 Fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Book Show. Alright everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show on this Friday, June 9th. As you can see I'm still in a hotel, still in Austin, Texas. Right after the show I will rush over to the airport and make my flight and travel to a home, to San Juan. So I'll probably do a show tomorrow and possibly on Sunday and those will be back in San Juan. And I'll be in San Juan, I'll be in Puerto Rico. I'll be home until Okon. Okon is at the end of June. So three, four weeks at home and back to a regular schedule of programs. So yeah, looking forward to going home. We are going to jump into, I guess we're going to jump into the news here. Just to remind everybody we've got the super chat feature on so you can ask any questions you want. Value for value, you listen to the show, hopefully you get some values from the show. Consider supporting the show as a return on the value you receive. But let's just jump in. I think a big part of the news these days is what's going on in Ukraine. And clearly there is significant action going on in Ukraine. There is the Ukrainian so-called counter offensive is in full swing. The Ukrainian military is attacking on a number of different fronts. Trying to repel Russia from territory they have taken from the Ukrainians. So I'm completely on board with Ukrainian's attempt to extricate Russia from Ukrainian territory. And hopefully they will be able to achieve that soon. You will be seeing a lot of photographs coming out and we are seeing a lot of photographs coming out right now. Primarily from the Russian side there's a lot of, Russia has really geared up its propaganda machine, if you will, for this counter offensive. So you're seeing a lot of photographs. Some of the most striking ones, the ones that have made the most press and the most noise are photographs of western equipment that has been damaged during fighting in the south of Ukraine. Particularly there's a photograph of a Leopard 2 German tank that seems to have been not destroyed because it doesn't look destroyed but it doesn't look like it's going to need repairs. It seems like the crew survived and it seems like the tank will be able to be brought back into operation. And then there's some Bradley US, Bradley fighting vehicles that have also seemed to be damaged and stopped. And a lot has been made of that called God, Bradley, and fighting vehicles and so on. But it's a little bit silly. Unless we start seeing large numbers of these, ultimately this is a war. Equipment is going to get damaged. People are going to lose their lives sadly. Soldiers are going to die. Large numbers of soldiers are going to die. There's no question about that. The Russians have had a year to basically reinforce their positions in southern and eastern Ukraine. So it is much more difficult now for the Ukrainians to advance at all as compared to how it was last spring and summer when Ukraine made significant advances. But at the time the Russians were a lot less entrenched, a lot less didn't have as many defensive positions. And now the battlefield is filled with mines. The Ukrainians are going to have to use minesweepers. Tanks are going to roll over mines. They're going to be disabled by those. The nice thing about Western tanks is that the mines are probably not going to destroy the tank. They're going to disable it for a while. That capacity to be repaired. It is also a big disadvantage that the Ukrainians have that they do not control the skies. Now of course the Russians don't control the skies either. It's a strange war in this sense. This is not a modern, in many respects, not really a modern war. Because I think in modern warfare the step one is control the skies. Knock out anti-air defenses and put your airplanes into the sky. In this war neither side controls the air. And that was a big disadvantage for the Russians. And now it's a big disadvantage for the Ukrainians as they try to capture ground. They have air defense systems to prevent the Russians from controlling the sky. But they can't provide air support to their ground troops. Which is a real, it makes it much more difficult to fight a war. Much more difficult to fight a war. Progress is going to be slow no matter what for the Ukrainians. Again the Russians have invested a lot in defensive, in defense. It's going to be bloody, it's going to be destructive. And Ukraine is going to take significant losses. I expect ultimately the Russians will take bigger losses. And that Ukraine will be able to dislodge Russians from big swaths of Ukrainian territory. We'll see how it all develops, we'll see how it all goes. It is the fog of war right now. We don't know whether they are, the extent to which they advance us, the extent to which they don't. And that is a reality. Can ask, so stupid ask yourself if it makes sense. Both sides don't control the air. Both sides don't control the air. That is a fact. It's not speculation, it's a fact. And the Russians don't control the air to the extent that when they fire missiles into Ukrainian territory, they fire them from airplanes that do not cross the