 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, February 5th. I hope everybody's doing well and eager to get going with the week. A lot going on this week. You know, I'm starting up media appearances. I haven't done that in many, many years. And so I'll be doing two tomorrow on big radio stations. And then it looks like I'll be on Neil Cavuto's show on Fox Business. Hopefully sometime this week, early next week, we'll see. Fox itself is going to be tough to break into, but hopefully we can get at least into Fox Business. And I'm hoping for CNBC and I'm hoping for CNN. I'm hoping for MSNBC. Anybody, I'm hoping to get just on TV and establish a presence. So that is happening. That's kind of cool and interesting. And we'll see how that all plays out. It means my schedule now is even tighter because I have to fit those in as well. Particularly if you go on, particularly television, you have to go to studio and it's a whole hassle. All right, let's just jump in. Tucker Carlson is in Moscow. He's been filmed in Moscow. You know, he was filmed flying in. He's been filmed, I guess, walking around and he was filmed entering the Kremlin and exiting the Kremlin. And everybody is pretty convinced, even though he has not actually stated this, convinced that he has interviewed Vladimir Putin for his X show, and he's going to be publishing that on X or Twitter at some point. Basically the world is, at least on Twitter, going apoplectic around us. You know, some people are calling Tucker Carlson for his arrest when he arrives back in the United States. That would be interesting because I'm not showing what basis he would be arrested. I mean, we still have an embassy in Moscow. We still have ambassadors there. You can still go and you can still come back and you can still do business, partially business. We have sanctions that are limited. We still buy, I believe the United States just still buys uranium from Russia. So the whole thing is just blown out of proportion. And just ludicrous, the idea of arresting him, I think that was proposed on Twitter. But there is an issue. There was a question here. Should somebody like Tucker Carlson, should a U.S. journalist be interviewing Vladimir Putin? My argument would be no, we shouldn't. But you know, at the end of the day, this is something that's pretty common for American journalists. So I don't think Tucker should be treated any differently than the journalists who have over the decades, whether it's journalists who interviewed Hitler in the late 1930s, maybe into the beginning of World War II even, but certainly just before the breakout of World War II. To the journalists who interviewed Muammar Gaddafi or interviewed the the Iranian president or American journalists who interviewed all kinds of authoritarian dictators who were threats and threatening or American journalists who went in and interviewed Osama bin Laden. Remember, there was a journalist who interviewed Osama bin Laden post 9-11. You know, journalists do this. Now granted, Tucker Carlson is not exactly a journalist. He's a propagandist. But American journalists have interviewed some of our biggest enemies and the reality is, and this is a failure of foreign policy, not a failure of Tucker Carlson's, that Vladimir Putin is, has not been declared an enemy of the United States. We, again, we still have an embassy there. We still, to some extent, trade. We still have not, you know, embargoed Russia. Russia is, and for that matter, we are now as a government, as a U.S. government, just using to aid Ukraine in its battle in its war against Russia. So overall, you know, we have, I think, at least a certain percentage of the American public and a certain part of the American government, the Republicans basically, basically said that Vladimir Putin is no threat to the United States. And as such, you know, why wouldn't Tucker Carlson go and interview him? Now, I think it's pretty horrible, right? You know, if Skylist says Wallace interviewed Khomeini, yeah, I know. And it's horrible. And it's immoral. And it's wrong. I think it's wrong for Tucker Carlson to interview, I don't think it should be illegal. I don't think it should be arrested. But it's morally offensive to go because I think Vladimir Putin is indeed an enemy of the United States. But given that our politicians have declared such, given that we don't behave as if he's an enemy, given that we haven't really done anything serious about the fact that he's an enemy, I don't think legally he can do anything to Tucker. What you can do is condemn him morally. And I think he should be morally condemned. I don't think that as a public figure, you should give a platform to brutal dictators. I don't think you should give a platform for genocide or maniacs. I don't think you should give a platform for people who don't respect an ounce of individual rights in their own country and then launch wars of aggression against others in order to violate their rights. You know, Putin is the aggressor. Putin is somebody who has launched the largest, the most substantial war in Europe since World War II, since the Nazis. And Stalin invaded Poland in 1939. People forget that Stalin invaded Poland at the same time as Hitler did. Russia and Germany invaded Poland at the same time in a coordinated effort. Russia and Nazi Germany were allies at the beginning of World War II. People forget that. But so there hasn't been a ground invasion as big as since World War II. And I don't think you should give a platform for lying authoritarian. What are you going to learn from it? Who's going to benefit from it? Well, I mean, Tucker Carlson's readings will benefit enormously from it. So I can understand why he's doing it. Tucker Carlson will fawn over Putin just like he fawned over Orban and just like he fawns over any right-wing authoritarian. You know, this will just breed more support for right-wing authoritarianism of the kind that Orban and Putin represent among the right in the United States. And it's, it's, it's disgusting. It's morally offensive, morally disgusting. Our job as human beings, but certainly as objectivists, our responsibility and our job and Ayn Rand talks a lot about this is to judge, judge, judge, morally judge, morally judge people. By the way, I was wrong. There's a sentence you don't often hear, but I was indeed wrong about the statement about Ayn Rand and out of the New Testament. I said that it was the one about a judge would be ready to be judged with some of the, was something that was the New Testament that Ayn Rand liked and it's, God, that is wrong. The New Testament says don't judge. The New Testament says don't judge. And Ayn Rand took, lest you be judged, something like that, right? Don't judge, lest you be judged. And Ayn Rand flipped that. So Ayn Rand completely contradict Christianity and upends Christianity by saying, oh, no, no, no, no. That is the wrong, that is the wrong advice. Judge not, lest you be judged is exactly the opposite of what is morally necessary. Rand says no. Judge and be willing to be judged is the right moral approach. And I am, you know, for what it's worth, I guess, for what it's worth. I am judging Tucker Carlson to be, you know, an immoral, you know, right wing, you know, click, click, desiring a horrible human being that he is. And of course, this is not my first encounter with Tucker. So Tucker Carlson has been in that particular place in Iran, Brockel for a while, for a while. But this is the Republican Party. They're going to cheer this. They're going to get excited by it. The modern Republican Party is a Republican Party that admires Putin and Oban and right wing authoritarians and wants to emulate them. All right, talk about the modern Republican Party immigration. So for years, we've been talking about, I mean, the Republicans will be talking about, we need to tighten the rules. At the border, we need a bill that will tighten those rules. We need to restrict illegal immigration coming into this country. We need to also make it, if they're coming in, we need to send more of them back and we need to get this ridiculous, what do you call it, ridiculous overhang of people who are not being processed through the system, because they're not enough judges and we need to get that solved. And we need to make sure that, why is this not working once and, all right, now it'll work. You know, we need to keep, as I said, we need to send back, but we need more gods. We need more of everything so we can deal with whatever's happening and we need to make it much less attractive for people to try to come so that they don't even show up. And then they said, okay, we're willing to consider a bill that supports Ukraine only if, only if we also get some real substantive immigration reform that tightens up the border. So, three