 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, August 10th. Everybody is having a fantastic week and thank you for joining the show today. We have a bunch of stories to go through, so yeah, welcome everybody. All right, so let's jump in. I mean, there's tons of stuff coming out. Oh, just a reminder, of course you all know this already, we have goals for these shows. No video, I'm sorry. I need to click this button over here. There we go. Thanks, Miro Slav. We have goals for these shows, $250 a show for the news to keep them going. And you can support the show with a sticker, just a contribution, value for value. You can actually ask a question, steer the show in the direction you want by doing that. So please consider one or the other as just a form of trade, trade with me. All right, there's a bunch of stories all over the place coming out on the whole Biden Corruption issue. It really is, it keeps blowing up, it keeps getting bigger, at least according to some of the reports that are out there. Part of the challenge here is to figure out what's legit and what's partisan. Now I know somebody's going to say, yeah, but you assume everything said about Trump is true? No, I mean, Trump admits everything he says about Trump is true. I mean, Trump didn't hide the fact that he hid confidential documents. Trump didn't hide the fact that he tried to influence the election in Georgia. Trump didn't hide the fact that he worked very, very hard, including going after Mike Pence to try to overturn the election. So I mean, I think the evidence is just staring us in our face in terms of Trump in it. And in terms of Biden, there's a lot of evidence, but exactly what is, what isn't, what is accurate, what is not, what is just hard to tell, it's hard to tell. And of course, because it's so partisan, the media is completely biased, right? I mean, if you go to, if you go to most of the traditional mainstream media, they're just not covering the story. And if you go to the right wing media, I mean, Biden is responsible for every horrible thing that's happened in the world in the last 50 years. He's the most evil president in human history. And the truth is probably some way in between those. Anyway, the latest out of the House Oversight Committee is that, you know, Hunter Biden and ultimately Joe Biden, you know, even when he was vice president, had meetings with a lot of kind of oligarchs from Russia, from Kazakhstan and from Ukraine. Meetings that Joe Biden says he never discussed business ad. Maybe that's true. But meetings that ultimately led to millions of dollars and they're estimating up to 20 million dollars of funds flowing from these oligarchs to Hunter Biden and other Biden's bank accounts. Even if there was no literal Joe Biden doing anything in support of these oligarchs, doing something to change US government policy in favor of these oligarchs, they were obviously paying for access. They were obviously, I mean, again, somebody did this really cool story. He took an example of a board member on Apple, right, Apple computers. I think, I forget her name, but she is like a senior person of BlackRock, so massive experience in finance. She sits on the board of Apple computers. For sitting on the board of Apple computers, she gets something like $100,000 plus $200,000, $100,000 cash and $200,000 in stock. Let's say the whole package is worth over a year, $400,000, $500,000. This is to sit on the board of the largest, one of the largest and one of the most complicated, complex companies in the world. This is a woman eminently qualified to do so with vast experience in the world of finance and in the world of corporate finance. And eminently qualified, eminently knowledgeable, and she's getting maybe half a million dollars a year, probably less for sitting on the board of Apple. Hunter Biden, loser, knows nothing, eminently unqualified to sit on anybody's board, sits on Burisma's board and makes $5 million. Now, even to a lot of, I think, leftist commentators, this is obviously nuts, right? Obviously something else is going on here. And the obvious thing that's going on here is the buying access. Whether that access was provided, question mark, and whether that access led to any favors or any different kind of behavior on the part of the American government, question mark. We don't know. But the reality is that Hunter Biden was paid huge amounts of money for something he was clearly not qualified to do. He had no knowledge in the energy industry. He had no knowledge in board of directors. There's no knowledge in business. The guy is a nobody and a nothing except he is the son of who used to be the vice president of the United States. And that was it. That was his full qualifications. And we've already learned from Hunter Biden's associate that the vice president Biden would call his son and often it just happened, happened by accident to be at a business meeting. But he never talked business. But it turns out he also met these people in person, maybe didn't talk business, but met them in person. Some trips were negotiated, whether they happen or not. Again, not completely clear to place like Kazakhstan to meet certain people. You know, and again, people say, well, Biden's supporting the Ukraine war because he's in the pocket of the Ukrainians because it turns out that Hunter Biden, at least it seems, was getting significant amounts of money from Russian oligarchs. Like, you know, Yelena Batuina, who is supposedly transferred $3.5 million to a entity controlled by Devon Archer, the partner of Hunter Biden and Hunter Biden. You know, now, after she transferred their money, she, you know, she happened to attend a dinner in which Joe Biden attended a dinner with her and Biden and. So again, what she got for the $3.5 million, we don't know. But