 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Brookshow on this Tuesday, February 20th. I hope everybody's having a great beginning of your week. I guess today is the beginning of the week, because yesterday was a holiday, technically, because then today didn't feel like that. I was working, but there were a lot of people going to the beach, and traffic was more weekend-y traffic than normal traffic. All right, tomorrow and Thursday, there will be no shows. I thought I could squeeze in a show tomorrow, but it's not going to work out. I'm doing a podcast for The Washington Times, and then I've got a flight. I'm going to Miami, and then I'll be traveling Thursday. Friday, I'll be back. I'm hoping to do a show Friday night, but we will see. That is my hope. So next show will be Friday night. Of course, no, that's not true. Scrap that. Next show is tonight, 7 p.m. East Coast time. Tonight, 7 p.m. East Coast time. Topic to be determined, but no news roundups. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, no news roundups, more news roundups this week. All right, I guess maybe Friday afternoon. We'll see, but none regular time. All right, let's jump in here and start. Yeah, so a lot of pushback on my comment yesterday about the Trump civil fraud case brought by the state of New York against Trump for defrauding his banks and insurance companies. The argument being that there has to be a victim. There have to be losses. And the other argument is that this is a law that's never been used like this. Now, I am not a legal expert, but there's some legal experts I trust. I went to them and found a couple of articles that I think are pretty useful. First thing is, there are a lot of laws that are legitimate laws where there is no actual loss. There is no, we'll get to whether there's a victim or not in a minute where there's no actual loss. Certainly if somebody is driving drunk, the police should be able to stop them and find them. And yet they didn't hurt anybody, but they do pose a risk. Lying to your bank about your net worth, lying to your insurance company about whether you face any litigation or not, those are potential losses. They can generate real losses to the bank because they would change their analysis if they had access to the truth. Now, in some of the cases, it's true that the bank can do its own appraisal and things like that, but it sounds like in many of these cases, the banks trust a Trump. One of them is where Trump claimed, I guess, the penthouse was 30,000 square feet, and it's only 10,000 square feet. It seems like the bank would have sent an appraiser in, but they didn't. Or at least, yeah, it seems like they didn't, and they accepted his statement. His statement's about his net worth. I mean, some of his loans required him to maintain the net worth of over $2 billion, $2.4 billion. I don't think it's, I mean, there's some reason to believe that his net worth has never been $2.4 billion. So is the lie there no big deal, or could there be circumstances in which the lie would actually cause the bank or the insurance company to take a loss? I think it's clear that it could take a loss. Here's some of the examples. I mean, a testimony from Zurich Insurance that basically he said, because the Trump Organization is a private company, not a publicly traded company, there's very little that underwriters, this is insurance underwriters, can do to learn about the financial condition of the company, other than to rely on the financial statements that the client provides to them. And if those financial statements are false, the underwriting is not going to be right. The representative of Zurich Insurance, according to the judge, at least, credibly testified because of that, it's important to know that our customers are being truthful to us if they're not giving us true information or accurate information that greatly impacts our underwriting decisions. Another example with the Goddard directors and officers insurance, that the Trump Organization represented that there was no pending litigation or notices or communications that could lead to litigation and implicate the directors and officers' liability insurance policy, which he viewed as in positive light and they forpriced it. But it turns out there was a pending investigation that the Trump Organization knew it. And as soon as that was revealed, as soon as the insurer could, they raised the price fivefold, fivefold. So it's just not true, just not true, that this is victimless in the sense that this behavior poses a real risk and it's fraud. It's fraudulent. It involves providing false information, false information. Or you can take the fact that banks and insurance companies and here people are saying there's no loss. Well, of course, there's a loss. There's a loss of what the interest rate would have been, what the down payment that would have been required would have been. There's the potential massive loss involved in the fact that this was mispriced. It was mispriced because the information provided was false. If you provide false information, if I provide you with false information about a diamond ring and you pay me a million dollars and you walk away and I walk away and it turns out it's not the diamond ring that I presented it as. I literally gave you fake information in writing. Then you could argue there's no loss. You have the ring, you're happy with the ring. I've got the money, I'm happy with the money. But fraud occurred here. You could have paid half. So you could say buy and be aware. But no, buy and not be aware. If fraud is committed, the job of the government is to protect us from fraud. So you can ignore fraud because it's Trump and you love Trump and he's a