numbers, but then it looks at wages and wages are going up. And the Fed, funnily enough, and this is because of kind of the Neocansion inflationary models, what's called the Phillips Curves and others, the Fed believes that higher wages are what cause inflation. Now, as I'll show you, this is complete nonsense, but they believe that higher wages cause inflation rather than the other way around, that inflation causes higher wages. And it, you know, so they are still looking to increase interest rates and thus reduce economic activities so that that reduction in economic activity will ultimately reduce wages so that ultimately that will reduce inflation even as inflation is being reduced anyway because of all the increases in interest rates they've already done, but more importantly than that because the shock to the system that happened over COVID is, is now kind of is priced the excess, the increase in money that resulted from the increase in debt during COVID is now priced. So hard to tell what the Fed is going to do to the extent that its models say that because wages are going up, we have to increase interest rates. They will increase interest rates, thus increasing the probability of inflation of recession. If they look at consumer price index, they look at, at some of these prices and they're coming down, they look at energy costs, they look at food costs, even service costs slightly less inflationary than they were a couple of, a few months ago, then maybe they won't increase interest rates at the next meeting and hold off. I still would have had to bet and I'm not sure what the, I didn't look at what the markets are betting at, but if I had a bet, I'd say they will increase a quarter point, but I think that's probably a mistake at this point, although as I've told you many, many times, anything the Fed does is a mistake because they're central planners and central planners can't get it right because they're central planners. Central planning by definition is wrong. The only right price as a market determined price, a price determined by a committee of economists is never the right price. So, yeah, so that's what I want. I didn't want to show this one graph, which I thought was really good. This is a graph basically that, so the, the Y axis is a cumulative for coinflation from 2019 to December 2022. So cumulative inflation over the, over a beginning of COVID all the way to 2022. And the, the X axis is government debt growth. So governments that during COVID increased debt significantly are seeing significant increases in inflation. Governments like Switzerland and Japan that did not increase debt significantly are seeing low inflation. The inflation we are experiencing, the inflation we're experiencing is a direct result of all the helicopter money or the, or the stimulus or the money directly into our bank accounts that the federal government engaged in during COVID and engaged in, in lots of different countries around the world. And all the countries that engaged in it, all the way to New Zealand and Iceland and Canada are all experiencing inflation to different degrees because it impacts their local economy a little differently and, and some are more dependent on, on imports, some are more dependent on exports. So it's going to vary a little bit, but you can see a strong correlation there between government debt growth and co-inflation, cumulative co-inflation. That's the cause of inflation, not wage growth. The cause of inflation was the extra government spending, the increased government debt that happened during COVID. And, and that increased, that increase has been priced now into the system. And it looks like, you know, the kind of CPI is going back towards the 2%. I thought this was a pretty cool graph. You know, it's rare to see such strong correlation between two economic numbers here at striking. I don't know how Switzerland and Japan survived without the government coming in to bail everybody out and to save us from, from COVID. How do they, how do you survive without the government saving you from COVID? Switzerland and Japan did it somehow. The rest of us, not so much suffering the consequence, suffering the consequences of that. All right, that is what I have to say this morning about inflation. A lot to talk about there. We can do a Capitalism 101 discussion of it another time. Yesterday was, I thought it was a good show. We did Capitalism 101 on market solutions to so-called environmental problems. I had a list of questions from Alex Epstein and went over, went over that and didn't even finish it. So we'll have to do a part two in a few days. But I did think we covered a lot and it was, I think a lot of interesting stuff, stuff came out of it. So I hope those of you haven't listened to it or haven't watched it yet. Yesterday's show, go watch it, go listen to it that way. All right, let's see. Yeah, Microsoft. So I think we've talked about this. We've talked about this. And let me just get there. We've talked about this in the past. Kind of the Linda Kahn's just campaign against a big tech and the idea