again, it's Russian, it's Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan is an ally of Russia. I guess Café Milano is in DC was the favorite place to meet for these things. I mean, there's a lot and clearly there's some really ugly stuff here. Clearly, there's some real corruption here. I'm not surprised, you know, Hunter Biden seems like the kind of leech that will do anything he can to leverage his family name to get as much money out of it. And, and yeah. So to be to be followed. I mean, I think I think it's going to be interesting to see what the plea deal if that's ever going to come together. And then it's going to be interesting to see whether the Republicans impeach Biden over this, whether they think they have enough to take it to impeachment. Of course, you know, because everything is partisan today, it'll fail in the Senate. Whether the mainstream media will ever pick up on this will ever do anything about this. Also, interesting and whether a broader investigation over the the the way in which influence is sold in Washington DC to Democrats Republicans and everybody else is would be would be really whether that is ever going to happen. I'm going to guess I'm going to guess the answer is no. All right, we got inflation numbers today. You'll see a lot of talk about inflation picking up. But the reality is that that cornflation. Cornflation is is came down a little bit. Prices clearly seem to be on a downward trajectory. Overall inflation went up a little bit because of food and energy. But but there's no reason to believe that is sustainable or that is a new direction. The most of the prices are stabilizing to coming down. Inflation is still higher than where the Fed wants it to be higher than it should be. Obviously, the Fed wants it to be a 2% white 2% because that's what the Fed wants it to be. There's no reasoning behind it. There's no logic behind it. And so, you know, we are we're going to keep monitoring this and seeing this because it has huge impact on the economy. My suspicion is that the the Fed will not raise interest rates again in the next meeting. They will hold it where it is right now to let this play out a little bit. We are seeing, I think the beginnings of some of those zombies may be struggling. As I told you, private equity struggling to raise capital, venture capital being very stingy in terms of investment except with AI. And yellow going bankrupt and other companies suggesting bankruptcy. We'll talk about one of them in a little bit. So I still think the U.S. is potentially heading towards a recession. But if not heading towards slower growth, you know, they revised the growth numbers, the economic growth numbers for the first quarter up to 2.4%. That's like 2.4% is like is the same economic growth that happened under the Trump administration when Trump was saying he was responsible for the greatest economy in American history. I wonder how many Republicans are giving Biden credit for the 2.4%. They shouldn't. I'm not saying they should. And the 2.4% is is fleeting and 2.4% is nothing to write home about. And it wasn't impressive under Trump and it certainly and it's not impressive under Biden. And what would really I think is worrisome is the long term projection for the U.S. economy, which I think is for stagnation. Low economic growth and and and and just just stagnation, which is which is really horrific given the potential of the U.S. economy to grow dramatically. Anyway, inflation counted the what some are saying out there inflation is still under control seems to be low. I don't see it turning around and spiking up anytime soon. It really does seem like the Fed has this at least somewhat under control. Spending is somewhat I hate to say this because it's not really true somewhat emphasis on somewhat under control. It's predictable. It's not, you know, you're not going to get big bills and huge amounts of spending as long as you have divided government. And yeah, I'm going to be a big advocate for next election to have divided government and you guys can yell at me and scream at me because of that. But I really do think it's the only thing that can save us from government spending out of control and therefore more bouts of inflation in our short term future. All right, so so yeah, dollars still fairly strong, particularly competitive yen, a little weaker compared to euro. But but generally dollars holding up the dollars not collapsed yet. I'll keep, you know, we'll keep monitoring kind of the doom and gloom predictions that are involved in in the U.S. dollar in inflation and in the U.S. economy. I still think we're looking at maybe a recession, maybe just slow growth in an ugly economy. We works. We works. You remember we works. We works is like everywhere. It's still everywhere. You go every city, lots of cities of the world and you see fancy buildings and you see the we work sign. And I know a lot of people who still work at we works and in a sense of they have their offices in a weak workspace. We work was supposed to revolutionize the whole office space industry. It was supposed to become one of the most profitable companies ever. The founder of we works, Adam Neumann, was at this whole mystical, you know, we're going to change the way people work and change the world. This is revolutionary. And of course, as it was going to go public, when was this 2019 at this massive valuation, I think it was valued at $47 billion, almost $50 billion for a company that does what it rents real estate. Makes it look pretty and nice, and then rents it to Subly source who rent space from it in shared in shared space, right? And how this was ever going to be worth $50 billion. Who knew? Soft Bank, the Japanese conglomerate invested and those kind of valuations invested heavily in in Soft Bank. But