 the radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Book Show. All right, everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show. On this Thursday, September 7th, the week is almost over. We're already having a great week and I guess looking forward to the weekend, although it still seems distant. All right, a lot to cover today. We're going to talk about the Google anti-trust lawsuit. Maybe the trial starts next week. Maybe the most important lawsuit this year, we'll see. I mean, other than maybe the Donald Trumps. But this is huge. This is the biggest anti-trust case anti-trust lawsuit since Microsoft in 1998. We'll talk about abortion, at least three stories relating to the abortion in the United States and outside the United States. We'll talk about an AI fleet. I think yesterday we talked about your conservatism in the Navy and then the Wall Street Journal publishes an article today that basically contradicts what I said yesterday a little bit. So we'll talk about that. It's ultimately good news. We'll talk about the potential for a United Auto Workers strike and the implications that that has longer term for lots of different things. And finally, just a quick story on science in China. So a lot to cover. Whoops, let me just press this button. There we go. So we can keep track of the chat and keep track of why is this not working? It is not working. It's going for the wrong show. All right, one second. Let me just get my super chat tracker working properly and let's see if this will work. Yep, that worked. All right. But before I wanted to remind everybody, A, that you could use the super chat to ask questions as Reno already has. So please use it a comment to argue with me, to debate me, to support the show and to ask questions, most importantly, to ask questions. Any amount, $2, $500, I think it's capped at $500. You can use this for and yeah, don't keep those questions coming. It enhances the show. I don't have a hard stop today so we can go a little longer if we have a lot of questions and happy to do that audio a bit strange again. That's weird, given that I didn't change anything. Everything is exactly the same. Let me, yeah, I'm not sure what I, nothing's changed. So not sure is everybody, does everybody have an issue with the audio? Let me just check to make sure nothing's being changed. Yeah, we're basically on neutral, which is what I had yesterday. Yesterday was better. It's exactly the same, exactly the same settings as yesterday. So nothing has changed. I'm not sure what the hell is going on. There's a reverb, but reverb is off. There shouldn't be any reverb. Everything is, everything is gone. So yeah, I don't know. Could be, it could be Wi-Fi signal. I'm not on Wi-Fi. I'm on a cable, but my high speed internet comes into the building is wireless. So it could be something on the wireless stuff, not bouncing off the walls. I'm not bouncing off the walls. I have no idea. Let me, let me change setting and you tell me if this is better or worse, better or worse. That one, that one should be worse. I'm kind of, I'm using you guys to test. But the room acoustics haven't changed. Exactly the same room acoustics as yesterday. The same doors are closed, the same shade is closed on the window. Everything is exactly the same. Anyway, it's, it's, it's somebody said it's worse. I thought that would be worse. So let me go back to neutral and we'll leave it at that. All right. Let's jump in. Oh, yes. I wanted to remind everybody I'm doing this speaker workshop, public speaking workshop in London, October 18th. Very small group. I've got a few people signed up already, but it's only going to be 10 people. So space is limited. I don't know if there are people in the UK or people in Europe interested. But if you are, please email me Iran at your own bookshow.com Iran at your own bookshow.com. And again, exclusive, small, lots of one on one, lots of, you know, time with me and an opportunity to significantly improve your significantly improve, you know, your public speaking ability. You know, I think I'm pretty good at this. I've taught it a few times now. And yeah, I think people have, I've seen big improvements with people. So hopefully some of you are interested and would be willing to come on board. All right. Let's jump in Google. So this is this trial. It's going to be a 10 week trial. It's basically the US government against Google. And it is claiming that Google used illegal practices, antitrust practices, monopolistic practices in order to establish itself as the dominant player in online search. This is a court case that the Justice Department, the Justice Department has been preparing for three years. It was initiated unsurprisingly to me at least. It was initiated under the Trump administration under the Trump Justice Department, and of course continued under the Biden administration. This is not the FCC. This is the actual Justice Department. This is the, as I said earlier, this is the biggest antitrust case since the Justice Department took on Microsoft in 1998. The idea behind the case is that Google basically came to agreements with Apple. For example, that Apple will use Google search as a default search. Although Google says justifiably that you could easily change your default setting in your browser, you can easily use a different search if you so choose. I'm sure Google is going to argue during the trial that the reason Google dominates search, 90% I think of search globally, it's because it's got the best algorithm. It is the best search engine in spite of all the complaints and all the challenges. Nobody has a better algorithm than Google does, and it won out fear and square in the marketplace. The government will argue that it was collusion and so on. It's going to be super high