Republican and the prosecutor's a Democrat. But it's fraud. Now, there's no question this whole litigation was brought under ridiculous and suspicious context. But the facts are the facts. Experts estimated that the interest and down payments or really the lower interest rates that Trump got on these loans because he lied to them, to the banks, generated a saving for Trump of $168 million. So that's part of the basis for this. So even though he was able to repay the loans, the banks didn't get the right risk-adjusted return. And when you provide, when you lie to a bank, I mean, then it's fraud. Pretty straightforward. Now, the law in New York is pretty clear that this is legit. Now, whether the size of the penalties makes sense or not, I don't know. They seem pretty high. You know, we'll see an appeal. We'll see an appeal how this is done. But I will note that this law in New York has been used in a number of other cases where similar types of penalties, similar ways of approaching penalties have been used. So it's not just they're going after Trump. It's just a law that's being used only for Trump. But they're using it on other businesses. It'll be interesting what happens on appeal and whether a court of appeal finds either the verdict is wrong, which I think would be difficult given that it's finding a fact. And then whether the size and the methodology for determining if it is wrong. And as we said, this could go to the Supreme Court. Ultimately, the Supreme Court has taken cases where the claim is that the penalty was too harsh. So that is a possibility. All right. People will still disagree. But I have a feeling that agreement and disagreement in these cases is based far more on politics than it is in your political position, far more than it is on facts, reality, objectivity, what's actually going on in the law. And it could be that the law that the New York law is flawed, again, not a legal expert. It could be that the New York law should be different, should be applied different, should be, you know, I'll leave that to objective legal experts, not just commentators who have no legal expertise, but claim that they do because it's Trump and the Democrats. And therefore, it must be one way, not the other. Insider trading, God. Insider trading is one of the most corrupt, non-objective, distorted, perverse laws on the books. It's up there with antitrust. And in many respects, insider trading is worse in its non-objectivity. And that's saying a lot, given that antitrust is like a record holder in terms of non-objectivity. So antitrust is truly a disastrous law. Congress never defined what insider trading actually means. It basically has left it up to regulators and courts across the country to decide what qualifies. And most of the time, these cases go on appeal. And ultimately, it is the appellate courts that determine what is insider trading and what is not insider trading. They rein in the SEC or they unleash the SEC, depending on the judges, depending on the appellate court, depending on the period. Anyway, we have a new attempt to expand the scope of insider trading. Now, we don't have the time to go into all the different articulations of insider trading and all the ways it's applied. But think of it as traditionally being applied to. If you have non-public information, information that's not being disclosed publicly about company X, whether you work at that company or not, the or not is one of these expansions of insider trading. But let's say the simplest case is you work at the company and you know because you're working on it that you're going to about to come up with a new drug or you're about to be bought out by another company and you're about something is going to happen that will increase, dramatically increase or decrease the value of your stock. You go in the market, you buy and sell based on that information. That's as clear cut as it gets as infight information. What if you don't, because it's a and part of the reasoning there is it's a violation of your fiduciary duty to your shareholders. Again, agree or disagree. Violation of your fiduciary duty to shareholders. Assuming shareholders don't want you trading an insider information, I could make the argument that shareholders want you to trade on insider information and actually benefits them over the long run but we'll put that aside. But what if you don't work for the company and don't have fiduciary duty? Well, it turns out it doesn't matter. Even if you don't work for a company this is cases going back to the 1980s. Let's say you're a printer, you're printing financial statements for a company, you observe some news that the rest of the world is only because you're printing it. The rest of the world is only going to discover. Later on, you're printing. Company does not have any contractual obligation, hasn't signed a contract of confidentiality for some reason with this company. You trade on that information the way the courts have interpreted it, you are guilty of insider trading. I mean, that is an absurd ridiculous application of the law but there you go, that's the way it is. You stumble across something in the street that tells you that, I don't know, all of those people that claiming the COVID vaccine is gonna kill people, they'll actually write and the news is gonna break any moment now and you conclude from that if the stock is gonna crash, therefore you buy fires, the stock is a consequence, insider trading, you're not only gonna have to return all your gains from that stock trade but you're also going to have to pay a penalty to the government. Well, now there's a new application, there's a new way in which this is going to be applied. A biotech executive, Matthew