 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Book Show. All right, everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show on this Thursday night. I hope everybody's having a great weekend. I hope you're not spending too much time watching your stock portfolio shrivel into, well, I don't know into what, but shrivel. Mark has just imploded today again, way down. People, I guess, figured yesterday, they figured, oh, 0.75%, Fed's serious about inflation. This is good, and then this morning they woke up and said, wait a minute, if the Fed's serious about inflation, then we're going to have a recession. Everything collapsed, including the tenure bond, which went down, actually, today, again, in indication that what really was on people's mind today was recession fears. So NASDAQ was down another 4-plus percent. You know, Bitcoin is teetering on the 20,000 level. We'll see if it breaks through and goes below 20,000. Stocks, just, overall, were just down, down, down. And this is not just under U.S. phenomena. It's a global phenomenon. Everybody knows that if the U.S. goes into a session, the whole world is going into a session. So, you know, if you're in the markets, you just have to have fortitude. You just have to be able to live with the declines and wait and hope that things recover, right? And things will recover. Things will recover if, if, if, you know, the, if they don't screw it up too badly, if they don't screw it up too badly. Oh, Jared, thank you for becoming a YBS fan. That's great. Yeah, you can become fans by clicking on the fan button below. And I think it's, what, 5.99 or something to become a YBS fan. There is some content that is available, available for fans only. So, go down, click on the fan button, make, make your support known. Now, all right, today is a sponsored show. Rory has wrote to me and asked me to do a show on the right to repair. So, I've been reading up on the issue of the right to repair. So, you know, I think I have a few interesting things to say, but more importantly, I think the broader question that should be at the back of your mind as we talk about this is, what are the standards by which laws should be passed? You know, how do we decide whether a law is a good law or a bad law? What is, what is the criteria for determining that? So we'll be discussing that as part of the more specific discussion about this particular law, which a lot of states are looking at, some are rejected, some are moving forward with it. And that is this idea of a way to repair, which we'll get to. And then, you know, if we have time, we'll also cover some of the latest kind of disclosures from the January 6th hearing. In particular, I found really interesting Michael Ludwig's comments, particularly because Michael Ludwig is an appellate judge who has been on the shortlist for the Supreme Court nomination of pretty much every Republican in the last 20 years. So this is a guy who's a conservative part of the, I'd say, part of the Republican world, part of the Republican judicial world. And again, somebody very, very highly respected and admired. And he had some pretty harsh words to say today about what happened on January 6th and who, where the responsibility lies. So we'll go over a little bit of that. We will have shows on, thank you, Paul, we will have shows on Saturday and Sunday. I don't have the times, so say, June, but most probably, like in the afternoon, 3 p.m. Eastern time. One of those shows will probably be A Rules for Life. And the other show, I'm hoping, will be a show on crime, on crime, kind of what the causes of crime, why crime goes up and down over time, and then, of course, issues related to how bad is crime today, how bad is crime today from the history's perspective, when particularly we look at New York City, and what we can, what we can, what can we project about crime? So that'll be the Saturday or Sunday, and then the other one will probably be A Rules for Life show. And then we'll have a full slate of show next week, starting on Tuesday and then Thursday. Today, the show was early because Go Celtics, there was a game on tonight, and it's a do or die game for the Celtics, so I didn't want to miss a second of it. So there's my sports fandom, and so I figured I was going to start the show early, finish well in time for me to make the game at nine o'clock, and that'll be fun if they win, if it'll be terrible if they lose, but I think they'll win, and then there'll be a great game seven, and that will be a toss-up because it's in California, and who knows who will win that. But I do think the Celtics chances of winning tonight are pretty good. All right. Just a reminder that we do fund the show, fund my time, fund other people involved in running the show with dollars generated through the Super Chat, that's at least one important way. It's about just under a third of the total funding that we get for the runbook show directly, and so please use the Super Chat feature. You can ask questions, and I promise to respond. Of course, the more dollars you put in the question, the faster I will respond, and I will keep you updated as to how much money we raised vis-a-vis the goal of $650 for the show. What did I want to say? Yeah, I also wanted, in addition to the fact that Rory is a sponsor of this particular show, we do at your runbook show have two other sponsors. One is ExpressVPN.com. ExpressVPN is a VPN, basically provides you added security. It basically disguises where you are communicating from, and it's very useful if you're in China and you want to get on YouTube or Facebook. It's very useful if you're traveling, particularly on semi-secure or insecure Wi-Fi networks, but you want to do some bank transactions. It's very useful if you want to watch a basketball game on ESPN, which you've got a subscription to, but you happen to be in Poland, and Poland is blocked for some reason, so the VPN can make it look like you're somewhere else. So VPNs are very useful. They add security, particularly for laptops as you're traveling, but also for phones and for iPads. VPN Express is the one I use. When I did my research, it looked like the best one. It's recently been bought by a larger company. It used to, when I first got involved with ExpressVPN, they were a startup, but they've now been bought by a bigger company, and it works. The product works as far as I can tell. Now, if you type in expressvpn.com slash Iran, expressvpn.com slash Iran, they'll give you three extra free months. So you get like a free, a package of free months as part of your sign-up bonus, and then you get an extra three months because you came from the Iran Book Show, and that's how they know you came from me, and that's how they send me, I don't know, a couple of bucks for every person who signs up for ExpressVPN, so please do that. And then our second sponsor, I've talked about this before, it's fountainheadcasts.com, fountainheadcast.com. It includes a bunch of classical sculpture and representational sculpture casts of those, a lot of busts, a lot of beautiful stuff, stuff that not very expensive, that you can start your art collection, start putting some art around the house, things that you love, things that you admire, things that make you feel good, that inspire you, and so it's a great way to get that art collection going and get started, and you can browse the catalog and look at it. It's www.fountainhead.fountainheadcasts.com, and yeah, it's a lot of fun, so please go look, don't buy anything unless you like it, of course, but it is nice. All right, let's see. So let's talk about the rate to repair. There's a bunch of laws being proposed at the state level. There is the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, which is responsible for a lot of the antitrust issues, a lot of regulation of business goes through the FTC, has, as recommended to Congress, that Congress do something about these issues related to the right to repair. It is an issue that I think a lot of people in tech, a lot of producers of things like the iPhone, but also Caterpillar, a lot of auto manufacturers, so it's tech, auto manufacturers, equipment manufacturers. There's quite a large segment of the U.S. economy that relates to this issue of repair, and what is way to repair relates to, so for example, it used to be, I think Apple recently changed the rule, but it used to be that if you took an Apple product and you opened it up and did certain things to it, you would void the warranty. Apple only provides Apple-certified parts, Apple-certified codes, Apple-certified instructions to Apple-certified repair shops, so if you want to repair your Mac, you can just take it to anybody, you can just take it to any person, and again, I think Apple might have changed this recently, but this is the principle, so I'm just using Apple as an example. You can just take it to anybody and they, I don't know, have an inventory of Apple parts, so contact Apple and ask to have the parts and know it and get the specs, and no, Apple just won't give it to them, Apple will only sell to the people that they certify as legit replacement parts, so you can, like I took my IWatch, my Apple Watch, not IWatch, my Apple Watch, the