members of Congress, three members of the Senate, a Democratic senator, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, and a cinema from Arizona, who I guess is an independent these days, got together, and they've been working for, I think, six, seven months on a bill that does exactly that, that tightens the border, and then also provides some, right, or provides some aid to Ukraine and to Israel and to Taiwan and so on. And the language of that bill was released yesterday, released yesterday night. And the bill does what Republicans want. It doesn't do as much as Republicans want, but it's a compromise bill. The reality is that the Republicans have not controlled the Senate. But it is a movement, a significant movement, a dramatic movement in the direction that Republicans have argued for for a long, long, long time. And it gives the president a lot more authority. It gives the border patrol a lot more authority. And Democrats have agreed to give the Republicans much of what they want, partially because this is a difficult issue for Democrats when it comes to elections, and partially because Democrats and many Republicans want to see aid to Ukraine resumed. The bill has been declared dead on arrival by House members and by some Republican senators like Ted Cruz and Bill Lee and others. What does the bill propose? So one of the problems is this massive backlog. So you come in, you say, I want asylum. You know, they look and they see if there's any fragment of a basis. If there's nothing, if you're just not qualified for asylum and there's no standard, they send you back across the border. They send you back to Mexico or back to your country. If there's a shred of potential, then you are set up for a court hearing to determine whether you get asylum or not. There is, I think, a 3.3 million person backlog in terms of reviewing that. And in the meantime, as you wait for the backlog, you know, traditionally you would be under detention. But there's so many people that the detention is exploded. Detention is full. So everybody is released into the U.S. to face a judge sometime in the future. And it could take well over a year for that to happen. Immigrants, people in, I don't know, Nicaragua or whatever, think to themselves, well, the worst case scenario is that I get stuck in America for a year before the asylum decision is made. That's worth it. I'll be in America for a year and then once a decision is made and it goes against me, they need to find me in order to deport me and I can stay illegally at that point. One of the purposes of this bill is to reduce the incentive to come because you're either going to be detained or you're going to be sent back across the border. But the likelihood that you will enter in to wait for your trial will be dramatically reduced, dramatically reduced. By the way, in your Unbookshow, you actually get content about what these bills are. You don't just get, well, it's Republicans that must be good or Democrats must be bad. Ted Cruz opposes it. Donald Trump opposes it. It must be bad. So the whole bill is structured to reduce the incentive so that fewer people come and that people who come are more likely to be true asylum seekers. It's law that the United States has adopted and has not overturned because it's international law that treaties that the United States are signed on to about asylum seekers, they have to take them in. I mean, that's a mistake. They should overturn that. But that's not on the table. Nobody's proposing that Trump would like that. But even there, I don't think he could ever get it passed. Anyway, the idea is more ICE agents, significantly more ICE agents, so that asylum seekers can actually who get rejected be found and sent away. More asylum offices so that asylum claims can be adjudicated quicker. More detention beds so that you don't release people into America. You have them in detention until their case is settled, which reduces the incentive to come. In other words, everything is geared towards making it easier to adjudicate asylum cases quickly and allowing the government to detain more migrants in the meantime. It's also going to tighten the requirements of who can apply for asylum at all. So fewer people will get asylum. So they're going to borrow migrants who could have resettled within their own country or could have resettled in another country on the way to America. And the whole idea is for the whole system to have a near total border shutdown if crossings get too high, above 5,000 crossing a year. But Republicans are lying about this bill. They're lying with no apologies. They don't care. They've learned this from Donald Trump. I mean, the politicians have always done this, but it's getting more brazen now. They're claiming that this bill allows 5,000 people in a day into America. Just not true. Not true. 5,000 is the max encounters in a day on average. But half of encounters, over half of encounters are sent across the border. The other half are going to be placed into detention if this bill is successful and they have the resources to do it over time. Those people in detention are a minor burden. They're not the kind of burden of shipping migrants to New York City and having them on welfare. And if you have lots of asylum officers, they will pretty quickly adjudicate them and either kick them out of the country or if they fail their asylum request and they can't hide because they're in detention or they'll get a work permit as asylum legal. They become legal immigrants at that point. So you're not going to get 5,000 a day. You're going to get 2,500 on average. And then a big proportion of those 2,500 are not going to accept asylum. We're going to throw them out. So you're going to get dramatically lower numbers than you're getting right now. Dramatically. Actually numbers, and this will reduce the incentive even to come which will reduce the numbers even further. I mean, I feel sorry for the Republican senator from Oklahoma who I'm sure I'm not a fan of generally who really worked hard on this and knows, knows with certainty that this bill will do everything Republicans claim they want to do except for one thing. Except for one thing. And that is that Donald Trump opposes this. And the Republican Party cannot, will not, cannot and will not do anything that Donald Trump opposes. Basically the House Republicans have said, the House leadership in the House has said before they even read the bill that it was dead on arrival. Why? Because Donald Trump opposed it. They didn't say that, but that's obviously why. Everybody is kissing Donald Trump's butt. The Speaker has already announced that he's read enough of it this morning that it's off the table. The, the head of the Republican whatever in the House, Scalia has said, not going to take it to a vote. It's never going to be voted on in the House. It's not even clear they will become voted on the Senate because there's not enough Republicans oppose it. Ready, Mike Lee, Josh Hawley, who do you expect? I'm sure G.D. Vance, Ted Cruz are all opposed to it. I mean, basically this bill is, is dead. Ate Ukraine at this point is dead unless Republicans change their mind about Ukraine in the House. And, and it's going to be difficult to get aid for Israel pass without aid for Ukraine. So it'll be interesting to see how they do this. Not that I, you know, not that I think Israel necessarily needs financial aid from the United States. It probably doesn't. Ukraine actually does. I mean, this is, I think this is horrible. It's horrible not because I like this bill. I don't. I mean, it's not a solution, but it's, it's better than nothing. It's better than the chaos that existed at the Southern border today. I think this is absurd and immoral because of the way in which Republicans are playing this as total politics. This has nothing to do with what's good for the country. This has nothing to do with what they actually believe it has nothing to do with the actual features within the bill. This has everything to do with the fact that they do not, they know this bill would work. That's the problem. They know the bill will work. And the problem is if the bill works, it takes a big, big, big issue away from Trump, away from Republicans in the 2024 elections. And that is the only thing, the only thing that is at issue right here. The only thing that is at issue at here. The bill will work. They don't, the Republicans all know every single one of them, including Donald Trump, all know the bill will work. There was a congressman from Texas who said on Sunday, he said he's the only honest one. I mean, he said, look, I don't want to help a Democrat. I'm not going to help a Democrat take away an issue that is bad for him in an election. And you know, I don't know. The shock, of course, is