Panawat, Matthew Panawat bought options of another drug company, another biotech company, not his own, not his own biotech company and he made $120,000 off of this. And even though it's not shares or options on his company and even though he had no insider information, no new information about the company's stock that he bought, the options that he bought, in spite of all that, the SEC is accusing him of insider information. Now, why did he buy the options? He bought the options because he came to the conclusion, it turned out that his company was gonna sell to Pfizer and he came to the conclusion that if his company was gonna sell to Pfizer, this other company which is a competitor's valuation would go up, its stock price would go up. You know, you could expect because if Pfizer buys, my company shareholders of this other company might expect somebody else to buy their company and they will drive the stock price up. That is now deemed insider trading. Note, the insider information had nothing to do with the company who shares he bought. He extrapolated that it had something to do with it but it wasn't direct. I mean, what if I as an investor learn that company X is gonna be bought by Pfizer, let's say before anybody else? So I can't trade on that knowledge because that would be insider trading. But I conclude this is good for biotech stocks generally and I buy three or four biotech stocks and indeed it proves that it is good for biotech stocks and they shares go up and I make money. Does that count as insider trading even though I didn't trade the particular stock and I have noticed, I have no fiduciary duty here that I have violated. I don't owe anybody anything. So this is a completely new interpretation. Panawat's lawyers tried to get it dismissed off the hand by a US district judge, pushed aside the objections and cleared the case to go to trial and it's going to go to trial. And if this passes, that is, if this counts as insider trading, first of all it would be huge injustice towards Panawat. But more than that, it would create massive new uncertainty about what you can do and what you can't do. On what information can you trade and what information you can't trade? It is a disastrous for traders, investors, hedge funds, all kinds of traders who trade on information they have extrapolated on new companies, new entities on industries and so on. But this is what happens when Congress writes non-objective laws and then it leaves it up to SEC and SEC, depending on who runs it is going to be more widely, it will interpret a law in a more white sense or a more narrow sense. So now we don't have a rule of laws, which is the very nature of the rule of law that is laws dictate what you can and cannot do. We now have a rule of laws as interpreted by men, i.e. the people at the SEC, whose politics shift, whose ideas shift and therefore the laws are constantly shifting and the rule of law, the rule of law and any kind of objective interpretation of laws is out the window, goes out the window. Equal protection before the law goes out the window. And this is of course primarily on Congress. If you're going to write laws, write them in a way that is clear cut in terms of interpretation or even better, repeal inside of trading laws, they don't make any sense, they're not rational. If people don't like inside of trading, then they can basically demand that their companies have company white policies that exclude inside information. Exchanges can restrict the ability of companies that list on those exchanges to engage in inside information. Markets in other words, can deal with whatever issues, if there are any real issues regarding inside information, can deal with those issues without government coming in with ridiculous rules, the distort trading, distort the allocation of capital and make prices in the marketplace less informative. Less informative and less markets broadly speaking, less efficient. So if you want to go after laws and you want to go after particularly types of laws, this is a great one but I guess nobody's interested, nobody's interested. Either way, because Trump's not evolved. If Trump had been accused of inside of trading and inside of trading would be bad and everybody on the left would say, no, inside of trading is great and everybody would be interested in it, but it's not Trump, it's just some Joe Schmo executive in a biotech company. I mean, if he loses this case, not only does he lose a lot of money, he has to return the 130,000 he made, he probably get fined triple that and then on top of that, he, on top of that he then has to, he's banned from working on Wall Street, his career suffers hugely from it. All right, let's see. Yeah, check in the military. One of the interesting, of course, links between technology and the military is that the military very much, military contracts were very crucial to the early development of tech. The microprocessor was the first real mass, large numbers of microprocessors that really made the production of large numbers of microprocessors and the investment in microprocessors make sense and accelerated development. We use for guided missiles, towards the end of the Vietnam War. There were uses before that, but again, the kind of the large scale purchases were from the Department of Defense. And of course, as the world gets more belligerent, as we see, have seemed to have more enemies, the threatened military force, I mean, just five, six years ago, people thought the world was pretty calm and pretty safe and nobody considered a war with China or very few people did. Very few people considered a war with Russia and even Iran seems somewhat pacified. And but now the world seems like it's on the brink any day now