screen broke, and I took it to a place here, and now the place here had an Apple-certified whatever sign on it, I don't know where they got it, they might have bought it in eBay or something, I don't know, but they had it there, and I said, you know, you're getting Apple materials and everything, oh yeah, no, I was completely compatible, everything's fine, everything's great, so they replaced the glass on the phone, and I got it back, and like the phone, I mean the watch, and the watch was like crap, battery life was 25% of what it used to be, some of the features didn't work, it just didn't work right, so I went back and I said, you know, what the hell? He said, no, no, this is legit, and I said, it can't be legit, is this Apple? He said, well, it's not Apple, it's a company from China, but it's the same thing. I said, but it doesn't work, well, yes, I mean, it has a little bit of problems, so you can, so Apple and these companies can't stop you from trying to repair the thing, but for example, you wanna repair your Caterpillar tractor. Well, Caterpillar is not gonna sell parts to Caterpillar tractors, except to Caterpillar authorized repairmen, and they're not that many of them, so they're the only ones who can repair parts, and it used to be the same for automobiles, you had to go, there was a big push to try to get you to go to the dealer, because only the dealer could sell you Toyota parts or GM parts or whatever, everybody else, you got out-of-market parts and whether they fit or wouldn't they, you weren't never sure, and then of course, there is the issue of warranty, although there is a law that says that a company cannot, it's a 40-year-old law that says that a company cannot restrict the warranty to only getting fixed with them, or only getting their parts, and otherwise you lose the warranty, so there's a lot of regulation, but not enough according to those who want a right to repair. So the idea is this, customers are inconvenienced by the fact that they have to only be able to use repair shops that are authorized and permitted by the manufacturer. They can just go to any repair shop they want, they can't just go anywhere. They have to use the authorized dealers, if you will. That means there are fewer, in a particular city, in any particular town, there are fewer people doing repairs for the particular product, which means there's less competition, which means prices are higher. These people also, their repair places are also buying original parts. Original parts tend to be more expensive. They also often have to use particular tools. Regular tools might not be sufficient, they might even need guidelines on how to do it. Other repair shops just can't do it, and if they do do it, the likelihood that the repair socks is very, very high. So consumers are complaining that, wait a minute, why can't we have real competition in repair? Why can't we go out there and basically get our iPhones repaired anywhere? Why can't we go out there and do what we want? I mean, I bought the iPhone, it's mine. Why are you telling me, now that it's mine, that it's my product, I have a property right over this, why are you telling me, for example, that I have to go to an Apple store or I have to go to an Apple certified repair place? I want to take it to my local electronics guy. We have a long-term relationship, he gives me a good price, why can't I just do that? And so a lot of consumers are complaining because they're saying, wait a minute, there's a property right here, this is mine. Apple's responses, again, I'm picking an Apple, I don't know if this is related to Apple, but we'll just assume that this is an Apple thing. Apple response would be, well, you can take it anyway. You're just gonna lose your warranty or you're not gonna get, you're not gonna get our parts and you're not gonna get, we're not gonna help these other places repair the phone and the consumers are saying, well, that's not fair. Wait a minute, that's unfair. It's unfair competition, you're limiting my access to markets and you're taking away my ability. Now, Apple also says, trade organizations that represent people who have this also say, look, we don't want just anybody repairing our products because these are complicated products, complex products, and they're likely that these people will break something, will screw it up as high and we don't want to be associated with them, we have a reputation to uphold. And on top of that, when we certify somebody to fix your product, we wanna make sure that they're not going to, once they're in your product, they're not gonna steal your information. And also, because when we certify somebody, we have to give them all kinds of information about how to repair, then that means that they have trade secrets and we don't want everybody to have our trade secrets. So we have a vested interest in protecting you, the customer from shoddy work, so we certify only good repair people. That's on the one hand. And we also wanna protect our own trade secrets and we wanna protect, by the way, your data because they will have access to your iPhone and if we give them too many tools, they'll be able to crack it and go in and steal your data. And this is true of Caterpillar that is worried that third-party repair people won't repair it, right Caterpillar will get a bad reputation. It'll destroy the reputation they have for excellent product, but wait a minute, people say, but, but, but, but, but, but, but. So you've got two claims. You've got the customer saying, but wait a minute, I want convenience and I wanna be able to repair this to the level that I get it back and isn't that my right to get my stuff repaired, wherever I want to repair it. And Apple saying, well, maybe you have that right, but there were these other considerations, there's privacy, there's our reputation, there's our trade secrets. And the question is, well, how do you balance these things? How do you make a decision? Who's more important? By what standard do you determine what's right and what's wrong here? Who do you believe? You know, how do you weigh the arguments? Well, I'll give you some examples. FCC, FCC basically clearly comes out on the side of consumers. And not just on the side of consumers, but it also comes down on the side of repair shops that have not been certified. And the reason they come out on the side of consumers repair shops that have not been certified is that they have an interest in competition and consumer protection. And that to them trumps anything else. But of course, it goes beyond that because the FCC, its government, and we have a Biden, a leftist administration right now, so there are other things that come into the equation. So for example, here's a paragraph from the FCC report on this, he says, furthermore, the burden of repair restrictions may fall more heavily on communities of color and lower income communities. Many black-owned small businesses are in repair and maintenance industries. And difficulties facing small businesses can disproportionately affect small businesses owned by people of color. The fact has not been lost on supporters of prior right to repair legislation who have highlighted the impact repair restrictions have on repair shops that are independent and owned by entrepreneurs from underserved communities. Repair restrictions on some products, such as smartphones, also replace a greater financial burden on communities of color and lower income Americans. According to the Pew Research, black and Hispanic Americans are about twice as likely as white Americans to have smartphones. But no broad bad access at home, so they're very dependent on the smartphone. Similarly, low income Americans are more likely to be smartphone dependent. Smartphone dependent. We're now smartphone dependent. This smartphone dependency makes repair restrictions on smartphones more likely to affect these communities adversely. Like, if one of you who's not, you know, smartphone dependent, I don't know how many of you are smartphone dependent. But if you're not smartphone dependent and you can go home and you can use the computer, you have access to other forms of internet access. But if you're smartphone dependent, that's your only accent. And if it breaks, oh my God, life has ended because you can't access the internet. So where do we put the considerations of altruism, for example? So this is pure altruism, right? I mean, it's racist and all kinds of other stuff, but it's pure altruism. The people out there that need, altruism is when you make an argument based on need, there are people out there who need to have their iPhones repaired. They need to have it repaired quickly. And the people who own repair shops tend to be people who need the business. And you're hurting them, but not providing them the business. And you know, they go on and say, the pandemic has made this worse because we now have a huge shortage of new laptops. We need laptops. And so part of the solution to that shortage of laptops might be that we, oops, what happened to this document? It didn't actually, didn't actually copy out the whole, oh there it is, okay. People need laptops and solution to laptop since we fix old ones and then we