in 2019, when the company was going to go public, people started looking at the documents. They started looking at the numbers and they started projecting looking at projections into the future and cash flow in the future. And this is just a business where you cannot make a lot of money. The profit margins are just not there. It's unbelievably competitive. The advantage you have easily can be mimicked. Anybody can create a fun, colorful space for people to work at. There's some benefit of having a brand called WeWork, but not $50 billion. And it's not clear that given that they were renting very high profile locations at very high rents that then they could ever rent them out again at a decent amount. So the company couldn't, you know, the IPO, initial public offering collapsed. Neumann was forced out, although he got like a billion dollars as an exit package that was later challenged. Who knows how much he got that was negotiated privately between him and Soft Bank. But he got hundreds of millions of dollars on his way out. The the Japanese Soft Bank ultimately ultimately took over the the entire company and later on through through a transaction with a SPAC won't get into that. I took the company public. So the company is is traded. It started becoming traded in 2021. The stock price has since then gone down significantly. And yesterday they reported that they that the future of the company is in question that they are seriously, seriously considering. What do you call it? Bankruptcy. And so this is a company that went for $50 billion to basically bankruptcy and nothing. When the SPAC actually was created, the company was selling it around $12, $12.50 a share. Right now it's selling for about 20 cents a share and has been for a while. So this is a dead company. All those WeWorks out there. I don't know what they're going to do with it. It's not like they have a lot of assets because they don't own those buildings. They don't own those spaces. Those are mostly leases. I'm not just scaling down. We'll save the company. I think there's a chance, a reasonable chance that we work as an ongoing business is going to disappear. The various locations that are kind of a shared office space. Somebody else might take them over. They might be taken over by local companies. They might be taken over by the people who own the building. They might be taken over by who knows whom. But there's a good chance. WeWorks in the next few months will no longer, no longer exist as a company. 50 billion to zero in in in five years. That's pretty, pretty impressive. All right. You know, you remember Portland, Oregon? Portland, Oregon. I visited there a number of times and Portland, Oregon is has to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Certainly in the United States. It's gorgeous there. It's unbelievably green. There are trees everywhere. It is rolling hills, rolling hills. There's a big river that flows, you know, flows through Chown or at the edge of town. There are lots of green spaces, a lot of parks, lots of hiking. You know, if you drive up from Portland, Oregon along the Columbia River, lots of beautiful waterfalls. I mean, it's just a gorgeous part of the world. It's beautiful. It rains a lot. That's the one downside. But it is a truly beautiful place. And Portland, Oregon, the downtown Portland, Oregon used to be a just again, a friendly, nice place to hang out with. It was Portland always was a very foodie orient place, a really good restaurants. Just just a great city to live in. But that has all changed. Certainly since 2019, that has changed dramatically. Indeed, last week, the New York Times did a four separate stories and opinion pieces about Portland, Oregon, describing the homelessness, the fentanyl, the drug use, the open drug use, the violence, the public safety concerns, the harassment, the empty office buildings, the storefronts that have never opened. And this is 2023. We also, if you remember back to 2020, Portland was the epicenter of the BLM riots. When the protests turned into riots, Portland embraced that, or the radicals, the crazies in Portland embraced that. And they continued for months after there were no longer protests of riots anywhere else. They continued to break windows, destroy downtown, try to set fire to a federal building. It was clearly the epicenter. Portland has become a, really over the last 10 years, kind of a poster child for progressives, you know, crazy left mayors and city councils and what they can, quote, accomplish. This is a poster child for what happens when you hand over total administration of a city to the worst elements in the Democratic Party and on the left. They've taken this beautiful city with an amazing downtown, a fabulous place to hang out, and they've turned it into a place nobody wants to go to, where even the New York Times recognizes it as a devastating place. It's as bad, if not worse, as downtown San Francisco. And, you know, you can blame the BLM riots, but that was three years ago. You'd think a city like Portland could have recovered. Now, and let's remember, this is not a poor city. This is not a city with huge levels of poverty. This is not a city that has flourished and prospered in the past. This is a city of upper middle class, wealthy people. This is filled with upper middle class, wealthy people. Again, a beautiful city, a city that a lot of people want to live in, would like to live in if it changed. A city where a lot of people have made a lot of money over the years. A city of a highly educated population, but a city that cannot escape the consequences of its own leftist policies. A city that doesn't build housing, so generates homelessness. A city that tolerates all manner of behavior in public spaces. A city that does not emphasize a police and public safety. A city that just has ignored the needs and demands of its business community. Anyway, because of all this attention Portland has suddenly got last week from the New York Times, ooh, people in Oregon suddenly realize, whoa, there must be an emergency. By the way, just to give you one more statistic, downtown foot traffic from March to May this year is down, is just 37%, not down 30%, 37% of what it was in 2019. So more than more, significantly more than half the people used to go to downtown or walk around, don't go there anymore. Again, a city that used to have this really friendly hometown, downtown kind of atmosphere, nobody goes there anymore. 