of kind of a World War III. And one of the great worries I think many Americans have is America is the American military up to the task, particularly if it has to face both Russian and Chinese aggression or Iranian and Chinese or Iranian and Russian or any combination of those three countries. Not to mention, you could add into their North Korea which is constantly threatening belligerence. And one of the edges the United States has is tech. It's its ability to do political technology. And what you're seeing, I think it has seen again from the birth of Silicon Valley, but more so I think now than maybe ever is more and more tech companies trying to get a piece of the massive, massive military budget and provide real solutions to challenges that the US military faces. SpaceX has signed numerous contracts with the government for secretive satellite projects and other projects that are secrets. I don't know what they are, but they've received lots of money from the government as a consequence. And recent hoards has recently started doing events, the last few years doing events in Washington DC primarily targeted towards the Pentagon, towards the Department of Defense bringing together a number of its new tech companies that might whose technology could have significant defense application. That is this idea that the defense could again accelerate certain applications. Certainly defense right now is accelerating the ability of SpaceX to launch rockets and to get us ultimately to Mars. It's enhancing significantly spaces ex-availability of capital to invest heavily in its ability to build and to grow. But the same I think is going, you're gonna see happening in a variety of different other sectors. It is interesting that Silicon Valley that is usually associated with the left is usually associated with, oh no, we hate the military. It's very interesting, both large companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, but also smaller companies. Now some of this is a little scary because some of this involves surveillance on, guess whom, us. I don't trust those satellites. I don't completely trust a lot of these things in terms of their ability to survey the American people. And I don't get a sense anybody is Washington really is watching us. I think they're pretty much dedicated to the surveillance. But a lot of these companies are outward focused. That is a lot of them are, Plantier of course, Teal's company, Plantier, is a massive technology is used extensively by the US military. And you're gonna see, and I think it's success, Plantier's success and others' success is now spurring a whole new generation of companies trying to get defense department spending. And Andreessen Horowitz, which is a big venture capital fund, which is one of its main partners is Mark Andreessen, who is this pro-growth, pro-build, build, build, which is great, is very much engaged with Washington DC in trying to get particular companies, at least the hearing, so that in front of the defense procurement, decision makers now know defense procurement is unbelievably expensive and unbelievably inefficient, more geared towards dealing with Lockheed Martin and Boeing than it is to dealing with startups. The Pentagon is trying to make changes, is trying to create a different process for startups. And let's hope they succeed, because at the end of the day, if the US military can withstand the challenges on a global scale that present itself to the US, whether it's again from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, it's gonna rely on advanced technologies in order to do that. It's gonna rely on our ability to deploy technologies that the Chinese and the Russians just cannot match. They cannot match. United States to win, our drones need to be better. China can make more drones than us. Ours need to be substantially better. Ability in Anachtama and the sky needs to be substantially better than their ability to do so, and all that requires tech. All that requires advancement in technology. If they're gonna jam GPS, we better have a technological alternative to GPS. If they're gonna jam whatever, we better have a technological alternative to these different things. So I'm glad to see Silicon Valley not being pacifist leftist or pacifist libertarian or however you wanna call it, and willing to go out there and actually invest in companies that are building weapon systems, that are building tech-driven weapon systems, tech means by which to help defend this country. Let's hope they continue to do that, and even Elon Musk is, of course, Peter Thiel has been at the forefront of this, and now Elon Musk is too with SpaceX. Talking about tech, an interesting article. The Chinese are very frustrated by the fact that, what's saying, I've got the wrong article open. Chinese are very frustrated by the fact that they are lagging the United States in tech, that they're just not keeping up in terms of innovation, in terms of tech development with Americans, and in order to remedy this situation, the Chinese Communist Party, Xi's Chinese Communist Party, has decided to take more direct control in steering the development of tech. So the Chinese government's conclusion from the slowdown in tech innovation in China that has resulted from increased government intervention in the Chinese economy over the last five, six, seven, eight years is drumroll. I need to have that button with drumroll. More Chinese government intervention into the economy, more Chinese control, more central planning. The Chinese party now is going to define the goals of tech, it's going to allocate, it's going to allocate capital to tech, it's going to basically choose winners and losers. Note the completely