 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 Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, everybody had a fantastic Thanksgiving yesterday. I did. Went to a favorite restaurant. Had some great, the best turkey I've ever had, really. And generally, fantastic food with my wife. It's a great company. Yeah, really a nice, relaxing event. We also kind of usually, Thanksgiving, you watch football, I guess. We've never watched football, but people usually watch football. Well, yesterday, the game to watch was soccer. The World Cup had four games going on yesterday. And the best by far, for those of you who don't know soccer, the best by far was Brazil yesterday. Oh my god. That was a fantastic game. And one of the most beautiful goals, one of the most beautiful goals scored that you will ever see. It's just gorgeous. So if you have a chance, try to go online or try to see it somewhere. The second goal, Brazil won 2-0. The second goal of the Brazilian victory, the Brazilian scores, is just a gem. It is a beauty. It is a testament to just the ability and the flair of Brazilian football or soccer. And a lot of fun. A lot of fun. I really enjoyed that game. Brazil could have easily won that game 7-0 or something like that. They had tons of opportunities that they blew throughout both the first and particularly the second half. But at least they won. I'm rooting for Brazil, this World Cup. Hopefully they take the title. But it was truly an enemy. I know Americans, most of you don't care about soccer. But yeah, that was a good game. And of course, a little bit later today, we've got the US playing England, not the UK, because the UK has like four different teams, right? The UK has England, Wales, Scotland, and I think Northern Ireland. They each have their own teams. And two of those teams are in the World Cup, Wales, and England and England is playing the American team, the US team this afternoon. So that'll be fun to watch. And I have to admit there that I'm rooting for England. Just because they're a much better team, they have a chance of winning the whole thing. In England, Brazil finals, I don't know if that's even possible, the semifinals or something like that, would be pretty cool. So that's what I'm rooting for. Anyway, I encourage you to watch that. So that was a lot of fun. But I do want to also use the opportunity of the World Cup to talk about a few other things relating to Qatar, which is the country in which these games are being held, a country that has, that is a dictatorship, a country that is basically a theocracy, that is run by Sunni Muslims, that treats its kind of immigrant workers, its imported workers primarily from Pakistan and from India horribly. I mean, just horrifically, they have no rights, they have no legal standing. But also, you know, this is a country that is unbelievably intolerant of because of its Muslim laws. So for example, Budweiser is a sponsor of the World Cup. It's one of the main sponsors of the World Cup. I think some of the cups, some of the prizes that are being provided are called Budweiser prizes for different things. And like a week before the World Cup started, the Qataris said, oops, we're not gonna allow any beer sales in the stadium. The agreement had been that while they wouldn't be alcohol sold in Qatar, because that's illegal, you will be able to sell beer in the stadium. Nope, that was banned. So here is Budweiser, the sponsor, and Budweiser is plastered everywhere and they can't actually sell the beer and here are the fans going to watch soccer and they can't drink beer. I don't know how they're managing, particularly those northern Europeans, how can they even manage to watch a whole game without a pint of beer? But that's just one example of kind of the randomness. I don't know contractually whether Budweiser has any claim against Qatar. I assume they do. I mean, I assume it was in their contract. But that's one example. Another example is the ban in Qatar on flying the rainbow flag of LGBTQ plus. So anybody seen with LGBTQ T-shirt, hat, flag, so just the colors, doesn't even have to say anything, just the colors. The item of clothing is confiscated. Luckily, it's very hot in Qatar, so if you lose your T-shirt, you can still survive. But they've confiscated items of clothing, they've confiscated bucket hats, and they've confiscated like armbands, and it's just being a constant conflict around LGBTQ because remember, this is a culture that stones homosexuals or drops them from skyscrapers to their death below or basically kills them. So homosexuality is banned. Homosexuality is something that you get killed over. So this is where they're holding the World Cup. It is really hard to believe that this is the kind of place that FIFA, the organization that runs these things, has chosen to run a World Cup, but here we are. This is it. So anyway, sad, sad, sad, sad, and I don't know, I have to say that in spite of all that, I'm still watching, but it is pretty horrific that this is one of the choices that were made by FIFA and by every measure or by every suggestion, corruption had a lot to do with this. Let's see, so we've already blown through our, what do you call it, a quota for today for Super Chat. Maybe I have to increase the quota, but so thank you. We're already at like $360. So thank you, let's see, who do we get? Wes, thank you for the $50. We really appreciate that. Doug has got a song with you. Heaven is a Place on Earth by Belinda. Carla, I'll never heard of that. Okay, we'll do that. Thank you, Doug. And then, so that was 150 and then Armin just gave 200, which is pretty amazing and Michael's just coming in with 100, but let me do Armin because it's related to Qatar. He says, Qatar is also cooperating with the Iranian government to support Iranian support, to