 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Book Show. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Iran Book Show on this Valentine's Day. All right, so I'm a little distracted. I'm way behind today. I apologize. I'm trying to get this final thing done. Yes, got it. All right, thank you. Hopefully, everybody's having a fantastic day. It's Tuesday. It's Valentine's Day. So I have to explain why I'm not out with my wife on Valentine's Day, because I shouldn't be doing a show on Valentine's Day. I should be out and about and celebrating with my wife. Anyway, the reality is that our wedding anniversary is in two days, three days. So we usually celebrate the wedding anniversary not so much Valentine's Day. But in addition, we're kind of celebrating the whole week this year. Yesterday, we had a Valentine's Day dinner at one of our favorite restaurants here. Tomorrow, we're having a Valentine's dinner at another restaurant. This one's kind of a special place where it only seats 12 people, and the chef makes the food in front of you. And the whole dinner is based on chocolate. The whole dinner is based on the chocolate bean. And every dish is going to have some chocolate in it. And we're really looking forward to that. It should be super interesting and a lot of fun. And the chef explains what he's doing and how he's doing it. So it's very intimate and really nice. And then Friday is our wedding anniversary, and we're having dinner at another one of our favorite restaurants in Puerto Rico, really in the world, really. So we're doing this whole week. And the reality is, Tuesday, Thursday, and the two days where I have the show, we've left open. But don't worry. I'm not neglecting my wife on Valentine's Day. I've just turned it into a whole week. We've just turned it into a whole week celebration. And doing it. Ian says, going out on Valentine's Day is for suckers. Just wait a few extra days and go out for a nice dinner for less dollars and probably better quality. I don't know. I mean, a lot of the best chefs out there making special Valentine's dinners, they're creating special Valentine's menus, I think they put a lot of thought and effort into it. It's, you know, in general, it's romantic. It's a date to celebrate romance. You know, it's about as, it's the same as a birthday. You know, every day is an important day to celebrate your love of your life and your existence. But birthday is a day where you stop to actually dedicate some time to actually celebrate it. So, you know, Valentine's Day is a nice day to spend celebrating your love and assuming you have somebody. And it's important to, if you don't, then it's important to think about getting somebody, finding somebody, pursuing somebody. And anyway, so that's why we're doing the show today. I figure if we do a show on Valentine's Day, we should talk about love, romance. And then I got a question in the super chat earlier today about, I can't remember what the question was now. Can somebody remember the question, what it was? But anyway, he's not here. He's working. He's a chef, probably doing a special Valentine's Day menu tonight in New York. But I can't remember what the question was, but something about love and art. So figure why not talk about love and art and, you know, broadly and particularly maybe the contrast between love and art today and love and art in the past. And yeah, that reminded me in a kind of an ugly way of the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl, what does love and art have to do with the Super Bowl you might legitimately ask? I wonder if any of you figured that one out. I don't know. How many of you saw the halftime show of the Super Bowl? It was so, god, what's the right word even to describe it? I found it dull, but offensive and just ridiculous and anti-sexual and anti-romantic and vulgar. But it was more than bad. It was vulgar and very modern in its attitude towards particularly sex. I mean, she's grabbing a crotch. She's grabbing a butt, I guess. There's a whole song, butt, butt, butt, butt, butt, butt. And they're all shaking their butts. I mean, animalistic, sexual, animalistic. It's cheap and it just, and this is the Super Bowl. This is supposed to be, you know, one of my business partners was saying that his kids were watching a Super Bowl and they really wanted to watch the halftime show. And they were asking who this Rihanna is. And then they watched it. And they were impressed and asked him were they impressed with the butt. So were they impressed with the exact? And he said, no, they didn't see that. If they'd seen that, you know, they didn't notice that. But why is that the image of, I don't know, sexuality, of femininity, of women, of sex, of what is it supposed to convey? It was just, and the clothes that they were wearing, remember this is Arizona, and they're wearing these winter coats that just bizarre and that eliminate the figure, eliminate the female figure. So there is no figure, you eliminate the male figure. You know, because males and females, they're all dressed the same. She was obviously pregnant, but, and the way they dance today is just so vulgar. And again, there's a certain animalism to the portrayal of sex. I mean, it was, you know, I think, and then if you think about the lyrics of so many songs today, particularly rap and, you know, and, but a lot of modern music, it's vulgar, it's explicit, it treats sex as trivial, as animalistic, love, romance, don't exist. It's all about just the sex. And, but sex means nothing. And it's all about, I mean, the way women are treated in it, it's, it's, what's his name? It retates a version of the way, the way to treat women. It's just, it's just so vulgar and primitive and backward. And if you think about, you think about songs of love, I mean, even going back to, to the 60s and 70s, that, you know, I know the Beatles song about love, they're, oh, they're happy, they're, they're pleasant, they're, they're, they're excited, they're, and there's no vulgarity there. It's just, it's just this amazing thing, love. And it's, it's, it's fun, right? It's fun. And then, you know, throughout, throughout the 60s and 70s and even the 80s, there was, there was music that one could define as, as, you know, it's not the deepest, not the most meaningful music, but it had a positive view of love, a positive view of romance, a positive view of relationships. It wasn't all about sex and, and, and vulgarity and treating women like, like dirt. Or if you go back even further, if you go back to, I don't know, think Sinatra, go back to the songs of, of Coporta, listen to Ella Fitzgerald singing some of Coporta's songs. Think of, you know, Jennifer mentions Fetistan Ginger-Rajah's dancing and dancing, you know, in a romantic way. And I'm not even talking about ballet as dancing, right? In contrast to what we saw in the Super Bowl. But, but we live in a world and, and I think the Super Bowl and I think the Super Bowl porn and rap kind of represent kind of the attitude, I think, of the world towards sex and romance and love, really. And that is an attitude of cynicism, skepticism. Love is just, just a word. It doesn't mean anything. It's, it's, it's just animalistic. You know, I think ultimately that is what kind of an evolutionary psychologist would tell us. It's not that meaningful. Don't get too excited about it. It's just a way to bond so that ultimately we can procreate. It's just a way to get, to get together and women wanting more than men because men can go and procreate with anybody. Women need detachment because they're, anyway, there's a whole, there's a whole kind of deterministic evolutionary psychological explanation for sex and love. And, and by making it about that, it turns