 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Book Show. All right, everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show. On this Monday, what is it? March 18th. March 18th, I hope we've just had a great weekend. Looking forward to a great week. As you see, those of you who are on video, we've changed things up a little bit. Hopefully, you like the new background. I've got my gold scotch sign up there. I've got a whole story around that one, some books, and just a different orientation for the camera. Lighting is, I think, more professional. I'm getting help from one of our listeners who is a lighting and broadcasting expert, Craig. And he's doing a great job, so I really appreciate it. But this is just step one. There's going to be multiple steps to the process. We're still going to get some ambient lighting and some other stuff that will brighten this up and give it a little bit more color, which it needs. So that is all going to happen in the weeks and months to come. So this is just step one, moving my desk, orienting it differently, getting different lights, and so on. But we're moving ahead with this. Richard, nobody really cares what you think, so there's no point. And yeah, other than Richard, let me know what you think. So what else do we want to do? Yeah, so we will work around this. I will tell you the Gold Scullch story at some point, and maybe if somebody wants to ask a super chat around it, later today we can do it, or on a future show. It's going to get much, much better as we move it to the future. This is just the beginning. All right, let's see. What did I want? Yes, it's going to be shocking. I know some people might want to hold on and sit tight. But I'm actually going to defend Trump in the news segment today. It happens once in a while, but it is looking. It does happen once in a while, and it will be happening today. So over the weekend, Trump gave a speech. We talked about a bunch of different things. And one of the things he said, he said a few things we'll talk about, but one of the things he said, which made the news and made the headlines and made the mainstream media and made commentators go basically ballistic, is that at some point he said something like, if I lose the election, there will be a bloodbath. And that's what everybody ran with. Everybody ran with Donald Trump is threatening a bloodbath if he loses the election. And violence, and this is horrible, anti-this, anti-that. And people really were nuts over this statement. But this is where it really is important to listen to what people actually say. Go to a transcript or watch a video. And in this case, it's not exactly what he said. What did he say? He was talking about the car industry, and we'll get to his horrible ideas about the auto industry in a minute. But he was talking about the auto industry, and he was talking about the fact that Mexico has, you know, Mexico is basically, why is this not working? What is going on? Oh, there it is, working. That Mexico basically is picking up massive amounts of automobile production. A lot of Chinese companies are building massive plants in Mexico with the idea of building automobiles by merely electric cars, almost all electric cars, in Mexico and then shipping them to the United States. But it's not just the Chinese. I think that American companies are particularly given the latest strikes and the labor union and that stuff. They basically have also moved to Mexico to build cars and with the idea of importing them into the United States from Mexico, and thus avoiding the Trump tariff on Chinese goods, which he has promised would be at least 60%. So he was riling against this and saying, he's not going to make that happen. And what he said actually was that if I don't get elected, there will be a bloodbath in the auto industry. That is that the American auto industry will be destroyed by all these imported cars from Mexico. But that is, of course, not at all. Not at all. How the mainstream media or how commentators interpreted it or presented his statements to the world, they completely ignored and evaded the context and presented it as, if I don't get elected, there will be a bloodbath. And this is typical of how they treat Trump, but it's not just Trump. Fox does this to people it opposes. The mainstream media on the left does it to anybody they oppose. A lot of just center stuff. A lot of times they just don't consider, they don't review, they don't investigate the context. And what they do is just report some statement out of complete context. This is why I've told you many times, whenever there's a quote, I try to go to the original sources. I try to find what's going on. I try to read what was actually said. And the reality is that Donald Trump often says really, really stupid, really, really, really horrible things. You don't have to make it up. But I think what happens when they do make it up, particularly in a case like this where it's so obvious, is that the media just loses whatever credibility it has. People stop paying any attention to them. And basically, they become irrelevant to the conversation and to the world. And that's a tragedy because media is important. And that's really where we are now. This is only