37%. Part of that is nobody goes to work there, nobody goes there. They don't want to go to restaurants, they don't want to hang out there. Anyway, because of all this attention, the governor of Oregon suddenly realizes a crisis and the governor of Oregon suddenly step forward and they're going to find a way to deal with this and the way to do that is, of course, the setting up a committee. So it was big news today that we now have a task force, a task force to bolster the downtown Portland. So they're going to have a committee, they're going to meet, they're going to get input from the public, they're going to confer the mayor of Portland and city council members have been invited to participate. It's going to be run by a business person and this is all by the instigation of the governor. You can tell when somebody is taking an issue really, really, really seriously and they really, really, really want to make changes, then you know they're serious about it when they form a task force. That is, all right, go Oregon, go Portland. I mean, it's sad. It's sad. Again, I've always enjoyed going to Portland, a beautiful city, not looking forward to going there again. All right, a couple of quick stories. You remember we talked about this on one of the shows a while back that a judge ruled in a case where the Biden administration is being sued for trying to censor the social media companies by meeting with them and telling them what's acceptable and what's not acceptable and all of that and a judge ruled that the Biden administration could no longer meet with, at least for a while, it wasn't a permanent ruling, it was an injunction, but it was a ruling that for now the Biden administration could not meet with social media companies to discuss these things. It threw the administration into like a tizzy and problems and everything, but I thought it was a great ruling. I wish we could pass a law that says government shall not meet with the media or social media other than press conferences and press releases. It shall not meet with them to disclose what is acceptable and what's not acceptable. Under any circumstances, I'm considering whether to make an exception for national security or not, but maybe you can make a national security exception for that, to fill them in on ongoing national security threats or something like that. But other than that, the government has no interest in disinformation even before elections. The government has no interest, even if that campaign is launched by a foreign country, disinformation is disinformation and it might be wrong, but it's just speech and you don't have to, you don't have a right to silence speech as a government, even if you don't like the source of that speech, even if the source comes from outside of the country. Anyway, the Biden administration is appealing that ruling. Of course, the federal judge, if you remember, ruled it because he viewed it as a likely violation of the First Amendment. Biden, the bottom of justice, is fighting this in court. This is going to go to court today and the Justice Department will argue in court for lifting that order. That is not a violation of the First Amendment. That they indeed don't force companies to toe the party line. And so we will see. By the way, the injunction that this, I think this judge, Terry Daffody, put out there was actually, I thought, quite good, quite good. I mean, this is what he wrote, right? And this is why it should be taken seriously. He quote, quote, if the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in US history. In their attempt to suppress alleged disinformation, the federal government and particularly the defendants named here are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment right to free speech. And he concluded that the Biden administration likely violated the free speech clause and that the court is not persuaded by defendants' arguments. So it's going to be interesting to see what the bottom of justice argues against this and how this develops in the courts because that was a unique, an amazing ruling if it stands. I hope it does. And this goes to my point that I'd be making throughout this issue that the censorship is not at the social media level. They're not censoring and they're not censoring by proxy. The censorship is by the government. The government is putting, is pressuring them, blackmailing them, quote, advising them with a clear, you know, with a clear threat that is involved in them. So that is where the censorship lies. That is the origins of the censorship. That's the essence of the censorship. That's what should be condemned. What the tech companies are doing, they have very little choice to a large extent, but what the government is doing, that's what should be condemned. All right. This is a story that probably deserves a whole show. So I'm just going to give you just a taste of it. This is a big story in the Wall Street Journal today. It's pretty lengthy. It's a lengthy article in the Wall Street Journal that documents just a sheer amount of money that colleges, public colleges, public schools, universities, what you call the premier