human beings into just another animal. And, and we're not just another animal. Because we have free will and because we have reason, we're not just another animal. We have values. We pursue values. We identify values. And to quote Iron Man, to love is to value. To love is to value at the highest level, right? And in that sense, you need reason and you need to engage that reason. You need free will and you need to be selfish and you need to be rational to be able to love. But love is to value. To love is to value at the highest level. To love is to value another person as representing a sum of your values. So it's, when you reduce man to a deterministic, you know, deterministic animal, no different than any other man. Or just guided by instincts. Guided by whatever we feel is just there to serve some quote evolutionary purpose. It has no meaning. We don't choose it. We don't adapt it. We don't change it. It's just there. It's just part of our being. And if everybody's capable of it, that is gonna create cynicism about love, skepticism about love, about relationships. It's all about just finding a mate. It's all about just having sex. It's all about just procreating. And if you establish families, the purpose of families to procreate because that's a purpose evolution has us. I mean, you just turn us into automatons. And I think porn really kind of creates the impression that love is mechanistic and lacks any kind of spiritual aspect to it. I think that the kind of music we listen to and the whole rap and hip hop obsession with sex and the motion of love is part of that, is an expression of that. And as is, and I think it also, if you add that up to, you know, now three, two, three, four generations of Americans in particular, growing up with a lot of divorce, a lot of love being temporary and, you know, people declaring love and then it turning sour and turning bad, all of that adds to cynicism. People are just cynical. So you don't get great romances in our movies. You don't get beautiful romantic songs. Frank mentions on top of corpore, you know, you get Isaiah Berlin, Steinhand, Gushwin and others. I mean, writing beautiful love songs. And a longing for love and a longing for a romantic partner and a recognition of the value of having somebody to long for. I mean, most opera is about love and about the power of love. You know, Aida, I spoke about Aida a while ago because I saw it, where did we see Aida? We saw it in Madrid and I did it on my show afterwards and I talked about it's, you know, the whole Aida is love versus, you know, love versus patriotism, which is, by the way, the same theme fundamentally as Mr. Sunshine. And the thing that makes Mr. Sunshine so extraordinary, so, the reason I love it so much and the reason I have to step back and say, whoa, is this being produced in the same century in the same universe as I live in because nobody does this, right? Is, don't worry, I will get to positive. And here, Mr. Sunshine, is there's no cynicism. There's no doubting love. There's no doubting the power of love. And again, Mr. Sunshine is about the conflict of love versus patriotism, most operas are love versus family, you know, parents, siblings, you know, La Traviata, if you know the story of La Traviata, they fall in love, but it's bad for his sister if he marries this woman who has a disrepute. So they break up the relationship because, you know, so it's love versus, but in all, in the 19th century, the 19th century is called the romantic century. This is the era of romantic art. This is an era where love is elevated above all else. Love is the ultimate pursuit of value. And love is being challenged during the period by family, by convention, by patriotism, by what do you call it, the class system. All of these are challenges. And in everywhere, you know, love in a sense is struggling and fighting back. And love is, of course, a theme of literature going back to, well, me and Juliet were Shakespeare and I just saw, my wife and I just saw on Friday as part of our Valentine's Day wedding anniversary celebration, right? We went to see West Side Story in a production here in Puerto Rico, which was really nice. And West Side Story is, in a sense, a remake of Romeo and Juliet, but, you know, love versus tribalism. That's what West Side Story is about. Love versus tribalism. And unfortunately, a lot of those love stories are tragedies because, particularly in the 19th century, because, you know, if you look at the 19th century, love was just being born in a sense. Romantic love as a concept was just being born. Romantic love had many challenges that it was facing. And, you know, it often lost because so much was up against it. But it was elevated to this unbelievable position. So we need to really, in a culture in which we live today, we need to recognize and reject the determinism, the animalism, the cynicism with which a culture takes love. And in that sense, we need to reject the music, most of the stuff in the movies, most of our TV shows. And this is why I so encourage people to watch Mr. Sunshine, because Mr. Sunshine is a real revelation when it comes to art presenting a love story without any cynicism. You know, love is an achievement. It's not, you can't just take it for granted, it doesn't exist out there. One of the reasons, I think, that there's so many divorces is because many people conflate, particularly when they're young, conflate passion and desire and with real romantic love. And then they rush to get married and then discover they don't really like each other and then it doesn't work out too well. I mean, Rand talks about love as this, you know, here's a quote, right? Romantic love in the fourth sense of the term is an emotion possible only to a man or woman of unbreed self-esteem. It is his response to his own highest values in the person of another. An integrated response of mind and body, of love and sexual desire. So sexual desire is not divorced from this, it's a response to values. And yet we live in a world in which sexual desire is what the hell, all the time, every way and to everyone and love, yeah, what's that? So love is an incredible positive value. It's something that we pursued seriously. And, you know, art that expresses love is rare and beautiful. And again, opera, one of the things I love about opera is how romantic it is. I mean, there were real problems with Wagner's, Tristan and his older, it's too long. But the final movement, which is way too long, is a, basically a love song, it is the dying and it's again, it's a Roman Julia type story. But the music is so beautiful and so romantic and so expressive of love as exaltation. Love is the highest of values. And you see that in all the operas, right, with beautiful music and music that is elevating of love that raises it up, puts it on a pedestal, doesn't treat it as a grubby thing on the ground here. And I think the more you immerse yourself in the spirit of the 19th century, in the drama of romanticism, in the love of love that the romantics had that the 19th century had, the more you'll appreciate what it is. Art is really important for having a complete appreciation of the concept of the idea and the 19th century, the 19th century, they nailed it. They had it down. I'll show you some examples in painting and sculpture, but poetry, I mean, you can go back and love poems. There was actually a story today I saw by Arthur Brooks, who's a guy I don't particularly like, is a, used to run the American Enterprise Institute, but kind of a very Catholic, quite religious, very conservative, but pro-capitalism to the extent that he understands what it is and but he can't defend it. But he actually had a good story today in the paper. He has a column, I think, in