 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Brookshow. All right everybody, welcome to Iran Brookshow on this Monday, August 7th. I'm going to do another news roundup. I hope everybody's looking forward to a fantastic weekend that you had, a great weekend. So a bunch of stories from all over the world, really, that we're going to cover today. No show tonight. Tomorrow will do, tomorrow at 8 p.m. we'll have a show on Oppenheimer and The Bomb. That'll be the title of the show. I saw the Oppenheimer movie yesterday, so I'll give you a review of the movie. And my view of Oppenheimer more broadly, and of course The Bomb, at least based on what I know. We'll also have, after the rest of this week, we should be on schedule this week. So Tuesday, Thursday, 8 p.m. shows, and during the morning we will have news roundup. I don't think we have an interview guest for Thursday. Maybe we might be still working on finding somebody or getting somebody to come, but as of now we don't have a guest for Thursday. All right, let's jump in with our various stories. I'll start with Yellow. Yellow is a freight company. Yellow is the name that it adopted after it received a $700 million loan from the U.S. government during the summer of 2020 when the Trump administration decided to bail them out. They were called White or Sea Worldwide before that. In addition to $700 million loan was part of that agreement. The U.S. government also took a 30% stake. It became a 30% owner in Yellow. The $700 million bailout was part of a $2.2 trillion. $2.2 trillion, because I think people have forgotten. $2.2 trillion pandemic relief legislation that Congress passed that year under Trump. Trump signed it and it went out. So if you want to root the roots of inflation, I mean there are many, but here's certainly one of them. Let's see. So yes, so Yellow has filed bankruptcy. It is shutting its doors. It is basically laying off 30,000 employees. It is liquidating. It is not restructuring. It is liquidating. It still is committed to paying off the government loan of $700 million, but it does have I think well over $2 billion of liabilities that it is responsible for. This is probably part of the consequence of the high interest rates. As I said, Yellow is probably one of those zombie companies that is failing as a consequence of the rising interest rates. This is an example of among many of why the government shouldn't bail companies out. I mean here's what we should be doing. We should have a law in this country. Somebody, maybe one of the presidential candidates, can you imagine who might want to propose a law that basically said, I mean it should be in the Constitution, but okay, let's just make it a law. And the law should say the government shall not loan any private business money. And the government should not take an equity stake, i.e. an ownership stake in any government, in any private entity. I think that would cover it. Can't loan money, can't take an equity position, can't own any private companies. The government should not own any private businesses, should not lend money to any private businesses. Not because it's going to lose money, they might get the 700 million back, but just because of the provision and distortion, this creates. Imagine if in 2020 Yellow had gone bankrupt, its assets would have been reallocated. Other trucking companies would have picked up their business. Other trucking companies would be healthier today as a consequence. The people who are losing their jobs now would have been hired three years ago by a better company, healthier company. And the trucking industry today would be in a healthier, better position, and everybody would be better off. And of course, taxpayers would not have taken the risk of giving a loan to a company that is now officially bankrupt. At the time when the loan was given by the Trump administration, there were a lot of suspicions about connections between people within the Trump administration and people affiliated with Yellow, including the fact that the trucking company had support from Apollo Global Management, a big PE fund with close ties to the Trump administration. Also, there was a report that career officials at the Defense Department, so the excuse for this was that they were big suppliers of military bases and that would disrupt the supply chain to military bases during COVID. But officials in the Defense Department denied that and objected to the bailout of Yellow. So why Yellow? Why not? A lot of other companies that went bankrupt. What about all the restaurants small restaurants that went under? Another government did try to bail those out, too, with a variety of different programs. But anyway, the unions, this is a company run by where their teamsters were very strong. You'd expect, as a consequence, them to put pressure on the Democrats. You'd expect Apollo and others to put pressure on the Trump administration. You can see a perfect storm, them getting bailed out. By the way, one of the reasons they're going bankrupt is because they could not kind of deal with the union and the union, you know, the company basically had to shut down fire. Everybody lay off everybody and shut down completely as a consequence. And I'm not too worried about the drivers. My expectation is, I mean, from everything I've read, there's a shortage of drivers in the trucking business. So most of them will find jobs with the competition and I'm sure most of the assets will be purchased by the competitor, the competition. So I'm sure the trucking industry as a whole will survive this quite well. Alright, so that is yellow. Again, I'm proposing simple legislation. The government shall make no loans to private businesses. The government shall never take an equity position in a private business. That's a beginning. Now you can add to that, the government should provide no subsidies ever to a private business. And that would be a nice trifecta. That would be a law that would change, change dramatically kind of the whole