universities in a variety of different states from University of Hawaii, University of Kentucky, other universities, just a sheer amount of money they have been spending over the last 20 years. The growth in that spending, the complete rebuilding of these campuses, the amount of money spent on new buildings and new dormitories and new cafeterias. I mean, this is an ongoing story. I've been reading about it for really for years. They've been a few years now. Just tens of billions of dollars spending. I mean, I think the University of Kentucky on its website, laws, the fact that they've spent $3.1 billion on remaking the campus. And where does this money come from? Where does this money come from? Because at the same time as all of this happening, it's also the case that state governments have actually been reducing the amount of money given to state universities. So across the board, and there's been a lot of complaining about this, across the board state governments have been reducing the amount of money they give to universities. Now you'd think that universities would see that and go, ooh, we better slow down spending. We better cut spending because there's less money coming in. But no, the contrary. They ramped up spending and they're spending more money than ever. Just as state governments are shrinking the money money, they're giving them. So where do they get the money? Well, almost all the money is coming from tuition increases, dramatic tuition increases. And we all know that because some of you might actually have some student debt. And because we all know for all the discussions about student debt and forgiving student debt and the burden of student debt and so on, which is real. And it appears like they can just increase tuition more and more and more and more and spend and spend. And much of the spending is going to administrators, all kinds of deans, vice deans, the administrative, this administrative, that the story has amazing statistics and all of this. It's going to building new buildings. Now some of that comes from contributions of alumni, but a lot of that again is being funded by tuition. Wages, everybody's wages, but primarily the wages of administrators are shooting through the roof and universities are spending. Nobody says no. They have boards of trustees. The board of trustees basically rub a stamp. I think the statistic is that basically 98% of all requests for funding that go in front of the board of trustees get approved. Nobody challenges them. There's nobody to say, wait a minute, you can't do that. Yeah, the statistic is that the University of Virginia, this is a researcher found that public university trustees approved 98% of the cost-increasing proposals they renewed. They reviewed, often unanimously. Nobody questions the state. There's no, the board is not functional. Nobody's questioning this. Often the presidents of the universities have no clue how to look at a balance sheet and how to look at an income statement. They don't know what's going on, their academics after all or their previous academics. It's rare that a businessman takes the job. Almost never did they cut spending. We're talking about the flagships. I'm sure a lot of the smaller universities out there, the less prestigious ones have much more difficulties raising tuition, but these universities are raising tuition like crazy. But not only raising tuition. At the same time, they're increasing the number of students, so they're growing like crazy. The big universities now are massive, massive. So it's not clear exactly whose expense. Somebody must be shrinking out there because it's not like we're having more and more and more babies and they're more and more and more university students. But these university programs are massive now. How can the students afford it? And this is of course where the quote market failure happens. How do the students afford it? Why don't the students say to hell with you it's not worth it anymore? Well, because the government gives them cheap loans. The government encourages them to take on loans, to take on debt, to finance education. They don't have to prove they can pay it back. They don't have to prove that they're studying a degree that is going to be remunerative. It's not like a bank saying, wait a minute, why are you going to this university? It's so expensive. You're never going to be able to pay this. You could go to another university. It's cheaper. We'll give you a loan there. There's none of that self-interest profit-seeking motivation of the lenders to try to allocate the resource, i.e. tuition, to places where you get a better bank for your buck. Instead, the government just gets everybody as much student debt as they want with no strings attached. They have to pay it back, of course. Anyway, as I said, this is a story that's worth kind of delving into at some point. It's amazing how this is going on. Nobody seems to care. Everybody worries about student debt, but where does that student debt come from? It comes from this massive increase in situation. Why are they happening? Is education getting better by those kind of percentages? Could argue the opposite. Who's the beneficent? Who's benefiting? Who's raking in the dollars? Look for the way the money flows to figure out what the scam is. We'll look at all that in great detail on a future show. But that was a big story today in the Wall Street Journal. So maybe, maybe, maybe we're getting a little bit more visibility for these things. All right, let's go to questions. We're about $70 short. A dollar for everybody listening right now would get us there. So again, view it as a value for value for what you get from these shows. Assume you get something because you're listening. And please jump in with a question or use a sticker. But