can get them. So there's a need to have them fixed. There's a shortage of semiconductors now, so we gotta fix them. Now this goes back a long time, 40 years ago there was a law called Magnuson Moss Warranty Act, which says that you can't restrict warranties to only repairs by your people and so on. I don't know exactly how that applies to Apple that has restricted it, but this has been around for a long time. And again, the question is, how do you balance all these considerations? What's the determinant? Is this kind of a utility function? Well, whose utility do you value consumers more than manufacturers, manufacturers more than consumers, because production is the most important thing. You know, we're objectivists, we value production, we value businessmen, so therefore they're the most important ones. So it just goes on and on. And then, you know, the manufacturers say, but look, you can use it anyway, so FCC says, well wait a minute, that's not true. The fact is that in order for a repair shop to be to repair anything, they have to be able to get parts from the manufacturer. They have to get schematics from the manufacturer. They sometimes have to get codes from the manufacturer to get into the chip or to replace the chip or to fix the chip or whatever. They have to get tools. Some manufacturers, you know, you need specific tools that only the manufacturer can provide in order to fix the thing. So again, so the manufacturers, by not providing these things, are hampering the ability of these other people to, you know, to fix whatever needs fixing. They've hampered their livelihood. So how do you decide on an issue like this? What is the principle? Do we just weigh pluses and minuses? You know, put a big whiteboard. This is the pluses of the law, these are the minuses of the law, and then we add it up and we look at what outweighs the other. What is the principle that should guide us, at least? Me, I don't know about you guys, in deciding about an idea like the right to repent. And in politics, there really is only one criteria, one standard, and that is rights. In this context, property rights, individual rights. It's not who's perceived to be getting hurt, who is suffering more, who feels deprived. It's not about the benefits and the losses, the economic consequences, the competitive landscape, nothing, none of that. It's about rights. Now, how does rights apply here? Well, do I have a right to get my stuff fixed anywhere that I want? Yes. Nobody can borrow me from going to my local electronic store and handing them the product and saying, fix this. If I have a right, it's my property. But under those conditions, the people who gave me the warranty have every right in the world to exclude certain actions that I take from the warranty. They can tell me, yes, you have a right to go into any store that you want, but we will only provide you a warranty if you get it fixed in authorized places. That's their right. And we have a contract, a warranty is a contract. And the fine print is very clear about these things. And this is what, it really gets mind boggling to me in terms of the rights violation. So I have a right to go into the repair shop and give them the phone. But then the question is, did that repair shop have a right to demand from Apple, to demand from whoever the manufacturer is, Caterpillar, whoever, the parts, the schematics, the codes, the chips, whatever it is, the tools, whatever it is, I mean, by what, what standard do they have a right? They take a gun out and force them to do it? So the repair shop has no right to demand that the manufacturer provide all of that. And I have no right to demand from Apple that they provide all of that. If I'm unhappy with the terms and conditions under which Apple facilitates repair of their products, I can buy a different product. But how can I have a right to dictate to Apple, to dictate a private business, to dictate to a free private business that has property rights over its intellectual property, its business model, its organization, its products, its parts, how can I dictate to them who they can or cannot sell that to? I can't. So this whole approach to law, this utilitarian approach is balancing the pluses and the minuses, looking at the economic effects, looking at who's harmed and who's not and who benefits and who suffers. And all of that is an anti-rights approach. And therefore any immoral approach to legislation. It's a violation of the fundamental role of government, which is to protect our rights, not to violate them. And it's not the case that, well, manufacturers have rights and consumers have rights and we have to balance the rights. No, there's only rights do not conflict. Rights are not balanced. One has to clearly see where the rights lie. And there's no way that it can be appropriate to say that a manufacturer, Caterpillar, let's say, has to provide parts to anybody that demands them. Well, that is willing to pay for them. Where does that come from? That's force, that's coercion. Caterpillar should be allowed to sell to whoever it wants to sell and not sell to whoever it doesn't want to sell. So the only standard is rights and you don't have a right to do whatever the hell you want to do. You just don't. If doing whatever the hell you want to do involves violating somebody else's rights, you don't have a right to do that. You can't have a right to do that. Rights do not conflict. Rights are, you have a right to act but you cannot use that action to impose an obligation on somebody else. You cannot have a right to other people's stuff even if you pay for it. Apple could decide tomorrow. Let's make it more controversial. YouTube could decide tomorrow, not seeing trade with me to borrow me from their platform. Okay, they have every right in the world to do that. It might not be rational. It might not be moral. It might not be legitimate. It might be stupid of them or whatever but they certainly have a right to do it. Apple has a right to sell products to whoever it wants. And certainly when it comes to repair, when Apple has a stake in how a product of theirs is repaired or Caterpillar has a stake in how their product is repaired, well, of course they have an interest in who does the repairing and who doesn't. And the more complex the product, the more important that becomes. Now, I'm not saying it's good business practices. I don't know what the right business practice is. That's the beauty of markets. Let's check them out, let's test them out so we can have companies that let people repair their stuff anyway and they'll provide the parts anyway and we can have companies that don't and we'll see how it goes. Let's see, any questions on this? Too bad Rory's not here to ask follow up questions. That would be good. I think I've covered it. I think it's pretty straightforward from my perspective that it's not this issue of balancing. It's just an issue of individual rights and state has no role, no role one way or the other. This is contract law. This is whatever the contract says. Nobody's rights are being violated here other than of course when the government gets involved when the states gets going. Let's do a couple of super check questions and then, yeah, we're way, way behind, right? So we're like $500 short of our goal. I'll keep you updated down there but Ashton has a $100 question so that helped out. Not a lot of questions today, just do you guys acquire today? That's okay. Ashton says, sorry I've been absent the past few episodes, I've been very busy. Oh, one minute, there is a right to repay question before we get to Ashton, sorry. James asked, do you think the legal mechanisms if any regarding the right to repay are similar to the right to resell plane tickets? Yeah, it's the same principle. The principle is you have a contract with the airline for a ticket under certain conditions. And under certain conditions, you can violate those conditions and under the conditions that you violate, you don't fly. So it's similar in the sense that they're both contract law, right? And it's, but it's a little different to the mechanism that applies. But the fundamental legal issue here is that the state has no business getting involved in a contract between me and a manufacturer, an airline, a service provider, unless there's fraud being committed, right? Unless rights are being violated in the contract which requires there to be fraud being committed or the contract is invalid contract because of the way it's structured. But then that's my responsibility to recognize that. So as a buyer. So it's the same rights violation when the government wants to say, oh, you have to allow resell of tickets, which they haven't done yet, surprisingly. They haven't intervened there yet, surprisingly. All right, thanks, Jason. Let me know if I answer the question if you want to follow up. That's not it, that's not it, that's not it. All right, Ashton asks, again, sorry, I've been at, what is, what did specifically I ran in Ludwig von Mises disagree on about economics? Obviously they had many similarities and agreements on certain issues, but I read that they argued a lot about economics. You know, I don't know what they argued about in economics and I