issue of cronyism. And then you'd have to deal with the whole regulatory side and the tax side, which again I think could be easily done by lowering corporate taxes to zero and by slowly phasing out regulatory agencies. But certainly that trifecta of a law with those three provisions would be a big step in the right direction in terms of getting the government out of business of business. Alright, talking about private equity. Private equity is in a strange situation right now. I'm typical of it for the last 15 years and that is that they're having difficulty raising funds. We talked about this when I talked about the private equity when I did a show on private equity. So I wanted to give you an update on this. Basically the update is that with higher interest rates, private equity is going to have it more difficult to make deals because it's going to find it more difficult to use leverage, to finance this deal, to leverage the loans are more expensive. And as a consequence, a lot of investors, pension plans insurance companies and others are hesitant to provide financing for private equity and they are struggling to raise money. And as a consequence, they are giving their investors all kinds of breaks on fees and all kinds of other sweeteners to try to get them to invest. So yeah, this is private equity is, maybe we will see in this cycle of this, in this point in the economic cycle is probably being hindered. If interest rates start coming down maybe next year, private equity will rebound again. And remember private equity is massive today, trillions and trillions of dollars, so it's massive. So a little bit of shrinkage in terms of, a little bit of shrinking in terms of the amount of funding is not going to change the fact that private equity is a massive economic force out there in the world of business and that it's going to continue to be a massive force for a long, long time. All right, again, with relating to American business, we've talked a lot about worker shortages and I focused primarily I think in the past about two types of workers that seem to be in short supply. Certainly low skilled workers in short supply, there's a huge need for people like construct, maybe it's not low skilled, certain skill, like construction workers, massive shortage of construction workers. One of the reasons we don't build enough, one of the reasons we won't build enough in any United States is because we don't have enough people to do the building, to actually execute on the building. So, massive shortages there. And then on the other side, we have a massive shortage in STEM, you know, in particular we've discussed in the show, the shortages that we have in semiconductors, in chip manufacturing and the different types of skills needed for that industry where we have shortages in it. I want to talk now about a different shortage, a massive shortage. Right now, the oil patch is doing phenomenally well. Oil and gas businesses are incredibly profitable. They are actually drilling, there's huge amounts of opportunity as Saudi Arabia and Russia restrict the amount of oil that they are selling. There is huge opportunity in the United States for more drilling and more production. But there is a challenge. That is that the industry is facing a massive talent drought. Primarily petroleum engineers, petroleum engineering programs have become smaller and smaller and smaller. Even though salaries are going through the roof, if you want to make a lot of money right now, petroleum engineering is where you should be investing. There's a massive demand and a huge shortage in supply, supply of qualified engineers to do the work. This is true in the United States. It's also true for American and European oil companies all over the world. Remember, American and European companies are drilling for oil and gas in the Middle East, in Asia, and they can't find enough engineers. They just don't have them. And it could be that we start seeing a reduction in crude oil, not because of peak oil, lack of supply, lack of actual oil, but because we don't have enough engineers to go out there and do the surveying and do the actual drilling and the piping and everything else that has to be done for the oil and gas business to flourish. Now, why do you think we don't have enough petroleum engineers in spite of these massive salaries in order to fulfill the needs of the industry? Well, I mean, it's kind of obvious, right? This is a profession that has been vilified. It's a profession that has been, you know, what is there more evil than, you know, in terms of vilification, this is one of the biggest professions. It's not about regulation. It's about the fact that kids don't want to go into an industry that they have been taught to believe is responsible for the end of the world. Who wants to go and work for an industry that has been blamed for climate change and climate change is going to kill us all. So the whole hysteria, the panic, the nuttiness around, I mean, the true nuttiness around climate change catastrophizing has caused a massive drop over the last 10 years in the number of petroleum engineering students, even in the state of Texas. So the number of undergraduate pursuing petroleum engineering has dropped 75% since 2014 at a university like Texas Tech, right? And even though a petroleum engineer today earns 40% more, hey young guys, you should, guys and girls, you should listen to this, 40% more than a computer, than somebody with a computer science degree. So, here it is, if you want to make a lot of money, this is where you want to be investing right now. University of Texas has seen 42% decline since the early teens. Texas A&M, 63.3% decline. Texas Tech University, 88.1%. Since the peak, the peak was in 2016, something like that. Colorado School of Mines, a big producer of petroleum engineers, 87.7% decline. Louisiana State University, 89%. University of Oklahoma, 90%. Notice all of these universities, almost all of them except for Colorado and the South, it