different direction that the two countries are taking. The United States government needs tech, but it allows basically the marketplace, venture capital, funds that are going to make money, driven by the profit motive, entrepreneurs driven by profit, interest, love for what they do. They're going to allow the market to drive economic and technological development. They will buy what they think is workable for their use, for their needs. They're not going to directly fund it, they're not going to come up with the ideas. China, on the other hand, is centralizing all of that and it's predictable exactly what will happen. The more they centralize, the less innovation, the less innovation, the more they'll try to centralize and they'll get less and less and less innovation. This is why long-term, if we can think long-term, then China has less and less and less of a threat to the United States because it's going to innovate less and less and less. The main threat I think ultimately in the long run, China and Russia post the United States is a nuclear threat or just a harassment threat because of our own weak political leadership. But in terms of war, a real confrontation, there's really no match and that no match is going to get the gap between the United States and China and Russia is only going to get larger as the United States stays marginally free and Russia and China become less and less free. Remember, the source of innovation is the mind. The mind to function properly needs freedom. The less freedom you have in China to innovate, the more it's guided from above by central planning, the less innovation there will be, the less breakthrough there will be, the less tech there will be, the less progress there will be, the less wealth creation there will be. China is clearly on the path away from floating with capitalism and back to a centralized communist slash fascist type regime. And this is to a large extent the consequence of the rise and the dominance really of Xi Jinping who is the party and who has already gone after Alibaba and group and created massive disincentives for intent and intent-cent, of course, a massive disincentives for those companies, for entrepreneurs and innovation that happen in China. It's the more control you'll see here, the more you will see Chinese entrepreneurs, Chinese engineers, Chinese scientists try to leave China. And again, one of the great tragedies, one of the great tragedies of 21st century United States of America is that we don't grab these opportunities, allow for these people to enter the United States freely, provide them with work visas as quickly and as effectively as we can, and get them, get them working, innovating, producing in the United States. Let's encourage and incentivize a brain drain out of China. Now that would be really cool. That's kind of immigration policy I could give behind. All right, finally, NIMBY, not in my backyard. NIMBY's been applied to a lot of different things. It's applied to housing, none of those multifamily homes next to my home. No skyscrapers blocking my view. And all over the country, primarily San Francisco, but really all over the country, NIMBY has dramatically reduced the amount of available housing construction over the last 15 years hasn't even come even close to matching the demand for housing. That is why house prices have risen so much over this period. And most of that is a consequence of zoning which is manipulated by NIMBY backyard. This is also true of why we don't have a more electrical production or more what do you call it refineries to refine fossil fuels. It's because you can't build them anyway in the United States because of not in my backyard. That is people rallying their communities. I mean, a lot of the lack of building in the United States, a lot of the lack of building of the infrastructure that our economy needs. A lot of that building, lack of building has to do with environmental regulations and building codes and all kinds of stuff like that. And that has to be fought and eliminated but really probably the biggest constraint on ambitious building projects is the not in bad backyard. I won't even call them movement, just attitude. There's so many people in this country here. You can build over there, just not near me. I want to grow this country. I want it to be successful. I want great jobs. I want a fantastic economy but you're not building that here. The latest victim of this are warehouse developers. With e-commerce, the demand for warehouses is grown dramatically and warehouses can all be centralized in one location. What you want is warehouses over the country so that you can minimize delivery times. Consumers are demanding shorter and shorter delivery times. I mean, there's some places where Amazon will deliver the same day. You buy it online, a wife's the same day. And that is only possible if you have local warehouses all over the United States. And that is true of an ever-growing e-commerce world. And yet, not in my backyard, groups everywhere are preventing this from happening. Why? What is it about warehouses? Well, traffic might increase and trucks, you'll have more trucks on the road, that's no good. And a variety of other things that people are concerned about in terms of quality of life, standard of living. And therefore, they take it on upon themselves to lobby the government, to block traffic, to motivate people, to rally democracy, to fight this and to stop development. It's not how the country was built. This is not how we get stuff built. This is exactly the opposite. This is how you stagnate. This is how you go backwards. This is how you land up with zero growth stagnation and where you just can't build anything in this country