don't know what you read that they argued a lot about economics. I haven't read that. I mean, suddenly, I think in terms of terminology, Rand disagreed with Mises, for example, on the issue of subjective value, Rand would view the Mises idea of subjective value really as objective value and that objectivity is important. On methodology, Mises was way too deductive. She was more of a, you know, she was more of a, she believed true knowledge comes from induction, not deduction. So I think the question, the issues were methodological. I also think that Austen economists, and I can't remember, I think this comes from Mises, this might be the biggest disagreement they had. Austen economics places primacy in economics, primacy in the economic process on the consumer. Businessmen are just satisfying consumer needs. And I, Rand, you can tell in Atlas Shrugged, completely rejects that view. She views economics as scented on the producer, and that the producer doesn't satisfy consumer needs, the producer creates consumer needs. The producer creates things that people have no idea that they need, and he teaches them, he teaches them that they need. So her focus is in on production, and on the genius of the producer, and on the fact that the production is the essential, fundamental part of economics, and economic activity. And that, yeah, if producers produce something that consumers don't want, then they fail, producers. But the producers are successful, the producers who teach the public what they want, discover for people what they want. I didn't know I wanted an iPhone until an iPhone was presented to me. That's the genius of Steve Jobs, is to not ask me what I want, but tell me. Imagine what I will want, and then go produce it and show me that I want it. And I think that was the biggest disagreement. I still encounter Australians that tell me, talk about the primacy of the consumer. And I and Rand was very opposed to the idea of the primacy of the consumer. She was all about the primacy of production, and it was, the economic process was both driven by the producer, by the entrepreneur. But also, yeah. I mean, there might have been other things, I don't know. Thanks, Ashton. All right, Corey asks, isn't it amazing that when the certification process has privatized people complained, but government certification by license is A-OK? This proves that private certification would exist in a free market for any industry. Yeah, it would. But the reason is obvious, right? Private certification is motivated and driven by the profit motive. And that's a no-no, because that's self-interested. And people reject self-interest. So they reject private certification because it's based on self-interest. It's the same as they reject private banking, where you might have a powerful banker, because the bank is motivated by self-interest. What are public certification and central bankers? What's their motivation? Well, their motivation is the public interest. Their motivation is the common good. They're not motivated by self-interest. They're not motivated by money. They're not motivated by profit, and therefore they must be okay. So people are fine with government certification because it's not profit-seeking. And they are against private certification because it is profit-seeking. All right, let's see. James asks, what are your thoughts on Richard Stolman, the founder of the Freedom Open Source Software Movement? I'd my his dedication to ideas, but disagree with him that free software is a moral issue. Yeah, I mean, what I like about him is that he's an entrepreneur in a sense, right? He has an idea about what software should be like and he goes out and he makes it a reality and he gets people excited and they write code. Ultimately, that code is particularly successful when it's commercialized by people like Lennox. But philosophically, he's completely corrupt by he denounces the profit motive, he denounces, which I think is a massive mistake, and he denounces the morality of self-interest. He's again, he is motivated by an altruistic morality, he is motivated by a rejection of individualism and therefore he rejects capitalism, rejects profit and rejects everything about what has made modern life possible and successful. And he rejects individual happiness as a consequence, although I don't think he'd think of it that way. So I think philosophically corrupt, even though productive in a narrow sphere. Emmanuel, any daily news sources that you'd recommend that are decently objective? God, not really, not really. I mean, you know, you've got to vary your news sources. You can't rely on any one news source because none of them are decently objective, not one. We know New York Times, Washington Post are massively leftist bias, Fox News is massively right biased. The Wall Street Journal, generally the front page is left leaning, the editorial page is kind of right leaning. So the challenge you have is that there is no objective source and the way I solve that problem, try to solve that problem, is for any given story, for any given item of news, I try to engage with multiple news sources to try to see multiple different angles from different places to try to see if I can glean the truth. And when a news source quotes somebody and it's important, then I try to look for the original, either a transcript of the video or the video or where they actually said it because they'll take it out of context, they'll distort it, they'll take a few words out, they'll chop up a sentence, the things they do unbelievable. So there is no one, you know, Wall Street Journal is one of the better publications out there, but again, particularly in the story section, it's very biased towards conventionality. So you've got to really search it out, you've got to research, you've got to look at original sources, original documents, otherwise it's very difficult to know what's actually going on. And look, and you can read the New York Times and figure out approximately what makes sense or what doesn't, what is interpretation and what is real, particularly if you can cross reference it with three or four other sources. Gene asks, there's a video with 15 million views called the man who accidentally killed the most people in history. It's about the businessman that invented leaded gas. I'd love if you posted a reaction video, it might get a lot of views. I'll look at that, I mean, I'm glad at least they say accidentally because it's clearly, it's accidental. But then the assumption that 15 million people died from leaded gasoline is God. I mean, I'm pretty sure that's BS. I'm pretty sure the science there is dubious. We'd have to, I'd have to go and study it and research it to prove that, but it seems like that's a massive exaggeration. And of course, you know, you have to, yeah, so I'd have to watch it, but you'd have to really research the science behind where they get that 50 million. And of course Mao Tse-tung and Stalin killed more than 50 million people. So it's not even true on that, right? He didn't kill the most people in history. I think Mao Tse-tung killed the most people in history with Stalin in a close second and only then you could argue about who else was part of it, right? So I'm skeptical of the whole way it's being presented. And is there any evaluation of the benefits that leaded gasoline had? Probably not. Jackson asks, how are you on? If I aspire to be a great student of economics for modern application, should I start with Adam Smith or is it necessary to go back further? No, I don't think you need to go back further. I mean, they all good thinkers in economics before Adam Smith took go who is a French economist is somebody you might want to look at. But I think even Adam Smith is not necessary. Really to understand economics, I would say go with say in the 19th century, pure economics say and then the marginal revolution. So the Austrians and the various marginal schools that come out of that, you know, in many respects, you know, Adam Smith's economics is pretty simple. What you really want is, if you really want to study economics, is you want to get into the Austrians and again say is very good. But I would also study the neoclassicals and then the kind of Chicago school. So study the kind of more modern, I'd say post middle 19th century, I'm not sure when say wrote exactly, but during the 19th century. So that's where I would start. Adam Smith is hard because of the style of the writing is very 18th century and it's just a slog to get through. It's not easy versus, and I think it's less important actually. I really do think it's less important. All right, Ashton, Milky Way and then we'll go back to the second topic. Ashton says, besides Ayn Rand, if you could have a conversation with any three people in history, who would it be? You would also have the ability to understand them if they speak a different language. Wow. Yeah, that's a tough one. I mean, Aristotle probably, that would be cool. Three people in history. Yeah, I mean, the founding fathers, Jefferson or Madison would be, Jefferson or Madison, Ben Franklin maybe. So one of the founding fathers definitely. So somebody from that era, founding fathers would be great. Yeah, I