suppress Iranian supporting protests. Yes, Qatar is suppressing demonstrations against Iran. It is intelligence-wise supporting the Iranians in many respects supporting the Iranians, but this is the killer thing about Iran. Sorry, about Qatar. It is the largest military base that the United States has in the Middle East is in Qatar. I think that's true. The military base responsible for all intelligence and all a huge air force base, the U.S. military, the U.S. military has, is in Qatar. So, you know, GoFigure, the U.S. is 100% sanctioning this regime, the U.S. is completely supporting this regime. A lot of Qatar's, you know, the U.S. supplies them, in a sense, with cover, supplies the regime with cover. And yet, the regime is cooperating with the number one enemy of the United States in the region, Iran. This is the kind of unprincipled, flaky, crazy foreign policy that the United States has engaged in. It's the foreign policy that they've been working on that the United States has engaged in. It's the foreign policy that they've been engaged in forever. This is not the Biden administration or the Trump administration or the Obama administration or the Bush administration. It's all of them. It's all of them. I mean, why do we have a base in Qatar? They're the enemy. They remember Qatar is also the regime that is most responsible for the funding of ISIS. Remember ISIS? And yet, we give them cover. We're right there. We legitimize them. Indeed, the biggest portion of U.S. soccer fans at the stadium cheering on for the U.S., a military personnel from the massive Qatar base, U.S. base in Qatar. I mean, it's just, I mean, these kind of things in foreign policy just boggle the mind. Just boggle the mind. There's no principles, no strategy, no ideas, nothing. Just pragmatism, short-termism, flagrant pragmatism. But supporting your own enemy, that's a whole other level. So, I mean, American foreign policy is a disaster anyway. We'll talk about, I'm gonna do a show on American foreign policy with regard to Taiwan in a while because I'm rethinking my position about Taiwan. So, I think that'll be interesting because I'm rethinking my position about Taiwan. Anyway, we will talk about that, talk about what is strategic and where the United States should focus its efforts. All right, amen, thank you. That was very, very generous. Michael, all right, we're gonna get to your question later because it's unrelated to any of these news items, but thank you. Okay, oh, Michael has a two-part question, $10 and $100, thank you, Michael. All right, let's see, quickly. So, that was the World Cup, that's Qatar. A quick Twitter update, Twitter update. Where's the Twitter update? Here's the Twitter update. So, Elon Musk, as we've discussed, I think, last week is running Twitter's rather than having a moderating council, which as far as I know, a moderation council has never been convened. Maybe it has, but no indication that it's been convened and no indication of who's on it. Rather than using a moderation council, which is what Elon Musk said he would do when he first took over Twitter and that no decisions would be made until the moderation council was convened, rather than doing that, Elon Musk is running Twitter's moderation policy based on two ideas. One is polling, and two is whim. Or at least what seems like whim, he still has to explain exactly what the standard is. So, the polling, so over the week, over Thanksgiving, he polled people and asked whether he should reinstate pretty much everybody that's been banned unless they had broken the law or engaged in a egregious spam. And I think the poll was something like 70-30 and four reinstating everybody. So, you know, this morning, I think, or yesterday, that he is reinstating everybody. So, everybody's reinstated. Kanye was reinstated over the weekend. Of course, Trump was already reinstated based on another poll. And, you know, so all of that is reinstating. It'd be interesting to see if Alex Jones is reinstated because Elon Musk has said, no, Alex Jones is not reinstated. Why something to do with, you know, Elon Musk's personal preferences, but nothing, no principle emerged. So that is kind of interesting. We will see. Also, next week, the checkmarks will be re-established, reinstated. There will be three different checkmarks. One for organizations, corporations and organizations. One for government and one for individuals. But, and every checkmark will be verified by a human being. I got my checkmark, there was no verification. Basically, I paid eight bucks. I don't think they've charged my credit card, but I paid eight bucks and I got the checkmark. So now they're going to be verified by an individual to make sure you really are who you say you are. What will be interesting is, is he going to charge for them? No indication yet if he's going to keep that the $8 thing. I still have a checkmark, but it's not blue. It's white. So I'm wondering what that means, right? So my checkmark's white. Is anybody have a blue checkmark? I don't know. So hopefully we'll get some visibility and some finality on, regarding checkmarks this coming week, because it looks like they will be doing that. So that is the latest news out of Twitter. All right, quickly it looks like we're going fast today. This is good because I only had four topics and I didn't have a bunch of others on top of that. Let's do UK immigration. We'll also add US immigration there. So immigration policies. UK immigration, it looks like this year is going to be a record year. So in the first six months of the year, the UK, in the UK remember this is legal immigration. The UK has admitted more immigrants than at any time in its history. Half a million people in the first six months of the year, which supposedly is the largest number ever. It's interesting