of breaking them up and the idea of using anti-trust against them. Lena, not Linda, Lena Kahn at the FTC. And one of the, one of the things that Lena Kahn has done is she sued Microsoft to try to stop the merger with what is it, what's it called, Activision Blizzard, which is the big gaming company that actually has, what is it, on call, duty, on duty as a non-gamer. I don't even know what the game is called. But Activision, you know, owns this call of duty. So you call it duty and World of Warcraft, which are these two massive games that have made Activision this massive, incredible company. Anyway, the FTC sued in court. And just a judge court in San Francisco ruled against the FTC. How cool is that? And basically approved that the deal could go on. The deal will close here soon unless the government appeals it. And there is an injunction at the higher level. But it does look like this will go through the FTC is considering its options right now. Any time we can defeat Lena Kahn, that is a plus. Any time the FTC is defeated, that is a plus. Any time anti-trust take a beating, that is a plus. So this is great news. And I know some of you hate Microsoft, but I don't. And this is great news. The deal was teetering also because, and I made a mistake the other day when I said that it was European Union that was blocking the deal. But it wasn't. It was actually the British English courts, the English regulatory agency was blocking the deal. But yesterday, when the court came out with his opinion, the English regulators basically said, OK, we will reevaluate. Microsoft withdrew from its suit suing the regulatory agency and is now negotiating with the British regulators to get the deal approved. So it looks like the deal would go through in the UK, in Europe, in the United States. And Microsoft will be able to buy this company. Whether that's good for gaming markets or not, I don't know. One of the issues was the fear, the call of duty, would be only Microsoft would only allowed it to be played on Microsoft products, right? On the Microsoft gaming platform. Microsoft said it's got long-term contracts with both Nintendo and Sony. And it's ridiculous. It makes so much money from this through Activision. Why would it do that? And the court seems to believe Microsoft basically said, FTC provided no evidence that Microsoft intended to supposedly monopolize this game on its own platform. So we will see. It doesn't really matter from my perspective. They can monopolize it. It's their product. They can decide who gets it, who doesn't get it. They can decide on the terms. So again, good news. Any time the FTC is defeated, that is good news. All right, some bad news. Pennsylvania. You know, in Pennsylvania, Joshua Piro, a Democrat, won the governorship to a large extent because Republicans nominated a complete nut to run against him. By the way, that nut is now going to run in the primaries for Senate to be the senatorial candidate of the Republican Party. And it'll be very, very indicative if they actually choose him in spite of the fact that he lost, in Pennsylvania, a very closely balanced state between Republicans and Democrats. He lost by 15 points. That's Doug Masturiano. Anyway, Doug Masturiano lost it. Joshua Piro won. One of the ways that Joshua Piro won is by promising some Republicans who did not want to vote for Doug Masturiano that he would be an advocate for school choice in Pennsylvania. And indeed, the budget he proposed to the Pennsylvania Senate included a school choice provision, a kind of weak one, not a particularly good one, but a weak one. And the Senate passed it, the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans, passed it. But then when it went to the House in Pennsylvania, the House said they would not pass a budget if it included $100 million, I think it was $100 million for the school choice program. Joshua Piro has, therefore, backtracked from his election promise and has withdrawn the pretty weak to begin with a school choice program from the program. I mean, the bottom line here is that in democratic states where the Democrats hold some power, it's very hard to get school choice because the reality is that the school, the teachers union basically controls local democratic politics, basically controls it. So it's not like individual Democrats don't support school choice. Indeed, many of them do. And a lot of minority voters in poor neighborhoods are huge supporters of school choice. It's that the teachers union has them by the co-owners. They control much of the democratic party, particularly at the local level, so that they're too cowardly to oppose it. Now, Joshua Piro says he's going to try again next year. And again, he has some big backers in Pennsylvania who have given him a lot of money campaign-wise to get at, and this is a big issue for them. So I think he will keep trying, but he'll keep fighting, have to fight the teachers union. It's not clear who's going to win in that battle. If you want school choice, you've got to get, Republicans elected in statewide, in state elections, in state