profile. You can expect the CEO of Google to testify. You can expect senior executives from companies like Apple and Microsoft and other companies to testify as well. The judge is a judge who was appointed by Obama in 2014. It's not going to have, it does not have a jury and the judge issues the final ruling. I guess it could be appealed, but these cases are, you know, it's rare that a case like this gets overturned later on unless there's some big judicial issue. This is, so the judge gets to decide to find a fact and the remedy. So this is all up for an Obama appointee. You know, we've got a 30-year veteran litigator for the Justice Department leading the government's argument. Google, of course, has spent millions and millions of millions of dollars on three of the best, you know, legal firms in the country. The lead will be a partner from the law firm William and Connolly, Williams and Connolly. And yeah, this will be big. You know my views on antitrust, I don't believe the law should exist. I see no way for the government to define what fake competition is. There is no such thing. I don't see any way that the government can decide what, you know, unfair practices are. There is no such thing. Everything that Google did, it did voluntarily. It did not use coercion. It did not use force. It did not pull out a gun. It did not blackmail. And therefore the government has no business. The role of the Justice Department is to protect individual rights. This is clearly not protection of individual rights. This is without all, without, I mean, there's no doubt, no question about it. This is a witch hunt. This is an attempt by the sorry, by the Trump administration and now by the Biden administration to rein in big tech, to rein in the power of big tech, to see this as something negative. Big tech is an enemy of the people. Certainly it's an enemy of government. And the government wants to, of existing big government and wants to rein it in. This is nothing but driven by hatred of bigness, hatred of the power, economic power, not political power, but the economic power, the big tech as a mass. And you know, I really, really, really hope the government fails, but I just, given the complete arbitrariness, given the complete subjective nature of anti-trust laws and the way they're implemented, it's hard to believe that they will fail. That is, you know, they obviously think they have a strong case, otherwise they wouldn't have brought it. They've got a judge that philosophically is probably leans in their direction, given that he's a Obama appointee, but hard to tell, but, but likely. And, and you, but primarily I'd say the law is so subjective. It's so amorphous. What is a monopoly? How do you define it? And, and there is no definition of a monopoly. There is no definition of harm. There is no definition of, you know, a wrong contract or undue contract or a contract meant to monopolize. These are all, these are all voluntary transactions. The fact that you have 90% of the marketplace, so what? How does that make you a monopoly? A monopoly can, can, you know, prevent competition, a monopoly can charge whatever prices it wants. What is the product that Google provides? It provides the consumers. It provides a product at a price of zero. So is the argument that Google is charging businesses that advertise in Google monopoly prices? It's Google doesn't have a monopoly. Yeah, it dominates online advertising, but online advertising competes with advertising on television and radio. Online advertising competes with, you know, advertising on billboards and advertising in newspapers. Not that those exist anymore. And, and there is competition even for online advertising. Significant competition, much more today than in the past. Meta, for example, Facebook is a significant competitor. So the fact that Google has monopoly of a search, who cares? Monopoly. I mean, sorry, doesn't have a monopoly. There's no such thing that it has 90%. Who cares? Why is price fixing a bad thing? Why is price fixing against the law? Why is price fixing any of the government's business? None of this stuff is the government's business. So price dodging, fixing, predatory pricing, all of those things are completely arbitrary claims that the government made. They have no objective definition and they have no reality in the world. So, you know, even if you can't find another browser to use, the argument is not that the browser is competition or, you know, so it's, it's search. And so what? If you have to, if you can't search other than using my Google, how is that monopolistic? How are you harmed by that? How is that, how is that a monopoly? Where is the price dodging? Where is that? I mean, there isn't any, but even if there was, why is that any of the government's business? It's none of the government's business. The government is not there to protect you so that you get the best price that some theoretical economists can predict using the perfect competition model, which is a bogus arbitrary bogus, you know, platonic model anyway. Oh my God, they search your track history. Oh, don't use them. It's pretty easy. Don't use them. You don't want them to search your track record. Don't use them. But when you go on, you sign a contract to use the search under their terms. You don't want us to use it under their terms. Use something else. Anyway, we're not going to get into a three hour program today on antitrust. We'll do a show on antitrust if that is an issue. But for now, I'll just say this is a big deal. And I am unequivocally, without any doubt, with no reservations on Google side, a hundred million, a hundred percent on this. So antitrust is a evil movie, evil movie, because I'm seeing somebody posting about a movie, is an evil laws. The anti-capitalist laws, the