reinforce people's skepticism about the mainstream media and justifiably so. Now, if we consider one other statement he made in that same speech. So in the speech, he's talking about illegal immigrants. And this is the way the Washington Post reports it. So I'll just read you how the Washington Post reports it again. And I think, hopefully, this gives you a little bit of sense of my attempt to be objective. I don't always get it right. I'm sure. But my attempt to be objective. Here we go. So it says, former President Trump ratcheted up his dehumanizing rhetoric against immigrants Saturday by saying that some who are accused of crimes are not people. I don't know if they, if you call them people, he said it a rally in the Dayton. In some cases, they're not people, in my opinion. And I'm not allowed to say that because the radical left says that's a terrible thing to say. So now he's calling certain immigrants to commit crimes not really people. Animals, I think he later commented on it. But of course, even here, it's not exactly what he said. Now, it was criminals. But he explicitly said which kind of criminals he was talking about. He was talking about, what is it, MS-13. He was talking about the most brutal, horrible criminals that he claims completely bogusly that are being released from jail on purpose in order to send them to the United States. And as a consequence, crime is out of control in the US. And they're committing massive crimes all over the US. Now, all of that is bogus. And you can criticize all of that. But to call criminals that belong to MS-13 and given what they do and how they behave and the just unbelievable violence that they engage in, to call them animals is part of the course. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. To call them subhuman or nonhuman is not that radical and not that bad. And to present it as dehumanizing immigrants is, again, you don't need this. Donald Trump says really, really stupid things and really, really, really bad things all the time. You can attack him on the reality of actually what he says. For example, his comments about crime accelerating and crime going out of control and gangs all over the place. All of that is bogus. The stats are completely opposite of that. Now, of course, nobody believes the stat. Remember, there was carnage in the streets of America in 2016 when he was running one of the safest years in all of American history. It doesn't seem like his voters care one iota, one iota about facts, about stats, about reality. They care about the emotion, just like the left does. It's all about emotion. And the emotions tell them there's rabid crime. Crime is all over the place. It's out of control. We need to stop it. And it's immigrants. It's illegal immigrants that are doing it, which is all nonsense. New York today is safer than it's been. I mean, you find me the crime statistics that show otherwise. There was just a study done about illegal immigrants. The only state in the US that actually documents who's an illegal immigrants in their jail system and whose legal immigrant categorizes them like that is Texas. There's just a study done. And clearly, illegal immigrants commit crimes at a far lower rate than Americans do. And legal immigrants commit crimes at an even lower rate. So there's just no evidence that illegal immigration is causing a crime wave. It just is not happening. Now, you can skew the news in a way that it sounds like it, but there's just no data to support it. You can look at crime statistics from Texas, from California, from New York City, from any of these places. And what you'll see is that New York City is a lot safer today than it was in the 80s and early 90s. Crime, crime reported crime, not prosecuted crime. I mean, you guys can, Scott, facts don't not relevant. Scott is one of those people that what matters is defeating the left. And if pretending that crime is high or convincing yourself even better that crime is very high in order to get energized about going after the left and so be it. DC is the one city. I talked about this. I did a whole program about this, about the different crime statistics. DC is the one city where crime is clearly up. No question it's up. New York crime is way down, way down. Look at the stats, the actual evidence. Again, I'm talking about violent crime, shoplifting in certain parts of the country, of course. But that's not illegal immigrants. It's not illegal immigrants. We're talking about violent crime. So when I say crime is down, I'm talking about violent crime. Rate, murder, assault with a weapon. All right, let's see. Stealing cars for parts in certain parts of the country is up. But actual violent crime is down. You can say bogus all you want. I mean, there are a few cities where it's up, but the overwhelming majority of cities, like 18 out of the top 20, it's down. Let's see. So those are the things that DMHD media got completely wrong about Trump. Unfortunately, because there are lots of other things they could go after Trump for. For example, it wasn't made enough of a big deal about the fact that Trump's solution to companies of building factories in Mexico and importing the cars into the US is to slap 100% tariff on automobiles coming