line into Ukraine, that are firing them from Russian territory. That is bizarre. And if Russia controlled the air they wouldn't have to do that. They would be pounding Ukrainian positions from the air nonstop and they haven't done that. That's because Ukraine has an amazing defense system, a defense system that has not allowed the Russians to control the air. Russia does not control either the tactical or the strategic airspace. It cannot fly its migs above operations because they would get shot down and they know that. The Ukrainians as Western sophisticated air defense system that the Russians cannot match and cannot evade using airplanes. If Russia controlled the airspace, they would be so much more further along in their war than they are. They don't. But neither do the Ukrainians. So it is a real challenge for both parties. And most of what's being fought now is using drones. Drones can much easier evade the defense systems than actual airplanes, but drones are also more limited in terms of what they can actually, the kind of payload they can carry and the kind of damage they can do. I expect that in the next few weeks, in the next months, we will discover that the Ukrainians are making significant breakthroughs right now, have made significant breakthroughs and will push the Russians away. It's hard to tell exactly what the Ukrainian strategy is right now. It is, and where they're attacking exactly, almost all the reports coming out of the battlefield are coming out from the Russian side. Ukraine is keeping media silence. Those people on Twitter and elsewhere that are following the war and following Ukraine tend to be pro-Ukrain and are not disclosing operational intelligence, which is good so that Ukraine has some element of surprise here in terms of its strategy and tactics. So we will see. But again, you will get a lot of negative news in the days to come from the Ukrainian perspective as Russian propaganda dominates the airwaves. The same thing happened by the way at the beginning of the war. It looked like Russia was going to take care of days, hours, days, certainly weeks. And it turned out that they were having a much, much harder time on the ground than anybody was reporting, certainly that the Russians were reporting. And that, I think, you'll see a parallel to that in this offensive. So this was not only a war on the ground. This was also a propaganda war. And the Russians have really ramped up the propaganda war in anticipation of this offensive from the Ukrainians. It is, but it is a war. And it's a large-scale war. It's a war with tanks. I mean, only dimension where it's not a large-scale war is in the air. And you're going to see tanks disabled. You're going to see tanks blown up. You're going to see, on both sides, you're going to see large numbers of casualties. But this is not going to be easy, again, given the nature of what is going on. Let me just see something. All right. I think that's, yep. All right. Let's see. Yep. I think everybody knows that Trump was indicted yesterday over the documents issue. I find it fascinating how people are responding to this. Clearly, Trump did something illegal and wrong. Clearly, he took classified information and tried to hide it from the FBI. And when asked to return it, he refused. Not by declassifying it, and not by claiming he declassified it, but by denying and rejecting that he had it, by hiding it, by, you know, and there's now audio evidence that he knew he had classified information that he was not supposed to have. He also ran exercises on how to evade the FBI when they came to search. Clearly, clearly, what he's did is wrong. Maybe other people have done worse. That's fine. But what he did was illegal and wrong. And the real, you know, the real, and the real, what do you call it, tragedy and the real crisis would have been if he had not been indicted. If he had not been indicted, the message to the American people and the message to everybody is some people above the law. If you're a former president, we don't go after you. Now, maybe Hillary should have been indicted as well. Okay. It's interesting that Trump was there. Trump was a locker up and everything. And even Trump didn't indict Hillary. And I wonder why. I wonder why the Justice Department didn't. Maybe because they didn't have a case. Certainly, Trump was motivated to go after Hillary. But here there's a case. It's a clear-cut case. It's not a hard case. The evidence is pretty public. Just the public evidence is pretty clear that this should be indicted. And whether Hillary should also be indicted is irrelevant. Maybe next time we can indict Hillary as well. But Trump should be indicted just like any criminal, anybody who does things that are against the law. And I'm critical of the whole use of classified information and what counts and what doesn't count and all of that. And I think the biggest issue for Trump is that he tried to evade. He tried to evade. He tried to hide. He tried to get around. You know, actually following the law. So the special counsel here is not particularly left. The special counsel here is a pretty respected lawyer, respected both on