anti-liberty laws, the anti-freedom laws, it would take another show to show that. Maybe we'll do it tonight, maybe on Saturday. We'll do a show soon on Monopoly, given that this is going on, and discuss all the different aspects and issues that it raises. All right, let's jump into abortion. A couple of three stories on abortion here quickly. First one, interesting just fact that over the last first six months of this year, with all these states, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and so on, that have dramatically restricted abortions, that have shut down abortions basically in their states, almost under any conditions. What you've seen in all the remaining states that actually do allow for abortion, you've seen a dramatic increase in the number of abortions being had, and overall in the United States, to the extent that we can monitor this, and to the extent that we have data. There seems to be a not insignificant rise in the number of abortions in the United States. You're seeing a very large increase in abortions in states that border states, that have banned it, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming, Illinois, Virginia, states that have seen a significant increase, including South Carolina. Even North Carolina has seen an increase in abortion, because they still were allowing some abortions there. And so states that aborted states that don't allow abortions seeing dramatic increases, but the total number of abortions has gone up. This is probably going to bolster the case of some conservatives who would like to see a national ban on abortions, because all this is doing, all these laws are making it inconvenient for women, and expensive for women, and just penalizing women who now have to travel out of state to get an abortion, which is just I think horrific. And so it's going to be interesting if the pressure is going to intensify on Republican candidates to actually advocate for an abortion ban across the country. Abortion is not a good issue for Republicans, so to the extent that that is something that they pick up and make their own, it is likely to hurt them in coming elections. So interesting as a response to this, the district attorney general of Alabama, the attorney general of Alabama, has now, you know, his name is Steve Marshall, has now basically made the case, and I think there's a lawsuit on this, where now Alabama, to remind you, does not allow any abortions, even in the case of rape and incest. The attorney general now is arguing that this does not go far enough, and the argument now is that if you assist a woman to travel to another state to obtain an abortion, if you let women know about the possibility of traveling to another state to have an abortion, you are now engaged in a criminal conspiracy under state law, and he is ready to prosecute, prosecute anybody who aides and abets an abortion. He says an elective abortion performed in Alabama would be a criminal offense, thus a conspiracy formed in the state to have the same act performed outside of the state is illegal. So it's going to be really interesting if a case like this goes to Supreme Court, how the court rules, if they rule that Alabama is correct in this, then they could basically make it impossible for women in these states to go out of states to have an abortion. So Alabama is criminalizing, viewing it as a conspiracy to go into another state to have an abortion. I mean this is really, this is dark, this is exactly what these right wingers want. They want to be able to control you. They want to be able to control you no matter where you go. They want to be able to control your body. They want to be able to tell you what to do with your body, where you travel, who you talk to. I mean this is the morality police writ large. This is why one cannot just support Republican candidates, one cannot just vote for the right. As Ike says, it's 1220. This is conservative barbarism and it's Alabama. I mean who the hell wants to live in Alabama? Very few people want to actively live in Alabama and I feel sorry for the good people who do live in Alabama that this is the kind of attitude their political leaders and their law enforcement takes. It's sad, it's sad and it's horrible for young women and it's, you know, this is just again an indication of what, of how they want to control you, of how they want to control you. I'd finally, in comparison to the barbarism that much of red America is engaged in with regard to abortion, Mexico's Supreme Court has just decriminalized abortion nationwide. It had, you know, abortion had been decriminalized in certain states within Mexico, but now it has been decriminalized across the entire country, which is a great step forward for Mexico, good for Mexico. I mean, imagine a day where part of medical tourism will be Americans, you know, Americans sneaking across the border into Mexico to get an abortion and then coming back. I mean, yeah, that's the horror that lays before us if some of these barbaric Republicans get control of the levers of national power. You know, so much of Latin America, Catholic Latin America, religious Latin America, backwards Latin America, whatever you want to call it, you're seeing more and more legalization of abortion across Latin America as they become civilized and we become less civilized. All right, yesterday, yesterday or the day before, I can't even remember anymore, but anyway, this week I did a show, I did a segment on the fact that there was a big story, I think it was a foreign affairs, about the U.S. Navy's conservatism criticism from the outside on its unwillingness to embrace modern technology and willingness to embrace kind of alternative strategy of using drones and artificial intelligence and small boats and a much more modern and innovative