mean then maybe JD Rockefeller, sorry, JP Morgan or Rockefeller, or one of the so-called robber barons of the 19th century, that would be pretty amazing to get to know one of those people. Mike says, I don't speak any English yet, but he's assumed that you have instant ability to translate and to speak the language. So it's a science fiction project, right? Steve Jobs, yeah, Steve Jobs would be cool. Yeah, it's a tough one. You know, I was thinking Newton, but Newton was a little bit of a... Yeah, Newton would be really interesting. Yeah, I mean, I would, yeah. There's so many good people in history I'd love to speak to. I have no interest in speaking to villains of history. There's nothing to learn, zero to learn from evil. So it's a good guys that you have stuff to learn from. All right, so today was another session, public session of the January 6th committee hearings. They met today focused primarily on, you know, Trump trying to induce Pence to decertify or to refuse to certify the votes that were coming in, the constitutionality of that, who influenced Trump to do that, the response of Pence, all of that was kind of discussed today. And, you know, again, I don't think there was much new other than the extent to which this was corrupt, the extent to which the people advising Trump knew that what they were advising him was probably illegal. And here you primarily, what's his name? Eastman, I mean, he was so convinced of what was advising Trump was illegal that he actually asked that Trump pardon him before he'd ever been accused of a crime, pardon him in advance for the advice he gave him because he was afraid that one day he would have to be in court trying to defend something that he knew was illegal. Now I know John Eastman. I've met John Eastman, I've had conversations with John Eastman. I think John Eastman, yeah, maybe introduced me before a talk that I gave. He was, he was the dean of the law school at Chapman University for a few years. So I met John Eastman. I was very shocked that John Eastman was involved in what, with Trump, involved with Trump in the way that he was, that he gave Trump the kind of advice that he gave him, that he supported Trump's attempt to steal the election, that all of that happened, very disappointed in Eastman. I thought he was a better guy than that. But it turns out that he was giving this advice, he knew it was wrong. He kind of, you know, Trump's gonna be Trump and I'm gonna tell him what he wants to hear. I know it's illegal. I wanna get pardoned. Please pardon me, please, please pardon me. So I don't have to ever face the music for what I just did. It's gonna be interesting to see what happens because when he was actually asked questions by the committee about issues relating to January 6th and about his advice to Trump and about what everything else was going on, he played the fifth to everything. He basically played the fifth, I think, 100 times. So he gave no answers. So it's gonna be interesting if ever there's a case brought against him what it actually does. But look, Trump tried illegally, illegally in null and election and take over the American government. I mean, he basically tried for coup. He didn't get away with it because Pence didn't go along because the military probably wouldn't have gone along because he probably couldn't have gone away with it. But he did what he could to try to get away with it. This is the guy so many of you admire. He wanted to basically wipe out a legal election. And everybody in his administration was telling him, other than Giuliani and a few other kooks, everybody in his administration was telling him, and this is what we've seen time and time again, and is you lost, you just did, you lost. There's no basis for overturning this election. None, zero, no, none, nada. Be a man, recognize this. And not only did Trump continue with the lie, try to put pressure on his vice president and was conceiving all kinds of ways to use the National Guard to seize ballad boxes and machines and do a whole variety of illegal things. From the perspective of the Republican party, he got away with it. The Republican party has basically said, yeah, we're fine with that, we have no problem with it. Trump's a good guy, we're all behind Trump. Even though the guy's the first guy in American history, as far as I know, that actually tried to illegally overturn an election, seize control illegally of the US government. I don't think that's ever been tried. And the Republican party's like, cool, we're with you. It doesn't matter, you're still the best guy possible. Now that is insane. Now just take the fact that during, you know, people are writing at the Capitol, they're breaking windows, they're using violence, they're rampaging through people's offices, Pence and certain congressmen are calling Trump and saying, we feel like we're in danger, this is a real danger, something really bad here is happening. And Trump does nothing. He doesn't call the National Guard. I mean, he's the commander in chief. There's an insurrection and he does nothing. He just sits there, watches television. And it's only Pence who calls up the National Guard, which is in and of itself illegal. It's just mind-boggling. And everybody goes, eh, okay, so what? We'll vote for him again. How, how is that possible? How is that possible? He is so, he is the most corrupt president we've ever had. He makes Richard Nixon look like the most honest guy ever. I mean, he is a thousand times worse than Richard Nixon. And I was glad to see Michael Lidwig, no, not Lidwig, Lutig, Michael Lutig, he's a former pellet judge, a staunch Republican, a staunch conservative. I'd probably disagree with him about issues all over the place because he's such a conservative. On the shortlist of nominations Supreme Court a number of times, including I think on Trump's shortlist, he came out with a statement lambasting Trump today, lambasting Trump today. But more importantly, lambasting the Republican party. I mean, he says, I mean, it's a long statement, I'm not gonna read it to you, but, you know, those who think that because America's a republic, theft and corruption of our national elections and a total process are not theft and corruption of our democracy are solely mistaken. America's both a Republican and representative of democracy and therefore sustained attack on our national elections is an attack on our democracy, our political theory, otherwise notwithstanding. Accordingly, if and when one of our national elections is actually stolen from us, our democracy will have been stolen from us. To steal an election in the United States of America is to steal her democracy. And in a sense that he means democracy, I agree with him completely. Oops, what did I do there? It is breathtaking that these arguments, the arguments about, you know, overturning the elections, that these arguments were even conceived, let alone entertained by the president of the United States at that perilous moment in our history. Had the vice president of the United States obeyed the president of the United States, America would immediately have been plunged into what would have been tantamount to a revolution within a paralyzing constitutional crisis. The former president's accountability under the law for the riot in the United States Capitol on January 6th is incidental to his responsibility and accountability for his attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election from the American people and thereby steal America's democracy from America herself. This said, willful ignorance of the law and the fact is neither excuse nor defense in law, willful ignorance lessens neither political nor legal excuse or defense available to the president of the United States as allies and his supporters. On January 6th, 2021, revolutionaries, not patriots, assaulted America. The walls of all three of our institutions of democracy were scaled and breached on that appalling date. And almost two years hence, one of America's two political parties, he's a Republican member, one of America's two political parties cannot even agree whether that day was good or bad, right or wrong, worse. It cannot agree over whether January 6th was indeed or not needed or not. Pause for a moment and reflect on that. The former president and his party cannot decide whether the vote at the United States Capitol to disrupt and prevent the constitutional counting of votes for the presidency was needed. And therefore, whether another vote might be needed at a future date to accomplish that which the previous vote failed to accomplish. The former president's party cynically and embarrassingly rationalizes January 6th as having means something between hallowed, legitimate public discourse and a visitor's tour of the Capitol that got out of hand. January 6th, of course, was neither. And the former president and his party know that. It was not legitimate public discourse by any definition. Nor was it a civics tour of the Capitol building. Though that day proved to be an eye-opening civics lesson for all Americans, I wish, I wish. January 6th was rather a defining and a redefining day in American history. Defining and redefining of America itself. On