anymore. One of the big differences with China and the United States looking at the last 40 years is that, you know, not for the right reasons, but China will build whatever needs to build. If a Chinese entrepreneur needs to build stuff, gets built. You know, as long as you don't step on any of the party members, China is a build, build, build mentality which the United States had, certainly until probably the 1960s, until the environmentalist movement really got going. And now it's impossible to build in this country. This is why other countries have amazing, fast, high-speed trains. In the United States, you can't build a high-speed train. It's why other countries build housing to capacity. Real estate prices don't go up there because supply matches demand. In the United States, we can't build houses because you can't build because of environmental pollin' between zoning and the not-in-my-backyard mentality that is so common among Americans. Again, you wanna fight something. Let's fight that, fight inside of training laws, fight not-in-my-backyard. Plenty to do. There's plenty to fight for and against. All right. Oh, Michael, I can't access stuff that you just put in the chat. Let me see if I can find it. My comment in the regular chat below, that's not enough optimism reason and love of life to hold it back. I don't know what you're referring to. All right, I assume it's this. Michael says, there's not enough optimism, reason and love of life to hold it back. To hold what back? There's not enough optimism, reason, and love of life to hold it back. Try again, Michael. I'm not sure why Super Chat wouldn't accept that or is there something else that I'm missing? Maybe I'm missing something. Come on. Yeah, I can't see it. Can't see it. Try again, Michael. Maybe put it in the chat again so I understand it better. All right, related to NIMBY, Adam says, NIMBYs have often become bananas. Built, absolutely, built absolutely nothing anywhere near anything, especially the warehouse industry. So bananas is built absolutely nothing anywhere near anything. Banana, I'm not sure what the S is for, but I guess especially. But yeah, I mean, that's the case and think about it, that you wanna build stuff close to stuff because that's where it has the greatest value. If you build electric generating plants close to where the electricity is gonna be used, you lose less electricity in the transmission. But if you're not allowed to, and you can only build the electric generation plant far away, then you lose a huge amount of the energy in the transmission lines. What does that do? It raises the cost. So the same people who are not in my backyard also land up paying much higher electricity bills. James, thank you for the $50, James, really, really appreciate that. James says, consistently reducing political and cultural discussion to man's independent mind, quickly leads to the recognition of the objectivism as the only philosophy that has correct explanation of current and universal human experiences. Yes, I mean, I think that's right. It's, you know, our challenge is to make people realize that, to make people realize what I think we already know. And that is the power of these ideas to explain what is actually happening in your own life and in the world around you. Objectivism is this amazing, powerful, efficacious tool, explanatory tool for explaining the world in which we live. Clark says, do leftists only want to apply altruism to somebody else, altruism external morality that does not require their own sacrifice? Are the philosopher kings allowed to be egoistic? Well, they would say, and of course this is a rationalization, but they would say, no, no, they're sacrificing for the common good by dedicating their life to be philosopher kings. They don't really want the job. The job is super stressful. It's really, really hard to tell everybody else what to do. And, you know, you hear this from politicians all the time and they're doing it for you. They are sacrificing for you. It's also true that people do sacrifice themselves all the time, all the time. They sacrifice themselves for God, for her cause, for, you know, for conforming with the rest of the world. So there is a self-sacrificial element to altruism constantly. It dominates. All right, reminder that we fund the show, you fund the show. A few contributions from people like you, listeners like you, if you're listening not live, you can do an applause in YouTube or if you're on a podcast, which most of you, most of you in the end of the day are, you can support the show on PayPal or on Subscribestar. So, or on uranbookshow.com slash member, membership and, membership and you can then just use PayPal or on Patreon, use your credit card to support the show on a monthly basis. Best way to support the show is that way. But since we're here and we've got a hundred people watching live, please consider supporting the show right now, live. You can do a sticker as Jonathan Honing did to start us off and Stephen Hopper did and James Adams did, thank you guys. As did Mary Alene. Thank you Mary Alene, thank you all of you guys. So one way is to do through a sticker, other way is to do through a question and that also of course helps shape the show. I've got a few more questions left but Adam has just come in with a hundred dollars. Thank you Adam, really, really appreciate it. And he says, Adam says I have seen single warehouses, bridge school budget deficits, improve infrastructure, provide jobs for HVAC, HVAC is a conditioning right and electrical engineers, architects, concretes, steel companies, drivers, HR roofing, landscaping, snow plowing, et cetera and struggling talents still, still the opposite. I know, I mean, great