that Scott has become one of these people who gets a fax of the Republican talking points in the morning and dedicates himself to Republican talking points. Dedicates himself to Republican talking points. He can't think for himself. He can't evaluate for himself. He probably hasn't even read the bill. But he is, they're convinced the bill will work. He believes every word that they say. Republican party, they would never lie to you. God, they never will. So if you can imagine, Scott, it's a well-earned smear after years of following. You can only imagine how the standard Republicans, you know, voters out there are going to deal with this. Standard Republicans out there are going to just completely support Trump on this, completely oppose the bill, completely oppose everything about it, because that's the talking point. And the reality is, reality that everybody knows, except if you're completely evading, is that the only reason they oppose this bill, literally the only reason they oppose this bill, is because Donald Trump opposes it, because, and Donald Trump doesn't oppose it, because it won't work, Donald Trump opposes it because it will work. That's what they've scared. They're scared that it will work. And that takes the number one election issue, the number one issue, that people prefer Trump over Biden on is immigration. And they're afraid that goes away. All right. All right. Three more topics. Again, everything takes longer. These days after I find a way to do these new shows shorter, maybe only have two or three. If you think about the Middle East right now, think about all the conflicts in the Middle East right now. We've got Hamas. Hamas and the Palestinians attacking Israel and Israel defending itself. Hamas, Hamas could not attack Israel without Iranian funding, without Iranian arming, and without Iranian, actual Iranian support in terms of even training on how to use drones, electronic warfare, that made October 7th possible. Hamas and the whole Palestinian war against Israel at this point is pretty dead without dramatic Iranian support. And there's no question that the Iranians were part of the planning and the decision to execute on October 7th. If you go further north to the Israeli-Lebanon border, which could any day turn into a ground war, but right now it's just each side bombing each other in a tit-for-tat type situation. Hezbollah is a branch of the Iranian, basically, Revolutionary God. Hezbollah was founded by the Iranian Secret Service. It was founded by Iranians. It's been funded and receives its marching orders to a large extent from Iran. Indeed, it is the largest and most militarily active war has been of all and oldest, because it goes back to the 1980s, oldest of Iran's puppets. And it is on the verge of war with Israel. If you look at Syria, which has been involved in a civil war, God, I can't remember when it started, but for the last decade or so, 10 years plus, Syria is a country that receives the regime, which was almost overthrown by various elements, some, you could argue, worse than the regime, some significantly better than the regime. It's only ally who's basically been Iran. Iran has been at the... Well, Russia, ultimately, but originally only Iran. Iran has been at the center of that conflict. They're funded and, again, supported with troops and a variety of other mechanisms. The Assad regime in Syria have allowed him to kill his own people, to destroy his own country, and ultimately to beat back most of the insurgents who were fighting against him. Iran has been instrumental in destabilizing Iraq since the United States invaded. The Shiites, who are the majority in Iraq, could have used the opportunity of Saddam Hussein's fall to really establish a relatively free country, and one run by the Shiite majority, or at least in a parliamentary system, a country that could be relatively rich because of its massive quantity of oil that exists in Iraq. And instead, the Iranians have done everything to turn it into a satellite state, and if not, when the Iraqis resist becoming a satellite state, to ferment whatever instability and whatever violence they can, and they've done that from the beginning of the U.S. invasion, and they continue to do that today. Part of that, the American forces in Iraq that basically train the Iraqi army and to continue the fight against elements of al-Qaeda, and particularly ISIS in Iraq and in Syria. Those American bases are being attacked by Iranian-linked militias. That's what they call them anyway. Really, for well over 10 years now, well into going back, really they were attacked during the Bush administration and the Obama administration, Trump and Biden. So all the kind of violence going on in Iraq and in Syria to logist that Iran has its hands in it. The final area of conflict the one has to look at is the Houthis in Yemen. The Houthis in Yemen are, again, a puppet, funded, supported, trained, armed by the Iranian regime. They are also, in this case, Shiite. The only one of these parties that is not Shiite is Hamas, but everybody else is Shiite, the same sect of Islam as Iran. And they have been devastating Yemen with the civil war for many, many years and now, of course, threatening the sea lanes in the Red Sea and up into the Suez Canal. In every conflict in the Middle East, Iran isn't just dabbling. Isn't just, you know, helping a little bit here and there. Iran is at the core of it. Iran is the source of the violence, the mayhem, the destruction. In every single one, every single area in the Middle East that is in flames, Iran is the source of those flames. The source, the inspiration, the ideological inspiration, note that all these groups, with the exception of the Syrian regime, all of them are Islamists, jihadists, Sharia law imposing, all of them are inspired by Iran, funded by Iran, armed by Iran, provided training by Iran, strategy of Iran. Now, the obvious conclusion for this should be that the only way to bring peace to the Middle East, the only way to bring peace to the Middle East, and I believe this has been true for 40 years, but it's certainly true over the last 20, since 9-11. It was, and it's certainly true today. The only way to bring peace to the Middle East is the absolute destruction of the Iranian regime. And nobody cares. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to evade that fact. Everybody wants to pretend that is not true. Everybody wants to delude themselves to thinking, oh no, we can deal with the Houthis separate from Iran. We can deal with the militias separate from Iran. We can deal with Hezbollah separate from Iran. We can deal with Hamas separate from Iran. You cannot, until Iran is liberated from the brutal theocracy this will continue. Or if it's impoverished enough, right, if it's destroyed economically, but that's the one thing no administration has been willing to touch. Yes, we had sanctions on Iran, but there are lots of countries that violate sanctions and Iran was still bringing money more today than ever before. But did we destroy their oil facilities? That would completely eviscerate their capability of earning a living. No, we never touched it. Even as they, by the way, attacked a major refining operation in Saudi Arabia with drones, I can't remember how many years ago. They were flown by the Houthis, but basically by Iranian command. Even then nobody attacked Iranian oil facilities. No, we destroyed their capacity to build drones even. Drones that are used by everybody. Every bad guy in the world today has Iranian drones. Oh no, God forbid we do that. So the Bush administration evaded, if you remember, Lenin Pekov's four-page ad in the New York Times and the Washington Post right after 9-11 declared Iran the enemy and that no solution was possible without taking out Iran. And that was true over and over and over again with the Trump administration, the Obama administration. In the Trump administration and now in the Biden administration again, Obama, Trump, Biden all tried to negotiate with Iran to no avail. I mean, Obama had a deal, but a horrible deal. The immorality of our leadership, the immorality of our leadership that sticks its head in the sand, that pretend it's doing something is outrageous, truly outrageous indicative of how weak and pathetic and how cowardly American leadership is today and the fact that American has no, no strategic vision, no farm policy, no way in which to defend the individual rights the lives of Americans going into the future. It's just, Americans are just going to hand the world over to the Putans, the Chaminis and the Xis of the world and God, it doesn't matter if it's a Republican or Democrat as you can see with this immigration bill, they all basically don't care. They're looking at the naval, they're gazing at the