Atlantic. It was all about we should get back to the old tradition of reading to one another love poetry on Valentine's Day. And while I've never done that, that sounds really beautiful and that's the kind of approach that I think is right. There is beautiful, beautiful poetry that is about love and expresses love that is gorgeous and we should embrace that. Now, I have a favorite love poem. I don't know if you guys have. So one of the things I'd like, and this would be great, one of the things I'd like from you is I'd love from you, like give me examples of, you could do this in the chat, it would be better if you could do it because then I see it easier, like do it for $2 on a super chat or something. I'd like to know your favorites. Favorite love song. Favorite romantic movie. Favorite romantic love poem. Favorite romantic painting, sculpture that expresses love. So I think this would be a lot more fun if you guys also expressed, but I want your favorites. I want what you really love, what really gets you, but in the category of love, romance, things like that. And post your favorites, put them up on the super chat. I'll give you a little bit of time or if you don't want to use the super chat, you don't want to spend the money, then feel free to just put it in the chat. I'll try to pick it out off of the chat. Yeah, sick video from Wagner. I mean, Wagner was so good at expressing strong, powerful, almost overwhelming emotions. I mean, it's what makes his music so amazing. Yeah, so what's that? There's an opera by Gounod that has a beautiful love scene in it. I think it's Romy and Juliet by Gounod is also, it's just a beautiful, we saw it years ago at the LA Opera and the singers actually make love on stage, on a bed and supposedly naked, but it's just a beautiful music and Gounod is a French 19th century opera composer. And actually, the male and the female sing on stage, I think at the time where dating and later got married or they were already married. And it was so romantic, it's so beautiful and so moving. But again, the music is expressing love and sex as these elevated values. The exact opposite of again, the andrutate. I mean, I'm shocked at how many people still think, how many people in the comments were defending andrutate? I mean, that whole attitude of love, sex as porn. That's it. All right, we've got a few of these. I'm gonna go over them later, but yeah. Add to these, Linda has won, Jennifer has won. I think Finn Hopper mentioned something earlier. You know, Alper Campbell, thank you for the $100 and we'll get to that after. I'll try to do, you know, related to the topic questions and stuff first. But yeah, send in, again, you can send it for $2 and that'll highlight it. Anyway, my favorite, I don't know what your favorite love poem is. If you have a favorite love poem. But my favorite is Annabelle by Edgar Allan Poe. Now, it is like most of Allan Poe's poetry. It is very morbid because it's a love song to a loved one that is dead, that is passed away. But I think it's beautiful. It really is gorgeous. I don't know if I should read it to you. I don't know how many of you know Edgar Allan Poe, Annabelle in particular. But, you know, look it up. Look it up. Shakespeare's Sonnets. You know, there's a lot of good love poems. My favorite is Annabelle. All right, I'm gonna read it to you. You know, hopefully we don't lose too many viewers as a consequence. I think I've read this to my wife. When we first started dealing a long, long time ago. Mahler's Symphony number one and two, Love and Romance. I don't get that from Mahler. I mean, there are sections of Mahler, but usually it's tainted with sadness. Usually it's tainted with sadness. All right, this is Annabelle. Let's see if I can do this. It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea that a maiden there lived whom you may know by the name of Annabelle. And this maiden she lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by me. I was a child and she was a child in this kingdom by the sea. But we loved with a love that was more than love. I and my Annabelle with a love that the wings surfaced of heaven laughed loud at her and me. And this was the reason that long ago in this kingdom by the sea, a wind blew out of a cloud chilling my beautiful Annabelle so that a high born Kingsman came and bore her away from me to shut her up in the specter in this kingdom by the sea. The angels, not half so happy in heaven went laughing at her and me. Yes, that was the reason as all men know in this kingdom by the sea that the wind came out and the cloud by night chilling and killing my Annabelle. But our love, it was stronger by far than the love of those who are older than we, of many far wiser than we and neither the laughter in heaven above nor the demons down under the sea can ever dis-ever my soul from the soul of the beautiful Annabelle. For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the beautiful Annabelle and the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes of the beautiful Annabelle and the stars and so all the night tied I lie down by the side of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride in her specter there by the sea in her tomb by the sounding sea. So I don't know, that in me is, wow. I mean, that's beautiful. My life and my bride, my darling, my life and my bride, I mean, it doesn't get much more beautiful than that. That is great art reflecting love. And think about the great romantic movies, I don't know, Casablanca, you know, we all, again, love versus, love versus. And it's interesting that in almost all the movies of love versus, the versus wins, not the love, which is unfortunate. But, you know, to have a have not or so many of those old movies that had this amazing, amazing plots of a man and a woman, heroic men and women, men and women who have values, means something, you know, signify something, falling in love and fighting for that love and pursuing that love and not giving, you know, not surrendering that love. And, you know, that is what love means. I mean, when you find it, you have to fight for it and you have to maintain it because it's so rare. It's so rare in life and it's so important in life. Let's see, here's again, Ayn Rand. Man is an Indian himself, romantic love, the profound, exalted, lifelong passion that unites his mind and body in the sexual act is the living testimony to that principle. Again, think about this idea of the profound, exalted, lifelong passion that unites his mind and body in the sexual act and think about how people view the sexual act in the culture in which we live today. All right, I see a lot of suggestions here, some of which I am not familiar with. So, cool, I'm gonna get some movie recommendations out of this and add to my list of movies. So, thank you to all of you, but keep it coming, poems, songs, music, it could be popular music, it could be opera, movies, paintings, sculptures. I'm gonna show you a few of my favorite, I've got one painting and then a few of my favorite sculptures that have this kind of theme to it. You'll only be able to get a sense from these photos because it's a photo of, other than the painting, but a photo of the three-dimensional sculpture. I'll tell you a little bit about what I know about them, I don't know that much about all of them, one of them I don't know much at all, but it is, I think they're all beautiful, they're all interesting, so I hope you like them and they all kind of focus around this theme of romantic love, of what I think is romantic love. This is a painting, I just took this photo, I mean, I've known this painting for a long time and some of you might know it, but this is a painting I took the photo in Milan recently, so hopefully you