jobs, all kinds of jobs. People just think, oh, it's just people moving boxes. A lot, if it's an Amazon warehouse, a lot of those boxes moved by robots today. A lot of the jobs are engineering jobs. A lot of the jobs are infrastructure jobs. A lot of the jobs are construction jobs that build the warehouses, for example. But then there's a lot of jobs for drivers. Drivers make a lot of money, truck drivers, quite a bit of money. But then there's all business around it which requires managers and HR people and all the rest of it. And then there's all industries that rise up around the warehouse. And then people move into the neighborhood because the jobs around the warehouse that creates work for an income for restaurants and everything else. Economic activity produces economic activity. It's a virtuous cycle. It's win, win, win, win, win, win, win, win. Jason adds hotels, absolute hotels. I mean, it's interesting that there are certain places around the country that are basically logistical hubs, cities that basically serve as warehouse depots. You can see this if you drive on the main highways, primarily east-west, that every few hundred miles you will find Ebaysquare Town, a city devoted to this, warehousing, infrastructure, trucking. You see a lot of this in Arkansas. Arkansas is well placed in the middle of the country. And it also is a place where Walmart is. So it's a great place. It's also where a lot of trucking companies are based because it's right on the main highway, east-west. And it's a hub. It's become a hub. And I've talked about this many times, Northeast Arkansas, where you have all these trucking companies and you also have Walmart, the headquarters of Walmart. And you also have just a logistical hub of warehouses and stuff. Massively dynamic, huge economic growth. Adam also says the warehouse workers go for minimal waste of $20 an hour and benefits in good environment. These are modern facilities. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like Adam knows something about this topic, but absolutely, absolutely. I mean, this is the thing. Again, it's win, win, win, win, win. Economic growth, faster economic growth. And almost everybody wins from it. The people are very narrow and they view the world as zero sum. They view other people's gain as their losses. They view, yeah, there's the inconvenience of trucks on the road, but hey, there are more restaurants in town now. Hey, there are more jobs available for people. The stuff I order from Amazon arrives like that. It's not amazing. So that is, that is the sad state of NIMBY, not in my backyard in America. All right, Phil asked the Puppa Wall of government, oops, Puppa Wall of government is to eradicate the initiation of physical force. Just as lying isn't force and shouldn't be illegal, far, lying should be legal in an objective world. Do you agree? No, I don't agree. Lying isn't illegal, but it is, lying isn't illegal. But in a business context, lying, which is meant to gain a value from somebody else that they wouldn't give you otherwise, is absolutely illegal. That is force. It is getting somebody to give you something, to give you something that you wouldn't have got from them otherwise. And that is force. There's, you know, I'm not a, you'll have to ask the legal philosophers exactly how they define it, but fraud is a form of force. Fraud is definitely a violation of rights. And look, even in personal relationships, I don't know, if you marry somebody under false pretense, you lie about a bunch of different things that have an impact on the decision to marry you, they can sue you, and they should be able to sue you. So, you know, lying, if it is there to attain a value, sure is illegal, absolutely. Fraud in every society is illegal, and absolutely should be. It's, there's a, there's a realm in which you can say, by a beware, particularly if I'm not making any claim about a product, but if I'm making a claim about a product, and I'm lying about it, then absolutely you have recourse against me. And the government needs to step in, and protect people from lying. Lying is a form of force. Lying is a form of, you know, violation of rights. If the lie is aimed at gaining a value. By the way, this is the position I ran had. This is the position Linda Peacock has. This is the position I'm in. This is the position Linda Peacock has. This is the position that every legal objectivist legal scholar I know has had. Fraud is a form of force. I think Tara Smith has an article on this. When is what appears to be speech, when is that force? And lying is, you know, lying in a commercial context is an example of that. Rob, in the UK there's been a lot of housing development that's been opened within the last 5 to 10 years after many years of stagnation. However, prices still keep rising. How long does it take for housing prices to decrease? Can they decrease? Yeah, of course they can. I mean the reason is that as much housing development as there has been in the UK, it's nothing as compared to the increased demand. The reality is that the UK over the last few years has opened up its borders and had more immigrants than ever. Immigrants increased demand for housing. And so not only do you have just the growth of housing that occurs for people having killed children or some housing becoming so dilapidated that you can't live in it and therefore you're moving into something that is habitable. But you also have a very large demand for housing that's coming in from the outside. The UK was already in a hole where there was a lot more demand or a lot more desire to move houses. A lot of old homes, a lot of people wanted to buy homes that couldn't particularly in the London area. And all the