the left and on the right. He's not particularly partisan. Nobody has accused him when he was appointed. Nobody accused him of being particularly partisan. A lot of people thought that this was a good appointment because he was pretty neutral. Now, I mean, this is, Trump is a bad guy. Trump has done bad things. Trump has done illegal things. He's indicted. He will go in front of a court. He will present evidence. There will be a trial just like anybody else who's indicted will have his day in court. And he will either be found guilty or innocent. He'll have an opportunity to appeal. He'll go through the same legal process as everybody else has. And if he's innocent, it's likely in our system of government that he will be found innocent. It appears that the judge overseeing the case now, right now, is a Trump appointee who is very favorable towards Trump. So there is a good chance that he will get favorable treatment for now on, but he should be treated like anybody else. And if there are injustices in terms of the fact that Hillary was not prosecuted or this person was not prosecuted, then fix it. Again, Trump had the Justice Department under his administration with his appointees for four years. For four years. So either you could argue he is absolutely unequivocally incompetent, which is true. Or maybe something else is going on here, but people... I mean, what is really interesting about all this, ultimately, is nobody cares about the truth. Nobody cares about the truth. And for everybody to come out and say, oh, this is the Justice Department using politics and not caring about the fact that we all know Trump did it. Everybody knows Trump did it. And instead of saying, yeah, Trump did it. This is awful. He shouldn't have done it. And yeah, by the way, there are other indictments of politicians that we should be pursuing, like Hillary. But Trump did it. Even his opponents in the primaries are so afraid, so terrified of the so-called Trump base. And this is what's really pathetic. They're so terrified. They're so afraid that not one of them will criticize Trump. Not one of them will say he's guilty. One did. Hutchinson, the former governor, I think, of Arkansas. The only one who will see what Chris Christie does. But all of them are just cowards, little baby cowards. And this is why one of the many reasons they won't win, because they're afraid to challenge Trump. They're afraid to challenge Trump base. You know, it's just, I mean, I think really, to categorize DeSantis and Scott and all of them, the appropriate word is pathetic. Just absolutely unequivocal, pathetic. Anyway, so it's sad to see so many serious people, like the people running for president, be so afraid of actually following the truth, standing up to Trump, actually pursuing evidence, actually talking about what actually happened. It really is sad. And none of them deserve, as a consequence, none of them deserve to be the Republican candidate. If you can't criticize Trump, you do not deserve to be the nominee. All right, there's a big difference between what Biden did and what Pence did and what Trump did. And that is, yes, they all had these documents, the differences, the fundamental differences, is that Trump engaged in hiding the fact that he had the documents. He engaged actively in an attempt to deceive the FBI and to deceive the Justice Department in terms of access to those documents. He engaged actively in moving them around and preventing people. So the main accusation of Trump is not on the fact that he had the documents. Everybody makes mistakes and takes too many documents with him. I think that is true of probably every politician who's dealt with top secret. It is to what extent you go in order to hide them, to what extent you go in order to deceive those who would take those documents. So that is the main problem with Trump. It is not his possession of the documents. It's his attempts to deceive about the documents, which was stupid to begin with because he was going to get caught. But that's part of the cause for Trump. I mean, he's not that smart. All right. Oh, some good news. Good news. Good news that I'm sure most of you are not ready to accept, but good news. Motorite is down significantly this year in the United States. The sharpest decline in motorite in a... I guess they've got some data anywhere from three to five months. Sharpest decline in a motorite that we might have seen in a very long time, maybe ever. Motorite is down 12% in more than 90 cities that have released so far data for 2023. So it's incomplete. We'll see what the looks like. We won't know that really until 2024 when the FBI discloses the data. But cities report data on a month-to-month basis, some cities. And there's a significant decline. It has surprised everybody. 