let's try to make our goal and we're certainly within reach quite easily within reach. $7, $10 questions or just a bunch of stickers will get us there. Michael says for $100. Thank you, Michael. I watched Vivek trying to defend himself on the breakfast club. While they unapologetically defended capitalism, he had a hard time defending self-interest when challenged about his lack of national service. How he only went into business world for personal gain? How he only went into business world for personal gain? Yeah, I mean, I don't think Vivek, my guess is that his unapologetic defense of capitalism is not a defense of capitalism. It's a defense of the mixed economy. I think that's what you get. He wants to de-regulate a little bit. He wants to do this a little bit. But he's not defending capitalism as I understand it as it should be understood. He is just giving lip service to slightly less government controls and slightly more market processes. But of course he can't defend self-interest. Who can? Who can defend self-interest? I mean, nobody out there can defend self-interest. And I don't expect Vivek to. Vivek who has repeatedly called for public service, repeatedly called for young people to be drafted in a sense, not into the military, either into the military or to public service. Somebody who has picked up kind of the nationalist conservative mantle and talks about the importance of the nation above the individual and so on. So it's not going to be easy for him to defend his own track record of business. And the best he can do is say, look, by building business I've contributed to the common good. He could do that. But then the question is, why shouldn't everybody do that? Why are you forcing them to do something called, you know, something called national service? I mean, I'm glad he's being asked that. I hope he gets cornered into it. I hope it is so ridiculed and he's made to look like a fool because I think one of the most horrible proposals in the American policy and political context is a proposal for national service. I'm 100% opposed to national service in all its forms and I think it is a really, truly horrific idea. Thank you, Michael. Thank you for the generous contribution. Okay, we have two other Vivek questions. So Ryan says, I wish Vivek could say going into business is one of the greatest ways to enhance life for all Americans. Where would we be if Jeff Bezos was in the military? Yeah. I mean, this to me is the worst issue of all of the things Vivek stands for. National service and the draft are by far the worst. The worst. I mean, you could stand for really bad things and if you don't support national service, I'll still maybe support you because of the less of two evils. But once you adopt national service as a big deal, forget it. I can't support you. It really is a litmus test because it really is, it exposes you as completely not understanding capitalism, completely not understanding America and what America stands for, completely embracing sacrifice, completely embracing collectivism. So on a foundational level, it embraces everything that's bad, everything that's bad. So, and as somebody who served in a draft, take three years away from a person and, you know, prevent him from pursuing his dreams during those three years. It's just, it's just horrible and I don't care if it's a military or if it's national service, it's the same thing. Alright, a reminder again. Support, value for value for these shows. If you value having these shows, covering the news for you, please consider supporting. There is, you can use the sticker feature, you can use the super chat feature and we can easily get to our target for today. One quick, other vivid one. I actually think vivid did a decent job defending self-interest on the breakfast club. He has guts going on these hostile leftist programs. He suddenly has guts and he has charisma and he's good at being super controversial. Whether it's, if there's anything there beyond that, I do not know. I haven't seen the breakfast clubs. I can't, I can't tell you if I agree with Hopper Collins or I agree with Michael and Ryan. Okay, friend Hopper says, my favorite aspect of Iron Man answers is that she never accepted the question as premise and formatted what he asked before answering. You have this in common with her. It's a skill. I do my best to hone, I keep up the good work. Thank you. I mean, I agree. I don't agree that I have the skill, but she has, she had an amazing skill of seeing the premise behind the question and targeting the premise not, not necessarily the question itself and thus answering the question in a much broader, quicker way. So yes, I wish more people had that skill. It's rare. I mean, Leonard, obviously Leonard Peacock has that skill in spade. Liam says, why do people look for certainty in others? That shows to me most people haven't turned their own mind on. I don't understand. Why do people look for certainty in others? In what way? Haven't turned their own mind on mode. Like you said on Lex, we're dealing with zombies out there, dead behind eyes. Yes, I think that's right. It's not that they're looking for certainty in others. It's that they're looking for anything in others. It's not, I don't think it's about the certainty. It's about guidance. It's looking for guidance, looking about what to think and what to feel and what to do to others. And it's what makes a culture ready for an authoritarian. Okay, Sylvano, thank you. Cut the deficit by quite a bit. What's your opinion of animal cruelty laws? If I wanted to raise an animal to die at my hand, should the government have to say, is it moral for another individuals to stop me? So I do not, I'm against animal cruelty laws. I know a lot of you upset at me for this, but during the club, people upset at