naval, they're gazing at the next election, they care about electoral politics, they care nothing, not zero. For the well-being of this country and what is necessary for this country to thrive and succeed, again, true of Republicans and Democrats, nothing. It's sad, pathetic, horrific. And of course, the consequence of this is more and more and more bad players are going to add and become more aggressive. The Houthis in Yemen right now are basically acting as pirates bombing and taking over ships. It all started with them landing a helicopter on a ship. Where'd they get that from? Where'd they get the helicopter? No helicopters are built in Yemen. Yemen is not exactly a rich country to be able to afford a rebel group helicopters. Those are all delivered to them by the Iranians. They land on a ship in a helicopter, they took the ship into a Yemeni port. They have captured the poor sailors. The sailors are not Israelis, they're not Americans, but they were in prison in Yemen, probably being ransomed. And since then, they've attacked ship after ship after ship. If you remember, this was going on for a while, it was a decade ago, out of Somalia. Well, you know, given the success of the Houthis in doing it, it's given the weak, pathetic and significant response of the United States and the West. Now the Somalis are getting into it. The Somalis are actually actively involved in hijacking ships in the Indian Ocean, just like they did in the past. They're not doing it as a response to the war in Gaza. They're doing it as a profit opportunity. They can then, you know, ransom the ships and the crews to the insurance companies or to the shipping companies. Bad guys observe weakness. The United States finally ended the pirate issue in the Indian Ocean when they started bombing Somali areas that were along the coast where the pirates hung out when they started suffering real pain for their pirating. They stopped. Well, now all that whatever was achieved back then has been reversed. You know, 12% of global trade passes through the Red Sea. And much more of that passes through the Indian Ocean. And both the Indian Ocean now and the Red Sea are basically now susceptible to piracy, whether it's the Houthis or it's the Somali pirates. And Egypt, not that I worry too much about Egypt, but just to give you a sense of this, Egypt's Suez Canal revenue, because these ships going up the Red Sea, most of the overwhelming majority of them, go through the Suez Canal, Egypt's Suez Canal revenue is plunged by 50% in January because of what is going on among the Houthis. In a different world, in a world in which America showed leadership and strength, the Egyptians would be supporting what America is doing. The Egyptians would be out there maybe bombing the Houthis themselves. They're no fans of the Houthis or fans of Iran. But given that they don't feel, nobody feels that America actually has their back, they're sitting this out and taking the financial hit. Egypt is a poor country, cannot really afford, cannot really afford the financial hit that's involved here. But then I'm going to take any action because they perceive themselves as weak without somebody having their back. And America's leadership in the world is zeroed out, gone. Finally, Chinese stock market doing very badly. It's down dramatically over the last 12 months, I think over 20%. And the Chinese government keeps trying to have schemes to prop it up and they all fail. And it's very frustrating for the Chinese because a stock market is a place in which authoritarianism doesn't quite work. A stock market is actually the opposite of authoritarianism. It is individuals making decisions about what the value they believe certain assets have. And while those values can be somewhat manipulated, it is very hard to control the behavior of individuals as they buy and sell these stocks. And the Chinese government, when it regulates industries, when it regulates businesses, the response to that is not going to be people marching out in the street demanding economic liberty, but certainly the response to that is, for example, if you regulate a particular business, increase regulation of it, the stocks of that business are going to decline. Just give you one example. On January 23rd, no, a month before that in December, the Chinese put out new regulations, new regulations on video games, new regulations that required video game providers to sprinkle games with pop-up warnings against quote, irrational consumption behavior. So this is to try to get people to play a few video games so they work more and be more productive. The response to that was nobody went out in the streets to fight against pop-up menus on video games. But the response to that was individuals thinking, huh, this is going to reduce the amount of gaming. It's just an obstacle. It's something that who's financially going to suffer if gaming goes down, Tencent, one of the largest companies in Tencent, the technology company in China, and they started selling off shares of Tencent. Last week, maybe it was the week before, the Chinese government took down the regulations. They eliminated the regulations in the hope that that would turn things around. But of course, markets understand that once you impose those regulations, they come away, market response, they put them back on. They've tried to make it very difficult for people to sell shares versus buying sales to make it difficult to short shares. Nothing has helped. The market keeps going down. The central bank has come out and said that it will expand, reduce the reserve requirements of banks, which increases the money supply, which is supposed to be a stimulant. Nothing seems to be helping. And what is really amusing in all of this, if you will, is that you get the sense that this is causing the regime in China to just go crazy. The regime in China is used to saying something and it getting done, declaring something, and it happens. And the regime keeps saying, we need to stabilize the stock market and it doesn't happen. And you get a sense that the Chinese are unbelievably frustrated by the fact that they don't have control over this thing called the stock market that they embraced 20-something years ago as part of a movement towards economic liberalization. And now it's a monster they can't control. It's a monster in which people act without asking permission from the central government. And that is mind-blowing to them. And the question is, what happens now? The question is, what do the Chinese do now? I mean, the ultimate response to the stock market going down so much is to shut down the stock market. But shutting down the stock market will significantly reduce the amount of capital available to Chinese companies, and they know that. And they're torn. On the one hand, they want to control. On the one hand, they want, on the other hand, they want enough freedom to have economic growth. But they want more controls, less freedom, and more economic growth. And it doesn't work. And the Chinese are discovering it doesn't work. And the choices they make in the months to come will reflect how they try to deal with a contradiction in their own mind, in their own thinking. Control versus freedom, incompatible, completely different results. And if you want that consequence of freedom, high economic growth, for example, you cannot have the cause without the effect. And yet China's not willing to embrace the effect. They're basically at the point of praying to the gods for the effect without embracing the cause. And you see there's a lot of chatter going on, a lot of chatter going on about what China needs to do and how China will do it and what it's going to do if you follow the financial press. I mean, China has big economic problems. And what Xi is going around the country saying, I want you to innovate. I want innovation. And what a lot of the Chinese economics guys are saying, we want a stable stock market. We want the stock market to go up. And it turns out that the wishes, wishes, wishes don't change reality. Wishes don't change the necessity that if you want a particular effect, you have to instigate its cause. They want, again, the effect without the cause, can't have it, suffer the consequences, which is exactly what's going to happen and is happening to China. All right. Let's see. I think we are good. Thank you, Wes. $50 on a sticker. I really appreciate that. Enric, thank you for the $3. Maria Lin, thank you. Roosevelt, thank you. Silvanus, thank you. Jonathan, thank you. Gail, thank you. David, thank you. And that's, and of course, Robert Nisu got us all started with a happy Monday. All right. I'm going to turn to the super chat. Remind you that you can support the show. The show is supported from listeners like you. You can support the show on