2020, as you know, saw a dramatic increase in motorites in the United States. In some places, 30% increases. Increases attributed to a lot of different things from, you know, just a lot of trouble caused by the fact that people were locked up, psychological problems, a lot of domestic violence increased, a lot of domestic motors increased during 2020. Also, a big factor was the anti-police attitude of BLM and the riots and everything like that, defund the police. And the fact that some cities actually went through with defunding the police or reducing funding for the police all contributed to a spike in motorite that continued into 2021. Again, saw significant increases. And so the highest rates in motor in a very long time, not as high as we saw in the early 90s or the late 80s, but higher than we've seen in 20 years. And then there was a slight increase in motor rates last year. So the trend, kind of the COVID effect, dissipated. A lot of the defunded police were reversed. There was significantly more funding flowing into police departments. Police got more engaged. And that contributed to a reduction in motor rates in most of the United States last year. And then this year there's a dramatic reduction in motor rates. You can pretend that the data is not real. You can pretend that the data is made up. You can do whatever the hell you want. But the reality is that motor rates, not all crime, property crime is actually on the increase, but motor rates are dramatically lower. And that's true in a number of major cities. It's true in New York City where motor is down 13%. Shootings are down 25%. Relative to last year, motor is down more than 20% in Los Angeles. It's more than 20% down in Houston and Philadelphia. That's 30%. That's huge, right? Sorry, that's 20%. But in Jackson, Mississippi, in Atlanta, Georgia, in Little Rock, Arkansas, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a defunded police city, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, motor rates are down more than 30%. More than 30%. There are cities where motor rate is up. Memphis, for example, so an uptick after Tyree, Nicole's killing in January. But even Chicago has seen a decline, not as big a decline as New York and some of these other cities. Some Texas cities have seen an increase. Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio have seen slight increases. But then Houston, of course, has seen a 20% plus decrease in motor rate. This is all motor rate. And this has to do with police returning, police budgets being increased. It has to do with more deployment of police. It has to do with, I think, a lot of the COVID effects winding down. And many cities have used federal COVID relief money to hire more police officers. Adding police officers helped to reduce homicide. That's not that surprising. Drug gang programs in L.A. that were suspended during COVID are now in full throttle trying to keep L.A. gangs from murdering each other. But even in horrible cities like Chicago and New Orleans, murder is down. And even though the number of police has unchanged from last summer, even though the anti-crime candidate had lost in the Mayo race, there's something sociological going on that is just resulting in less death. In New Orleans, murder is down 8%. And in New York, in spite of the fact that they have 2%, fewer officers, murder rates are down 13%. So it's not just more police. Other factors are going on here that are hard to identify. And hard to tell what they are exactly. But the reality is that we are going back down to the very low, relatively, very low rates of murder that existed in the United States pre-COVID in the mid-20s. Yeah, so that's good news. And I know a lot of you don't want to believe it, but that's fine. It's not an issue of believing. It's an issue of reality. Let's see. That's done. Okay, so in court yesterday ruled in a kind of surprise ruling that redistricting in Alabama was unconstitutional or actually violated the Voting Rights Act. This is a surprise because two conservative justices voted with three liberal justices, leftist justices, and a 5-4 decision. The two conservatives were Kavanaugh and Roberts. And so in Alabama, what they ruled is that the districts, as they were drawn in Alabama, basically disenfranchised the black community in Alabama. The idea is that the lines were drawn to make it so that in every district the black population was a minority. And they were drawn in artificial, non-organic ways as to make every single district a white majority district, even though the black population in Alabama is significant. And even though they are concentrated in certain places, and this is to guarantee that they are not, don't find representation. It's a major case because many southern states have drawn lines this way. And this could really hurt Republicans in the House of Representatives. It could, to the extent that blacks vote Democratic, it could produce a number of Democratic House seats in the south that didn't exist before. This one is just about Alabama, but it affects probably other southern states. And it's a real issue that I'm sure Republicans are very worried about facing the next House elections in 2024. So it is interesting that both Kavanaugh and Roberts voted this way, how to tell exactly why. And I don't have a strong opinion about the legitimacy of this, but I think that somehow, I think gerrymandering, which happens on both sides, both parties do this all over the place, I think it's clearly wrong. It