techniques in order to deal with threats. Some of this is being used, as I mentioned, in the Gulf to combat some Iran's activities over there, and the idea was many people were criticizing the Navy for not thinking about applying this on the Pacific front with regard to China. And well, you know, the, what was it, the Deputy Secretary of Defense in a speech yesterday, yesterday, articulated plans for the Department, this is I'm reading this in the Wall Street Journal, articulated plans for the Defense Department's plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to produce an array of thousands of air, land, and sea-based artificial intelligence systems that are intended to be small, smart, and cheap. The idea is for the United States to keep pace with China's rapidly expanding military amid concerns, and I'm quoting that the Pentagon bureaucracy takes too long to deploy, and to develop and to deploy cutting-edge systems. To quote Catherine Hicks, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, we're not in a war, we're not seeking to be at war, but we have to be able to get this department to move with the same kind of urgency because the PRC isn't waiting. So part of this is again quoting from the article, one approach could be to build on the capabilities demonstrated by Task Force 59, the US Navy's network of drones and sensors designed to monitor Iran's military activities in the Middle East. And again, I'm quoting from Hicks, imagine distributed pods of self-propelled or autonomous systems afloat powered by the sun and other virtually limitless resources packed with sensors of plenty enough to give us new reliable sources of information in near real time. From the article, other capabilities that are being considered are autonomous ground-based systems to provide logistics, space-based autonomous systems that would be so numerous they would be difficult for an adversary to destroy and autonomous systems that could defend against incoming missiles. Autonomous systems use AI to detect and engage enemy targets and can include self-piloted air and sea-based drones. The Defense Department has long invested in such systems, including self-piloted ships and no-crew aircraft. Yeah, these self-piloted ships are pretty cool. Ukraine used some of these self-piloted ships to attack Russian Navy targets. So this is the Pentagon responding very quickly to an article I was reading just the other day. And this is exciting and good for them. And I'm glad to see this is a lot cheaper. And I think ultimately long-term going to be more effective than building, although we need to build some, but building more and more and more super sophisticated aircraft carriers and submarines and destroyers, even though again, those are needed too. If you go to the Wall Street Journal website and you look for this article, there is some cool video showing some of these drones, particularly the ships and stuff. And there's a whole video about this Task Force 59 and how they use the ships. I know Israel has also kind of this kind of drone technology on boats in boat format. And it's very exciting to see it doesn't put lives in danger. And it's where, because I think we have a real technological advantage, the United States can maintain its absolute military superiority in the world today. And again, they're talking about these systems that, and according to Hicks again, systems of things we might use for three to five years before we move on to the next thing, because they're cheap. They can easily be replaced as we move, given the dynamic, fast moving adversary and the pace of innovation. They're all fantastic. Now it's true that China has more ships than the US Navy does and has invested in autonomous systems. I find it hard to believe that autonomous systems Chinese have or as good as the Americans. And the total number of ships is not a very good calculation because the ships that China counts as navy ships, not particularly powerful. China is still way behind the United States. What you want to do is keep it that way. A good for the Pentagon for investing in this technology. It's exciting. And the more we invest in this, and the more we make a big deal about announcing it to the world and letting the world know that these are things that the United States developing and deploying and investing in, the less likely a war is because the Chinese will not want to challenge a force that is dramatically superior in numbers. All right, UAW, whoops, God, I just closed the window of the story. I was going to, where's the history? I need to find it. There it is. All right, the UAW, United Auto Workers is about to go on strike. They have already approved the strike. They voted on it and they've approved it. The contract, current UAW contract with all three automakers, GM Ford and what used to be Chrysler, but it's today, I forget the name Stalys or something, some weird name that owns Chrysler. All three contracts expire September 14th, that is in a week. They are negotiations that are only just starting with the other companies. It seems like the other companies have delayed these negotiations for whatever reason. And it really does look like this is going to go for a strike. I mean, this is like, again, kind of the worst timing in history. I mean, the United States auto industry from my perspective, it's not clear to me should exist. The reality is without repeated bailouts starting in the 1980s under the end of the Reagan administration, bailing out Chrysler. And then under Obama, bailing out basically Chrysler and GM. Ford is the only one that I don't think is actually needed bailout. If they had just been allowed to go bankrupt, to restructure under bankruptcy, first of all, if they'd restructured under bankruptcy, they would have come out