that day, America finally came face to face with a raging war that it had been waging against itself for years. So bloodshilling was that day for our democracy, that America could not believe our eyes and she turned them away in both fear and shame. Even so, many have already forgotten and many more have chosen to forget. Some who rioted and occupied the Capitol that day had already decided how this war for our democracy must end. While others of the account compatriots upon sober reflection afterwards decided that no, this war must end now before there's further bloodshed. And he goes on, it's a pretty long statement. But he says, America is a perilous crossroads. Who is it that we have become and what is it that America has become? Is this who we wanna be and what we want America to be? And if not, just who is it that Americans want to be and just what it is that America wants to be? Not always well written. Let's see if there's some. Now what he really is afraid of, what he points out here is that Trump and his supporters are basically set up to 2024 elections for them to steal. No matter whether, if he loses 2024, he's now got people in position in various parts of administrations at the state level who can not certify the elections, reverse them, send different people to the Constitution Convention, Constitution Convention to the Electoral College, sorry, to the Electoral College. And he is terrified that in 2024, Trump will steal an election. He tried to steal the previous election, failed. And now he's gonna try to steal this election. And he's right to be terrified. If you watch and you see the kind of people being elected by Republicans or some of these primaries, it is truly scary. It is truly scary, all right? So, it's gonna be interesting. They're gonna be more revelations. They're making a big deal now of the role of Judge Thomas' wife in the proceedings. I've met her too. I've heard her speak. I've met her. She is not. I don't like her at all, never have. I like Thomas, I like many of his rulings. I do not like his wife. She was a horrible, populist, Republican way back. But it is interesting to see what her role will be in this. Hopefully Thomas had no involvement and it was not kind of guiding things in the background or whatever because I'd hate for him to leave the court. But yeah, I don't like the wife. I don't like Judge Thomas' wife. So it's gonna be interesting. I think this is crucially important that the Republican Party, not the American people, the Republican Party comes to terms with January 6th. And I don't think they are. And I think as long as they don't, it's basically a disgrace. It's basically a disgrace. Ian says Ted Cruz cloaked for Ludic. That's interesting. That's interesting. Maybe Ludic can give Ted Cruz a call and give him a chewing out over this issue because Ted Cruz is one of the bad guys here. The Republican Party better wake up before they are responsible for the end of freedom, political freedom in this country. All right, let's see, we'll go back to the super chat. We're at about 380 shorts. Catherine's not here to kind of get you guys excited and get you going. So you're just gonna have to do it for me without Catherine. It's 380 bucks. That's a lot of money. We'll see. But feel free to ask questions, support the show, whatever you guys want. It's been a long time since we haven't met the goal, so we'd be ending the streak. Hiram says, this may be a personal question you're on. I know it's something you're not a fan of in general, but what movement of Judaism, Judaism, Judaism, religion were you raised on? Well, you know, in Israel, there's no reform. There's no such thing as reformed Judaism. At least not when I was growing up. Maybe they have some presence today. Judaism basically is, you know, the way I was raised was with conservative Judaism. My parents kept Kosher at home. They're different plates. I mean, mostly Kosher. They want fanatics about it, but plates for meat, plates for milk. We never had pork. We never had shellfish. We never had stuff like that at home. We ate Kosher when we went out. So mostly, again, not fanatical about it. We went to synagogue. We went to conservative synagogue. We said extensive prayers before eating and after eating every Friday night, but not anytime other than that. When a synagogue on the high holidays and when my grandfather was alive, I would go with him sometimes just to keep a company. Even though I was an atheist by then, I would go with him. It was a conservative synagogue. So, but, you know, we didn't wear Yamica at home other than keeping Kosher and doing the Friday night stuff. We weren't particularly religious. So I don't know what that would even mean, right? So I wasn't really raised in a movement of Judaism. But, you know, in any meaningful way, it was more, I was just raised with Judaism around me and a sudden of the symbolisms of Judaism and expectations. Oh yeah, all right. Mane, 86% of voters in Massachusetts overrode the car companies in past. Automobile owners' rights to repair law in November 2012. Should laws ever be put to a vote? No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. I'm against the referendums in California. I'm against voters voting. I mean, that's the kind of democracy that I'm against. I'm for using the democratic process to choose the president and to choose our representatives. I'm not for using the democratic process for voters to decide on which laws are okay and which laws are not. The whole point of the founding, the whole way in which the founding was structured was to separate the decision-making from the voter to elect representatives who supposedly were experts, to have representatives who could have the objectivity and to think through the issues, to think through the issues. So no, I don't think you should ever have direct vote on particular legislation. I mean, Russ Perot used to have had this idea of everybody should have a little button at home and every time a law came up in Congress, we would all vote for it. Awful, awful, awful idea. Michael, in the 1970s, we had an entire decade of DAs across the country, not prosecuting crimes. World capitalism doesn't have to have a short half-life. Well, first of all, they weren't woke. I mean, if people in the 1970s were woke, then woke doesn't mean anything. You can't just take a concept that's clearly modern, that's clearly of our time and place right now and apply it to something that happened in the 70s. It's just not relevant. It's something completely different. You know, but there were leftists in the 70s and there are leftists now. The particular variety of leftists that we're talking about, the woke leftists, are particular to this era. They deal with issues that are particular to this era. So you can't just take any leftist policy and call it woke that is meaningless and it's a historical and it's out of context. You can't apply the principles, the ideas and the language of today to the past without examining what those concepts actually mean. So I don't think the DAs of the 1970s and I'm not sure that the DAs of the 1970s were as soft as you make them out to be and or soft as the wokeest DAs today and I'm not sure their motivations were the same. So again, I don't think you can extrapolate. I don't think you can put them all under this wokeish label. They weren't post-moderns back then. They weren't obsessed with identity politics. Identity politics wasn't a thing. They weren't woke by any definition of woke. They weren't. Not every DA whose softened crime is woke. There are lots of reasons to be softened crime other than wokeness. Wokeness is a particular view that has this more subjectivism, post-modern epistemology and an obsession with identity politics. All right, Richard, $20. Why do you think anti-Zionist Haridi Jews tend to be primarily Ashkenazi? This is anecdotal, but every major group I've seen, I've seen heard of was almost entirely Ashkenazi. Is this a cultural phenomena? Yeah, I don't know. I think so. I think it emanates from this idea that Israel is a perversion, that Israel, legitimate, could only be founded by the Messiah when he comes, a Jewish state can only be founded by the Messiah when he comes, that Israel, by founding Israel now, is delaying the coming of the Messiah and therefore is evil and bad. That is a particular set of ideas that comes from particular rabbis that happen to be Ashkenazi rabbis. I don't, and they have had some influence among certain very religious Jews. But I don't think it has anything, I don't think there's anything in being Ashkenazi that would cause you to gravitate to that position or not. I don't know enough about the very ultra-religious Sephardic Jews to know much of the differences between the two groups, to know enough to tell you why the Sephardic Jews tend to be more pro-Zionism, you know, ultra-Authodox Jews. I don't know why there is that kind of dramatic difference. All right, it looks like we're halfway, $325. Wow, halfway. All right, Adam asked, the validity of the vote counts that was decided by state courts and a conservative-dominated US Supreme Court let them stand, was January 6th directed against the rule of law under the Constitution? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely, it was a complete and utter negation of the Constitution, a complete and utter negation of the rule of law. It was clearly flouting, you know, the principles of the American system of government. It was saying the only thing that matters are the wishes of Donald Trump. The only thing that matters is what Donald Trump thinks and we're so committed to Donald Trump, we'll even get distinguished lawyers like John Eastman to come up with ridiculous excuses to justify Donald Trump staying in power. The sellout of the Republican Party, the sellout of Republican senators and congressmen who on that day were very anti-Trump and two days later were cheering for him and refusing to impeach him is astounding. The sellout of Republican voters who are excited about Trump. January 16th was a direct attack on the, January 16th, six was a direct attack on the principles of Americanism. It was one of the most, if not the most anti-American act that we have. It was fundamentally anti-American. Okay, Harper-Carramble. Orange County is the only Republican section of California and they have no homeless yet both parties are the same. I never said both parties are the same. Nobody's ever said both parties are the same. But there are other, by the way, other parts of California that are Republican. It's not, I don't think Orange County is the only part of California that is Republican. And there are homeless people primarily in Democratic cities and I've talked about that and I've talked about why. I did a whole show on homelessness but I've never said both parties are the same. I said they might be equally bad when it comes to long-term outcome for America. That doesn't mean they're the same and it doesn't mean the particular policies in any given point of time and on any given issue are the same. They're not, they're obviously different with different outcomes. So on the issue of homelessness, Republicans for the most part are better than Democrats. On the issue of abortion, Democrats generally are better than Republicans. But they're not the same. Nobody's ever said that. Richard asks, I'm vehemently against theocrats on the right. However, as a law student, there's some silver lining in that the administrative state might be curtailed somewhat by this court. Yes, I mean, this particular court is a fairly good court, fairly, not completely good, but fairly good court when it comes to things like property rights, when it comes to curtailing the administrative state, maybe even on issues of free speech. And I think even on issues of standing up to corrupt Republicans. So I think this court would have certified the election. I think this court would have said that Donald Trump was wrong and would have backed, would not have backed, let's say if, what's his name? If Pence had not agreed to certify the election, I think the Supreme Court would have overruled him. So I very much think the court is good on a lot of issues. It's bad on the social issues. And it's bad on certain principles, but it's as good as court of who's ever had. It's better than Scalia's court, but it is very bad on the religious issues, very bad on personal freedom issues. That's where I worry. But in economic issues, it might be one of the best courts out there. Oops. All right, Richard, again, for 50 bucks, chipping away at those goals. I love it. What do you think of the argument that the administrative state is one of the greatest threats to liberty? The ability to write laws and interpret their own laws is a tyranny unimagined to the founders? Yeah, I definitely think it is one of the greatest threats to liberty. However, the real threat to liberty is allowing the administrative state to exist. And that, you know, and I don't think any court is going to wipe out the administrative state because that basically would wipe out all the regulatory agencies. And basically more than many of those regulations, or most of the regulations on the books today are illegal. And I just don't see a court actually doing that. So while I agree with you, I would love to see the regulatory state wound down to zero. I don't actually think the courts have the power to do that. I think you, because if they did, if they found a way to do it, then Congress would just find a way around the courts to get it done, right? They'd create some other entity to do it. I think the only way to do it is through legislation. And the only way to do that is through the American people rejecting the idea of the regulatory state. And I don't like to call it the administrative state because administrative state sounds kind of neutral. It sounds kind of technical. No, it's the regulatory state. It's the central planning state. It's the telling you how to run your business state. It's the regulatory state. That's what needs to be done away with it. I don't like the lawyer's use of the administrative state as if, yeah, these are just administrators. What do they do? No, these are regulators. These are people who want to regulate your life. They want to control your life. So we got to get away with getting, can't let these nice technical words interfere with what's really going on. So I just don't think the law, the courts are powerful enough to eliminate the regulatory state. They can shrink it. They can curtail it, and that's good. And this court is more likely to do that than any other court since probably the Great Depression. And I'm not an expert. That's just my sense. All right, Schausbach says, do you prefer 90% or 95% dark chocolate? I prefer the 95% lint. It's just got that creamy thing. And I don't like a lot of sugar, and the lint has very little sugar in it. So the 95% lint, that's Swiss chocolate, that's my favorite. And I prefer the 95 to the 90. Yes, even though it's more bitter, but I prefer it. Kayfax, in what way is today's woke-ism a legacy of the New Left's movement of the 1960s and 70s? God, I mean, the Institute is just, I think completed a, I don't know, eight session, I don't know how many hours, 20 hours course on critical race theory. To really get to the heart of woke-ism, I mean, that's a big assignment. It's a big project to do, but fundamentally, what the New Left movement represented was moral and political subjectivism, you know, an negation of property rights and economic freedom. And the New Left represented, you know, Dionysius, it represented emotion and the rejection of reason, and that's the essential, the essential. The New Left rejected reason and adopted emotionalism. And for whatever reasons, they kind of woke up from that and they failed. They failed miserably, you know, in the 1972 elections was a massive failure for them politically. And then they kind of abandoned, they woke up from it. The people who really committed to it went to teach at universities and the people who were not that committed to it went to work on Wall Street. And you got the kind of the Me Too generation in the 1980s. So the woke-ism is a legacy of that. It's those committed, you know, subjectivists and emotionalists of the New Left, teaching and sticking around and teaching at universities and educating and, you know, and one of the things that emotionalism and emotionalism, that is the rejection of reason, and subjectivism leads you is to tribalism. And that tribalism is elevated by the woke-ism of today. So we're still, the woke-ists share with the New Left this emotionalism and rejection of reason and rejection of truth, rejection of objectivity. And they've added to that racist and sexist tribalism. You can't even say sexist, genderist, I don't know. Tribalism and an elevation, a new level of altruism, you know, where need is everything. Need is the driver of everything so that, you know, this how you get, what do you call it? You know, the pyramid of need, you know, which we have today where you categorize the different groups by how needy they are, by how much suffering they are, by how, you know, by how much, yeah, how much they suffer and how much they need. So, and you've got a pyramid of need that dictates everything. So, yeah, today's left, and I, you know, woke-ism, I don't know if that's the right term for it, but today's left, today's far left is a complete extension. Suddenly the legacy of the new left of the 60s and 70s, because the new left of the 60s and 70s made it legitimate to be an emotionalist and a subjectivist. And then there was only a matter of time before that manifest in tribalism, right? Richard says, regulatory state, I like that term. Is the intellectual over the 19th century progressives? It's intellectual creation of 19th century progressives. Yes, regulatory state is what I'm used to calling it from school, and YB is right, court voted 72, not to even hear the case re-overturning the election. Yes, yeah, I mean, and the two who voted to maybe hear the case clearly suggested that they just thought it was right procedure to hear the case. It's almost certain that they were voted against the case being resolved for the people who wanted to overturn the election. So even the two voted against hearing the case, or for hearing the case, did not indicate anything to suggest that they