clearly, there needs to be a way to divvy up districts that is not done politically, that is done kind of geographically, demographically. I don't know exactly how you would do that, but getting politics out of redistricting is important to the extent that the Supreme Court can get the district to be more objective is good. Although I understand that many of you only care about this in terms of losing Republican seats. Democrats did this, I think, in a place like New York, and it was also ruled illegitimate and had been turned around. So the courts have ruled on both sides of this to kind of fix the attempt of both political parties to try to dominate particular states through the districting and it's time that we come up with some kind of better, more objective system by which to do this. So surprising, but one of the arguments I read somewhere is it could be that Roberts voted for this because they're going to rule against affirmative action in education, they're going to rule against racial, and he wanted to kind of present a balanced thing when it came to race, so who knows what goes on in the mind of Roberts. But that is one interpretation I read somewhere. Alright, just a quick word on deficits. The government is running at a pace of $1.5 trillion deficit this year. That'll be 50% above deficits that were being run pre-COVID. They were, at the time, were about a trillion, which was outrageous. The Trump administration ran a trillion-dollar budget deficit. It then spiked up during COVID, both during Trump and then during Biden, to above two and now it's at 1.5. It went down to below 1.5 and now it's spiking again towards 1.5 with everything the government had done. So in spite of this budget deal, the stupid budget deal that McCarthy and Biden agreed to, it's going to do nothing really to reduce government deficits that are running at 1.5 billion, a high percent of GDP. One of the things that's happening is revenue, tax revenue has declined. It was very high in 2021, beginning of 2022. It was above 19% of GDP. Now it's close to the 17% of GDP. So revenue is falling, spending is rising. Not a good combination if you care about government deficits. I think the problem is government spending. Not deficits, but anyway, that is the issue. How you deal with this, how they're going to deal with this? Hard to tell. There were a lot of, of course, calls for raising taxes. And in that context, there's an interesting paper out that shows that basically the rise and fall of deficits in post-World War II has nothing to do with tax rates and has everything to do with business cycles. That is, when you go into recession, tax revenues go down or the economy slows down, tax revenues go down. And spending doesn't. Spending actually usually increases during recessions because the government's trying to stimulate the economy. And that drives deficits up. Revenue is, as a percent of GDP, changes very little. As you raise or decrease taxes. So you get somewhere between 17% and 20% of GDP as revenue, no matter, no matter what the tax rates are, people find ways around it, people change their work, the way they work. But at the end of the day, you know, deficits are closed because the economy picks up, you get economic growth and tax revenues goes up, not because taxes went up but because income goes up, because economic growth goes up. So it is not correlated. It is not correlated with tax rates. It is correlated with the state of the economy. Anyway, it's just a, I mean, we're at record levels of deficits and there's no, and of course, what is driving the deficits? What's driving the deficits to a large extent is Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Those things, the Republicans and Democrats agree, cannot be touched. And with that kind of mentality, there's literally no way to close these deficits. We'll continue until some massive economic downturn forces our policymakers, forces all of us, I think, to actually face the reality of government spending, the growth of governments and the fact that our government is basically bankrupt and needs to restructure, needs to rethink what it does, how it does it and everything else. All right, and that means, by the way, reforming or phasing out or privatizing or doing something with Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. You cannot, you cannot and you will not have any impact on government spending and government influence on the economy as long as those programs are as big as they are. They dominate spending by a long shot. All right, let's take some of your questions. Rimo says, this summer I will go to holiday to Switzerland. Do you have some tourist recommendations for Geneva, Bern, Lucerne and Zurich? Now, really, I mean, Switzerland, I think the best thing to do in Switzerland is to get into a car and drive and go up the mountains and see the views and engage in that. You know, all those cities are extraordinary, beautiful cities. It's worthwhile spending a little time there and going on the lakes and just traveling around. But I think what really makes Switzerland unique is just the peaks, the mountains, the valleys, the scenery. The