a monthly basis if you're not watching live, or you can even give it a, if you're watching on YouTube, you can give it a, what do you call it, an applause or something like that. You can, you can support it. But you can support a monthly on Patreon and you're on bookshow.com slash membership. You can support it here. If you're watching live with a super chat, asking a question or just the sticker, thank you guys for your generosity and for the amazing support the show gets. All right. Let's, let's, let's jump in with, with the super chat. And, oh, I do want to remind you that the Iron Man Institute is a sponsor and the Iron Man Institute is running a conference for people interested in delving deep into Iron Man's philosophy in Austin, Texas at the end of March. Registration is still open. They're offering scholarships for students or anybody really who wants to delve really deep. You have to have an interest in objectivism, a real deep interest in objectivism. You can go to ironman.org slash start here to apply for that scholarship. You know, they're going to issue quite a few of them. So you've got a good chance if you apply. It's going to be an amazing program. They've got Greg Salamieri and Ben Baer and Jason, Jason Reins, who I'm going to be interviewing I think this Thursday. I think it's this Thursday on the Iran Book Show. So you'll get to meet Jason Reins, who's phenomenal and others. And it's going to be an amazing tour de force of kind of intellectual history philosophy. Don't miss it. It's in Austin, Texas. In Austin, Texas. And to be a student at ARU, you do not have to move to California if that's what Ryan is asking. I don't know. I kind of just see random posts on the... Okay, so ironman.org slash start here. Please go there. Get the info. Okay, Hopper. Hopper says, do you feel like you're putting an enormous amount of work for only gaining small incremental progress in growing objectivism? Yeah, absolutely. What's your point, Hopper? Yes, I feel like I put a lot of work and get only small progress in the growth of objectivism. What's new? Everybody out there thinks that, you know, they've got the answer to how to grow objectivism fast. Maybe we should just hitch our wagon to Trump, hitch our wagon to the Republican Party, and that's how we'll grow dramatically. Anyway, yes. It's frustrating. It's difficult. It's... Yeah, all of those things. But I don't know any other way to do it. I don't know any other way to do it. The only way to do it is one mind at a time. What we're asking you to do is think for yourself. What we're asking you to do is think outside of the box. What you're asking you to do is challenge conventional wisdom, the conventional wisdom that you are all associated with. Right? And that's a lot. And most people are not willing to challenge their beliefs and challenge their families' beliefs and everything else. Scott, again, you're being so dishonest. You know, just ad hominem dishonesty. Now, maybe it's a way for you to respond to my so-called smear, but if Scott says interact with any outside group ever, that is so disgusting and so... so obviously a lie. And so obviously a deception, given that we interact with outside groups all the time, that it's pathetic. This is the level at which you want to attack, right? Pathetic. All right, Adam, thank you for being one of the few to judge based on moral grounds and op-ragmatic ones. Thank you, Adam. We really appreciate that. Adam Campbell. Tom, questions for my friend after watching your talk. Oh, the Israel talk. How will defeating Hamas military curb the widespread and ideological diverse Islamism, given the historical resilience of ideas and movements such as Judaism under Roman oppression? I mean, Judaism was not resilient. I mean, the radical... the extremist views of Judaism were not resilient. They peed it out. They went away. At some point, the Jews were defeated, completely defeated. And as a consequence, for basically, you know, almost 2,000 years, Jews were completely non-militant, non-military. They had no military. They had no even national aspirations, kind of a vague notion they wanted to go back to Israel one day. But nothing. They were scattered and there was nothing. So it was completely suppressed because the Romans did a good job in suppressing a rebellion. That's how you, you know, that's how you do it. You defeat people thoroughly, thoroughly, right? Then, you know, and the reality is that you can't defeat Hamas. And I said that during the talk. You have to defeat the Palestinian people. And this is why providing them with aid and allowing aid trucks in is so absurd and ridiculous and counterproductive. The Palestinian people need to know unequivocally that they are being defeated. They need to suffer the consequence of allowing Hamas to lead them. And only then will they reconsider their ideology. Will that stop them from being Muslims? No. But it will, I think, bring them to the realization that Israel is not going anywhere. That if they want to survive, if they want to have any chance of thriving in the future, they need to stop seeking the destruction of Israel, learn to live with it, and figure out a way to emulate Israel in, you know, basically creating the, you know, putting together the cause that allows you to get the effect, the effect of wealth and prosperity and flourishing. So you need to defeat Hamas, you need to defeat Hamas, but really you need to defeat the Palestinians to a point where they are going to accept the state of Israel. Now, will the ideology of Islamism still survive? It will, because the ideology of Islamism, it might not survive as a powerful force within the Palestinians. But it will survive as a powerful force still in the Arab and Muslim world as long as Iran exists and thrives. So that's why I said earlier, it all is in Iran, and unless you take on Iran, then nothing really changes and nothing really happens because the ideology of Islamism is not challenged, not challenged. You know, Scott wants to unite the liberty movement with the anti-liberty movement to create a semi-liberty movement, somewhat, sometimes when you feel like it, liberty movement. And yeah, you know, there's something I never wrote about compromise between good and evil. But Scott is, is what he is. All right, Tom, why compare Hamas to Nazi Germany in a pure Japan-sovereign state with global ambitions instead of localized movements, like the IRA, the ETA, which resolved conflict through negotiation not military dominance? Because Hamas, indeed, is a sovereign nation in a sense that it is a government representing a Palestinians and they don't compare Hamas to the Nazis. I mean, compare Hamas to the Nazis and the Palestinians to Germany, right? To the Germans. Hamas is the political party running the Palestinians. The Palestinians are, according to their own, in their own mind, the distinct people who are represented by distinct political entity called Hamas. And in that sense, they're similar to Nazi Germany and pure Japan. They're not just a terrorist organization without any basis within a political entity, within a particular political reality. They're not the IRA, and even the IRA, and I'm not sure the ETA, who's the ETA, but the IRA is very, very unusual that the IRA piece was established without the complete defeat of them and that has to do with the particulars of, I think, that cause. But the IRA is the exception. It's certainly not something to be used to establish any kind of rule. It is a massive exception to how terrorist organizations typically function. They almost all have state support. The IRA did. It had state support from the USSR. You could argue that the only reason the IRA was at the end willing to cut a deal in Northern Ireland at the end was because the building wall came down. And I know that's not an easy one, but all their financing, all their training was ultimately provided to them by the USSR. They were often trained by Palestinian terrorists, but the funding came from the Soviets and it could be that when the funder went away, there's always a funder, they turned to negotiations because they had nothing else. And this would happen, by the way, I think with terrorism in Israel is if you got rid of Iran and Qatar, the funders, a lot would change. On what moral or legal basis did Israel justify its occupation of Gaza for nearly four decades? And how do you reconcile this with the principle of human flourishing in the pursuit of happiness? I mean, that's easy on the basis of the fact that Israel was aggressed again by the Egyptians who controlled Gaza. That is, Gaza was part of Egypt. Egypt basically attacked Israel. And Israel in a war of self-defense, absolutely a war of self-defense in the Six-Day War, occupied Gaza not because it wanted Gaza, not because