doesn't matter, this absolute hysteria and catastrophizing has had an impact on young people. Young people are not going to go study a profession that they have been taught to believe is going to end the world. And of course, because they're not going to go into this profession, we won't see the end of the world, but we will see a significant decline in the, you know, standard of living. Because we need oil. We need oil and gas to sustain civilization and the fact that we do not have it because we won't have enough engineers is going to create, I think, more problems than climate change ever will. And this is not even about immigrants. This is probably, this is a worldwide phenomena. Europe is experiencing the same thing. Europeans are not studying petroleum engineering. I don't know what the situation in Asia, my guess is Asians never had a lot of people studying it because we don't know that a lot of Asian oil and gas companies. So, yep, I mean, real problem. But again and again and again, what you're seeing is distortions in the market for labor caused by lack of immigration caused by stupid, a variety of different bad policies, bad education policies. And because of the culture, because of kind of what we teach our kids, what we tell our kids, what we encourage our kids to do, and the kind of stories that we tell our kids. So, as a consequence, you see significant distortions in the economy out there. And that's true of everything from nuclear energy all the way to oil and gas. I'm sure there were a lot. I'm sure that the industry that is flush with engineers is windmills and solar panels. There are probably too many, too many, right? But, yep, it won't happen. Breaking point. What is breaking point? Ali says that he suggested me as a guest to breaking point, but they won't have me. What is breaking point? All right, what's the next one? Oh, Israel. So, we've talked a lot about judicial reform in Israel and the problems and what is going on there. Well, Netanyahu this weekend basically announced that he is going to pass one more piece of the judicial reform and then basically back off. Basically back off from it and leave it and leave it alone. So, you know, whether this will satisfy the demonstrators, whether this will calm things down and allow things to settle. I don't know, probably not. But Netanyahu was never passionate and enthusiastic about the judicial reform. It wasn't something he initiated. It was his partners on the far religious right that wanted this. And I think he is trying to come up with a compromise that allows him to stay in power, which is the only thing he really, really, really cares about. And, you know, satisfies some of the opposition so that they don't completely shut down the Israeli economy. So what he's doing now is they're going to overhaul the way in which judges are going to be selected. Exactly how they do that is hard to tell. The reality is that the initial proposal I thought was terrible. The initial proposal basically gave the government itself almost unilateral ability to appoint without very much, very much, you know, vetting of basically Supreme Court justices. So the government, so that basically you get the executive branch appointing them. Now, again in Israel there's very little difference between the executive branch and the legislative branch. Well, what Israel needs in order to appoint judges is for the government to propose judges for them to go in front of the legislature to be questioned by the legislature. Just they are like in the United States to do hearings, to do background checks, to do all that. And then for the legislature to vote and then maybe like in the Senate you need or use the need. I think you still need for the Supreme Court, you know, you go for a supermajority or something like that so that you get justices that are representative of Israeli politics. Now, the thing about Israel is that what representative really mean is center Israeli politics is basically centered around the center. There's no crazy left wing except in the judiciary, but there's no crazy left wing in the parliament. There are a few, right? There's Arabs and merits which I don't think even made it into the Knesset parliament this year. But the left in Israel is center left and the right in Israel is center right mostly. That's a liquid. And then you've got the crazies on the right. So Israel is very much tilted rightwards with a big share of crazies on the right and what a need. And so if you had a supermajority, I think you could get very reasonable good judges appointed to Supreme Court that gave it balance. And hopefully that's a direction that will go for in Israel in order to fix the judiciary, the court appointment system, which clearly is broken. And the 10 hours right to want to fix it, but fix it in a way that doesn't tilt it in the other direction where the government has too much power. Executive branch has too much power. Okay, we don't have a lot of time, but the Niger situation is just getting worse. There was an ultimatum to have returned the legitimate government of Niger to power. And that ultimatum was given by Nigeria and 11 other Western African countries. Otherwise they threatened to invade Niger. So that's, we haven't heard anything this morning about whether that will happen. And if it does happen, what is the time frame for that? That could involve a significant war as two other countries in Africa have threatened to join the Niger side. So that is certainly, I thought I had a map at some point I had a map. Oh, there's the map. Let me see if I can pull this off for you and show you a map because maps are great, but I think that's it. Open. All right. Let me just center that. So here you can see the map. You can see Niger in the center there in red. You can see the light red. That is a swath of the southern Sahara desert. It's got dots on it, which is where al-Qaeda and ISIS are very active. The country to the left of Niger is Mali. Mali is another country in which the