scenery is astounding and beautiful and amazing. And the best thing is just get into a car and drive and go see it. And if you're into hiking, go hike some of the beautiful trails. You know, I've spent a little bit of time in Zurich, a little bit of time in Geneva. Again, beautiful cities. Geneva is quite a bit more expensive if I remember right, hotels-wise than Zurich. But yeah, just walk around the streets. But I think the main thing is going up into the mountains and seeing the views. Michael says, how do you train your mind to be stronger than your feelings? I think a lot of it is introspection. It's realizing, identifying those feelings and getting to understand them and then getting control over them. So the main mechanism by which you do that is through introspection. I encourage you to listen to Gene Moroni's, Harry Benzweig's wife's work on this, Gina Gorlin. So that is primarily psychological work, which I'm not an expert in. But I think Gene Moroni has a lot about introspection in my interview with her that I did a few months ago. We talked a lot about that and it was quite enlightening, I think. So I would encourage you to listen again to that and to engage with some of the material she has produced. Stodget says, a bad part of Trump's crimes is a self-righteous pontification of leftist commentators. The worst part is watching the GOP self-destruct. Thank goodness there's at least one voice of reason to turn to thanks. Thanks, Stodget. I appreciate it. I think there are other voices of reasons, but I appreciate you including me in that category. All right, Scott, you said you immediately clarified your fifth call of remarks, but do you have a link or title to your clarification? Yeah, it's in the same show. If you just don't take that few sentences out of context, it's right in the same video and then it's in the videos afterwards. I don't have a list because I only think people of ill will. I'm going to stand by this and even if it's insulting to some of you, I only think people of ill will misunderstood what I said. I think anybody who's followed me a little bit, anybody who's listened to my show more than one show, anybody who listened to that whole show carefully, anybody who listened to the shows before and shows afterwards knows exactly what I meant by my fifth column comment and did not misinterpret it. I mean, that column didn't need any significant clarification because it was within the context, it was clear. I was talking and always would be talking about people who justify everything Trump has done. Now, I'm against voting for Trump. I was against voting for Trump. I encourage people not to vote for Trump, but I did not accuse people who vote for Trump for being a fifth column. I accuse the apologists, people who will justify anything Trump does as being fifth columnists. And anybody honest who listened to the shows and who has followed my shows over time knows this. Leonard didn't misunderstand it because Leonard was never presented with the evidence. Leonard was only presented with your interpretation of the evidence, dishonest people's interpretation of the evidence. So don't bring in Leonard Peacock as you love to do, Scott. Your appeal to authority is pathetic and misrepresent what Leonard thought or what Leonard said or anything like that because you don't know. All right, enough me being angry. Remo, value for value, keep up the good work. Thank you, really appreciate that. Steven, they have empire on Ukraine, doesn't game over, never underestimate your opponent. Steven, you've been wrong about the Ukraine war from day one. So I would be very carefully making predictions. The reality is I've been right about the Ukraine war from day one and pretty much everything. So show just a little bit of respect for the fact that you've been wrong and I've been right. All right, let's see. Andrew says a Republican congressman said on TV that the border is not a crisis but a catastrophe. It's a cataclysm. Is the term crisis being overused politically to the point of losing its effect? Yes, generally what is happening in politics is hype. I mean, you hype, you panic, and this is the, you know, I think what Trump masked it. He was brilliant at this. The one thing he's brilliant at is identifying what I get people super excited, super afraid, super worried, super concerned and hyping that and creating a buzz about the crisis. And then people, you know, politicians now in both parties do this regularly in order to create attention. Now granted, this has been part of politics forever. I just think Trump was a master at it. You know, you can learn how to get people foaming at the mouth and hysterical over issues by watching Trump. So it's now standard practice to basically, you know, associate crisis with it. It's why people don't want to hear the good news about motorways going down, because God, there's no crisis in America's cities. What are we going to do? How are we going to get people excited and upset? Michael says, people promoting false epistemology have mastered the art of muddying the waters to make them appear deep. Yes, yes, confusion, complexity, vagueness is