it has anything to gain by occupying Gaza. God, Israel doesn't want Gaza. And it occupied that. And it held that occupation until a peace deal with the Egyptians. In that peace deal, Israel tried its best to have the Egyptians take Gaza. Israel didn't want it. But notice that there's never, ever in all of human history being a Gaza state. There's never in all of human history being a Palestinian state. There's never until modern times anything called a Palestinian people. And so what are you supposed to do with Gaza? Gaza, the Egyptians didn't want it. Israel wanted to deal with Egypt. So they gave them all of Sinai, but they didn't give them the Gaza Strip. So they kept Gaza. They tried to somehow integrate Gaza into Israel. But ultimately, the Gazans obviously rejected that and were built against that and were violent against Israel because there was the tax in Israel, throughout Israel. So Israel basically, so Israel at that point, right? Israel didn't occupy Gaza because it wanted Gaza. It occupied Gaza because nobody else wanted Gaza. And, you know, it was a, somebody had to be there and Israel was there starting in 1967. And then in 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. All right? Start your own country. Establish your own state. Make something of this. They could have turned it into the Gaza Riviera, beautiful beaches with tourists. They could have, they got gazillions of dollars of aid. They could have built hotels. They could have built casinos. They could have, they could have built industry. They could have, they could have done all these things. They chose not to. They chose to become a terrorist state. They chose to arm themselves to build tunnels. They launched rockets into Israel to be the aggressor in every respect. So I don't know what anybody expects Israel to do. Just lay down and be slaughtered. That is the expectation because that's the only alternative. But the only way to pursue happiness is if you achieve peace. And peace is 100%. You know, in the hands of the Palestinians, whenever they want peace, Israel would embrace that. Palestinians do not want peace. They want the destruction of Israel. They say that in their charter. Hamas says that in their charter. And Israel gave Hamas that property. That gave it to them. Do whatever you want with it. And the first thing the Palestinians did on the day the Israelis left is destroy all the industrial and agricultural infrastructure that Israel left there. They could have used it to become, to be successful. It was technologies they didn't have. They could have used them. They destroyed them. God forbid they use anything that the Jews built or created. That's the mentality. That's a mentality of losers. That's the mentality of destroyers. And that's a mentality that you can't change without defeating them. Andrew, 60 minutes at a peace on gaming addiction. Now that sports betting is legal, the morale was to regulate industry to help gambling addicts. They all believe that to fix every issue you use forces never the answer. That's right. But yes, they want to regulate gambling. If they ever, you know, whenever they legalize marijuana, the first thing to do is tax it and regulate it. Everything needs to tax and regulate. Because that's the perspective of the state. The perception of the state is to encourage you to behave in a socially acceptable utility maximizing way. The whole perspective on the role of the state is not to protect individual rights, but to guide your behavior to achieve some, again, socially optimal outcome. Whatever the hell that means. And they'll do that. Anything that the philosopher Kings above us, anything that the political elites and the intellectual elites believe we are doing wrong, they are there to fix it. They are there to correct it. And again, left and right, just maybe different issues. But that's what they want to do. And that's why we have today a heavily, heavily unbelievably regulated state. A state so regulated, I don't think Americans 100 years ago would even recognize this country in terms of the lack of freedom. And they even use the tax code, not just to gain revenue so that the government can function, which is bad enough, right, using force in that dimension. But most of the tax code is geared towards regulating our behavior. We want you to buy a house so we mortgage this tax deductible. We have syntaxes. So we use the tax system to regulate behavior. Alright, Frank. Reading James Fitzgames, Stevens, Liberty Equality Faternity, a woody and serious criticism of mill, is diversity, equality, inclusion, modern offshoot of mills, experiments in living? I don't think so, but it's, you know, I don't think it's certainly not direct for mill. But you know, mill was eclectic enough that you could certainly find roots there. I think at the end of the day, you know, diversity, equality of inclusion has much more to do with postmodernism, which also is somewhat connected to mill, with postmodernism and with the notions of egalitarianism that dominate. I mean, in that sense, DEI has much more to do with walls, you know, the Harvard philosopher, in a sense that promoting egalitarianism, the position of egalitarianism, necessitates kind of DEI. So I think this is egalitarianism as a ideology of equality of outcome has driven this. And mills has a part to play in it. I wouldn't make him the ultimate culprit. The ultimate culprit is Kant. And the ultimate culprit, even if there, is Christianity. Christianity is responsible for DEI more than anything else. But that's by several different routes and by several different intermediaries in between. Mill might be one minor one, but not a major one, at least my understanding of mill, which is not particularly deep, but any kind of, if you have any questions in intellectual history on philosophers of the past and these kind of questions, ask Jason Reins when we talk on Thursday. He's a philosopher with very, very, very deep knowledge of, he's actually an expert on Plato, but he's got deep knowledge of the whole history of philosophy. And he has definite views on the interaction between ideas and history over the last 2,000 years. So Jason would be really, really good for that. You can point out my contradictions if you can find them. That's to the chat. Can you discuss the Institute for Justice's victory against FBI? Now I might be mistaken, but I don't think that's the Institute for Justice. I think the FBI case was a case of the Pacific Legal Foundation. Pacific Legal Foundation is a brilliant, excellent organization that, together with the Institute for Justice, they are both excellent organizations, have changed, I think, the legal landscape of the United States, have protected property rights and protected constitutional rights in ways that a hard to imagine could have ever been done without them. The organizations I support morally in a huge amount. You know, Scott, who claims we don't work with anybody. I mean, a significant number of the staff, several of the staff of I.J. and the Pacific Legal Foundation are objectivists. A number of them are graduates of the Iron Man University. One of the senior people at the Pacific Legal Foundation is not a board of the Iron Man Institute. Again, some of the leadership, the leadership of I.J. and leadership of the Pacific Legal Foundation are objectivists that we work with and coordinate all the time. So you said we never work with anybody, so you need to redo what you said. Anyway, so I think it's great. So let's talk about the case. The case is a case where the FBI raided one of these places that has a safety deposit box. A safety deposit box place. And, you know, under that particular reason to raid it, I think money laundering and some such. Anyway, they landed up opening every single safety deposit box there, whether they had probable cause or not. They opened them up and anytime they found cash, anytime they found cash or any kind of form of gold, things like that, they confiscated it. Under the assumption that it must be illegal, why would somebody have cash in a safety deposit box? Really horrific. I mean, a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment, Search and Seize Amendment, and they were sued and they won. A couple of weeks ago, they won the case. It's a huge victory. They should be commended for it. The abuse of the FBI is unbelievable and unbelievable. I mean, it's very similar to the Civil Forfeiture Laws where they stop you, I don't know, because you've got a broken light and they come to some reason to search the car and they find, in the back of the car, they find a suitcase with, I don't know, $5,000 worth of cash and it's gone. The cash is gone, the car is gone and go prove and the assumption is that it's illegal, you know, wrong money and you committed