in from Mexico. That's his solution. And again, that is central planning. That is him being the equivalent of a leftist Democrat. It's Donald Trump from the 1980s being upset that we were importing as much as we were from Japan. It's Donald Trump who is completely ignorant and stupid about both economics and definitely about trade. So that's what they should be focused on. The 100% tariff, which is suicidal for the American consumer, it's suicidal for American auto companies. Just look at how well the tariffs of steel have worked out for American industry, being a disaster for American industry. And yeah, you're going to tell me that's not true, but I can cite the papers, the evidence, we can go on and on and show you, right? So yeah, here we are. Here we are. Instead of attacking Trump on the actual content of his speeches, they have to take what he says out of context and you don't have to. And sometimes he's attacked in context. Charlottesville, he was awful. He was awful. I've read that speech many, many times. I've watched the video of that speech many times. And he was beneath contempt. Here what he said was completely taken out of context. There we are. And it was made all the news headlines over the weekend. All right, let's see, where do we go from here? Yes. Right now, I think right now, they might have wrapped up, but right now the Supreme Court is hearing all arguments about what I think is probably the most important free speech case. They've heard it in a very long time. They've got a number of very important free speech cases in front of them this session. It's going to be very, very interesting to see free speech and the internet, basically. And it's going to be really, really interesting to see how they handle these free speech cases. But the one today should be a slam dunk. This should be easy for them. And it's going to be crucial for them to protect free speech. This is the lawsuit brought by a number of Republican governors against the Biden administration, claiming that the Biden administration put pressure on social media companies to try to dictate what they couldn't and couldn't say about certain topics and not topics related to national security but topics relating to things like the COVID and the COVID vaccines, that is most of it. But basically, the idea is that the government would meet with these social media companies and say, this is what we don't want to spend on your platform. And even though they might not have made explicit threats, there were implicit threats, particularly given that at the time these companies were being investigated by the Justice Department and being brought in front of Congress. And the Biden administration had lots and has lots of levers to pull against these social media companies. In addition to that, in some cases, there is evident that there were explicit threats being made against Twitter and against Facebook and against other companies in terms of the government expecting particular behavior and, particular expectations in terms of what is said on the platforms and what is not allowed on the platform. Now, this is a pure free speech issue. What the government is doing there is violating the free speech of the platforms. The platforms should not have any interaction with the government. Maybe if it's a national security threat and maybe it regards using the platforms to round up terrorists or to facilitate spying on the US or something like that. Other than that, I cannot think of any time where it's appropriate for the government to sit down with social media and discuss anything. Because anything at that point is the potential to force anything at that point. Is the potential to restrict the speech, i.e. the choices of the social media companies. Now, social media companies do not violate the individual rights of users, but the government certainly can. And the government certainly does. And in telling social media companies how to behave, the government is clearly violating the individual rights, the free speech rights. So it's gonna be fascinating to see how the court decides this case, what it chooses to focus on. I hope they side with the Republican governors against the Biden administration. I wish the social media companies were the ones suing and not the governors. That would be more appropriate. But I hope they recognize that the governors have standing. That could be an issue. But I guess we will see. As I said, it's being discussed right now. If there's some interesting juicy comments that come out of that discussion, we'll talk about them tomorrow. But crucial, crucial, if they side with Biden, then the government can then, the government control what's happening on social media and basically free speech rights out the window. They're gone. They're finished. All right. Let's see, quick story. And I'm being a little quick today and we've only got two more stories because I do have a hud stop at 3 p.m. East Coast time. So take that into account also with the questions. I see we're getting a lot of questions coming in. Primarily Michael is all over the place. Michael, you might wanna save some for one of our longer shows just because I'm a little time constrained today. In any case, if I do run out