Islamists are very active. It too had a coup not that long ago. And it is now run by generals who are affiliated with Russia and the Wagner group and Pagosny. Exactly the same thing can be said with regard to Burkina Faso just underneath Mali there with a border with Niger. It too has had a coup and is run by the military. And it too is affiliated now with the Wagner group, Russia and Pagosny. Niger, the coup leaders are now in a sense wearing allegiance to the Russians and have invited the Wagner group to help them out to fight off the Nigerians to fight off anybody else. And in addition, it is, you know, they are, they now have to decide what to do with the U.S. Now, I just want to bring this up. We could talk quite a bit about Niger, but I'm going to make this short. The United States has invested, invested, spent $500 million arming and equipping the Niger military. Primarily in training the special forces so that they can fight Islamic Jihad and, sorry, ISIS and al-Qaeda in Africa, you know, in the states. The United States also has two state-of-the-art drone bases in Niger with U.S. troops there running these drone bases. I think we have, I can't tell you how many troops we have, but we have significant presence in Niger of U.S. personnel. Now a number of things can happen here. The U.S. can get involved in a war here and place those troops in real danger. The U.S. can back out and leave the Nigerians, the Wagner group, the Russians with two bases which are state-of-the-art, you know, drone bases. But give up, in a sense, their prime bases in the southern Sahara from which to go after ISIS and al-Qaeda. All the United States could blow up those bases, shred them, and retreat all its troops. $500 million, poof, gone up in the air. I mean, people are concerned about the money we're spending in Ukraine. We're spending money all over the world on these things. This is what happens when you don't have a foreign policy, when you won't stand by anything. This is a consequence of decades and decades and decades, certainly since 9-11, of not identifying their enemy, not going after them thoroughly, allowing this to continue, really uninterrupted. Continuing with, again, with funding and investment and sending our troops into a harm's way, you know, again, people are complaining about Ukraine. We have actually troops on the ground here. For what? The variety of different ways in which we could take care of ISIS and al-Qaeda without literally having troops on the ground in Africa and without investing hundreds of millions of dollars. This is just one country, Niger, where we put $500 million. Now, it is, Niger is strategic. So if we have a strategy in Africa, I doubt we do. But if we had one, then wouldn't we want to keep Niger? And if we do want to keep Niger, if we want to keep our presence in Niger, would we help the existing regime even by just encouraging their special forces, who we trained to overthrow the coup? But we won't even do that. You know, as far as I know, our stupid state department has said nothing. By the way, we don't have an ambassador in Nigeria. We don't have an ambassador in Nigeria. We don't have an ambassador to the African Union because Rand Paul is holding up all ambassadors to Africa, all diplomatic appointment because I think, because of Ukraine or something like that. So, oh no, because of COVID-19. He's holding up all these appointments until he gets information about the lab leak in Ukraine. So American troops are in danger there. American facilities in danger there. American, quote, investment is in danger there. But nobody really knows what they're doing and nobody has a plan. And the whole thing is a complete and utter disaster and mess. And basically what we're doing is we handed this part of Africa to the Russians. Now, it might not be a bad idea to hand it to the Russians to the extent that the Russians are going to take care of ISIS like they did in Syria. Ultimately, we handed over American bases in Syria to the Russians and to the Wagner group. But they were pretty good about annihilating ISIS in Syria. It wasn't the Trump administration that beat back ISIS in Syria. It was mostly the Russians. And maybe we can just outsource ISIS and al-Qaeda to the Russians in Africa and save some money and get our forces back home. No strategy is my point. Okay, finally, some good news. You remember a couple of months ago, or maybe it was longer, I can't tell time wise, but there was a report. Actually, it was in December. So more than a couple of months ago, like eight months ago. In December, there was a report out of the Lawrence Livermore Lab in California that scientists have achieved fusion energy. That is, that they had achieved a... I mean, people have... In the past, they'd achieved diffusion in a sense that achieved a process by which energy was extracted. But what was unique about the December test is that their energy that came out was greater than the energy put in, which is what you need, right? You don't want to lose energy. You want to produce energy. And there was some skepticism about whether this had really been achieved, about whether this was replicable. Well, it was replicated. So a group of scientists repeated the landmark energy feat, nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than put into it was achieved again. I think it was last week or the week before that, but in the last few weeks, it was reported this morning. This is great news. And of course, a potential still far off potential because of the cost and the complexity and everything else. But at least now it has been proven that it can't be done. I know there's a lot of venture capital money going into this. There's a lot of brain power, a lot of engineers that are not going to petroleum or going into things like this, trying to figure out how to make this profitable, how to make this economic. But of course, if they can, this is like an energy revolution. This is breakthrough. Maybe they can apply. Maybe they can get