housing that's been built so far has done some. So prices are not rising as fast but you need a lot more housing. One of the problems in London is that you can't build up very high. You don't have skyscrapers, housing. And most of the housing that is being built is being built fairly far out of town. But what London needs is a lot more housing development. As much as there's been, there needs to be a lot more. I mean it's basic economics. At some point, if you have enough supply, prices will start coming down. But will that ever happen? I don't know. Because I don't know if that'll increase the supply enough. I don't know if they'll allow enough building to make up the gap. Harper Campbell, it could be that Biden wins again. He will be a bumbling dementia patient and get nothing done but will teach the GOP the Trump style is not the way to go. I hope so. But also, it's not clear that he won't get anything done. That is, he's got a team around him that is competent in getting what they want done. They've got a lot done even with the Republican Congress. So the only way to guarantee that he won't get anything done is to get the Republicans a majority in the House of Senate or ideally in both, if Biden wins. If Biden loses, if Trump wins, you want the Democrats to have at least one of the houses. You don't want one party to have everything. It always turns bad, always. Never turned out well. Ann Milka says, let's accuse Trump of insider trading and then mobilize MAGA tards to get insider trading laws repealed. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the only way it'll happen. Clark says, everyone hates a winner. Yeah, particularly when they repeatedly win, right? That's altruism. Raphael says, what's your opinion about libel laws? Would they exist in an objective society and how to protect freedom of speech under these conditions? Yes, they would, but they would have to be strictly... I mean, the standards for libel would have to be pretty high. They are clearly too low, for example, I think. They're too low in the UK. And I think the United States probably has decent libel laws. They don't apply to public figures because you have to be able to criticize them. But they apply everywhere else and they're reasonably used. You don't hear of these outrageous cases because if I criticize you, you can't sue me to libel. It has to be wanton, reckless. It has to be you have to lose something as a consequence. So they have to be real consequences to what you say. But yes, I think they're completely objective, they're completely legit. Again, you don't have a right to get something to cause other people a material harm as a consequence of your speech. Material harm being economic harm, for example, economic harm. You don't have a right, indeed, to yell, fire in a crowded theater for a variety of reasons, partially because the theater is owned by somebody else and they don't want you to yell, fire. Assuming there's no fire, of course. And you don't have a right to get people to do stuff by lying to them that clearly is against everything they would do if they knew the truth. So exactly where the line is, this is what you need legal philosophy for. This is what you need philosophers of law to help define that line. It can't just be left up to whatever. So it's tricky. There are a lot of definitions around these issues. Speech, property rights are tricky definitions. And that's why you need, dare I say it, experts. You need elites. You need people who know the field and can articulate, you know, and decide and articulate a standard. At 8am, did you see Norman Ficklstein get shouted down and bullied by Rabbi Shmueli and Piers Morgan? So cathartic. No, I did not. I'll have to look that up. It sounds like fun. Frank says, Beethoven wrote Turkish March for Ruins of Athens by August Kutsbu, murdered by a student nationalist for speaking out against anti-Semitism. Beethoven was quite intellectual. He was really a composer of the Enlightenment. He believes in human liberty and human freedom. He was an impressive, really, really incredibly impressive person. He was somewhat malevolent, but his music certainly has aspects of that. But he is without a question a very intellectual person and somebody who had the right ideas about freedom and liberty. If you listen to his opera, his opera is very much about freedom, liberty, you know, wrongful incarceration, you know, justice, the meaning of justice. Proper, right? Do you think nimbyism has something to do with aging demographic? No. I mean, maybe somewhat, but you see it. Families do it. You know, young people are out there with signs. It might be more prevalent with an aging demographic because as we get older, we care less about the future. Maybe, maybe. I mean, it would be interesting to have that as a hypothesis and go test it out and look at different towns, different cities, different places where they have this and look at the demographics of the different places and see is nimbyism more prevalent in older communities? I just don't know. It's an empirical question. But it makes sense as a hypothesis. All right. All right, guys. Thank you. Really appreciate the support. And I will see you tonight, 7 p.m. and a topic to be determined. Watch out for my channel. I'll announce it a little later. And yeah, I'll see you tonight. Thanks to all the supporters. Again, those who would like to support the show monthly, Patreon or uranbrookshow.com slash membership. And of course, if you're not a subscriber, please consider subscribing to the show. Just click the button below. And also like the show before you leave. Like the show before you leave. It really helps us with the algorithm. Thanks, everybody. See you tonight. Bye.