house seats, in state Senate seats, and in state governor's seats. But to do that, you have to avoid the wackos. You have to avoid the crazies. So the reason this state is not a Republican state is because it nominated somebody like Doug Mastriano, who was a cook, to run. The only reason they lost the Senate seat is because they nominated Dr. What's-his-name, Dr. Oz, was it Dr. Oz, to run for the Senate. If they'd nominate a solid Republican, they would win. But this is the problem. The same was true in Arizona, the same was true in a lot of places. Certainly, certainly this is true in Georgia, where it's unbelievable that the state has two Democratic senators. But this is not, this is the problem with their modern Republican party. It has, it's most active members are people who are going to nominate unelectable candidates. And I know, I know, I know that some of you hate that and it's probably all my fault that Republicans lost Pennsylvania. I wish I had that kind of power. I would gladly embrace that kind of influence if it was truly my fault. That would be amazing. All right, anti-racism, if you remember during COVID we talked a lot, during COVID we talked a lot about this, BLM. I did a number of shows on anti-racism. I think kind of anti-racism is kind of disappeared. Nobody really talks about it, anti-racism. Since Biden got elected and BLM is gone. And so on. Scott says, you did say you'd spend your influence to stop Trump. Yes, my influence, my tiny little influence. Yes, to the extent that I can, I will spend every bit of my influence to stop Trump because it is Trump that has lost the Republican Party, Pennsylvania, and it's Trump that has lost the Republican Party, Georgia. And it is Trump that lost the Republican Party, the Senate and almost, you know, and lost it for a while, the House and it's gonna, yeah, Trump is the problem. So to the extent that we can defeat Trump over and over and over again and maybe defeat him more thoroughly next time. To that extent there's some minor little hope for the Republican Party. To the extent that Trump succeeds, the extent that you continue to support him, to the extent that he is the nominee of the Republican Party, the Republican Party is finished. Is finished. They are, you know, it is Trump's destruction of the Republican Party that is to blame nobody else, nobody else, and if you, but anyway, we'll let you guys keep on that. Anyway, the anti-racism. So this was kind of a cool, you know, a story that comes out of New York. It turns out that NYU, New York University, one of the top universities in the country, hosted a quote, whites only anti-racism workshop for public school parents. In the name of being anti-racism, only whites could attend the workshop. Now, of course, the workshop was focused on how whites are inherently guilty and they have to understand, you know, the attitude of minorities towards them and how ultimately it's their fault and they must do what they can in order to, to eliminate systemic racism everywhere where they find it and systemic because, ultimately it's because they themselves are white and that they should feel super guilty and everything. And of course, you know, this is why it's whites only because why would you want to inflict all this, you know, white guilt and white self-obsession on minorities who might also participate in the seminar. So we want to, you know, spare them all this, all this trouble. You know, as part of the, you know, the supposed to be the first session, the workshop won't include about a dozen parents, these parents are public school kids and, you know, the first session started out with, you know, in the background, the music of Woody Guthrie, all you fascists bound to lose. That's a good way to start a seminar. I like Woody Guthrie, but he was quite a leftist and, you know, pronoun sharing and then urge the participants not to intellectualize. I have a different way of phrasing that instead of saying, please don't intellectualize the real way to express that is don't think. We don't want you to think. We're not, this is a quote, we're not going to get through this without welcoming the feelings, the feelings. Yes, this is all about emotionalism and a lot of it is about the emotion of guilt that you should have because you're actually white. You know, there was a lot of emphasis on don't try too hard because, you know, that's just virtue signaling to be the good white person. Just feel guilty because there's nothing you can do about the fact that you're white. And so there was at least one person from a local, actually from the Community Education Council from New York, from one of the districts. So somebody from in a position of power. And yeah, I mean, this is the continuation of this. It's done quietly in stealth and this is all about white supremacy and how inherently whites are white supremacists and that we live in a white supremacist culture. And again, all of this is this completely insane, ultimately racist ideology of anti-racism that's both deterministic and racist and just overall horrific that we, you