can see that. It's by Francisco Hayez, H-A-Y-E-Z, H-A-Y-E-Z. He's got a lot of fantastic painting, he's one of my favorites, I mean, this is a truly magnificent painting, it's beautiful. I mean, look at the sheen on the dress, look at the light bouncing off that dress, look how beautiful and lifelike and yet at the same time stylized that is. Look at the contrast between that dress and even him and the kind of nakedness of the wall behind it, behind her. I mean, it could be Robin Hood, it could be a lot of things, but, and look at, I wonder if I can do this. Let's see, can I, yeah, I think there is a way to do this. All right, I'm gonna enlarge, all right, do you guys can see that? I'm moving it around and we're gonna enlarge it even further. Okay, look at that, look at the actual, look at the kiss, look at his hand on her cheek. Look at that, how gently it is placed, how beautifully that is painted so that the hand just rests on her shoulder and cheek. She is embracing him. I mean, you don't see obviously expressions here, you know, the hair, the sheen again on the dress, all in the stark background that only enhances just how gorgeous and how sensual, how private this moment is. It's almost like, all right, I turned the corner, I saw it, I should look away, but it really is, I think a stunning painting and a beautiful painting. Whoops, I don't know. Okay, we'll have to see if I can get it back to where I wanted to be so we can show all the other stuff. All right, I think that's good. Maybe enlarge it a little bit. All right, there we go. Yeah, so that's a painting, 19th century again, everything I show you is gonna be 19th century. That is the period of romance. It's a period where romance comes out into the open. It's not anymore hidden away. There are novels and poems and paintings and sculpture and there's an explicit recognition of human emotions and of the value of personal emotions because this is a period of liberty and freedom and individualism and individuation. The 19th century is the century of romance. It's a century where, in that sense, the greatest century ever in the sense that it is a full recognition of what it means to be human. It embraces the whole ideas of the enlightenment of reason and everything and then in art, it just flourishes and manifests itself in all of the human potential, in all of what human beings are capable of doing, right? So you get paintings like this. This is Italy, late 19th century. Hayes did a lot of paintings. You can find his work in Primalian Milan. So this is Northern Italy and a number of museums in Milan. I think there's, if I remember right, there's a museum just dedicated to him in one of the museums, right? Let's see, let's move to a sculpture. This is, I think this is a beautiful sculpture. It's, I've never seen it live, but next time, I'm in the area, I will go see it live. It's in Northern Italy. It's in a city in Northern Italy. This is an Italian sculptor of, again, the 19th century. Where else could it be? And it is a, what do you call it, an monument, that this is a sculpture depicting his mourning over her passing away. So she here is kind of rising to heaven, if you will. He is holding on to her, holding on to his love, holding on to his memory of her, holding on to what she is and what she means to him. I mean, I think this expresses at all the passion, the intense, intense passion of both of them. You know, I think it really is a beautiful, his mourning, his bearing, his face, and her trying to hold her with him as she is escaping from his grip, but rising kind of in exaltation. There's no suffering here other than him mourning the fact that he has lost her, but I think this is beautiful. So it's actually in a cemetery in Northern Italy. This is actually, this is Pygmalion. So this is the sculptor who has sculpted the sculpture and she has come alive and they are kissing. There's a famous painting by Jerome of this subject matter. This is a sculpture by Jerome, 19th century French painter primarily, but also sculptor, and the sculptor's just finished carving her and this is the legend of Pygmalion and she comes alive, you know, he falls in love with her as a sculpture and she comes alive and they kiss. This is actually in, oh God. Of course, it would escape my memory. It's in, sorry, it's in the Hearst Castle. It's a Jerome sculpture. It's in the Hearst Castle between Southern Northern California. It's in a castle on the hill. Most of the stuff in the castle is, you know, not that worthwhile. There's a few sculptures that are very good. This is this sculpture, I think the only copy of this made by Jerome, one of the greatest painters of the 19th century, is just stuck in a corner of the Hearst Castle. It's, you know, it's not even really on the path which tourist takes. It's like stuck in a corner. People don't value it. People don't value the art. They don't value this kind of stuff. Yeah, in San Simone in California at the Hearst Castle and what's stunning is that nobody pays attention to this. This is the world in which we live. Sculpture like this is just not, is just not, not there. Not, this is a sculpture by a Norwegian slash Danish sculpture, Sculptor by the name of Syndin, Stefan Synding, S-I-N-D-I-N-G. And you'll see another sculpture of his in a minute. I just find this beautiful. I mean, look at the look that they're having between each other. They embrace the look. I mean, this is sculpture. So we don't, we're not getting the full three-dimensional effect but the way he's holding her, the way she's, but mainly this is about the look between them. And if you look, there's a line between their eyes which parallels the line of her arms and the lines of his arms which really create the scent of a focal attention of our eyes. And, you know, I think it's beautifully romantic and a beautiful sculpture. This is another Synding sculpture. This is a sculpture of the kiss. This is a beautiful, beautiful sculpture. I think it's much more beautiful than Rodin's kiss. And you can see again how he's holding her, shielding her in a sense. She's holding him. They're kissing. It's beautiful. It's anatomically beautiful. You know, he's anatomically a man. She's anatomically, you know, they've got the features of beauty when it comes to the male form and the female form. I know that's politically correct these days but indeed that's what it is. I think this is the best photo of it but just to give you a sense of it's, you know, just a few other angles. That's the setting it's in. This is a close-up, which I really like. I like this close-up a lot. Look at the arm. Look at how well it's sculpted. Look at the muscles there. Look at his eyes. So the sculptor has paid attention to the eyes and the eyes are looking into her eyes. So, you know, this is a real romantic kiss. There's real contact here. There's a real relationship here. What's interesting about the sculpture, you ever want to go see it? It is in Copenhagen. It's at the Kalsberg. You know, Kalsberg is the beer company. So Kalsberg, the guy you founded, the Kalsberg family, the Kalsberg family or the original Kalsberg who started the line, he loved sculpture. He loved 19th century sculpture and he collected what I believe is one of the best sculpture collections in the world, maybe the best. A lot of it was donated to the museum in Copenhagen, which everybody goes, a lot of people go to, the clip, clip, clip, something. And it's an amazing, a truly amazing museum. It's one of my favorite all-time museums. I think this piece is at that museum. And you can see a lot of sing-dings work in that museum in the, and I highly recommend, I mean, Copenhagen is a great city to go to. If you go there, go and see this museum. But this particular