of time, I will save the questions for next show. Hong Kong came across this story, doesn't surprise me at all, but basically Hong Kong is dying. It's dying because people don't wanna go there. People don't wanna spend their money there. People don't wanna do business there because of the Chinese takeover. Just anecdotally, both trailer Swift and Coldplay decided to skip Hong Kong in their world tour, a city they would have always played at in the past. But this is just a sign of something much, much more wide. Hong Kong used to be the banking capital, if you will, of this part of Asia. Everybody went there and everyone did business there. The Hong Kong stock market was thriving, money was invested, the amount of money invested was unbelievable. And the Hong Kong government was perceived as being super responsible, low regulations, of course, very low taxes, also low government spending. Government spending has gone up over the last few years significantly. And again, investment and its integration into the global economy is in the decline. And here's a sense in which the Chinese are killing a golden goose that they basically had, right? It was, they had all the benefits, China got all the benefits from having Hong Kong be this center, this thriving place, which they could interact with. And by going in there and suppressing and destroying kind of any semblance of freedom in Hong Kong, they basically destroyed the appeal of Hong Kong, they've destroyed that energy, they've destroyed that entrepreneurship, and they destroyed the trust and the confidence kind of the global economy had in Hong Kong and their willingness to invest in it. And Hong Kong is in decline, as I think China is as a whole. It's one of the saddest stories of the last four, five years because, I mean, Hong Kong was a model, a model for so many amazing things. Hong Kong was this model of achievement, success, of wealth creation, of what happens when you don't regulate or regulate very lightly, what happens when you basically leave people free. And where you respect property rights, you respect contract rights, at least to some extent, it was just an amazing place. I used to say to audiences, go to Hong Kong, see Hong Kong before you die, it was so beautiful, so energized, so exciting, and much of that is gone. And that is, well, I expect all of that will be gone soon. But just seeing it, people are noticing it, it's not just me. And now it's bankers and pop stars and others who are skipping Hong Kong. They're not going to Hong Kong, which was unthinkable not that long ago. All right, finally, a quick update on Gaza. A few things going on there right now. One is negotiations for ceasefire continue. I think an Israeli delegation is off to Qatar to meet with, I guess, the Qatari government, the white Israel would ever meet with somebody from Qatar. I have no idea, I don't understand it. The model implications for that are so truly horrific and the sanction of the victim, talk about sanction of the victim, sanctioning the victimizer Hamas and Qatar and Iran and the whole thing is really pathetic. But Israel is trying to free its hostages, I guess that's the only excuse one could get. And it's under enormous pressure from the Biden administration to do this. And let's see, what else? I'm censoring, I'm not censoring anybody, I'm not touching anything. What else? So they're off to try to negotiate. The negotiations are ongoing, every proposal Israel has put together over the last few weeks Hamas has rejected, Hamas not put a proposal together, Israel's rejected. But supposedly Israel and Hamas, a party dedicated to Israel's destruction and death, somehow are gonna be able to, somehow are gonna be able to deal with one another, somehow are gonna be able to negotiate and compromise and every compromise between good and evil, only evil benefits, only evil benefits. And in this case, every time Israel sits down and negotiates with Hamas, never mind coming into agreement with Hamas, Israel loses Hamas wins. On the ground in Gaza, the so-called humanitarian crisis is increasing food and stuff like that is in short supply. And aid, they try to drop aid from the air and I guess some aid packages hit some people and kill them. So that was deemed unacceptable and then the Biden administration decided that it's gonna build this floating port off the coast of Gaza and they're gonna bring in aid by ship because the aid by truck, there's not enough of it. So they are in the process of bringing massive quantities of aid by ship. The one good thing about that is UNRWA is not associated with this. I think Global Kitchens is, which is a private non-charity run by, I think it's Jose Andre, but the famous chef. And so the US and others are basically providing massive quantities of aid into Gaza through this some kind of temporary port that was built, temporary port that was built in order to get this aid into the Gaza Strip. Again, every time this aid comes in, it's a win for Hamas, it sustains them, it keeps them around longer, it allows them to survive, it stops the Palestinian people from being as alienated from Hamas as they should be and as angry and as hostile to them as they should be. Again, this is surrender and compromise