help from AI to make this an economical economic proposition. All right, let's jump into the super chat. You guys did well while I was talking there, but we are still $90 short. So no more five, 10, $2 questions. I appreciate all those, but from now on only $20 questions because we don't have a lot of time, need to get a goal, and I've got a lot of questions ready. All right, Tessa, thank you. Really, really appreciate the support. Thank you, Tessa. Andy says, could you comment on Richard Hanane's apology? Curious what you think. Unfortunately, further proof it's far easier to be anti-left and pro-individual. Yes, I think it's a very interesting apology. I read it yesterday. I will talk. It doesn't really deal with my concerns, particularly the fact that even in the apology, he links to this story he wrote, which features this guy, who is a well-known anti-Semite. So even though he's distancing himself from way to premises and explicitly racist views, Hanane is still sympathetic. I don't know, sanctioning, affiliated with in some way, open to, I don't know. I don't know how to categorize and neither does he. And that's the point as he really thought through the implications. Anyway, I've got a lot to say about it. I'm going to say about it tomorrow. So tomorrow, before the Oppenheimer section about the movie and about the atomic bomb, I will cover the Richard Hanane apology. So you're going to have to wait until tomorrow. But that's just an indication. It's really the question fundamentally is, does he really understand the nature of racism, the evil that it is, and by doing misogyny and the way he talked to women, the damage that does, the damage that does to individuals, to people. And does he really get it, the evil that racism has perpetrated on the world forever, maybe? Does he really understand that to what extent? I appreciate that his views are what they are today. But does he understand how evil what he used to believe is? And he's completely eradicated it. Again, why would he link to this UN historical? Why doesn't he just take it off and say, yes, that's still a remnant of my past. I need to get beyond it. I don't understand it. I'm sure he's got an explanation. I'm not sure it's a very good one. Ali says, hi, what do you think about the South African president candidate who was shouting, kill the boars, kill the farmers? Why the West doesn't care about South African farmers? So this is kill the boars. The boars are the Afrikaners. These are the whites in South Africa that have their heritage is originally from the Netherlands. So they speak their own language, Afrikaners, which is similar to Dutch. And there's another contingent of whites in South Africa that tend to come from England. So they are part of the remnants of the British Empire who still live in South Africa, which you tend to have, not as a rule, but tend to have. The boars tend to be the farmers and tend to be the less educated whites. And the English tend to be the more educated and rural and, sorry, city dwelling white population. That's split, but the boars are the larger white population. I mean, I think it's horrific. Obviously, what this presidential candidate said, I think that the West doesn't say anything about it and doesn't acknowledge it, because it doesn't know how to deal with a situation where blacks are racist towards whites, particularly in a country that saw such horrific, ugly racism of whites against blacks for decades and decades and decades and finally managed to reverse it and did so peacefully, stunningly peacefully, to see the kind of naked black hatred and racism towards the white population. I don't think most Western media, most of the Western intelligentsia knows what to do with it. It doesn't fit. All they can say, well, yes, you can kind of understand them because of the historical context, which is evil to accept that. I mean, the best solution for South Africa has always been capitalism. The best solution for South Africa has always been equal rights before the law and a move towards capitalism. Unfortunately, Mandela and those who followed him were socialists, were leftists and believed in as so many people do, particularly in the Third World, believed in, you know, that socialism was the way to bring blacks out of poverty and to get the South African economy going and to redistribute wealth in the name of justice, but also in the name of economics. But not only that, unfortunately, the people who've come after Mandela have been unbelievably corrupt. The leaders of South Africa have been unbelievably corrupt and have stolen and have betrayed their own, the people who voted for them. So, you know, I have a long history of South Africa. I know the country reasonably well. My parents were both born in South Africa. I still have family members in South Africa. My uncle sat in jail in South Africa for anti-apartheid activism in the late 1960s. So, you know, my family is well connected and, you know, the evils of apartheid were truly evil. But the solution to that evil is more freedom. The solution to slavery is freedom. The solution to Jim Crow laws is freedom. It's not reverse racism. Reverse racism, and particularly calls for murder, are disgusting and horrible. One of the reasons, I think, that there's also hesitancy about commenting on this, is that there was, was it a few years ago, the story about white Southern African farmers being killed and murdered. Blacks were roaming the countryside and killing white farmers. And that turned out to be a very, very, very inaccurate story. That turned out to be something that white supremacists and racists of very kinds in the United States were using as, what's the name? South Africa and Southern went to South Africa and told the story. But when you looked at the stats, when you looked at the data, the story was not a real story, right? Now, you know, Zimbabwe, again, I had family in Zimbabwe, so I know the Zimbabwe story. In Zimbabwe, they basically kicked out the whites and took all