now considered profound. And I think that's right. Michael says, I think narcissism is a bigger problem in more than 11 of force in the culture than altruism. I don't think that's right. I think narcissism is superficial. Altruism is very deep. And, you know, you could probably find a link between people being narcissistic and altruistic, because they superficially reject altruism, but the only alternative they can find to it is narcissism. But deep down what's motivating both their narcissism and the guilt that they feel is altruism. Altruism is the dominant. It dominates people's attitudes, emotions, thinking about morality. Narcissism is a superficial response to that. It's a consequence of their discomfort with altruism. But it's not a force. The force is altruism. Michael says, will Trump make a deal to drop out of the presidential race if he can get his crime charge dismissed? It's getting more and more likely the Santas wins this thing. I surely hope so, but I don't think... I don't see how the Justice Department can make such a deal, because then the attitude will be clearly that this is political. If he can get off because he won't run for president, then the whole purpose of doing this was to prevent him from running for president. That would be awful if that was the conclusion of this. I hope that he withdraws for a variety of reasons. I hope he cuts a deal somehow, and we don't have to live through a trial. But I do not think he can cut that deal. I won't run for president and you dismissed the charges. I don't think that's a legit deal that the Justice Department can go ahead with. I think he's going to plow through this, and he's going to use every one of these indictments, and he's going to be indicted in Georgia. I don't think there's any doubt that Georgia will indict him over attempts to manipulate the election and to put pressure on. I think that's the one that I think is the worst, and I think it's the one that's worse in a sense that, again, clearly he did it. We all know he did it, and you should be prosecuted for that one. But we'll see if that goes through. Michael says Alex Epstein just did a one-on-one with Peter Thiel discussing altruism and why it's destructive. Do you have the interview? Have you seen it yet? I'm curious to see it. I mean, Peter Thiel is an interesting guy. I'm very curious to see how Peter Thiel deals with altruism, what he thinks altruism is, and so on. I've met Peter several times, and he is an interesting character. But good for Alex. By the way, Alex is sponsoring a Euron Brook show. Alex has actually paid to sponsor a show. I will be doing that probably next week or the week after that. It's going to be a show on, if you will, free market solutions to environmental problems that he's asked me to do, so he sent me a list of questions. So it's going to be a lot of fun and it's going to be a lot of interesting interest. I do also need to hook up again with Adam Campbell to see what shows he wants to sponsor, and we'll get all of that back to all those sponsor shows and a regular show schedule once I am back on a regular schedule and at home. All right, guys, I think that is the last question. We're only $44 short of a goal. It would be wonderful to achieve that goal if anybody out there wants to get us over the hump, that would be great. But let's see. So let me just say, my expectation is the next show will be tomorrow, probably at 3 p.m. East Coast time, and then I will probably do a show Sunday evening just because I'm behind on the number of shows I've done. I haven't done a lot of shows because I've been traveling. But then next week will be a show every day, a new show every day in the mornings and then some evenings there will be shows. So we will get back to that regular schedule. Andrew has a quick question. Is there more to the affinity between certain conservatives and RFK Jr. than just weakening Biden? Yes, I mean, RFK Jr. is a conspiracy theory nut. A lot of conservatives are conspiracy theory nuts. RFK Jr. is an isolationist when it comes to farm policy, I think, so are many conservatives. RFK, I think, leans towards Russia, so are the conservatives. RFK Jr. is convinced that COVID vaccines are killing people, so are many conservatives. So I think that's the affinity. The affinity is a conspiratorial view of the world and an anti-American view of the world, in my view. So I think that's part of it. I will do a show on RFK Jr. One of my goals over the next few months is to do a show on every one of the leading presidential candidates. I want to do a show dedicated to DeSantis. I want to do a show dedicated to RFK Jr. A show dedicated to, I don't know, who else is a major candidate on the Republican side? But do many of them, and as we discover who the bigger people are, that would be better. Alex, of course, debated RFK. He's just, he's horrible. All right. Thank you, Andrew. And yeah, I'll be watching the Ukraine war, trying to filter out what's propaganda and what's not. And yeah, much of what Ukraine is going to publish will be propaganda as well. I mean, it is a propaganda war. It's not just a ground war. And part of the job