and evil only benefits from this. Lastly is a sign for the fact that Hamas is still alive and well, maybe not well, but alive and functioning is that Israel this morning, or yesterday maybe went into the, again went into the Shefa Hospital. This is the largest hospital in Gaza and it went into the hospital because if you remember months ago, it cleared out the hospital, discovered tunnels, cleared out operatives, caught a lot of Hamas operatives, killed a lot of Hamas operatives in the hospital. Anyway, it turns out that they're all back, at least the different ones, of course, but still Hamas operatives, including one senior, very senior Hamas official was there. Israel had to go back to the hospital, enter the hospital, the world is of course going apoplectic because Israel is going into a hospital and isn't that awful. And as part of that, they have killed a bunch of Hamas terrorists, they've killed one of the Hamas leadership in the major, I don't know what number, but somewhere probably in the top 10, top 20 of Hamas leadership, they killed in the hospital, they've discovered more caches of weapons, which means as soon as Israel leaves a place, Hamas fills it back in, which means they still have a tunnel network going, they still must have ways to move around Gaza that is undetected by the Israelis. It must mean that the Israelis have not destroyed anywhere near as many tunnels or as much of the tunnel system that Hamas has built that maybe they've even expected or they think they have. And it does show that Hamas continues to be a force. It's not a force that can beat Israel, it's not a force that can do anything, but at least one Israeli soldier was killed in this operation. And they're still a force to be reckoned with and they're far from being destroyed. And it's not surprising given that, given the amount of compromise, given the amount of appeasement, given the amount of just recognition that the world is giving Hamas and hope that the world is giving Hamas that they can somehow gain something from the horrors of what they are doing. So that is my Gaza update, nothing yet. With Rafa, they still talk about going into Rafa, but no actual actions, no plan that anybody's seen about evacuating the civilians from Rafa. And there's no doubt that Israel will not go into Rafa until they evacuate civilians. Unfortunately, that's the reality. So this is just being delayed and delayed and delayed, which is the story of this war, sadly, delayed, delayed, delayed, as Israel can't afford to delay. I mean, think about the economic costs, the human life costs, the fact that these kids are in this horrible situation of being in the Gaza Strip for so long, all of that, it is a true nightmare that's being handled about as poorly as one could expect from Netanyahu and the rest of the Israeli government. All right, let's, let us move to the super chat. As I said, I'm a little constrained on time, so I wanna get these super chats done. You guys have been very generous, so we're in great shape. But we'll start with Michael, who started with a $100 question and then another $50 question and then a bunch of $10 questions. So Michael's on a roll today. Michael's $100 question is the initial intention of conservatism was to conserve classical liberalism. Now it has completely fallen away from that. It's rather less and it's grabbing onto tribalism to try to maintain itself, which is proving no solution to the nihilism of the left. Well, if anything, they're grabbing onto aspects of the nihilism of the right. But yes, absolutely, conservatism originally was supposed to conserve. The achievements of the founding fathers conserve. The founding documents of America conserve sudden of the ideas of classical liberalism as contradictory and incomplete as those ideas were from the very beginning. But certainly a deep respect for the founding fathers and the founding documents was a big part of what conservatives meant. Today conservatism is whether it's in its populist variation or its nationalist variation, certainly in its national variation, but also the populist doesn't care what I owed about the founding fathers, has no interest in the constitution or declaration of independence, has no conception of individual rights, what that would mean, how that would shape government and basically is drifted just as an attempt to grab power from the right and institute the kind of central planning and the kind of regulation of human life that is much more like and much more typical of Europe than it is of the United States. They are not trying to conserve this country, they're trying to conserve some primitive, pre-enlightenment Christian culture that inhabited Europe in the pre-enlightenment period. It is sad, it is pathetic, conservatives used to be a lot better, but I'm also painting with the big brush, there are better conservatives today, but the movement is gone and what is replaced it is tribalism and nihilism of a right-wing flavor, Trumpism, which is tribalism and nihilism and what they call populism, which is just a lack of any principles, lack of any ideas and a willingness to say and do anything in order to attain power. And to appease the people, that is what the right has drifted into in the