their property. And most of the whites, Zimbabwe and whites had to leave Zimbabwe in one way or another and took their wealth with them and left. Of course, we know what happened as a consequence, but not as a consequence just of the whites leaving, but the consequence of the fact that the Zimbabwe government has been since independence, basically a leftist, Marxist klepto-government that has stolen from its own citizens, but has engaged in policies that had the highest inflation rates in all of human history. I think I've got that $100 trillion note that I think, I've got a few of them. I think Jonathan Honing gave me some of them. And it's happening again in Zimbabwe right now. There's actually an election in Zimbabwe soon to try to replace this unbelievably corrupt and horrific government. So there was starvation. Zimbabwe, one of the most fertile in the bread basket of Africa to a large extent, became, you know, there was starvation just like Venezuela in Latin America. Socialism never works. It doesn't work in South Africa. It doesn't work in Zimbabwe. And socialism mixed with racism doesn't work on steroids exponentially, right? All right, Andrew, what are your thoughts on two-tier justice system narrative of the right? I think it's bogus. I think there's, look, I think that there are real problems about persecuting people in power. And I think that Trump has attracted a particular amount of focus in terms of persecution that others, Republican and Democrats have not. I think the reason is, he asked for it. The reason is he's a big mouth, louse, that keeps egging people on, that keeps, you know, coming up with stupid reasons that hides documents when the FBI is looking for them. He's asking for it. He basically walked right into it. I don't know that Hillary Clinton did anything that could have been prosecuted. There was prosecuted a bill before the 2016 election. I mean, I think she's crooked. But I think, I think what's his name is, her husband is as well. But was there any proof of that? Was there any real evidence of that? Well, there was evidence, but people could really build a case around it. I doubt it. But I think that's true. I mean, do you think the Bushes are not corrupt? Do you think that any of these other families in the past, in politics, have not been corrupt? I think many of them have been. And I don't think there's much emphasis. Do you think the Republican senators are not corrupt and so on? So I don't think it's a Republican-Democratic thing. I think it's a Trump thing. Trump is basically begged to be prosecuted. And look, having chance of locker up as part of your campaign stuff, and then of course not initiating any kind of prosecutable proceedings, because there was no case there, I think. If he had a case, he would have locked her up. It's not going to win you any friends and it's not going to protect you from this kind of thing. Does Trump deserve what he's getting? Absolutely. Do other people deserve stuff like this? Sure. But the fact that Trump deserves it, the fact that Trump is most likely guilty of every single one of the charges brought against him, or at least a big three, I think is pretty clear. So, yeah, I mean, the idea that Hillary Clinton had a function control over justice is just BS. I mean, it's just BS. The reality is that a bar was not a Clinton-controlled person. He could have initiated a special counsel to look into Hillary Clinton. He could have done a lot of things while he was Justice Attorney General. Trump could have done a lot of things. They didn't do it because clearly they didn't have a case. They didn't have a case. And Trump has made it easy. Trump has made it super easy. Okay. Jack says this is part one of Atlas Shrugged movie based solely on part one of Atlas Shrugged book. It is, I finished part one of the book and want no spoiler, but movie is interesting. Don't watch the movie. Don't watch the movie. I mean, generally, if you never watch the movie, you're in great shape. The movie is just, you know, I think terrible. I think it's a horrible aesthetic experience. It looks like it's an amateur production. And philosophically, it adds nothing. I mean, finish the book, be inspired by books, spend a few years, you know, with the book as the only thing to remind you about Atlas Shrugged. And then in 10 years, if you want to watch the movie out of curiosity, fine. But don't spoil the book by watching the movie now. Okay. Michael says, in any rational nihilist culture, how open and friendly with people should one really be? I would be. I think most people are not in most of their life irrational and I don't think they're nihilist. If it was a truly completely rational nihilistic culture right now, the world would be collapsing and it's not. Landon says, yellow is a cheap carrier which performed poor delivery service in an era of just in time shipping, which failed to integrate its acquisitions two decades ago. Yes. And the government had to bail it out. I mean, the fact that they went bankrupt before COVID. And while during COVID, to such an extent, they probably went bankrupt before COVID. But it only manifested itself during COVID and that the government would step in and bail them out is such a travesty. I like numbers. By the way, we're $85 short of our goal. It would be great if we started off the week by making our goal. That's always a good thing. I like numbers as a following from your O A O C answer. I don't remember that. Is it okay for objectives to interview with outside objectives groups? If the interviewer gets elected to Congress. I don't know. I mean, let's, let's, let's get somebody. I mean, God, these, these ridiculous hypothetical questions. I mean, it is really ridiculous. Let somebody affiliated with the objectives outside groups, get elected to Congress and then we'll talk about it. Okay. It's a hypothetical devoid of context. How did they get elected to Congress? I don't know what circumstances that get elected to Congress. They still consider themselves