know, I was first exposed to during the BLM or the post BLM when all of this came to the forefront. So just know it's still out there. Seminars are just being done. One of the sponsors of the seminar was a group called AWARE LA. This is the Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere, Los Angeles. Let me just tell you the name again. Just see you, Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere. I guess if you're brown, gray, blue, yellow, you need to form a different chapter. I mean, how do these people keep a straight face? Don't they see the overt racism in just the name and identifying people based on skin color? The problem is that racism has been redefined. The reality is that racism is treating people based on the color of their skin or some other immutable characteristic rather than the content of the character. This is how I understand racism. This I think is how Martin Luther King understood racism. But today racism is not that. You can, racism is about power. Racism is about power over the people and being white immediately makes you a racist because you have power over others because I guess I, you know, of an oppressed minority, you cannot be a racist. You cannot be a racist if you have dark skin because you're part of an oppressed minority and therefore by definition you can't be a racist. The whole way in which they use language is bizarre, offensive and racist, racist. But it's all about, yeah, it's all about oppression, the oppression of the Olympics, who's more oppressed and therefore who has power. But it's not about freedom, it's not about colorblindness, it's not about real anti-racism. Anti-racism is colorblindness. In all these other things they oppose the colorblindness. Unprinciple, unprinciple. That's why they call themselves white, this, this, this because the color matters. All right, lastly, a story that just magnifies the extent to which Vladimir Putin is losing this war and is losing the long-term battle, the long-term war, particularly given the long-term ambitions of Russia, of Putin and of Putin's mystical, crazy philosophers, intellectuals. Poland, Poland is building up a substantial military force. I mean, it will be very soon. The largest military force in Europe, it'll be bigger than Germany, it will be bigger than the Brits, it'll be bigger than any other country in Europe. Of course Poland has a long border with Ukraine, it has a long border with Belarus and Poland knows Russia. It understands Russia. It has a history with Russia and it is not willing to count on Ukrainians defeating the Russians in Ukraine and that'll be it. They're not willing to count on the buffer zone that is Belarus, they're not willing to count on NATO and Americans and everybody else. They wanna be able to defend themselves versus the Russians, which is interesting because so much of the perspective of American conservatives and American libertarians is, no, no, Ukraine's the villain, the West is the villain, Russians somehow, you know, maybe they're not the good guy but they're not the bad guy. But the Poles, who many conservative American conservatives admire because the Poles have a very conservative government, a very Catholic government, a very conservative government, they're having none of this. I mean, one of the main questions I got in Poland was what happened to American libertarians and American conservatives? Don't they get it? Don't they see what's going on? How can they be supportive of Putin or at least not supportive of Ukraine? So the Poles were flabbergasted by the United States. Kaliostro says, libertarians did not say U.S. is the villain, of course they do. All the time they do. The U.S. pushed NATO, the U.S. created a, you know, a pushed Ukraine into revolution in 2014 and in 2004, it's all the U.S., behind every problem in the world, libertarians are fundamentally, American libertarians in particular, are fundamentally anti-American. This is why I call Tom Woods anti-American, because he is. He follows in the footsteps of his mentor, Marie Watbot, NATO expansion. There are a million reasons why it's all the U.S.'s fault. The Poles don't buy it. The Poles know exactly whose fault this is. They become the largest buyer of weapons systems from South Korea. They're buying 1,000 K-2 main battle tanks. They're buying 673 K-9 self-propelled howitzers. And they're basically doing away with their Soviet-era weapons. They're shipping all of them to Ukraine. So again, it's like casting the Polish economy by giving the Ukrainians weapons systems that they are not gonna use anyway. The Poles aren't. Same as the U.S. In addition to this, the Ukrainians are spending $6 billion on 366 American Abrams tanks. So they're gonna have more tanks than any other country in Europe, with the exception of Russia. Of the 366, 250 of them are the state of the art M1A2, the latest, greatest in tank technology. I mean, they are arming themselves to the hilt on top of that. They're buying 32 F-35As, which is the most advanced military jet in the world. They're also buying 96 Apache attack helicopters, which will give them the largest military helicopter fleet in Europe. They're increasing their active duty forces to 300,000 and with another 50 reservists, 50,000 reservists. And because they understand. Now in addition, they've also bought U.S.