this was becoming a big issue in England and I think the Labour Party, the left has now come out and said British businesses are going to have to get used to managing without immigration because we're going to cut immigration dramatically. So the Labour Party, it's the left in the UK that wants to cut immigration. I've always said the left was anti-immigration because of Labour unions and so on. They don't want the competition. It is interesting that the number of reasons why this year is a record year. One is that 2020 and 2021 were really low years because of COVID. So very little immigration in 2021. During that period, there was massive labour shortages in the UK. So employers urged the government to increase legal immigration and that has manifested itself this year in terms of filling in those positions. You've got also the fact that you've got they've allowed many more immigrants from Ukraine and from Hong Kong because of the Chinese takeover Hong Kong. But what's interesting is that now almost all or big majority of the immigrants coming into UK are no longer people from the EU. So many, many more Pakistanis, Indians, Africans from places like Nigeria, so former British colonies in Africa. So what's happened is you're getting a lot more immigrants for former colonies and a lot fewer immigrants from EU which I've said this before, which is interesting from the perspective of xenophobia to the extent that that's an issue. Europeans at least look like the Brits and they come from European countries. These new immigrants don't look like the Brits. It'll be interesting to see if there's a backlash against this. So far the backlash has been on the left, not on the right. Now that might be an attempt by the left to capture the populists. The populists on the populists who voted for Johnson to bring them back to the left, the working class people who voted for the Conservatives and bring them back to the Labour Party. So it is interesting. It is also an indication of something that's happening as the West ages, as the West loses its workforce because of aging. Well, two reasons as soon as it's over. One, because of aging, an aging population, people are retiring. But second, because of the welfare state, there are more and more people in the West who would rather not work than work the kind of jobs, kind of manual kind of service jobs. The more that happens, the bigger the labour shortage becomes. And that labour shortage is spurring to a large extent mass immigration or significant immigration. In the UK, you have to give them credit. They have, first of all, they're on islands. That makes it easier for them. But also, they have a system that allows immigrants and it allows and matches basically immigrants with needs. In the United States, we don't have such a system. We don't have a robust system of legal immigration. Particularly, we don't have a robust system for legal immigration for manual labour. We have an unrobust, a pathetic, broken system of H1B-type immigration. But even that has broken down. I mean, one of the great tragedies right now, one of the great global tragedies right now, foreign policy tragedies, again, of the US, is that there is real unhappiness in places like China around its own regime. And the smartest people in China want to get out. They want to leave. They're super smart. They're super productive. They're super innovative. They would enhance any economy in the world that they move to. And yet, because of immigration limitations, for example, in the United States, we don't allow them to immigrate here. Now, I know you guys are always complaining about immigrants from, I don't know, south of the border or whatever. But these are Chinese immigrants who are really, really smart and really, really productive and will immediately, as soon as they come here, create more jobs than they take away, supposedly, whatever the hell that means. And yet, we have barred them from coming in. We've made it almost impossible for them to come in both legally and then, of course, culturally. And there's massive talent, massive talent which we used to have, we used to get, and now we don't. Of course, now, you know, I already told the story of the guy who invented 5G who was a graduate student in the US and basically couldn't get that green card to stay in the US or went overseas and basically 5G was created and built outside of the US because of that, because instead of being hired in the US and being at the forefront of 5G in the US, it ultimately, technology landed up in China in the hands of how we, or something like that, I can't really pronounce it, because of our immigration policies. Immigration policies are insane. Not anybody who gets a graduate degree in STEM should get a visa immediately. I mean, I don't think that's a limitation of it, but that's at the very, very, very basis of it, right? All right, let's see, what else? So, CS, same problem we have in the US right now. There is a massive shortage of labor. There's still millions and millions of jobs that go unfilled in the US and unfilled because Americans don't want them because it's not an issue of wages, because wages are rising. It's an issue of Americans don't want these jobs. There are millions of these jobs that are unfilled, which hurts our economy, puts a cap on GDP growth, puts a cap on our standard of living equality of life. Some of these jobs are very high-end, some of them are low-end, some of them in the middle. You know, blue collar, very high-skilled laborers. There's always seems to be in the US a shortage for welders. There's certainly a massive shortage in construction workers. It's why real estate prices, one of the reasons why real estate prices are high is because there's just not enough construction workers to build all the homes that are