of intellectual is to try to figure out what is what, what is objective, what is not. I have to pat myself on the back, since I know some of you won't. I think I've done a pretty damn good job of that with the Ukraine war. And so far, so good. We'll see if my predictions continue to be good. But so far, the information you've got in your run book show regarding the Ukraine war has been amazingly accurate. All right. With that self-compliment. Oh, we got another question quickly. What do you think of the merger of the PGA and live golf, creating a big monopoly in golf sports? And I don't believe it's heavily regulated. Does this mean that even in free markets, monopoly still exists? I don't know. I haven't studied really whether the PGA is protected and how the PGA is protected. But I have no problem with monopolies in a free market. Monopolies, if you mean to dominate a particular industry, why not? You know, in your, where you British pounds, are you in England? The British football league is a, you could argue a monopoly, but you know, some industries, you need one league. It doesn't make sense to have competing leagues. So I have no problem in quote monopolies in a free market if they are a result of a free market. I've never have. I've never said that if you mean by monopoly is a dominant overwhelmingly dominant company or presence. I think it's a disgrace that they're merging not because it creates some kind of monopoly, but because, because it basically brings the Saudis strong into PGA. Live was a disgrace because I think the Saudis are disgrace. I think working with the Saudis, I think cooperating with Saudis is disgraceful for a variety of reasons. How they treat their own people, how they treat their own women, how they fund terrorism, how they've, you know, how they treat the West and how they manipulate oil prices in a variety of different ways. So my view is don't deal with the Saudis. PGA was the only game in town before Live came about. PGA is back to being the only game in town. I don't know anybody who suffered as a consequence of that, who exactly suffered. It did a good job. People enthused about golf. They generated revenues for themselves. They should, the golfers made a lot of money. People got to view golf on TV and everywhere else. Who is the loser? I don't see who's going to be the loser in the future other than, you know, relationship with Saudis create all kinds of losers. Okay, we're going to do these two last questions quickly because they do have to run the airport. Michael says, do you think this need for uniqueness phenomena we see in the culture is driven by narcissism? And let's start hitting these super chat goals, people. Thank you, Michael. I really appreciate you getting us over the 250 goal and appreciate you encouraging other people. You know, I think it's driven by subjectivism. There's some narcissism in there, but I think a lot of it is subjectivism. A lot of it is the idea that you need to be different. You need to be unique, but in a superficial way, not in a deep sense, not independence. But you need to rebel. Every teenager has experienced this. But it's the subjectivism in the culture that leads it to be, you know, just anything goes. Kind of uniqueness rather than uniqueness that is driven by intellectual independence. By thinking for yourself, by actually pursuing values, but that you can objectively identify as values. Thank you, Michael. Demon, last question, talking to my social friends and we got down to the point of him saying, if it came down to the dream, then I would be on the chopping block. Thought, I don't understand that question at all. Talking with my social friend and we got down to the point of him saying, if it came down to the dream, what dream, then I would be on the chopping blocks. In other words, he would be willing to kill you in order to achieve his dream. I'm not sure what the dream is. Let's see if he's clarifying here. Demon says, we talked about more end game socialism and capitalism. He was saying, if it came down to it, I was blocking the dream, then I'd be the one to be removed. Yes, I mean, force, coercion, violence, murder have never stopped ideologues of the left and of the right from achieving their goals. That is, collectivism does not value the individual. Collectivists value some collectivistic dream, some collectivistic goal, and you as an individual don't matter. So if you're an obstacle, you must be eliminated. And this is true of every authoritarian, every collectivistic regime. It doesn't matter left, right or center. Religion views it this way. Socialism views it this way. Fascism views it this way. Individuals, this is what unites the authoritarians. This is what unites political evil in the world. That the individual does not matter what matters, some collective goal, some collective ambition. And it is truly horrific and truly dangerous. And this is why we must fight collectivism in every form it takes. And we must not align ourselves ever with collectivists because collectivism is the real enemy. Alright everybody, I will see you all tomorrow. And I will be home by then. Thanks everybody. Bye.