-made Himmars, they bought rocket systems, they're buying everything they can in order to make them substantial. The Poles get it. The American, the anti-American libertarians in the United States don't get it. And am I surprised that they hate me because I call them anti-American? No, but as you know, I call it the way I see it. Marie Watbaard, Ron Paul, Woods are all anti-American. I've seen videos of Ron Paul blaming the situation of Venezuela. Not on socialism, no. It's not socialism that's causing poverty in Venezuela. You might have fought that. Not according to Ron Paul, according to Ron Paul, the situation of Venezuela is caused by America. American sanctions, American, just American foreign policy. Let me make this very clear. I'm not, you know, just doing this to insult them. This is just what I'm doing is to say that this is factual and the fact that they hate me doesn't worry me. It doesn't concern me. It doesn't bother me. I find it entertaining. I find it funny that they discovered they hate me. They've hated me for a long time. They've hated me since 9-11 because they blame 9-11 on, who did they blame 9-11 on? Who was 9-11? Whose fault was 9-11? Who did Ron Paul blame 9-11 on? On America. It was America's fault. So yeah, I fundamentally disagree. And in many respects, politically, you know, completely reject, completely reject the American, libertarian, Ron Paul, Tom Woods, ultimately what body and view of foreign policy. They don't know what they're talking about. They don't know anything about the world out there. They have no concept of what the world is like. They can't think in principles and they hate, at the end of the day, the country they hate the most, the country they despise the most, in terms of its, you know, in terms of the country and its behavior, decisions, actions, is America. Every single international problem out there is blamed on America. Every single one of them. They're the ones running the Mises Institute and they're the ones that have, you know, and they know this. Again, going way back, they, you know, have known my position of foreign policy and despise me for it. I despise them for their position. Why is this a surprise? Not to mention that I think anarcho-capitalism is a ridiculous idea and ultimately a collectivist idea and anti-liberty and anti-freedom idea. All right. Ooh, I'm gonna get even more hornest nests coming at me. All right, we're about $135 short of our $250 target. If you enjoy this show, if you value this show, if you get value from this show, please support. I'm also looking for new supporters on Patreon, on Subscribestar, and on uranbookshow.com slash support. You know, monthly supporters are the best for me. They're predictable, they're knowable. I just got a new $250 supporter, so thank you for that monthly. I'm looking for more. If you listen to the show and they're not a supporter yet, please consider going to Patreon, or going to uranbookshow.com slash support and subscribing at whatever level you can afford, from $2 to $500, those are the options available now. If you wanna do more, we can make sure that happens, but you know, I don't know, thousands of people listen to every single episodes of these shows on one platform or another. We don't yet have thousands of people supporting the show financially, so please go out there and consider supporting the show. All right, DWNLogic has just put in $50. He says, I'm a PlayStation guy, but I'm very pleased that Microsoft won against FTC, though it was a big blow to Sony. That's the right objective approach to take. I mean, this is not about your subjective emotions about it, it's not about, you know, even if it turns out that PlayStation is Sony, even if it turns out they would draw a popular game from Sony, this is overall the right decision. That is, even if you might suffer from not having your best game on the platform, you benefit from living in a country in which people are free to engage in the kind of transactions that Microsoft and Activision went through. So I salute you for being objective about these kind of issues and about where the benefit comes to your life and the benefit comes from your life living in a more free place than having this particular game or that particular game. Thank you and thank you for the $50. We really, really appreciate that. I know those of you who listen live are great with the Super Chat. Of course we have about 70 people listening right now. Couple of bucks from everybody who would get us over the target. You can use a sticker to do it. You don't actually have to ask a question. But a lot of you out there listening are not doing Super Chat or don't listen live and don't have the opportunity to do Super Chat, so please consider doing the monthly support. All right, Doan Regive. I know you said JP, John Peterson is one of the more