me for stuff. I don't think it's a right to violation, and therefore I do not think the government has any business in telling you how to treat an animal. I think it's unbelievably immoral to torture or to be cruel to an animal for no reason. And just as an expression of your emotions and your anger or whatever. So I'm against animal cruelty and I think that people who engage in animal cruelty should be shunned and people should, you know, yeah, again, shun that person. There might be other things that are appropriate in a social context to do to people who are cruel to animals, but it's not a violation of rights. I don't think you can use force against that person, but so they can't stop you, but they can certainly shun you. You know, you could argue that maybe they could be in a position to free the animal and get it out of your grips. But what you're doing is clearly immoral or what this person is doing is clearly immoral. That doesn't mean the government should have a say. Indeed, I don't think the government should have a say. Once you allow the government to police morality, you're in big trouble. And this is a moral issue, not a legal issue. Legal issues relate to violations of rights, not to personal behavior. Clark Young, a person with an effective self-esteem is much easier to control. Absolutely. The less self-esteem you have, the more easy it is to control you. I forget the details. What did Toscanini say to the fascist face? Yeah, I'm not sure what you're relating to here exactly. I mean, Toscanini had a lot of run-ins with fascists. You might be talking about what he said to Richard Strauss, the famous and great composer at a party after World War II. He went up to Richard Strauss and said, I take my hat off to you as a composer and I put it back on ten times as a human being. That's allegedly what he said. I'm not sure if that actually happened. I was in the middle of the kind of definitive biography of him and I never finished it. I got distracted and I finished it. I have to finish it. And that story was not... We had not reached post-World War II, so I don't know definitively if that story is true. Michael says, why do we have to go through a fascist quasi-dictatorship period before enough people who matter recognize that objectivism is the best way forward? Well, because objectivism, I mean, because it's hard, because they're going to have to change much of how they think about the world. Because they're going to have to learn this new philosophy and they're going to have to accept premises that they've rejected in the past. And because they're going to have to... a significant number of people are going to have to turn their minds on and stop evading. And that's just too difficult. It's easier. People are not inspired by what leads to success when it comes to politics. People are inspired by what makes them... what feeds their status quo bias and what feeds their moral biases, what they think is just and right. And they just don't... they don't think objectivism is right. Alright, last two questions. If somebody wants to come in with 40 bucks and get us over the hump, that'd be great. Frank says, what about filling out selective service cards? I think that's wrong. I don't think they should be selective service cards. Selective service cards means that the government could one day draft you. No, I mean, it should be in the Constitution that the U.S. government can never draft you. I don't care if Russia invades or China invades or draft is always, under all circumstances, wrong. It's wrong in the U.S. It's wrong in Israel. It's wrong in Russia. It's wrong in Ukraine. It is wrong. Your life is yours. It is not the states to be drafted for its cause. You know, I believe there are many circumstances under which you should volunteer to fight for the state, but they cannot draft you. Wyatt says, thoughts on James Valiant's eye close. We're not close. I don't know James very well. And I'm not giving thoughts on... you know, I'm not giving thoughts on other objectivist intellectuals. I've asked you guys not to ask me questions like that. And that doesn't mean the negative. I just don't want to be in a position. I'll answer for Valiant and then you'll ask me about somebody else and somebody else and somebody else. And there's no end to it. And it's not objective. If I have criticism of somebody, I'll say to their face. If there's something unique I want to say, this isn't the context in which I'm going to evaluate people publicly. John says, when will there be an authorized bio of Rand? Good question. Any day now. And maybe not for 10 years. I don't know. I mean, somebody's working on it. She's been working on it a long time. It's been almost finished for a long time. Someday it'll be published and it will be magnificent, but waiting for that day. Daniel says, do you have trouble listening to Wagner Strauss because of the philosophy? No, no. You got to separate out the long dead. The philosophy is not relevant to me. What is relevant to me is the beauty of the music. I don't know what Beethoven's philosophy is. I don't know what Tchaikovsky's was. I don't know what Rachmaninov said. Yeah, I happen to know that Wagner and Strauss was bad, but so what? William says, I'm thinking of rejoining the Marines as an officer. Can you provide your opinion on a career in the military and how objective it is and views military service? Look, God, this is a really tough one because while I am hugely supportive of the U.S. military and supportive of those serving in the U.S. military and want the military to have good people, and I think it's a really important institution that fundamentally is necessary and is one that is essential for the United States to stay a free country. I also think that the people running it from the generals