objectivists. I mean, I have, I have relationship with a lot of people who have relationship with outside objectives with outside objectives groups. Lots of them. I've even met Jennifer Grossman had coffee with them. I mean, I mean, so context context is everything. Who is this person? What are they doing? Why are they involved? Have they been exposed to other side? I mean, there's a million questions you have to ask. I noticed Michael says, I noticed a lot of successful business people are not intellectual. They think if you, if you're devoting energy to anything other than making money, you're wasting your time. Yes, I think that's absolutely right. It's one of the reasons that business people are very weak in defending themselves and not being able to defend themselves vis-a-vis the attacks that they constantly get. So, yep, it's, it's one of the challenges we all face. By the way, if you want to really understand this phenomenon and see what an alternative intellectual defensive businessmen and the kind of approach businessmen should take, read for the new intellectual. For the new intellectual is about the brotherhood that should exist between the intellectuals and the businessmen and how businessmen should adopt an intellectual stance in their defense of themselves. And of course, you can also listen to Ayn Rand's lecture, you know, the, what is it, the persecuted minority, the persecuted minority, the businessman, which was our last lecture in New Orleans and it's available on YouTube. Landon says, the union issues just pushed their customers to fire them. They lost 80% of their customers a year today. We fired them last month, good riddance. Thanks, Landon, for giving us more color on, on yellow and the fact that they were a lousy company. It usually is the case that a lousy company is the ones that, that, you know, get into this kind of trouble. The auto companies, when they went bust, they didn't go bust really because of the unions of the unions kind of tipped them over. They went bust because they were lousy companies. They did not produce good cars. They did not run themselves well. They were not profitable. They did not do what was necessary in order to achieve their goal. Thank you, Landon. By the way, we have 80 people watching live. You can support the show value for value, a couple of bucks from each of you and we're way over the target. So you can use a sticker to support the show. You don't have to ask a question. Michael says, do you think racism has become more intellectualized over the past few decades? No. There's nothing intellectual about racism and that's part of the issue. Part of the issue is that, and people ask me, why don't you debate a racist? Because there's nothing to debate. That is, there's no content. Like communism has content. I mean, there's a real question and if you watch Oppenheimer, it's a real interesting question. Why is it that almost all the scientists and intellectuals in the 1930s and 40s America were sympathetic, not outright communists or sympathetic to communism. Communism has some, we'd argue illegitimate, but some intellectual argument and appeal. Racism has no intellectual argument and appeal. That's what makes racism so despicable and disgusting and so just dismiss it. Just reject it. You don't have to debate it. You don't have to discuss it. You don't have to raise issues. I'm not going to get up on stage and discuss racism. What's it to discuss? I mean, this is a, it's mind-boggling to me that anybody thinks that racism is worthy of debate. That debate ended with the civil war and it should have ended with the civil rights movement. It's gone. There is no issue. There's no question. There's no challenge. Now, communism does pose a challenge and its popularity and its success with really, really, really smart people indicates that there's something to debate. There's nothing. Zero. There's no theory to debate when debating racism. Michael Sander says, Jordan Peterson mentions IQ all the time. Are you saying he has a hidden racist agenda? I think he has an agenda, but Jordan Peterson, no question is, in my view, is wrong. I mean, I would encourage people who are interested in IQ question to read Nassim Taleb's critique of the IQ issue. IQ is very good at defining the very extremes. If you've got an IQ under 70 or 80, maybe 90, I don't know, but if you've got a very low IQ, yes, it's very predictive of your outcome in life. If you've got a very high IQ, it's predictive of something, not exactly wealth or anything like that. It's predictive of something. In the middle, it's not predictive of much at all, and that's 90% of the population. And in addition to that, if you actually look at objective criteria of, again, objective criteria of success, wealth, for example, money, money-made income, IQ is not very predictive of that, again, except at that low extreme. High extreme, it's not. You've got a lot of very smart people who don't make a lot of money, but at the low extreme, you do. They don't make a lot of money. They'll never make a lot of money at the very, very low. But everything else is not that meaningful. So, Jordan has a certain agenda. He has all kinds of agenda. His agenda, I think, is not so much racist. His agenda is his commitment to hierarchy. Commitment to hierarchy in the wrong sense. Commitment to the lobster stepping on the other lobster, right? The lobster getting to the top. And to him, IQ is representative of the lobster hierarchy. There's IQ hierarchies. The human beings also have hierarchies. But there's a big difference in terms of what's required to be a successful human being than what's required to be a successful lobster. IQ, if it's measuring something, no question it's measuring something, is measuring one aspect of what it's required to be a great, successful human being. But morality and focus and choices you make, character, which is morality, character and choices you make, which is character again. So character and then how much work you