sculpture is not in the museum. This particular sculpture is actually in the brewery. So you can go get a tour of the brewery. But I'm not interested in making beer. I'm not interested in beer generally. I have no interest in going to see how beer is made. But what is interesting is you can go and you can look in the offices of the brewery. And the offices of the brewery are like a museum. They have all the artworks that Kalsberg, the great businessman, the guy who founded the brewery, collected, and not only are they in the museum, but they're also in the brewery. So this, when you see the background here, this is what it looks like. This is the brewery. And these are the offices. And you can see the reliefs on top there on the wall in the back. You can see the painting there. You can see the sculptures. There's another sculpture in the back there. But it's like another little museum. And people don't go there because they don't know, but also people don't really care that much about art or don't emphasize it. But we went there and it truly is, I think it truly is a beautiful, beautiful place. And just the sculpture is worth getting to know we have here in the house in Puerto Rico, a small version of this that's quite good, but it's a small version. So it's a sculpture I love. My wife and I love them. My wife found it online. They were selling it. And so we bought a copy and we love this sculpture. I'm gonna show you now a photograph. Let me just, I need to do something. I need to figure out, I had this earlier. I wanna say one, two, one, two. Almost there, almost there. Give me a minute. There it is. So this is one of my favorite sculptures. And it's, I think it's just so expressive. And it's just so beautiful. You know, it's young man, young woman. You know, he is in this completely tranquil, relaxed stage. She is kissing him above the eye. I think she's beautiful. Her hair is draped upon her face in a kind of a, the whole pose is kind of a protective pose, a very romantic, very loving pose. I mean, I think this sculpture, one of my favorites, we actually have two photos of the sculpture in our home, hanging on the wall. It's one of my wife's all time favorites. It's kind of incomplete, right? But I think that partially, because it's rough on the edges and her hair is a little rough, it really focuses the eye towards the meaning of their faces. It really orients you towards their faces and away from their bodies, towards the her expression and his expression and towards what the sculpture's really trying to capture. And the rest, this is where you should focus. This is what's important. This is what the artist really wants you to see. And sometimes that is an important technique in art is to make the background and some of the elements like the clothing or the body fuzzy in order to orient you to focus here. And because this is just a very intimate piece. It's not a full body. It's not a, it's not expressive of an entire body of either one of them. It works here that it's kind of incomplete that it just stands because you're just getting, you're just getting the face. And again, this is 19th century. This is actually German. It's a German sculptor by the name of Gustav Eberlein. Eberlein, now who knew Germans could sculpt? You usually think of French Italians. And Scandinavians. But it turns out Scandinavians and Germans could sculpt. And this is just beautiful. One of my favorite all-time romantic, thematically romantic sculptures ever. So I hope you like it. I hope you enjoy it. You're enjoying looking at it. It's impossible to find. It's in some museum in Germany. I think in Berlin, I don't know. I can't remember which museum exactly. A good friend of mine took this photo and we've had it on the wall since then. I need to ask him where it is exactly so I can go and see it. I think I saw it. I don't think I've ever seen it live. I don't think I've only seen it in this photo. I'd love to see this live. But this isn't traditionalism. Somebody says something about traditionalism. I mean, this is romanticism. This is beauty. This is artists expressing their values, expressing their soul, expressing who they are and what they believe and what they stand for in clay, marble, bronze, in the poetry, in the music that they produce. And I think popular culture today is a rejection of all of that. It's simplistic. It's dull. It's grotesque. It's, again, it's very materialistic because we're just material. You're just a bunch of DNA driving you towards some goal. All right, so Troy come in. Troy, thank you for the 500 Australian dollars that got us over it. Really, really appreciate that. And I see a lot of you have put down different recommendations. So we can take a look at those. I will close this window with this. I'm curious to see what you guys have to say about art and love and romance. More of you should be commenting. Oh, I see. Oh, they're more than I saw. OK. Fender Harpers says, the opening music for anime is often about love. Yeah, I think I've seen in the stuff you've sent me or people have asked me to review that was anime. It's often about love. But from the angle of virtue and valuing the other person, being stronger to keep them safe, being supportive, not love from the angle of lust, I find it very inspiring. Yes. And what I like about some of these sculptures about great art is that the lust is implicit in there. The lust is part of it. The lust is not to be denied. And I think there's one rodent sculpture where the male and the female are embracing and the male is sexually aroused. And I think it works in the sculpture because there is an element of lust there. But it's an element of lust that is associated with real values. It's associated with the whole moment of them embracing and the expressions and everything. It's not just porn. It's not just lust for the sake of lust. It expresses much more than that. Not that lust is a bad thing necessarily, right? So yes. But I think anime, like the South Korean k-dramas, seem to have this, Asia seems to have this romanticism. They didn't have it in the past. It was very repressed societies. Japan was quite open about sex, but repressed in terms of emotions, repressed in terms of love. And I think a lot of the monoculture in Korea and in Japan is trying to break out of that, is trying to get away from that and trying to be more romantic and to express more romanticism. And I think anime, it's there in anime for sure. Jennifer asks, do you know supposedly Romeo and Juliet was based on an old Greek story, Primaeus and Thebes? I wouldn't be surprised at all. I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised. I mean at the end of the day, almost all of Shakespeare's stories, the basic story, it was taken from some other source. Shakespeare's genius is what he does with it. And if you think about the stories, they're not that core story. They're not, they don't sound that interesting, but what he does with it, the language, the drama, the conflict, the character development, but all expressed through kind of the words and the way it is staged. All of that is what makes Shakespeare genius. The stories themselves are often taken from somewhere else. All right, so Will says, the tiger, I need to write these down. Will says the tiger and the snow, the 2005 film by Edward, by Roberto Benini. Wow, I've never heard of that movie, so I'm writing these down as movie recommendations. Thank you, Will. Let's see, I'm looking, yeah. All right, so Richard said, my favorite modern painter is a silver book called Brian Lawson, Kicking Up Her Heels and Tomorrow Today is silver book on the scent of man, Lawson and my favorite, I Love Kipling Poetry. All my favorites, I Love Kipling Poetry and In