influential intellectuals today, but he continues to prove that he is not, that he is not to be taken seriously in most cases. Do you agree? Yes, I absolutely agree. I think Jordan Peterson has come down dramatically from his peak. I mean, he had some positives, I think originally, but this is what happens. At his core was a rotten philosophy. At the core of Jordan Peterson's idea is a rotten philosophy. And that rot ultimately impacts everything he does. So ultimately even the better things are infected with the rot. And he becomes worse and worse. And his rant on the war is one of the worst things he's ever done, but he's done a few other rants that were just horrible. And, but this is who he has become. And it's a consequence, a direct consequence of, again, the mystical epistemology and the duty, the ethics, the duty ethic orientation that he has. It's inevitable that he get worse, not better, unless he really changes those fundamental beliefs, but that's not gonna happen. Bradley, what's the worst case scenario for the stock market if the US defaults on its debt? How likely is this and is gold a good hedge? You know, I don't think the US is gonna default on its debt. I think that's very unlikely. I've always thought it's unlikely. You know, I think the political consequences are grave, much more than the economic. And therefore neither party will allow it to happen. And ultimately the US can always print more money to pay it to that issue more debt. The consequence of that are higher interest rates, higher inflation, long-term stagnation, low growth, which is stagnation. So the economic consequences of not defaulting or grave, just as the economic consequence of defaulting or grave. I think gold is a hedge against things going really, really bad. Gold does not prove to be a great hedge against inflation. It's primarily, it gets price increases. It's primarily a hedge against the end of the world. If a US default ultimately leads to kind of an end of the world scenario, everything dropping, everything, then gold is good. So gold is always good against dramatic, uncertain events, but negative, uncertainty. But I don't think it, I don't see proof that it necessarily keeps up with inflation. And in terms of the stock market, if the US actually really did default, that would be very bad for the stock market, at least short run. Of course, if the default didn't last very long, the stock market would fully recover. It's not a substantial event unless there's something real that is preventing them from paying up, i.e. they can't sell any bonds because the bond market people refuse to buy American debt, no matter what interest rate they're off is. But if interest rates go up as they sell more debt, that in and of itself will tank the stock market. So bad economic policy is what tanks the stock market, not a particular political manipulative event. Andrew says, it's in a humorous context that Ms. Maisel's father says that no one who has achieved anything of worth has ever been happy. Still, what is the cause of the notion that high achievers must be tortured souls? Well, it goes back to Christianity and to Emmanuel Kant, virtue, success. But success generated from being a good person is associated with pain and suffering because being a good person means being altruistic. So it's associated from Christianity and from the fact that every saint suffers and has to die a horrible death to Kant saying, be suspicious of happy people because they probably acted in their own self-interest. And we know that is the essence of immorality. So and then it's expanded to in a modern framework, happiness comes from your social interactions, it comes from family and people who obsess too much with their work can never be happy because they're ignoring their family and they're ignoring their friends and the community and all the places where real happiness comes from. And then there's, of course, there's a mythology about art. Real artists suffer because suffering is the essence of the human existence and you can actually achieve greatness without suffering and therefore greatness equals suffering in that it's all caused by altruism. It's all caused by altruism. John says, the Russians are reportedly down one general today due to Ukrainian missile strikes. Yes, I saw that yesterday. So yes, the Russians have lost the general. We only see the Russian losses. I mean, if you watch, if you follow some of the Russian news media, they claim that a lot of, quite a few Ukrainian senior officers have died as well, which I have no reason to doubt. That is the world like this is, you know, where they're getting more and more sophisticated and targeting command and control posts where the senior officers are, a world like this is likely to take a real toll on senior officers and generals and commanding officers. But the Russians have lost a lot of generals. I think from all available sources significantly more than the Ukrainians have. They also have more of them. Greatest supply. All right. $40 short, $220 questions when we make our target and making our target