healthier, leaner, more efficient, smaller, maybe fewer employees. And maybe the employees would all be doing much, much better today because the companies that they worked for would be doing much, much better today. But the reality is, the United States is not particularly good at building cars. When was the last time you really craved an American-built car? You really, you know, maybe short of Tesla, right? But the week three, if just haven't made an exciting car and don't make particularly exciting cars, they're not particularly cheap, they're not particularly technologically advanced, they're not particularly safe, they're not particularly anything. If you want a luxury car, you buy a German car. If you want a car that requires very little maintenance and sustain, you buy a Japanese car, both the German car and the Japanese car, probably built in the United States. So it's not like by letting the three big companies go bust, nobody makes cars in the US, they're just made by other companies elsewhere. As it is right now, Chrysler is not an American company, it's owned by a European company. So we keep bailing out the auto industry and every few years, they get in trouble and you have to bail them out again. And part of the trouble they get to is in the good times, the auto unions go on strike or the auto unions negotiate really, really hard and negotiate and the auto unions squeeze the companies and get terms and conditions that are unreasonable and cannot and in a way out of line with what Toyota is paying workers in South Carolina or BMW is paying them in Alabama or in Georgia or in all the other places where European and Japanese cars are being made by Americans, by Americans, but they're being made in non-union states, they're being made at a far lower cost of labor. The reality is that the UAW is going to strike, is going to demand better pensions, better wages, better all this, but the fact is that these auto companies cannot pay that without substantial government support. So the only way that any of these new contracts are sustainable is if the government bails them out. Now add to this the fact and this is what makes us so such a horrible timing. What was the story I did yesterday? Well the story I did yesterday was a story about the fact that China is dominating and will likely dominate electric vehicles. And I know Ford and GM and Chrysler are all trying to get into that space, but they're way behind. They're way behind Tesla, they're way behind the Chinese, they're probably even way behind the Germans and the Japanese in terms of this because and so this is, we know that the next big auto crisis is going to be as states like California and other states around the country make it illegal to buy internal combustion engine to buy gas fired automobiles. At that point Detroit is dead, at that point the American auto companies are dead. I mean what's the probability that they're going to ramp up electric car production in time for all of that and be in a position to compete with all these other companies that are way ahead of them right now? This is why Tesla has such a high valuation because it is poised to replace these companies or theoretically to be bought by them, but nobody can afford to buy Tesla. Tesla indeed could probably buy GM with no real problem and maybe they will one of these days, maybe that's the ultimate bailout. But what a time for the UAW to be thinking about going a strike or what a time in terms of the evolution of the auto industry and where the auto industry is going and what appears to be real weakness in the American in the big three auto companies in terms of the long-term future of the automobiles. So we'll see, I mean the strike will probably come next week, but I am predicting another auto bailout over the next sometime in the next five by the end of the decade, so by 2030. All right, finally, this is just a great quote and I wanted to read it to you because it says so much about why China is not a threat long term and why I don't worry about technological advance and advances and by the way there is a story out today about the chips, the advanced chips, could be chips that China has been accumulating since 2020 produced elsewhere, not produced in China, so it could be non-Chinese made chips that are that have been put into these phones. We don't know, we'll wait to find out. Anyway, this is about China's control over its scientists and this is just, I'm just reading you a paragraph, the rest of the article is behind a firewall so I can't access it, but I think this says everything we need to know. This is a, I guess an Asian, it's an Asian news source, but a legitimate Asian news source. China's top science academy, this is my quoting the news article. China's top science academy has updated its code of conduct with new rules that require members ensure, that is scientists ensure, that their public statements are in line with the general policy of the central committee of the Communist Party of China and that prohibit openly expressing academic views unrelated to their field of expertise. So you have to make sure that your science, whatever your science happens to be, that your scientific results are consistent with the general policies of the central committee of the Communist Party of China, CCP, otherwise then the science must be wrong would be my guess if they're the principles, if they're not aligned with those principles. And of course if you're a physicist you can't comment on biology and if you're biologists you can't comment on physics, but it's probably much narrower than that. If you're not a, only a climate scientist can comment on climate and only an epidemiologist can comment on viruses and on and on and on you go narrow, narrow, narrow, narrow and the government controls