Memoriam by Tennyson, In Memoriam's truly beautiful, truly, truly beautiful. And yeah, I love Kipling, if I think was Iron Man's favorite poem. Richard says, also great K-dramas that convey a positive vision of love besides Mr. Sunshine are startup 2421 and Iotuan class. Okay, I'm gonna give them another shot. Everybody keeps recommending these. I guess I need to give them another chance. But the show, they show the importance of shared values and love, that's great. All right, Ian says, the question from this morning is I'd love to hear you talk about how love is portrayed in contemporary art. But maybe that's a question for tonight. Yeah, I mean, again, I think in contemporary art, almost everything is either cynical or silly or I don't know. I mean, some of the romantic comedy is okay. I mean, you know, one of the romantic comedies, modern romantic comedy, You've Got Mail, is based on a Chopra on the Corner, which is one of my favorite movies of all time. What's the other romantic quality? When Harry Met Sally, but the whole point of when Harry Met Sally is, it's like the anti-romance, right? It's the friends and then they become lovers, but are they really in love? It's the exact movie that tries to undermine the idea of being in love, of romance, is this great thing to strive for. I think it undermines that. It's kind of a naturalistic, yeah, love is just what happens when you're really friends. And I ran ahead, some real harsh commentary about friendship and love. She didn't consider them as the same thing and the same category. They were different categories. Friendship was different fundamentally than love. And that you weren't your lover's best friend. That wasn't the right way to think about it. It was a different category of relationship. So my general view is that our modern culture and the modern artworks, you know, are grotesque in terms of their presentation of love. Primarily, I'd say music. I mean, think about the embrace, that sculpture that I talked about of Martin Luther King and his wife embracing when he won, I think, the Nobel Peace Prize and the sculpture. I mean, the sculpture I showed you focuses just on the faces. The sculpture they did focuses just on the arms. It's arms with no heads. I mean, there was never any excuse to make a full-fledged sculpture of human beings without a head. The head is what it's all about. I mean, you could have a torso without hands and legs. But, you know, but if you really wanna express something, you need a, you really need a face. You really need a head. And that sculpture of Martin Luther King, I mean, it's just a little terrible. You know, that's, that embrace compared to, to some of the sculptures that I presented here. It's just ridiculous. No emotion, no meaning, no relationship, no connection. Just a form, just a form. You can't even tell it's arms unless you really, if you know that it's supposed to be an embrace. We'll do that later. Marilyn says, I think sexy and benevolent should go together, but today we really see that portrayed. Yes, I mean, sexy, benevolent, charming. Yes, those should go together. And, you know, Marilyn Monroe had that aspect. A lot of Hollywood movie stars from the 1950s had that charming, benevolent, and sexy versus, you know, today sexy women are action figures. They have to blow up stuff and shoot people. I'm thinking Angelina Jolie, maybe. I mean, or even Salma Hayek, who's a pretty tough, tough lady in some of her movies, right? Marilyn says, Lucia de la Mour is the tribal tragedy with gorgeous music. Yes, that is an opera. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful opera. Linda says, Frank Sinatra singing violets for your furs. Yes, amazing. Ooh, this one, I don't know what this is. Gurenje by Emily about reaching a higher potential to keep the loved ones safe, very virtuous. I take that to be anime, and that's why I can't pronounce it, it's an anime, a song from anime by Amali. I think, didn't I review that? Okay, maybe I reviewed that. Marilyn says, Liebestod from Tristan is Old Yes, that's the one that goes a little too long, but is just some of the most beautiful music ever. Just gorgeous, and I love music in terms of intense, romantic emotions. That's what it evokes. Adam says, my favorite love music is Sin-San's Organ Symphony, Who Needs Words? All right. Yeah, I mean, I love the Organ Symphony. I don't associate with love, necessarily. Jay says, a surprising delight of a movie. Okay, I have to write this down. A Little Chaos with Kate Blanchett and Alan Rickman. I don't think I've seen that. I'll have to put that down as well. There's another one of your recommendations. Thank you, Jay. Jennifer says, The Ghost and Mr. Muir movie with Rex Harrison, oh yeah, that's a fun one. Well, what's that, from the 40s or 50s? That is fantastic. Ginger Clark says, Ella Fitzgerald sings Colporta. Unbelievable. I was just looking at some Colporta songs before the show started. What a voice she had. Let's see. Hi, Ioanna. Are you and Mrs. Book familiar with the painter, Odd Nairdroom, in the Norwegian podcast, The Cave of Appellis? There was the Italian artists. It might be worth checking out for objectives. I have seen them. Actually, I've listened to some of the podcasts. I've liked them. I like the paintings. I like some of his paintings. Let me, I'm just licking him up quickly because I've seen the paintings, but I have this hard time recollecting. I mean, they were a little dark. A lot of them are a little dark. That's what I thought. And yeah, there's, I mean, they're stylistically good, but they're quite, they have this quite, I don't know, both the way you use colors and there's just a lot of darkness that I say that. Yeah, anyway, but there's a lot of, not a lot. There are a number of good schools of art today that are actually teaching good art. There's a school in Minneapolis in, I think, Minnesota. There's a school in Florence. There's a number of academies that are trying to resurrect the style of painting from 100 years ago, 120, 30 years ago. And yeah, all right, let's see. Ian says, my favorite romantic author is Maevee Binchie. Wow, I don't know Maevee Binchie. Never heard of him. You guys are full of surprises. All right, thank you, Ian. Adam says, is the Korean series Itaewon Class Love Wins in the Korean series? Thank you, Adam. Apollo Zeus Flashdance the movie. Yeah, it's fun. I don't think it's a great romantic movie, but it's fun. Simon Gassy, would you tell leftist to cite the Gilded agent, oh, that's off topic, so let's get back to that later. All right, Stephen Harper says, my favorite living composer is Alma Deutsch. Yeah, I mean, she's really good. I love her piano concerto, especially which she premiered in 2017, when she was 12. The world premiere of a new opera. Is it Cinderella or something? A new opera in Salzburg will take place on March 4th. She will soon be 18. Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing what direction her career takes and whether she can hold on to that romantic, benevolent spirit that she has. It's so hard in our cynical culture to sustain that kind of benevolence. So I'm really hoping that she does and that she can. All right, thank you to everybody. Okay, we're gonna switch topics because I'm gonna go to general super chat questions, but if you still wanna share favorite poems, love poems, love poems, love songs, love movies, I surprised there are more movies. That's surprising, romantic movies and songs. Where are all the songs? Some of you must have favorite romantic songs, so share them, poems, songs, movies, plays, novels, whether romantic novels. In 1996 she was filled with great novels of romance. What was the British author? The woman who wrote a lot about love in British society. Yeah, Fidelio by Beethoven is a love story. It's also an opera of liberation. I don't think it's Beethoven's strongest in terms of the music, but it's brilliant, but it's just not as good as some of his other things. I've got you under my skin, yeah, a corpore, Sinatra, Stella by Starlight, yeah, all those are good. What's the movie with the lion? You maybe want to be a better man. Yeah, good question. That's a great line, and I can't remember what movie it is. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen, yeah, that's the one I was looking for. Stone Cold, Jane Austen. What is the movie with that line? You make me, oh, I know what movie that is. That's Jack Nicholson. It's Jack Nicholson. It's a very strange movie about romance, but it's wonderful, it's very benevolent, and it's as good as it gets. He is autistic, he's schizophrenic, autistic, he's something, right? I mean, something's wrong with him. Many things are wrong with him, and he falls in love with this waitress, but it's difficult and it's crooky, but his best line, and one of the great, great, great romantic lines ever, is, you know, he's struggling. Everything for him, he has OCD. Everything for him is an effort. Everything for him, he has to control himself. He has to control himself, and he says at some point, and this is the line that gets her, right, and gets her in the end, is you make me want to be a better man, and that's exactly what love should do to you. It should want to make you be better. You want to live up to the best that she expects from you. You want to elevate yourself to be deserving of that love, right? So you want to move. So yes, that is a great line, and I like that movie a lot. It's just a really fun movie, and it's, you make me not want to sleep with a bunch of people, the goon. I don't know, it's quite, isn't quite that elevated a sentiment. Let's see what else we have. I'm just looking through the chats. It's harder for me to track the chats than the super chat. It's right in my face. Anyway, yeah, I can't do much more than that. I think of you by Renaissance, Renaissance, God. You know, Renaissance was one of my favorite music bands when I was a teenager in the late 1970s. I saw Renaissance perform live. At least twice in Israel. I loved Renaissance, Renaissance was, but I can't think of their song. I think of you, I'm gonna have to look it up. I'm sure I know it because I knew at the time, I knew all of Renaissance's songs, but I can't remember that. It was a long, long time ago. All right, let's see, Hoppa Campbell, $100. Thank you, Hoppa. Hoppa is one of the people who really made it possible for us to guest to our target tonight, and thank you all to all the super chatters. Troy, of course, with the $500 Australian dollars, and Hoppa and the lead in terms of getting us there. Hoppa says, how much of people's failure today are due to their own laziness and lack of willingness to get out of their comfort zone? Well, are most people hard workers and government regulations that destroyed the opportunities for any success? How can this be measured objectively? I don't know that it can, but I do think that it's a combination of both. I think that the government and the regulations and the controls dumb us down. I think also wealth has a little bit of that effect in the sense of life is easy and comfortable without having to try, so you can just have a job and just be okay. And why be ambitious? Why try? Why take risks when you can survive? So, but that combines people's laziness. They can get away with being lazy. They can get away with that lack of willingness to get out of the comfort zone. But it's also that getting out of the comfort zone can be penalized, that getting out of the comfort zone is more risky than it should be. But look, fundamentally the problem today is not government and it's not laziness. The fundamental problem today is ideological. It's ideas. It's that people don't know what to do if they want to get up and think out of the comfort zone because then they'll be taught to think. It's that they'll be taught to question their reason into question their mind and not trust rationality and not trust their own thinking. They'll be taught that. So why take risks? Why go out on a limb when I can't trust it anyway? What can I do? I'm impotent. I mean, what modern culture, what the modern educational system, what our modern philosophers have done is they've dumbed people down or they haven't dumbed people down. What they've really done is they've caused people to question their means of survival. They've caused people to question their reason and their thinking. They've caused people to question their ability to live great lives, to take risks, to be successful. That's the problem. It's not government. This is, we're not libertarians. It's not everything's not the government's fault. Everything's not, it's the philosophers. It's the intellectuals. It's the teachers. It's everything to do with the ideas that Kantian, Hegelian, Russoian, Marxist ideas that have undermined reason and this goes to romance. Why is romance viewed cynically? Because free will is out. Reason is out. We're just animals. But where does that idea come from? From intellectuals, from philosophers. And once you lobotomize human beings, once you tell them their reason is impotent, once you tell them they don't have free will, that romance is meaningless. What are you romantic about? Why value? It's all just, it's all just nothing. It's all just material. It's all just flesh. It's all just DNA. Nothing else. It's nothing else. That's why people are the way they are. And that is a cause for their laziness. It's a cause. And then that's why they rely on government. And that's a loop, right? They rely on government, which makes them even more dependent, which makes them want more government, which makes them more dependent, which makes them more government, makes them more dependent. Back and forth and back and forth. All right, let's see, Stephen Hopper says, Alma Deutsch's new opera is the emperor's new waltz. Thank you. I will attend the premiere. Good for you. That's exciting and fun. Will says, full nakedness, all joys are due to thee. As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be. John don't is mistress going to bed. I love that. That's beautiful. Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee. As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be. That's right, sex is revealing of the soul. The soul is naked in sex. So is the body. But I didn't know that. I wasn't familiar with that. That's really pretty. I don't know anything about John Donne, Donne. All right, copy, paste it, look him up. All right, some other questions, off-topic questions. Off-topic, any plans to read Malice's new book? It's called The White Pill and it's about atrocities of the Soviet Union. First chapter is about Rand and her Huak testimony, interesting Rand trivia too. Probably not. Probably no plans to read the book. Partially because I know the atrocities of the Soviet Union. I might try to pick up a copy somewhere or just to read that first chapter and curious what he has to say, but it's not for me, I don't think. Justin says, is it possible that those of us who fight for the dignity of mankind will lose our fight? It is not possible that we must lose our fight, the thesis of Malice's book. Well, that's good, that's a good thesis. It's a very good thesis. I hope, to that extent, I hope it does really well. Liam says, why do people feel such a strong desire to attack reason? Well, because they've been taught that it's impotent and pretentious and meaningless and doesn't teach you real reality. This is from Kant to today's post-modernism, to CRT, to the