needed in the US. And you could go on and on and on on the shortage of labor. And there are millions of people south of the border who want to immigrate to the United States. There are millions of jobs in the United States that they could fill, and yet we have created a bureaucratic, you know, irrational, stupid system of immigration that encourages people to cross the border and get welfare, rather than actually cross the border and work. It encourages people to, if they want to come legally, to apply for all kinds of, I don't know, humanitarian issues, and then they can't work for six months, and then there's a backlog, so they can't work for another year. And so we're taking massive human productive ability, and we're taking them off the market. But because they're in the US already, because they cross the border, they still get aid. So we're basically tanking foreigners who come to this country to work, and almost all of them want to work. And instead of providing them with work, we do what Germany does. We give them welfare. And we sustain them on welfare instead of requiring them to work. So, and nobody, not Republicans and no Democrats, nobody is proposing solutions for this. I mean, the solution of just turning them around and sending them off to Mexico is not a viable solution long-term. You know, increasing and increasing the militarization of the border, building more walls, is not a solution long-term. The solution is to provide them with jobs. The solution is to increase legal immigration and thus reduce the pressure on the border. It is insanity, absolutely insanity anymore. It's both economic insanity and, of course, immoral to, you know, stop these people from immigrating. And if they do come in, then ban them from working. It's doubly stupid. So, you know, a lot of stories about the border crisis, the border crisis, the large decree, is driven by labor shortage. So, you've got a border crisis that's driven by labor shortage. If you solve the labor shortage, you also solve the border crisis. And you do that either by driving the U.S. into depression where it doesn't need the labor and then people stop migrating into the U.S. or you do it by opening up the border, making it much easier to come in, much easier to come in legally and allowing them to come in so they can pick the strawberries and go and help on horse ranches and picking apples and everything else where there's massive labor shortages and, of course, in construction. So, you solve it either way. You either depress the economy or you liberate or you fill the jobs. That's the two ways in which you solve the labor shortage. Sorry, the border crisis. All right. Finally, Chinese lockdowns. God, it's only getting worse in China. It is truly unimaginable how bad it is. There is an entire province, Xi Jinping or something like that, that has been locked down now for months in spite of the so-called loosening up of the zero COVID policy in China. Now, you have Beijing on the edge of being quarantined and locked down. You've got Guangzhou, really the industrial and productive center of China in the south close to Hong Kong. They are now being ground to a halt because of COVID restrictions. You know, the Chinese economy is taking a massive beating because of this. The economy is taking a beating. Of course, people's lives are being destroyed or being harassed by being forced to be locked down for days, weeks, months on end. I think the culture in China is taking a beating. As we said, the economy is taking the beating. It's going to be interesting politically if Xi and his cronies, how well the economy is taking a beating. If Xi and his cronies, how well they survive all these COVID shutdowns and how well they do moving into the future. But it does not look good for China. China is a massive problem, a massive challenge. And of course, they could solve this with vaccination. They at least could solve the fear of millions of deaths and fear of hospitals. They won't do that because they won't take the technology without owning the technology. They won't actually embrace the vaccines unless they get to own the technology and Moderna and I think Pfizer standing up to them and not allowing them to just steal the technology. So there's something through this that's unthinkable. I think one of the interesting things about this, one of the really, really interesting things about this, I do not think, by the way, that the Chinese are doing this on purpose. I do not think the Chinese are doing this in order to control their population. They already had massive controls over the population. They already were monitoring much of what they did. They already had the cameras and the social scores and all of that. So this is not about control. This is a massive failure of the Chinese regime. And they know it because it hurts their economy. It hurts their ability to project power. It's going to hurt their investment in things like chips. It's going to hurt their military strength. It hurts everything. There's no advantage that the Chinese central government has from these lockdowns. And at least I find it fascinating that I find it fascinating that so many conspiracy theories still exist around COVID. It doesn't really exist. There was no COVID. COVID isn't a big deal. Or that COVID was somehow imposed on us by the Chinese. And yet who is the biggest sufferer for COVID? By far the biggest sufferers from COVID are the Chinese. They've had more lockdowns. Their economies have slowed more. They have recovered less. They have lost more GDP. They have lost more. They have fewer deaths. But that has come as a massive cost. If COVID is a scam, if COVID never existed, if COVID is not dangerous, then you must conclude that the Chinese are absolutely unequivocally stupid. And I don't think that's