is important for these shows. It is important for these shows and to keep them going. Michael Sanders says, did you hear Jordan Peterson's talk against legalizing assisted suicide? He said it would lead to Nazi-like eugenics program to save state-run medical systems money. Yeah, I mean, you know, Jordan Peterson is a little fascist. Deny people the ability to kill themselves. The light people, the ability to die a dignified death at the end of their lives. And of course, how does he think that medical systems that are going bankrupt, including in the United States with Medicare are going to fund the massive expenses of, you know, last few months staying alive. Most of the money you will spend on healthcare in your entire life, indeed, that is going to be towards the end of your life, which means that the government is going to spend gazillions of dollars on you to extend your life in a period where extending your life is not that valuable to you. So, yeah, I mean, what if we had a completely laissez-faire private healthcare market? Well, a lot of insurance companies would refuse to pay expenses to keep people alive when they're about to die. And in that sense, a lot of elderly people will die because that is the only way to keep the healthcare system going, absolutely true. And why is that a bad thing? That's right. I mean, in reality, we should be spending, and I think a healthy healthcare system, would spend more money when we're young on prevention. And the whole idea is when you get really, really old, you die quickly. Not that you drag it out at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions of dollars, and who is going to pay those? Your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren through their taxes. But yeah, but John Peterson's idea is that the state has control over you, your life and therefore your death. And I did a whole show about this. It's just horrific, just horrific. Michael, somehow we're trying to balance capitalism with the politics of the dark ages. Why are pre-enlightenment barbarians able to outcompete free market intellectuals? Because the vast majority of the public is still pre-enlightenment. It hasn't caught up. It hasn't caught up to the Enlightenment, our educational system, because our educational system never caught up to the Enlightenment, and therefore we keep creating more, we keep creating more pre-enlightenment barbarians. Lewis, if we did have nuclear war with Russia, how capable of Russians to get nukes past our interceptors and vice versa? I don't know. It's better if we don't test it. The problem with Russian nuclear program is they have a lot of nukes. It's not clear that even if we had the best interceptors in the world, we could knock them all down. I don't know how good our interceptors are. We haven't invested in interceptors. We haven't invested in missile defense systems as much as we should have. I think a big chunk of our defense spending should be focused on stopping incoming missiles, much more important than spending it on offensive weapons. Let's build up an iron dome-like system, like Israel has, but against potential nukes to take that off the table. But I don't think, I don't think, now they wouldn't be able to shoot, I was down, I was a much more sophisticated, but also they don't have the anti-missile technology. Certainly not at the level we have. One of the reasons Sweden switched, as you know, I was right again, and not Sweden switched, Turkey switched, and is agreeing to have Sweden come back into NATO is that Turkey, for a while, they was floating with buying Russian weapons system. They bought the anti-aircraft S-400 for the Turkish army, even though Turkey's a member of NATO, they were starting to buy Russian weapons systems. Guess what they've learned in the Ukraine war? That Russian weapons systems suck, and now the Turks realize that they're gonna be dependent on the Americans. So suddenly they become a lot friendlier to the US and a lot friendlier to NATO, a lot friendlier to Ukraine, I don't know if you noticed, but Ogoan is, they're actually gonna build a drone manufacturing facility in Ukraine to build Turkish-designed military drones for the Ukrainian military in Ukraine. That's how friendly they are to Ukraine. They've also said that the Navy will escort Ukrainian grain ships if the Russians don't agree to a grain deal. So Turkey has become super friendly suddenly. Why? Because they realize the weakness of Putin. They realize the weakness of Russia. Something that, again, the American right and many American libertarians don't. Turkey has realized and therefore they are scrambling to make nice with America and Western Europe, even suggesting maybe if they behave themselves, could they enter the EU, which would be a huge boost to Turkey. You know, they're suddenly playing nice because they know that the alternative, i.e. Russia, is a complete disaster and a complete failure. All right, we're only $10 short. If somebody wants to do a $10 sticker, that would be very, very cool. Just to get us to the number so we can check off one