an offense and the cash goes to the local police station. They have every incentive, the police department, they have every incentive to do this. These are horrible anti-constitutional things that luckily we've got organizations like IJ and Pacific Legal Foundation working on them and they should be absolutely 100% commended for doing it. They are unquestionably holding down the tide, the tide of abuse against, you know, against rights in America. They're buying time for the more fundamental philosophical change to happen and we need them. So if you're going to support any organizations outside of the Ironman Institute, intellectual organizations, these should be the one. I would say they're the best by far of any of the so-called free market organizations out there. Institute for Justice and the Pacific Legal Foundation do unbelievable, unbelievable work, you know, calling the government for when it is just outrageously in violation of our property rights. All right. Mary-Eline Yaronimos. I like that Robert. All right. Thank you, Mary-Eline. Michael, do you see the Supreme Court overturning civil asset forfeiture laws? I think the Supreme Court could do that. I don't know if there's a case in front of them where that is an issue. I don't know the legal framework for how that would come. Most of it is state law. I don't know enough about it. It's something to ask when I have somebody from the Pacific Legal Foundation on, which I'm sure I will, or from IJ, it's something to ask that person when I have you on, when I have them on. Hope Torres, what does it take to make sure that one is not simply advocating a position from your own favorite group think tank? How can a person truly come to a conclusion independent of tribal influence? It's difficult. And it requires real work. And it requires real thinking about the position. It requires actually examining the facts behind it. So, yeah, somebody like Scott can accuse me of I'm just speaking CNN talking points. But I happen to agree with some CNN commentators on this. Does that make this not my opinion? Does that make it CNN? If anybody knows me, they know I don't even watch CNN, never do. And that half the time I'm blaming CNN. So one way you can evaluate me is do I only attack one side? Am I tribal? Do I have a tribal influence? Are my positions easily categorized as just one particular perspective? Or do I try to cover these and give you the facts and then give you my opinion? I can't prove my opinion because I don't have time to give you all the facts associated with that opinion. But at least give you my opinion. And my opinion can range from left to right to middle to some people agree, nobody agrees. Almost never is it that everybody agrees. But I'm always in the opposition here. Is there a semblance of objectivity? And maybe your answer is no. Scott clearly doesn't think so and that's fine. But your responsibility is not so much to evaluate every new story that I present here about whether it's objective or true or not. Your responsibility first and foremost is to try to evaluate whether you think I do a good job or not in not being tribal, in presenting an independent objective view of the news. And if your answer that is no, I don't. Then I'm not sure why you listen because there's no other value I present here other than screening the news and providing you with news that I think is worthy of listening to. And if you think I'm not trustworthy, why would you listen? Or if you think I'm so biased as everything I say here is just biased from the tribe, then why listen to me? You can listen to any tribal leader who's affiliated in some way. But I think you get a unique perspective from me and I think that's why most of you do listen. And in terms of you, if of all the stories that cover this, one you say, huh, that's a story that's really important and relevant to my life or relevant to the decisions I make, I need to make sure Iran is not biasing me here. I need to make sure or not being fooled here and not being influenced overly by whatever the tribe. I need a dig deeper. And the way to dig deeper is to read widely about the issue. If there's an original source, read the original source like the legislation and immigration. Read the legislation and immigration. Read what the left has to say. Read what the right has to say. Look at the sequence of events, for example, how everybody was excited about this bill until Donald Trump said, no, you can't pass it. It's bad and everybody flipped on it, basically. Not everybody, but a lot of people excited about the bill. A lot of Republicans were excited about the bill and then Donald Trump said, no, it's no good. Don't give Biden a victory in a sense and the Republicans all flipped on it. So you can see, oh, yeah, I see the sequence. I see the events. I'm looking in the newspapers. I can see this happening. And maybe Iran's right. But again, if there's a topic that really interests you, dig deep and do the work. And it requires work. There's no doing this without a lot of work given the fact that there's no objective source of news out there. You have to read widely and check them all out. All right. Apologies. Should politicians be psychologically assessed before taking position? No, I don't think so. I mean, maybe we should have an age limit or some kind of competency test. But at the end of the day, look, voters, if voters want to elect a senile person as president, then it's horrible, but so be it. It's voters' responsibility to figure out the psychology of the candidates and choose. I don't think they should have, you know, which psychologist, I'm sure you could find psychologists to disagree about anybody's efficaciousness. Whoops, I didn't mean to do that. All right. Eyal, can you recommend any good books on the modern history of the Middle East? God. Not off the top of my head, but I do. I just need to go dig for them. So you remember there were those idiot guides to different things? The idiot's guide to, and there's an idiot's guide to the Middle East conflict, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that actually is very good. But a real history book, I have to go find, I have to get a list, so I'll try to prepare a list for one of the future shows. I see some news that some Iranian resistance forums are getting taken down by private U.S. companies because the Iranian regime requested they do so. What is appropriate for these companies to do here? Oh, God. What's appropriate to do is to take down the Iranian regime. If that's true, that is beneath contemptible. That is just horrific. And, you know, if they're afraid, then that is a failure of the U.S. government to protect them. And if they're just doing it because, well, it's the Iranian regime, then they should be morally condemned and banned. And, I mean, banned by us as individuals from using them. That is truly, truly horrible. So I hope that's not true, but it's despicable. Hi, YB. What is a nakba? People are calling for a nakba. A nakba, too. I don't understand some of it. Nakba is a disaster. Nakba is a catastrophe. That's what nakba means in Arabic. And what people are referring to in the nakba is 1948. The fact that 700,000 or so Palestinian Arabs in what became Israel left their homes. Some of them were, you know, were encouraged by the Israelis to leave their homes, but many of them just left their homes and abandoned what became Israel. And that is considered a great catastrophe, the nakba. And, you know, they are now living in Lebanon. Many of them are living in refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank. And they used to live in some of them are Jordan. And all over the Middle East there are Palestinians who left during the 1948, during the 1947-48 basically war of independence, Israeli war of independence. And that is the disaster. Disaster is not the UN resolution. The disaster is the fact that the Arabs lost that war. And as a consequence, 700,000 people lost their property, their homes. And the second, what people are calling for is a nakba too, you know, kind of right-wing Israelis who would like to basically kick out all the Palestinians from Gaza and probably the West Bank and basically, you know, send them out. So have a second out migration of Palestinians and some, you know, some, I think some Palestinians are embracing this as, look what's happening in Gaza, what they really want us to leave and abandon our property, abandon our homes and get out of here. And it's a nakba too. It's a second disaster. And they're thinking of the Hamas of the Palestinian defeat in Gaza as a second nakba. But it doesn't look like the Palestinians are going to leave. Nobody wants them for one. And Egypt, which has a border, has that border closed and has not allowed them in. So, you know, and the