put in. And then other aspects of intelligence that are not easily captured by IQ. So there's a lot more complexity to what actually leads to success in life than just looking at that one number. But that is for a simplistic you want to create a hierarchy among human beings. That's a way to do it. Michael, a false conclusion once arrived at and widely accepted is not easily dislodged. Absolutely. Unless it is understood, the more tenacious it is held. Yes, altruism and religion are good examples of that. And finally, Florida Henry says, good morning from North Dakota oil fields. I love it. There's somebody who's not afraid to go work and produce the necessary fossil fuels that we need in order to survive and to thrive. All right. I know that Jordan Peterson didn't say it was the only thing involved in success. So if I said that, that's a misrepresentation. But he said it's a dominant one. It's an important one. It has massive predictive power. I don't think that's right. And he talks a lot about it. There are a lot of other predictive, but he talks about that a lot. So because again, it's simple. It's easy. It's condensed. It's simple to explain. So I don't want to misrepresent Jordan Peterson. I mean, he's wrong without having to misrepresent him. I disagree with him about a lot of things without having to misrepresent him. I've been invited just to end with this. I've been invited to a conference, a big conference that he's holding. Him and a bunch of others are holding in London in October. So I will tell you about that conference after the fact. But it is a big conference of Jordan Peterson. I'm not sure how to categorize it exactly, but it's definitely Jordan Peterson-like people. And I'm not speaking at it, but I'm one of the participants. So there it is. James, I don't have your question. Where is it? James, did James put it? No, I don't see your question. All right. Hopefully it's a $20 question if you're going to do it because I have to go and have to go in like two minutes. So make it fast. All right. So as a reminder, tomorrow we'll have a new show, but we'll also have a Oppenheimer. We'll talk about Oppenheimer and the bomb. So we'll talk about nuclear weapons. I'll get in trouble with that one. The Libertarians hate me when I talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We'll talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We'll talk about nuclear weapons. We'll talk about Oppenheimer. We'll talk about the movie. We'll talk about Ayn Rand's relationship with Oppenheimer. And Ayn Rand interviewed Oppenheimer several times. And then we will also talk about Hananya's apology that he published yesterday, which is an interesting document in and of itself. So we'll talk about that as well. So tomorrow is a pretty big show at 8 p.m. East Coast time. We'll do the new show. James, I'm running out of stuff and I really do have to go. Ryan, thank you for the support. Really appreciate it. And let's see, what else was there? Yes, Thursday I do not have any deviewee. Maybe we'll still get one, but if not, I'll come up with a topic. Let me remind everybody that you can sponsor a show. I'm looking for show sponsors. And it's $1,000. You get to dictate the topic. And it would be great if I had two, three show sponsors a month. That's about the amount of money that in addition to what we get right now, we need to raise, you know, to keep this flourishing. All right, Jeremy, thank you. James says, how do people get into PE? What can be taught to young children in high school? What about community college students? Well, I mean, PE is just an application of finance. So, you know, studying finance, studying business more broadly. You can get into PE from a number of different directions, but that's the dominant one, MBA or a finance degree. It's very competitive because a lot of people want to get into PE, so it's very competitive to get a job as a financial analyst, let's say, starting out. Also, if you've been successful in a particular business, a lot of times PE companies will recruit you to come and work for them so that you can take that expertise and apply it to the companies that they take over. So, a lot of roots, you know, what you need to teach children is to think and you need to teach them math and you need to teach them kind of basic economics and basic accounting, but they could get that in high school. They could probably get that in community college. But really, you know, the top PE funds, private equity funds are funds that recruit from the top business schools in the country. So, it's difficult because it's very, very competitive. It's a very, very competitive field. But in terms of teaching young children, math. Alright, James, he also says, please go over what can young children watch at a young age to help in development of business and other, in another show. I don't think there is anything. I really don't think young children should or can develop business skills. I mean, it's just not right. Young children need to learn a few things. One, they need to learn math and they need to learn to think and they need to learn to read and they need to learn to write. They need to learn the very, very basics. And then on top of that, young children need to have a healthy respect for business and productivity and growth and, you know, an economy. But that doesn't mean they have to be experts. They just have to have the right, healthy approach to all of that. Alright, thank you Antonio. Thank you James for getting us over the top. So it's not that there's anything specific to business. They have to learn all the things that good human being needs to learn. Plus, a positive approach. Maybe the one thing they have to have is a healthy, positive approach to money. To money. Alright everybody, thank you. See you soon. Thanks to all the superchatters. You guys got us over the top. We made it to our goal. Thank you to all the people watching. And I will see you all tomorrow morning and have a fantastic and productive.