subjectivist movement, to everything, to the determinists. From the Marxist determinists to the evolutionary biologists determinists. Reason is meaningless, so why do you pretend? Why do you make such a big deal of it? And of course, the underlying reason for many people to attack reason is to defend their faith. Is to defend their chosen religion, whether it's Christianity or environmentalism or whatever, it happens to be at any given point in time. Faith is the opposite of reason. To establish faith, you have to attack reason, you have to undermine reason. This was the mission of Kant and this is what he achieved. Liam says, does objectivism subscribe to virtue ethics? I mean, there's a sense in which objectivism is a virtue ethic. We don't subscribe to virtue ethics because that's somebody else's ethics, but there's a sense in which objectivism is one virtue ethic, because it's an ethic that emphasizes human virtues, but we're very different. So I don't think we're part of that movement, part of that tradition, part of that thinking. It's the closest to objectivism today because it emphasizes virtues as a means for self-betterment of living a better life as Aristotle did, but objectivism has a much more complete system of ethics. And has a metaethics, which I don't think I'm not sure virtue ethics has, that is the art from an is, the whole idea of where the arts come from. I'm not sure virtue ethics really has an answer to that. Reggie Woodcock is in cave in the light. The author said, Plato was the main influence for the Renaissance, do you agree? No, I don't. I think he was the main influence on thinkers during the Renaissance, primarily philosophers. The Neoplatidists were big and the Humanists were influenced by Plato. And I think there's a mistake that the thinkers of the time and I think that many people today make of associating the Aristotle's influence with the rigidity of the Catholic Church, with the scholastics, with the scholastics, that Aristotle equals the scholastics. But Aristotle had more subtle ways in which he impacted, you know, to think about science and the rise of science during the Renaissance and the importance of science during the Renaissance, the growing importance of science in the Renaissance and onwards. And unfortunately one of the great tragedies of history, I think, is that Aristotle got his philosophy and his name got too related to the scholastics and therefore dismissed by the non-Catholics, dismissed by people who dismissed the scholastics dogmatism. It also was perceived like to be an Aristotelian, you had to agree with Aristotle's everything he said, but also his science. And if you empirically discovered something new about science that contradicted Aristotle, then you were not Aristotelian. But that's upside down. You're using Aristotle's method. What's most important about Aristotle, the scientist, is method, not conclusions. And in methods, the Renaissance is very Aristotelian and moving towards more great influence of Aristotle as there's greater influence of science. And the whole idea of reason and thinking and individualism are all influences of Aristotle, even though the craze at the time was to read Plato, because again, Aristotle was associated with those scholastics over there. Marilyn, do you think people also attack reason because it gets them off the hook for the inability to think? Yeah, psychologically, I'm sure some weak people do that. I don't know how aware they are of it. It's hard to believe that somebody like that is aware of it, but it could be the fence mechanism. Simon says, any plans of having a show with Harry Binswine? Yeah, I mean, we're in contact. My assistant is trying to schedule shows into the future, so I think we've got shows through the end of March being scheduled and partially depends on whether the person gets back to us and their schedule and my schedule, all of these things. But the general idea is every week when I'm home, that is when I'm in Puerto Rico and when I've got this equipment, I will interview somebody. And, you know, tomorrow, no, on Thursday, it will be Alex, Alex Epstein. And then I go to Europe for two weeks and then when I come back, I think the first Thursday I'll be interviewing Robert Handyshop, my business partner. We'll be talking about a project that he has initiated, we're doing together, about something called Ingenuism, so we'll talk about that a little bit. And then I've got other people, including Harry on a list for the rest of the year. So it will all happen, all happen over the rest of the year. But there are a lot of people I want to interview. Harry's on the list. It's not being prioritized based on who I want to interview more urgently. It's being prioritized based on who is available and are they getting back to me in time and is their calendar open in the days that I want to interview? All right, that was the final super chat. Thank you, everybody. I hope you enjoyed, oops, one last one. John Wayne just said, I recently finished Atlas Shrugged. Why does Sheryl Brooks commit suicide? Is there no alpha? I mean, it's really, really important that she commits suicide. Again, it's a novel, remember. She doesn't exist in real life. She commits suicide because she is the innocent victim of James Taggart, of that philosophy, of that ideology. She is not, she's not enough of an independent thinker. She's not enough of an original thinker to be able to withstand the philosophy around her. She is that basically good, simple human being. Then in a sense, trust the media, trust the culture, goes along with the ideas of the culture and gets slapped and slapped and slapped and slapped by it. And she is honest enough to know that she's out of her league in a sense that she can't understand what the hell is going on. And everything she has thought exists, doesn't exist. And it's, life is not worth living. I mean, she's enough of a romantic. She's enough of an idealist to know that life's not worth living if that's the necessary state of the world. And so it's very important for a philosophical ideological perspective for her to be, for you to see that she can redeem herself. This is why I'm gonna emphasize is the evil of the intellectuals and the role of the intellectuals. How did I miss that question? Oh, there it is, okay. I don't know how I missed that question. Sorry, Simon. So, yeah, John, I hope that answers your question. In the real world, one would hope you could sit her down and you remember that she tries to talk to Dagny and Dagny tries to straighten her out, but it's too late. Too much of a world view is tied up in the world, in the culture, she sees it and she can't imagine a different world and she can't grasp fully what Dagny's telling her and the world is just gone. And the point is that, you know, Dagny will survive no matter what happens. Cheryl will not survive. And that's a big part of this. It's why Eddie Willis in the end, you know, cannot rescue himself. Simon asked, what do you tell leftists who cite the Gilded Age as a failure for capitalism? Well, it depends what it is they're citing. What is it about the Gilded Age that's bad? I mean, the Gilded Age was a wonderful period in which people became rich, people were incredibly successful, industry was built and created, the quality and standard of living of Americans and people around the world in industrializing countries rose. So it's a fantastic period of time, you know, so inequality rises, but inequality rises as, inequality rises as people get wealthier and better off. So it's a good period, not a bad period. All right, I have to run. Thanks, everybody. I'll see you all tomorrow for a news show. And of course, on Thursday for both the news show and Alex have a...