what you say and what you make public and what you publish and you could get into real trouble with an authoritarian government if you deviate from these rules. This is why I don't worry about big scientific advancement, big technological advancement and this is why I think the United States is missing just an unbelievable opportunity, to actually go to, you know, basically advertise to the Chinese that we are open for business, that the United States would give a green card to Chinese scientists interested in coming to the United States, to work in the United States. I think that's, it's such an obvious thing to do. These scientists I'm sure are not happy about this. They're a lot of unbelievably talented scientists in China. Wouldn't they love to come to the United States and work here with some of the amazing talented scientists that we have in America? Great missed opportunities, green card to any Chinese scientist who wants to come to America tomorrow. And now some of them will be spies with a risk, easily with a risk. All right. What else, what else do you, what else do we need here? Yeah, I think, I think we've covered, we've covered our topics. We're good to go. So thank you everybody. Hopefully you enjoyed that. We've got a bunch of super chat questions. We just a little off our goal. So there's an opportunity to reach a goal today. Let's hope we do. And we'll jump into the questions. You can use the super chat to ask me a question to support the show. We can use a sticker to support the show. We have over 90 people watching today live. So should be easy to make up the $70 a show that we are short. All right. Remo, Remo says just finished reading your three chapters and winning the unwinnable war. Thanks for the value. My pleasure. I'm glad you enjoyed it. It is a book that people should really get. While it addresses what happened after 9-11, it addresses questions around 9-11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, it really is a book of principles of how to approach foreign policy, how to approach foreign policy conflicts, how to deal with enemies and I think has a much broader applicability than just the applicability to the threat of Islamism or jihadism. Stephen says, I loved Spencer Tracy's condemnation of antitrust in the 1940 movie Boomtown. God, I don't remember seeing that. That would be interesting. All right. I'm copy pasting it so I can try to find it and watch it. Thanks, Stephen. A friend of Harper says, do you plan on watching one piece? I don't even know what one piece is. There is a live action adaptation of the world's most popular magna anime that is putting up big numbers globally and might be worth commenting on. Its author is now top 10 fiction writer. Where is it on? Where can you see it? Is it a TV show? Is it a movie? What is it? Never heard of it. So let me know what it is and then maybe man ga, man ga, not man. Yeah, I don't see the difference. What did I say wrong? I said something wrong. It's a TV show. Where is the TV show? What's it on? Netflix or something like that? Okay. I'll copy and paste this as well. One piece. I'll give it a, I'll try. I'll try. Can't promise, can't promise that I would like it. By the way, I'm just curious if you guys, if the sound has gotten better or you just got used to it or what the sound is like right now, we've got a lot of things interacting here. So I wonder if some of this is issues related to, I don't know, the internet online, it's the same. A boy in says it's worse. All right. I'll keep playing around with this, but it's weird because no matter what settings I give you, you still don't like the sound, which is very strange. There's a weird echo, which might be coming. I wonder if it's coming from, yeah, I don't know, from something to do with, yeah, but I've turned that off. I don't know. Not sure where it's coming from. Will you continue the capitalism 101 series? Yes, definitely. You know, as topics come up, I think the monopoly one will definitely be a capitalism 101. We'll talk about monopolies under that. So I don't know if there is an audio expert out there in the audience, if it's somebody who really knows audio and you know, now it's my mic. It's definitely being generated by my mic. You heard that, right? That's me tapping on the mic. And it's like a really expensive mic. It's a very high quality mic. And I've got this new, a very high quality kind of streamer, audio streamer. So if there's anybody out there who's a real expert on audio and knows something about Rodecaster, but Rode, Rodecaster is, let me know. I'd love to get some consulting, whether you're listening live or recorded. It would be great if we could walk through and see what I have done wrong to make the sound. I need, but I need a real audio expert. I need somebody who really knows what they're doing, particularly if it's somebody who has experience with the Rodecaster series. I'm using a Rodecaster duo for those of you who know what it is. All right. All right. Robert, in capitalism, how would pharmaceutical companies be profitable? One customer cure is a customer lost to imagine millions of people cured. So imagine millions of people cured. Yeah. I mean, but that means you're selling a drug to millions of people. That's a lot of money. And of course, if you can cure one disease, there are plenty of other diseases to be cured. And, you know, and we still don't have drugs that cure you forever other than vaccines who can, in some cases, at least can make you immune from something forever. How do companies make money off of vaccines? Vaccines basically cure you or prevent you from ever getting a particular disease. But there are a million types of diseases. And cancer is, cancer is not one disease. It's many diseases. I mean, the reality is that the fitter