more show as making the target. Oh, you can do two $5 stickers or five $2 stickers, but just if you do something, we can make it. Frank says, Manson Disciple badly does $24. All right, we'll take that. Manson Disciple, Leslie Van Houten is being released from prison. How can this happen? Ken LeBianca children follow her every move and harass her. I don't know how it happens. I don't know how anybody who's committed basically homicide should ever be released. I don't think murder is particularly that kind of gruesome murder and murder of more than one person can ever be, quote, forgiven and anybody should ever be released from that. So I think it's a miscarriage of justice and it's horrible. In terms of harassing them, I don't know. Beware, why would you spoil your own life by devoting your energy to harassing them? Live your life, the best remedy for the injustice to live the best life that you can live. All right, we'll do these quickly because I only have five minutes before we have to end. Where's the line, Bradley asked, between altruism and objectivity, objectively wanting work that improves the world? IE, an entrepreneur builds a health food concept. Small market over a big junk food market makes less money but loves the product. Well, I mean, the key is the loves the product. That is, I think it's altruistic to the extent that you are giving up more than you're gaining. If what you're giving up is your time and your effort but what you're doing is you love what you're doing, then it's not altruism. And your motivation to change the world, there's a sense in which every entrepreneur's motivation, part of the motivation is that. But if, for example, you're saying, yeah, but profit, I feel guilty about the profit, then it's a sacrifice. But if you're making money and changing the world and providing value out there, that's what business is about. It's about providing value to whom? To other people out there. You're making the world a better place. That's not altruism. That's you pursuing your best interest by making the world a better place. And that is fantastic. I don't think making the world a better place can ever be the primary value, the thing that drives you. The thing that drives you has to be inside you. The love of the thing, the love of creating values, the value itself that you're creating for you and for all these other people. So it's an orientation, which has massive implications to your soul, to the way you view the world. All right, Kim says, how much would it cost for you to do a review of a 30-minute Reason TV video? God, a 30-minute video is gonna take me forever because as you know, I review every 10 seconds. So if you can take like a five to 10-minute clip from the 30, that would be a whole show, right, probably. So if you can give me the timestamp from where you want me to review, I don't know, I'm just throwing it out there, 250 bucks but make me an offer. Make me an offer, send me an email. You're on it, you're on bookshow.com. But the 30-minute, I can watch the whole thing and comment on it, but I can't show it and comment during the show because it'll take five hours to cover 30 minutes. Let's, let's, give me a clip. Andrew, what do you make of the assertion that Putin goes someone worse who overplays him? I think it's possible that someone worse who overplays him, but so what? I mean, you know, you still gotta get rid of Putin. The only chance that somebody better replaces him if you get rid of him, there is definitely a possibility somebody worse who overplays him. That's why it's not just enough to get rid of Putin. You have to defeat Russia, set it back and make sure that they can't attack again. Whoops. Connor, do you think we could potentially develop AI to a point where it could stop nukes from being launched? I don't know because certainly if that were possible, then I in my country would cut the nukes off of the network that the AI controlled so that it couldn't reach it. So I don't see how you would do that as long as you can cut them off in a sense from the internet off on the communication networks where the AI sits. All right, everybody, thank you. We made our target. That's a beautiful thing and very, very motivating. I will see you all tomorrow morning, no show tonight, but there will be a show at about the same time tomorrow. I think it's at the same time. I think it's one o'clock with a whole new set of topics. I had one that was particularly interesting that was looking at earlier. What was it? Let me just see if I can find it. Oops, but I need to go. Anyway, so tomorrow at one o'clock, yeah, really good, a really interesting story by David French or an op-ed by David French that I want to cover about the new right. As you know, oh my God, this thing is playing games on it. Anyway, thank you, everybody. See you all tomorrow. And yeah, have a great rest of your week. Oh, I want to talk about the chip industry tomorrow. We'll talk about chips and chip manufacturing. Are the sanctions against China working? Is the chip act to build chips in the United States working? All of that.