United States. It is sad, it is pathetic and it doesn't bode well for any of us, certainly any of us who respect and believe in and admire liberty and freedom. Thank you, Michael. We really, really appreciate the support. Okay, Michael, for 50 bucks, we can get called out for calling these people animals and savages as if we're dehumanizing people, but what else can you say about people who come across something like a music festival and can inhibit the impulses and go on a killing spree? Yes, they are animals and MS-13 are animals. The torture, the murder, the rape, the horrors that MS-13 inflicts on the populations within their own countries. I mean, this is why you can understand why El Salvador is so excited about what Bukele has done to MS-13. He's put them all in jail. He's put them all behind bars if you just add a tattoo of MS-13, you're gone. But to the extent that some of those gang members came into this country illegally and set up gangs in the United States, yeah, I mean, what they do, they're animals. And it's completely legitimate. You should be able to call them that because that is their behavior, Hamas are animals. They're not human beings. They're not fully human. So I don't blame and I have no problem with Trump calling those kind of people animals, that's not how the mainstream media is going to interpret it. It's not how a lot of people will interpret it. And if he wants to win, if he wants to win the general election, he's going to have to appeal to others other than his base, other than MAGA, and he's going to have to appeal to people who are not necessarily going to do their research and he's going to have to think about how to bring more people to his side. And the speeches he's giving right now, which I did filled with hate and a lot of stupidity and a lot of stuff that doesn't make any sense. And some of the stuff that he says can easily be taken out of context, it's dangerous for him if he wants to win. It's very dangerous for him if he wants to win. John, Yuan, did you change the price of your music reviews to $100? Or are they still 250? I have three songs that I'd like to review, the Disney songs from animated movies that I heard the other day. Three of them had positive message you might enjoy. I can't remember, I think music is $100 a song. I think that's right. So it's $100 a song for, I mean a short song, a three minute song is $100 a song. 250 is for an episode of a TV show. One episode of a TV show is 250. So 100 is for songs. So let me know which ones and you can either give me the money here or through PayPal, whatever's more convenient for you. Zach T, would you recommend starting reading Iron Man's novels or essays? I've yet to read her work. Oh, I would definitely recommend reading her novels. I would start with the fountain head and then Atlas Shrugged and then go to essays. Of course, if you're one of these people, a lot of people are, they just hate novels and then you can start with the essays but I really think you're missing out and you miss, I think kind of the real sense of life, the real excitement, the real passion, the real idealism of her ideas if you don't read the novel. So fountain head and Atlas Shrugged. I mean, she was a novelist first and foremost and I think those, a lot of people start with Atlas Shrugged. So it might be that you wanna start with Atlas Shrugged, up to you. I think I started with Atlas Shrugged. So there's not one way to start. You can also read Anthem first. It's just a couple of hours, three hours maybe to read the whole book, it's a tiny little book. But the real books you need to read are fountain head and Atlas Shrugged. So that would be my recommendation. Andy, I'm always a show behind, what do you think of the strategy of using the S&P 500 as a long-term saving investment account? My dad was a fanatic about this as a plan. I'm not so sure. You know, I think it's a good, it certainly is good. I wouldn't only put money in the S&P 500, it's heavily weighted towards a few stocks because I think it's market cap weighted. So the big tech companies dominate the S&P 500. I would wanna see you also have a fund that kind of has a small cap, mid cap kind of index and maybe something that has a value orientation, which is probably more long-term, less correlated with the S&P 500, but probably over the very long-term will give you better, more diversified returns. But the S&P 500 is certainly not about bad starting place. And you should also consider kind of an international ETF or international mutual fund that has a little bit in, you know, maybe South America with Miele, maybe a little bit in Europe, just for the sake of diversification. Just for the sake of diversification. Thank you, Andy, appreciate the question. And that was from the show on Personal Finance that I did on Saturday. So if you haven't listened to show Personal Finance Saturday, you guys have been asking for Personal Finance show, so I finally did one. Please go ahead. And Andrew, $60, thank you, or $65 because it was 60 Euro. Hi, Yohan, have you watched Dune 2 at the movie theater? From purely cinematic standpoint, it's spectacular. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. I love the show, keep it up. Thank you, Andrew. I haven't yet watched Dune 2. I will, I watched Dune 1 on my TV at home and I don't know if I'll see Dune 2 in the theaters or if I'll see it when they stream it, which I think will be pretty soon. And I will also plan on watching Godzilla as soon as it comes to streaming. So those are the two shows I know I have to watch. But yes, I mean, Dune 1 I thought was very good and I have a very good in terms of just the cinematic. You have to think about what the themes are and I'm waiting to see what Dune 2, what the theme is. And it does look like there's a Dune 3 and we don't really get closure until Dune 3. So I'm curious about all of that. But yeah, I will watch it and give you my review when I do. Thank you, Andrew. Michael, are you approaching pre-holocaust levels of anti-Semitism, medicature, manifest in a trendy progressive way? I think that hatred is there. It just needs to be honest from the likes of somebody like a Hitler. But it's still a small group of the population, right? It's still that kind of level of hatred, Holocaust level hatred is only a small portion of the population. It's nowhere near the kind of point where one would have to worry about, oh, this is gonna happen, another Holocaust. I don't think they have the numbers. I don't think they have the charismatic leader to pull it off. Now, of course, you could say that in the early, late 20s and early 30s and it hasn't yet happened, but I really don't think it's gonna happen. And I really don't think it's gonna happen anytime soon. And the trendy progressive thing is truly scary, but most of it is mindless stupidity and they're still in spite of everything. There's a small fragment of our society. Even the small fragment of the left, most of the left does not buy into it, even if the left is more sympathetic to the Palestinians, they don't buy into this level of hatred, of insanity, of, you know, genocidal insanity. Bre, the TikTok ban will undo decades of indoctrination of children in school by showing them that politicians hate them. I hope it gets shut down completely so the kids will learn a lesson. It often takes decades to learn. I don't think that lesson is important enough, you know, important enough to violate the free speech of TikTok and people who use TikTok and so on. So while I get what you're saying, I just don't think it's worth it. I don't think the kids will get it. I don't think they'll absorb that. And they'll just move on to some other platform. I think the real issue with TikTok is the violation of free speech, the idea of shutting down a social media platform because you don't like the owners or you don't like what's being said on it or you just think it's bad for teenagers or whatever. That is a really, really, really bad precedent to make. And one would hope that even if Congress does pass it, gets passed the Senate, that ultimately the courts will throw it out. But that is to be seen and that we will see. I wish it was that simple where kids would learn the right lesson from it and everything would be better in the world because of that. But I just don't see people learning the right lesson from anything, particularly given that it's bipartisan, both the left and the right want this. I told you many times, whenever it's bipartisan, run for the hills. That's when it really gets scary. It's when the left and the right agree on stuff, particularly stuff that is limiting your freedoms. All right, Michael, Michael has almost all, yeah, he has all the rest of the questions. Michael has just gone on. Thank you, Michael, really, really appreciate it. I mean, he's done more than 200 dollars, just here, I think 270, something like that. Michael says, it seems so easy to continue society towards a collectivistic nightmare and so difficult to turn towards a more individual rights personal responsibility-based society. Yeah, it does. It seems really difficult. It does because the one is, in a sense, a default. The one is the collectivism is a sense of going backwards, which for some reason is easy for a lot of people. It plays to the non-conceptual mentality that Ayn Rand identified to this preconceptual mentality, to a people on the perceptual level. It plays to the tribalism that Ayn Rand wrote about in global buccanization. It plays to the most privative kind of set of emotions people have and in a world in which the intellectuals will not defend liberty, freedom, and rational ideas, reason, and science. It's easy, that's where the drift is. And it's absolutely true that the alternative, which is personal responsibility using your mind, thinking, engaging in the world, using reason to explain the world and making real choices, that requires real effort. That requires real engagement. That requires real energy commitment. And it seems we live in a world where people are not willing to use that effort, in which intellectuals encourage them not to use the effort, not to use the effort. Michael, how much can you really trust crime statistics when district attorneys are not prosecuting? I think you can try, you can trust them a lot. And this is why I don't trust crime statistics relating to shoplifting. Those are meaningless. I do trust crime statistics that relate to murder, that relate to