something one can easily conclude. Let's see. So China lockdowns are only getting worse. They try to loosen things up. But you know what? COVID's out there. COVID's very virulent. People are getting COVID. And unless the Chinese are willing to accept the fact that COVID's not that big of a deal, or are willing to actually start vaccinating their people and pay more than and pay Pfizer the money that they need to pay them in order to do that, they're in trouble. Of course, you know, they are trying desperately to develop their own mRNA vaccines. They have not been able to master the technology. It's not easy. Just like they're trying desperately to produce next-generation chips. And they have not been able to master the technology. All right. Thanks, everybody. That's the program. We've got a bunch of Super Chat questions. We're going to go over them quickly. We have raised almost $500. That's amazing. That's almost double our goal. So thank you to all the Super Chatters, particularly Amin and Doug who did a song and Michael and here's Michael's question. So Michael says, my philosophy professor asserts that everything we perceive is bias. So there can be no concept of objectivity. I gave a simple count example of a hot stove. I said the fact that a stove is hot is not subject to bias. It just is. She responded by saying hot is subjective. The fact that people can perceive reality differently because of their pain tolerance is bias. All the perceiver can do is experience his own bias. I mean, that's, yes, I mean, that's typical, but that is nonsense, right? The stove is hot, right? We can measure that heat. We understand the physical properties of what hot means. We can see the damage that it does to our fingers. No matter what your heat tolerance is beyond a certain temperature, you will burn. It might be somewhat individual at what temperature you will burn or at what temperature you perceive something as hot. My wife and I constantly argue about the air conditioning. She's always called, I'm always hot, but there's a certain level where we both are hot and there's a certain level where we're both cold. So absolutely it is objective and it's scientifically knowable and provable. The more we understand about human biology, the more we will know exactly the temperature at which human skin will burn. The more we understand about human biology, we'll even understand the differences between why you perceive heat a little differently than I perceive heat. None of that is bias. Every single aspect of that is objective. Now imagine where somebody like that is so easy to show that it's objective. Human fire walkers are not going to say it wasn't hot. They just have the tolerance for it. But it's still hot for them. And if they stay there, if they don't walk, if they actually stand, they will burn. They will burn. So I mean imagine if at that level they think our sense is a bias or everything we perceive about reality is bias, then what they think about more abstract things. Paul Azuz says, sanctioning you are question, sorry, sanctioning Qatar. I mean the question is who should sanction them? I think FIFA should have sanctioned them. I think Budweiser should have sanctioned them. I think everybody should have sanctioned them at the time. Now it's too late. What are you going to do now? I mean some, you know, people, US soccer could have withdrawn from FIFA over this or something but they're no principles. But for you to sanction it now and not watch the soccer, that's just inflicting pain on yourself to make you a little feel a little bit better. There's no benefit. There's no anything else. I don't think watching the games is sanctioning. I get what he's asking. I don't think you sanctioning him. All it does is it hurts you. That's all. Stephen Thurden, I hope you had a great thanks. Just giving you on mind was great especially because the Cowboys won. American football is better than soccer just saying. No, not while American football players when they leave the game suffer significantly from brain injuries, significant numbers of them do. Not while the NFL could, for example, change the helmets to make it a safer game and they refuse to do so. But not while everybody cheers the bigger the hit, the more the concussions, the better. No, I would rather watch soccer right now. The idea that every time a quarterback gets hit and his head hits the thing means he's cutting his lifespan or increasing the potential of brain damage down the road. I think football is an amazing, beautiful game and American football and I love it. But now that I know about the brain damage, I can't ignore that. I have stopped for the most part, stopped watching football. I watch it once in a while, but rarely. Colt Savie says, I like Ben Shapiro, but he went after Schumann immigration. Well, of course he did. It's frustrating that we have a labor shortage and the rate is more wide about making sure immigrants can't come in. It's stupid. I mean, I think it's sad and it's uniform. There's almost nobody out there who's pro-immigration. Almost nobody. All right, again, thank you everybody. A great Super Chat day. We did it a little shorter. I'm happy about that. We're only 37 minutes in. We're still going to try to make it a 30 to 40-minute show. I appreciate all your support. I hope you're enjoying these. I will see you again with one of these on Monday. On Sunday, we've got a Q&A Ask Me Anything session, both with my 25-plus supporters on video and all of you through Super Chat. And then I will either have a show tonight at 8 p.m. or tomorrow, or tomorrow, probably at 3 p.m., so we'll see. But the Q&A with supporters will be at 3 p.m. on Sunday. See you all maybe in a few hours. Maybe tomorrow, I will decide later today and let you know. Thanks, guys. Hope you enjoyed it.