we get, the fewer diseases we have, the fewer pharmaceutical companies there would be. But the ones who do will deal with diseases we actually have and problems we actually have, and they will solve them. And if the problems go away because we somehow become disease-free, then the industry goes away. But I don't understand this question, right? I would be willing to pay a lot of money for pill that prevented me from ever having cancer. And whoever could produce such a pill would have me and 8 billion other customers. And then even if it was just a one time thing, that's a lot of money just there. And then of course, every generation of new people born into the planet would have to take the same pill. And if such a pill existed, I mean, think about that sheer profits that would occur to it, there would be competition to get it, even if it turned every other product into a negative cash flow. Capitalism is the only way to secure that you get it because it's the only one that secures the competition around it. This idea that companies produce faulty products so that you keep having to buy more of them is just, it's again, it's a misunderstanding of capitalism, misunderstanding of how markets and how competition works. The reality is that there is massive competition to increase the quality and increase the reliability of something. Because if I produce a shitty product that you have to replace every year, then my competitor is going to produce a product that's just a little bit better than mine in order and sell it as such, but still has to be replaced. And then here's another competitor is going to come and improve the quality a little bit. And I'm going to be forced to improve my quality if I want to compete with them. And the competition is always for improvement and getting things better and making things better. All right. On the leeway, Iran, can you address the accusations that your audio issues are due to having replaced yourself with AI Iran? I can't comment. I think the only reasonable answer to that question is no comment. All right. A friend helped us set free information. Manga is like a comic book, but typically back in white anime are typically made out of popular manga series. If that anime becomes big enough, they consider making it a live action. Manga is a huge Japanese induction. I don't know what induction means. Why is it an induction? But anyway, okay, thanks for the info. Don't know much about Japanese animation. John says, Iran, how much to review an album that's 18 songs and runs 47, oh god, 47 millions in minutes in length? Or I might just request two songs by someone different? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, if you really want to review of an album versus, I could just give you my opinion of an album, but you know, it depends what the music is. I mean, if this is going to be painful for me to listen to for 47 minutes, you're gonna have to pay me a lot of money. I don't know. Let's make it like a movie, which is $500. So $500 to review an 18 song album. All right. That doodle bunny says all the crappy objectivist intellectuals end up working for TOS. All the really crappy ones, let's see, all the crappy objectivist intellectuals end up working for TOS. All the really crappy ones end up working for TAS. T-O-S-T-A-S. Who can tell the difference anymore? I didn't say anything. That's what doodle bunny said. As I said before, no comment. Shazba says, do you suppose that the Justice Department employees have been using alternative search engines in an effort to thwart Google's dominance? Probably they were using DuckDuckGo or something, Google Duck or something like that. I have no idea, but of course, even if they have been using Google, don't forget, they were forced into it. They had no choice. This is the kind of evil that they're trying to combat where people land up having to use this amazing, fantastic search engine because they have no choice because using another search engine produces inferior results. Don't tell anybody. Is it Google Duck? Where's the duck going? No, it's DuckDuckGo. No, it's not DuckDuckGo. It's something with lots of ducks. This turned out into a comedy show. I don't know what happened. Robert says, just a bit of slap back echo. It's not too bad. You'll be able to hear it in playback. The fidelity is still good. Any chance you've got a speaker monitor, a headphone enabled, and the microphone's picking up a bit of that? Yeah, I thought I basically turned, completely turned. No, I mean because, oh, no, the headphone is disengaged. The speaker is not getting any sound from the mic. I set it up that way. I turned off the speaker so it's not feeding any mic back. Yeah, I mean, that's what I thought it was initially, but I thought I'd taken care of that, but yeah, I'll have to keep looking. Again, if there's anybody who really knows audio, let me know, particularly the roadcaster. Harry's not tonight. Harry's not tonight, right? No. Harry is, Harry Binswanger will be on next week, probably Friday because I'm not going to have a show Wednesday or Thursday night, so it'll probably be Friday night, but Harry's next week. Michael says, will your next debate with Johan Chazzoni be live streamed? I don't know. And it's not Johan Chazzoni. I just found out this morning, I go to the website of the organization putting on the debate, and I'm debating somebody else. I'm debating somebody from Johan Chazzoni's organization, the Edmund Burke Society. I'm debating the chairman of the UK branch, but it's not Johan, which is unfortunate because I was hoping it would be Johan Chazzoni. So it's this other guy who I, name is really familiar, so I might know him. But anyway, and the conference is going to be an interesting conference. I've spoken at this conference before. They