physical assault, that relate to rape. Because there's clearly a victim and the victim is filing, it doesn't require a district attorney to actually prosecute. All it requires is that somebody was murdered, somebody was raped, somebody was assaulted. Even if the perpetrator's never caught, the statistic, the rape, the murder, the assault are captured. Even car theft, things like that, that people clearly report. Because there's insurance, for example, car theft, right? I mean, you report it because you go collect insurance. All of that, the statistics are very good, they're very clear. And, you know, they were very good about their spike, their large spike in crime in 2020 and 2021. And about the decline in crime in 2022 and 2023. I mean, and the continued decline in crime. Again, the crime that is statistically actually captured in the first few months of 2024. So you can argue all you want. You can debate these things, but the reality is that when it comes to crime that is unequivocally reported, the numbers are clear. The numbers are clear. All right, let's see. Michael, you can be overwhelmed or underwhelmed, but can you ever be overwhelmed? I don't think so. I'm not sure what that means, but no, I don't think so. Interesting observation about the English language. I don't really have anything to add to that. Michael says, do most people not have the self-esteem to handle happiness? Well, they don't have the self-esteem to achieve happiness. Right, they can handle maybe joy, momentary joy, but they can't achieve happiness which requires sustaining something over the long run, right? It requires holding it over the long run. That I don't think they can do, but they certainly can capture joy, but they can't turn it into this, you know, non-contradictive state of being over the long run, you know, the sense of I'm whole with myself, I'm happy and integrated and achieving my values, that most people don't have the self-esteem to achieve. Okay, John, the three songs are How Far I'll Go From Moana, Surface Prussia From Incanto, Knowing What I Now Know From Wish. Oh God, okay. I was hoping like you would do like The Little Mermaid or, you know, what's it called, Lion King. The Disney movies I actually know. I only saw Moana and I was hoping that Moana song, you would please try and do your best one for one interpretation of what certain things represent like the island, the wind in a sail and the sea itself. Yeah, okay, I will do that. Sadly, I haven't watched those movies. Oh, I saw Incanto. That was mixed on Incanto. I wasn't super enthused about it, but yeah. Mainly for aesthetic reasons, but I haven't seen Moana and I certainly haven't seen Wish, but I will review the music. Okay, Michael says, the GOP doesn't even seem to praise wealth and enterprise anymore. Look at the mindless criticism of Taylor Swift. Absolutely. I mean, I've been saying this over and over again. They don't care anymore. They're gone, right? They're not interested in that. So yeah, sad, very sad. In honor of this, how to review a movie and how fast do we get the review back? $500 is a movie review. How fast do you get it back? God, it can take weeks, but it partially depends on the movie, but it can take a few weeks. I still owe two movie reviews. Yeah, so if I'm a long time ago, so it can take weeks and sometimes months it turns out, but I'm trying to get better at it and faster at it. I still owe a bunch of song reviews, painting reviews, two movie reviews. And I have the list and I will get to all of them. Apollosus, have you ever watched Belythe Spirit with Rex Harrison? Your thoughts, I haven't. Not that I think of. Wow, I love, generally love Rex Harrison, but I have not watched that movie. Rafael says, hey, Ron, why only Aristotle Plato, Rand and Kant, are systematizes philosophers and why so difficult to be like them? Just because they're the only ones who really had a comprehensive philosophy that covered everything and that's just unusual and it takes a genius and original thoughts and everything. So not just somebody who tinkers here and there, takes the philosophy of genius like that, produces and then changes or alters it, like a Hegel or a Marx, but somebody who actually has something original to say about every piece of it, that is, and something new. And in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics, they're only four in history. They're only four in history. So it tells you something about how difficult it is. And again, you have to be saying something new. You have to be presenting a new system. And it's not clear you need more. I mean, maybe the truth is there. Now all we have to do is develop, apply, and so on. Thanks, Raphael. All right, guys, wow. I mean, John, thank you. You know, $350, we really, really appreciate that. Thank you, Michael. Michael did, I don't know. I think he did the 250, 270 all by his own. And yeah, it was a great super chat day and you've given me enough time so that I can catch my next appointment. So I appreciate that. I'll be back tomorrow with another show, news roundup, and then in the evening, a to be determined topic of another show. I will see you all tomorrow. Have a great rest of your day and see you tomorrow. Bye, everybody. I miss you.