to the politicians are clueless, have no strategy, don't know what they're doing. Often send the military on missions that are anti-American or that don't serve America's interests and treat you as a soldier and a military officer, a Marines officer, as sacrificial lambs. They don't care about your life. They don't give one a Yoda about how many people die. You can see that in the treatment of Americans in Libya with Hillary Clinton. You could see that with the treatment of all U.S. forces by the Bush administration, which was despicable and you should have been impeached for that. You can see it in the way U.S. forces were treated in Afghanistan. You know, Biden's retreat, the U.S. troops that were killed on the last few days of our presence in Afghanistan by a terrorist bomb because of the panic and hysteria of coming out of there. You can see it in the way our troops were treated in Afghanistan and the Bush, Obama, and Trump where they were sent on missions that they could not win, sent with whose engagement that basically treated them as sacrifices for the good of who knows whom, Afghanistan, or to cover up the tracks of corrupt generals and corrupt politicians and their horrible, horrible, horrible policies vis-a-vis Afghanistan. So I can't tell you to go because I can't be positive because I know that you are going to be viewed by your commanders, again politically and in the military, as just a warm body to be sacrificed for something that has nothing often, that has nothing to do with American interest. And sometimes is in violation of American interest. And you know, that movie that I recommended a long time ago, maybe years ago, on the Afghan, the American troops in that Afghan valley that was being attacked, they couldn't hold it. They knew they couldn't hold it. The generals knew they couldn't hold it. They didn't be nice to the Afghan population. Why were they there? Nobody could actually say other than it was to be nice to the Afghan population. But they were in a valley with commanding heights where the Taliban was at. Nobody cared. The commanding officer getting killed. Nobody cared. They were finally attacked and many of them died. Nobody really cared. And a brilliant movie, whose name I can't remember right now, was made of this. Nobody cared. So why would you want to put yourself, and I'm not, you know, I'm just saying, William, it's a really tricky thing. But why would you want to put yourself in a position where you are at the, you have to follow orders by people, the outpost, the movie is the outpost. If you haven't seen the outpost, watch the outpost if you want to see the horror that is the American military today and how much it cares about its own troops. Why would you want to put yourself at the behest of people who clearly do not care for you and people who do not know, understand or understand what American self-interest actually requires? Anyway, so that is my thinking. So I cannot recommend it. And I really, but I can't tell you what to do and shouldn't tell you what to do. You really need to think it through. I can think of a bunch of positives and I'm sure you can, but you really need to think about this negative of being at, you know, being commanded by people who are just horrific. A thought criminal says, have you read Schopenhauer's Capitalist and Socialist Democracy? If so, your thoughts. I did a long time ago. I mean, the parts of the brilliant parts I didn't really agree with. Generally Schopenhauer is a mixed bag, a brilliant insights and, you know, so-so and giving into certain aspects of, well, I just think poor analysis. Let's put it that way. But that would take a long time to give you a proper book review and I don't remember it well enough to do it. Do you think that post-humously published ran material, her journals and Q&A is accurate? I've read that they were so edited to be with us. They're edited. I don't think so edited to be with us. That's ridiculous. I think that is a just a baseless attack by people who don't like the people who did the editing, by people who don't like the Iron Man Institute. Any scholar is welcome to come to the Iron Man Archives and compare the original to this. Anybody doing serious work on Iron Man can read the original. They were edited for clarity because a lot of it was, you know, with speeches and things like that. And, you know, absolutely, absolutely these are unbelievably valuable content. Again, if you're a scholar that cares about the exact use of a word and what the comma here and a comma there and every aspect of that, you're welcome to come to the archives and study them. But for 99.9% of us, these are unbelievable resources and we should be unbelievably thankful to the people who edited them that made them so much more accessible for all of us. Don't pay attention to those people who are just trying to stir up trouble and just trying to be nasty because they happen to not like certain people. Thank you, John. Thanks everybody. We made our target. Really appreciate the support. I have to run. I will see you all tonight. Tonight I'm going to do a show on morality without religion. So we're going to talk about morality. We're going to talk about religion. I'm going to talk about some of the comments I got on the video I did about the new atheists. There's some comments that I think require or deserve a comeback, a response. So we're going to dig into the question of religion. We're going to dig in and God and we're going to dig into the question of morality and the relationship between them. And we're going to talk about an objective morality and what that requires. So it should be fun. A lot of people still battering religion. So still lots of comments saying, but religious people are so much better, so much nicer, I'd rather live with them.