really, really hated me. It's a conference of right of center political organizations, political parties from European right of center political parties in the European Union Parliament. So there'll be a lot of think tank people, but there'll also be a lot of political people. And I was hated last time because I talked about individual rights and liberty and freedom. And, and particularly the polls and the Eastern Europeans did not like me. So I am doing this debate and clearly, they're going to be on the side of, of the national conservative side, not on my side, but it should be fun and interesting. And again, for those of you who think that I'm an isolationist when it comes to these things, and I don't interact with anybody and I don't reach out and I don't work with anybody else. I don't talk to other people and I, you know, I'm just a curmudgeon who sits at home all day and doesn't interact with, with people. I mean, that is a massive, a massive joke. But yes, I will be at this. This is an organization that was whose first symbolic head of this organization or first head of the organization was Margaret Thatcher. It was set up in the 1980s, 1980s to do that. And again, I've spoken at this conference. I'm a participant in the conference. I'll be there for the entire conference. And yeah, it's, you got to go and you, you know, and you got to, you got to try to get better ideas into the debates, even among, even on the right. All right. Harper Campbell says, I ran focused on reality, that is on nature, as the standard for determining which concepts are valid. What other method is there other than make-believe? There is no other kind. You, you start with reality. You start with the evidence of the senses. Everything should be reducible to, to, to something you can see. Everything is reducible to, you know, again, the, the, the evidence of one's senses. So, to reality, to facts, to observable facts. Richard Cunningham has anyone written a book about philosophical detection? No. Is it just that one article by Ayn Rand? Leonard might have had some talks on it. He's done, he's done, certainly has taught in a sense taught philosophical dissection way back. But no, no book, from an objective perspective at least. Harper Campbell, a narcissist like Trump wants the authority of a king while having the accountability of a toddler. That's really good. That's a great formulation. You know, Harper, so perfect. All right. James, there's a type of person who refuses to think and will hate you for reminding them of their inadequacy. Yes. I think that's absolutely right. Thank you, James. All right. Last question is by Frank. We are actually four dollars short, but, you know, you know, if somebody wants to pitch in four dollars as a sticker, I've got a lot of stickers today in support of the show. Stickers away without, Mary Eileen did is provided a sticker. Thank you, Mary Eileen. And a few others I think early on that I can't go back to have done stickers. So thank you to all of you. If anybody wants to do a quick four dollar sticker so that we can say we reach the target, that would be great. We still got 90 people online. A bunch of you haven't done anything to support the show today. So a sticker would be a nice way to support the show. Stickers where you don't ask a question, where you just support it. Frank, this is the last question. So there are only a couple of minutes. Are there any abortions with women having twins? I assume they are. I don't see why they wouldn't be such abortions. So my guess is yes. The answer is yes. All right, everybody. Thank you. There will be a show tonight at 8 p.m. I'm thinking of doing it. Although this question of monopolies, I'll probably do monopolies on Tuesday or Saturday. But I'm thinking of doing it on a fascism of socialism, what they are, what they mean, what's the difference between the two? Why is one more attractive to some people and one more attractive to others? What countries are more likely to go one direction? What countries are likely to go a different direction? So we'll probably do the show tonight on fascism and socialism. I hope you join me for that 8 p.m. East Coast time. Apollo Zeus, thank you. Apollo did three pounds, I think three pounds, but it doesn't quite get us to the four. So we still had a dollar short. But thank you, Apollo. It's 3.74 and the software still counts as one dollar missing. And what did I want to say? That's because our week, our week of British pounders these days, but Paul just got us over the hump. Thank you, Paul. So tonight 8 p.m. East Coast time. Tomorrow we'll be back for another news roundup and there will be a show at 3 p.m. Saturday. I do promise in the next one of the next few shows will be a capitalism 101 show on monopolies and anti-trust. Okay, Finn Harper says, I'm not sure how, but I've seen other YouTubers post polls in the chat, though I would share that you might find it fun to use. Yeah, I mean, if any of you know how to do that, that would be fun to do. We could do polls. We could do polls in the thing. So that would be great. Let me know. Let me know. That could be fun. Jeremy, thank you. Jeremy doing a first supersticker ever. Thank you, Jeremy. Really, really appreciate the support. I'm still waiting to download the special effect of applause for first time superstickers and first time superchatters. Ian, thank you for the sticker as well. Really appreciate it. So now we're solidly in reached our target space. All right, everybody, I will see you tonight. Don't forget to like the show before you leave. We should have 100 likes on there. Don't forget to share and don't forget to do everything else that you can do to help the algorithm identify the show and let people know about it. I will talk to you all soon. Bye, everybody.