were, they just wanted, they just thought that legally it was a case that merited because it was questioning a state Supreme Court or something like that, there was something on its merits that should have been heard by the Supreme Court and shouldn't have been just dismissed like it was. So yeah, there was no, I mean, the whole idea of Biden stealing this election is a joke because again, the person who tried to steal this election, the person who made all the efforts, intellectual, financial, who threatened people who probably criminally threatened, we'll see if he's accused of that in the state of Georgia to try to reverse the election without any basis is clearly Donald Trump. James Taylor, have you seen, Matt Wells, what is a woman documentary? It is hysterical. I've watched a couple of segments. They, I don't know if hysterical is the right term, they're pretty scary. But yeah, there's a sense in which they're hysterical. I will do a show analyzing one of the segments because I think it's so interesting. And it goes to this issue of emotionalism and subjectivism, which this professor that he's interviewed clearly exhibits and I wanna dig into that rather than in what is a woman, which is not a very interesting topic. The topic of the way these people think or the way they don't think is fascinating. Liam asks, if things get really bad, will the Republicans get 60 seats in the Senate? No, I don't think so. I don't think they have a chance of getting 60, even if things get bad. Ben Davies, what do you think of the Mises Caucus takeover? I've already talked about that. It's on one of my previous shows from the last week or two. I think it's terrible. I mean, this is the worst wing of the libertarian party in a sense that it's the anarchist win of the libertarian party. It's the anti-American wing of the Republican party. So I'm horrified by the fact that the Mises Caucus took over the libertarian party. But on the other hand, I'm not surprised. I don't really care that much. I'm not involved in libertarian politics. I'm not involved in the libertarian movement more generally. I just don't care that much about it, but it's definitely the anti-American wing of the party. So if you care about the libertarian party, it's not a good thing. I mean, the von Mises Institute, as an institute, is anti-American. It's inside the principles of America. It's anti-freedom. It's anti-liberty. And that's who got elected. And one of the great travesties of this is that they call themselves the Mises Caucus. They should call themselves the Rothbard Caucus or the Luwako Caucus, but they should not tarnish the name of Ludwig von Mises, the greatest economist who ever lived by calling it the Mises Caucus. The libertarian party, you know, one of the freemen says, rest in peace. You could have said that when he was born. It was still born, fundamentally still born. It's never been alive, not really. Nathan asked, are you familiar with the nature of this movie, 2000 Mules? It's supposed to make the case for Vodafod in the 2020 elections. I haven't seen the movie. I've read the fact checkers on it. I try to read fact checkers of movies like this only from the right. And not only did the fact checkers dismiss it, but Trump's attorney general Barr explicitly dismissed the movie as completely lacking of any credibility of any basis in reality of showing anything real. If the movie had any real evidence of election fraud, why isn't it in front of the courts? Why haven't the courts viewed it? There are plenty of Republican jurisdictions that you could bring this case to. There's no there that the next to Suzer is a propagandist. He has been a propagandist for 20 years. He is not an intellectual. He maybe used to be in his early in his career, but he has become and became pretty quickly a pure propagandist, pure propagandist. Let's see. Frank says, can you explain the difference types of oil being sold? Bonnie Light, Louisiana Light, Brett Crude, WTI Crude? No, I can't. They're all different. So the different places you bring out the oil, you're gonna have a slightly different composition of chemicals within the oil, different densities which require different mechanisms by which to refine that oil. So I don't know the differences between them, but that's generally the difference. It's the chemical composition and the refiners are going to use different refining methods to refine the different oils. And you have to be, I don't even know that Alex knows the exact difference between each one of those, but he probably has a better explanation for the big differences between them. All right, Richard is on a roll today. All right, Richard, Republicans have a chance of getting 57 to 58 seats by 2024. Yes, I think 2024, they have that chance because of the way the electoral map lays out. Maybe 60 in 2024, but that would be a real stretch and that would be a real stretch, but not in 2022. They won't even get 57, 58 in 2022. They've got a chance of getting 52, 53, maybe 54 in 2022, but they're not going to exceed 54 in 2022, but maybe in 2024. Okay, Richard also says, Libertarian principles, contradiction in terms, you cannot be a principled advocate of freedom while hating America and blaming US for terrorism. I'm with you, Richard. I've been saying that for over 20 years, but Libertarians hate me for it, as you'd expect. Hitchens asked, will worker shortage get worse? What can be done in your view and how does the shortage play a role in current economic issues? No, the shortage will not get worse because I think the jobs market will get worse. So there are going to be fewer jobs. So there'll still be shortages of particular professions. For example, there's a massive shortage of doctors in America and that will continue, but there's going to be rising unemployment in the United States. So the shortage is more of a mismatch between the jobs available, the jobs that people need, and the skills people have. And the solution for that is easy. The solution has a massive increase in immigration. And I've advocated for a long time for immigration policy that basically allows anybody who can find a job in the US to come here for let's say for five years. So you're going to see, unfortunately in the United States, like welders and doctors and areas where nurses, the shortages, what you're going to see is you'll still have shortages there, but then you're going to get a lot of people who are going to be unemployed, but can't fill those jobs because they don't have the training. And if you increased immigration, the immigrants who came would have to be the immigrants to fill those positions because that's the only way they could find a job. So immigration is a solution, lots of immigration, but nobody's going to do that. And by the way, it's not just Republicans who hate immigrants or who reject immigration. It's Democrats as well. Democrats don't want immigrants because unions don't like immigrants because the immigrants outcompete the unions. So as soon as Democrats start talking about freeing up immigration, the unions get on them. So it's neither party is pro-immigration. Richard asked, I like the Taiwanese term gong fi, meaning communist bandits. It's an eloquent way of referring to CCP for the bandits that they are equally applicable to the petty tyrants of the SCC and IRS. Absolutely. I mean, we just call all government bureaucrats gong fi, gong fi, gong fi, gong fi, probably gong fi, okay. Richard says, the Mises caucus nearly all supported removal of a plank that simply said, we disavow all forms of racism. Of course, from the LP platform, they're truly hippie racists of the right. Not all of them are racists, but some of them are. And the Mises Institute has in the past come out with racist statements. All right, thank you, everybody. We didn't make, oh, we're very close. Wow, somebody should get us over, you know, we're at 530. So only $119 away, $120 away from the 650 goal. So fairly close. Thanks, guys. Really appreciate the support. Appreciate all the questions. Appreciate you being here. I am going to watch the Celtics win, hopefully. Who knows? They have to play well. I will see you all on Saturday. Remember that if you wanna support the show, you can do it on youronbrookshow.com slash support. That is a monthly contribution. I love that because it's knowable. It's, I can plan based on it. It comes every month, like clockwork, you know, superchats, well, Richard just put us very, very close. With a $100 contribution. So we only show 20 bucks. So let's see if somebody can do 20 bucks to get us over the hump. That'll be fantastic and that'll keep our streak alive. But yeah, the monthly contributors are incredibly important. And that's the way those of you are not watching live, not listening live, maybe listening on a podcast, maybe watching on YouTube later, can support the show and allow it to grow and allow me to live off of this so I can keep doing it. Now we've got Sparks and Richard Cunningham coming in with $20. So we're at $670, which is perfect. Actually $690. Oh, cause Jennifer came in with 20 as well. So it's $690. So thanks everybody. Thanks for the support. Have a great day. Go Celtics and I will see you all on Saturday.