reality is that overwhelming majority of Israelis don't think that they should be expelled. And the reality is that in 1948, they weren't expelled. Most of them left. Left because they were told that the Arab armies were coming to save them and they would soon be able to come back to their homes because the Arabs would conquer it. Left because they didn't want to be in the middle of a war. Left because they were losing and they were part of the offensive war against the Jews and they were losing. So they ran away. And in other cases where refugees, where people run away and become refugees, they integrate into other societies. They integrate into the places that they run away to. And, you know, there are no German refugees in Poland or German refugees in Germany that are still waiting to go back home to Poland or German refugees in Germany that are waiting to go back to Czech Republic after they were kicked out at the end of World War II. There are millions and millions and millions of people who became refugees because they lost in wars and nobody assumes that they should be just a lot back to where they were. It's part of the consequence of losing a war. Don't start a war. Tom says, I was not surprised Taka Karsen is doing what he did. He's been a fan of Hungary's oban. This was a logical neb step. He's completely lost my respect. Yeah, I mean, I lost respect for Taka Karsen a long, long, long, long time ago, but I agree. It's completely consistent. It's not surprising at all. Christian says, going soon to Tbilisi, Georgia, I know you were there. Any personal recommendations, history, gastronomy, whatever. Yeah, I mean, Tbilisi's amazing. Try to get to know the local people. They're super friendly. Food is amazing. You know, go eat at restaurants and try the local food. Don't go to standard European restaurants. They go to Georgian restaurants. If you have a chance to go to the wine country, it's beautiful and they have really good wine. That's another thing you should do is taste the wines. They have really good wine and they have a fascinating history with wine and a fascinating, you know, fascinating and a beautiful wine country. Yeah, I mean, you know, a room's hotel is really, really good. These days I usually stay at the Marriott Hotel, which is good, although Marriott has just opened a new hotel, luxury hotel that I might try next time I'm there. Go to the old city. Hopefully, hire a private guide and have him take you around the city. It's a pretty cool place to visit. Steven Pettit asks, what are your thoughts and feelings on the Pledge of Allegiance and the Star Spangled Banner? I mean, I have no problem with it. I like the Pledge of Allegiance minus what they added in the 1950s, which is the God part. And the problem is I don't like children doing it. I don't think children should pledge allegiance to something they don't understand and they can't understand it. So something that if you're going to do, adults should do it. It shouldn't be something that children do. I like the Star Spangled Banner. I like the anthems. I think it reflects, you know, kind of the sense of life of Americans, the fighting spirit of America, the fighting spirit at least of their founders of America and the people who fought for independence. And I like it. I think it's something that it's a uniting feature of America. So I don't have a problem with Pledge of Allegiance and Star Spangled Banners. As long as America lives up to them to question whether it is. And as long as with the pledge you take out under God and as long as with the pledge you don't require children to do it. Children don't know enough to do it. You shouldn't train children to be patriots. You should train children about the nature of their country and if it's a pro-human life country they will see it and they will love it because it is such. Marx says, do pro-China western leaders and overseas Chinese bear more responsibility for China's acts against investors? They're lied about China's Marxism. Well, again, I'm not sure. I don't think China is Marxist. I think China is authoritarian, fascist, pragmatist. I don't think they're Marxist. There's no class consciousness. There's no class really stuff in China. I think, you know, for a long time they encouraged billionaires and stuff. So I don't think they were lied about Marxism but certainly they lied about and they still lie about the consequence of authoritarianism to wealth creation and the reality is that a authoritarian nature is the more they become authoritarian the less they can create wealth and if you invested in China under the assumption that you could make a lot of money because in spite of the fact that it was authoritarian and you were told that by your political and intellectual leaders then that is where they lied to you. Matthew, I feel conflicted about an upcoming windfall from a grandmother. I'm honestly close to. And how to think about earning everything on my own versus inherited money to get what I could earn on my own. I mean, yeah, I mean, I get it. On the other hand, it's a windfall, so what? I mean, it's not that you stole it. It's not that you took it from somebody else. You know, you're getting, you're lucky. Luck is part of life and it's not something to be avoided unless it comes to you. And if you want, think of putting it aside for something special, putting it aside for retirement, putting it aside for, I don't know, a contribution to the Iran book show or the Iranian Institute, put it aside for rainy day emergency stuff. Don't let it, you know, do whatever you need to do to not let it distort your motivation in terms of the work and the wealth creation that you do. But there's nothing to be conflicted about. You are earning a living. You should be proud of the earning that you're living. And hey, somebody handed you an envelope full of cash. Okay, cool. It's just one more thing. Buy something special with it. Spend it all at once or something so that it's done, it's over, it's gone. And then you can go back to, oh, I need to earn a living. Whatever it takes to psychologically help you. But yeah, I mean, don't feel, there's no guilt associated. There's no, as long as it doesn't demotivate you from doing the wealth creating work that you need to do, yeah, be happy that you got this extra money and you can do stuff with it. And you know, your grandmother or your grandfather, whoever worked hard to get it, and they chose to give it to you, they chose it. They won't cost. It's not some tax when fall. It's, you know, some subsidy. It's not a government subsidy. It's, no, somebody chose to do this, you know, because they value you and it's a response to the value. But look, if, you know, if accidentally, I don't know how you do this, if accidentally you win a lottery, you win a lottery, you know, you got the money. You don't. Now, you can't accidentally win a lottery, so maybe that doesn't apply. Usually, if you get a windfall, it's because somebody chose to give you a windfall, like an inheritance. And that's good. There's nothing unvirtuous about that. Tessa, I just visited the Churchill war rooms. Churchill speeches gave me chills. There's moral clarity and support. Wind wars. It certainly can. There's no question. Churchill inspired the British people to fight. He inspired the British people to stay focused on winning, in spite of, you know, being pushed to the brink and in spite of the pessimism of the age and of the justified pessimism that they were losing. He gave them moral courage. He gave them moral clarity. Absolutely. I mean, there's no doubt in my mind that Ronald Reagan's speeches ultimately brought down the Berlin Wall, helping it down when they did. And I think Churchill helped win the Second World War with his speeches. There's no question about that. I've been to the Churchill war rooms. It's a very moving experience. It's an enlightening experience. I mean, the conditions under which they had to function and then, of course, listening to those speeches. He was a great orator. And he had this unbelievable moral clarity. I wish he'd had the moral clarity around other political issues, but certainly around the war. He had it. He used it. And he communicated it. And I think he saved Britain. I think he's a huge hero. All right. Thank you guys. Really appreciate the support. Thanks to all the superchatters and all the questions. God, we've gone for an hour and a half, which is way more than... Anyway. So I appreciate it. And I will see you all tomorrow, about the same time for another one of the roundups. So remember, Jason Reigns, I'm pretty sure is this Thursday. And yeah, don't miss that one. It will be a lot of fun. Yes, Jason Reigns this Thursday. All right, everybody. Have a great rest of your week. See you tomorrow. Bye. Thank you.