 Welcome to a discussion of radical fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, laissez-faire capitalism, and individual rights. The Yaron Brooks Show starts now. Hey, I am back home. Hard to believe, but after doing these shows from, I can't even remember where, but not here, I know that. I'm finally back home, so hopefully the technology will work fine today. We're back on Facebook Live. You can catch us on my YouTube channel, YaronBrook, Y-A-R-O-N-B-R-O-K. And of course on the Blaze Radio Network, so I'm on all channels, full speed ahead, and video audio should all be great. I am actually in California. So yeah, for Thanksgiving of course. I flew in Wednesday just in time to celebrate Thanksgiving, one of the best holidays ever invented, a great holiday. Because what's Thanksgiving really about? It's about giving thanks for what's important in life, and it's about giving thanks to our ability to live as well as we do. It's to give thanks to the incredible, incredible wealth we all have as individuals. And I conclude here, even relatively poor people, because of the great producers of the world, we have electricity, we have running water, we have TVs in which we can go watch the football game, or the basketball game, or the latest movie, but more than that, you can stream anything you want. So what a world we live in, what a world of great innovation, and progress, and productive wealth, and it really is worth celebrating. Because if you think about Thanksgiving, what were they celebrating? Harvest and their ability to, you know, they're living well, and they're eating finally, right? The pilgrims, they have to suffering, and after, you know, crops that didn't really yield anything, they finally, finally now are producing, and this is really Thanksgiving. The new end called Thanksgiving, the producer's holiday. This is the time we celebrate our ability to produce, our ability to put food on the table, but more than food, to put Netflix on the television, to, you know, to be online, to create all the wonderful things that are in our world, and celebrate that, and really to live the good life, to live the good life. Thanksgiving is a time to celebrate and to cherish. Really, the, you know, how much, how much we have, you know, we have around us, the wealth we have around us, it's stunning, it's good to sit back and think. Just 250 years ago, we were all subsistence farmers, and most of us were, most of us were dying of starvation, and most of our kids died before they reached age 10, and we lived on, what, $3 a day or less? Most of us lived on less than $3 a day. So, to me, Thanksgiving at the end of the day is really a celebration of the great producers, of the people who made the modern world possible, who made us as wealthy, as rich, as, you know, as successful at life as we are today, and the wealth of opportunities that each one of us has today is just inconceivable to people 100 years ago, even 50 years ago, suddenly 250 years ago before the Industrial Revolution. So, I'm thankful to all that wealth, and really thankful to the people who made that wealth possible, because I don't take it for granted. You see, one of the things that people do is they take it for granted. They take whatever wealth their parents had, and they take that as the starting point, and everything's just up for grab. You can't take it for granted. Somebody has to produce it, somebody has to make it, somebody has to provide it. We log on to our computers, and the internet is just there. And if it's not there, we're ticked off, because we take it for granted. But somebody has to work on it, somebody has to produce it, somebody has to create it, even the internet. It, you know, we'll talk about net neutrality later, but net neutrality is an example of taking what exists for granted. Other people have created the infrastructure, and it's just here, so we get to abuse it. We get to take it. Instead of being thankful for it. Instead of having respect for what other people invested in the quality and standard of life that we have. So the things I am really thankful for is really our ability to live the kind of life we live today. And that is so dependent on all the great heroes, known and unknown, of production over the last 200 years. You know, all the people who made modern life possible, who invented indoor plumbing, who created a modern sewage system, who created, you know, Thomas Edison, who discovered what you could do with electricity, but then tried to commercialize it. And then there's all the people who actually succeeded in commercializing electricity, in spite of government's attempts to block it over and over and over again, all the time. And then there's all the engineers and the scientists who, you know, worked unbelievable hours and under unbelievable conditions in order to increase human knowledge, so that ultimately entrepreneurs could take that human knowledge and apply it to, I don't know, building the internet, let's say, or building such companies today that, again, it just seemed to just exist, like Facebook and Twitter. And, well, Twitter, I don't know, but, you know, Amazon and Google, well, what would life be like? I mean, we love to hate Google, but what would life be like without Google? Without Sege Brin and his co-founders who created this amazing, amazing company. So I'm thankful to all those entrepreneurs and inventors and creators and engineers and scientists, the people who build the world. And notice I have not mentioned politicians because I'm not thankful to them because all they do is try to get in the way. The last politicians I'm really thankful to, the last politicians I'm really thankful to are the founding fathers because they're the last worthy politicians. All right, what are you thankful for? What are you thankful for? Colin, you know, if you've got a great entrepreneur, Stuart on Facebook Live says, Carl Bosch, you commercialized synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, helping fight starvation, right? Great. I mean, I'm thankful right now in Southern California, really, every day of the year, wherever I travel. And thankful, I forget his name, the guy who invented air conditioning. I mean, that is so cool, you know, guy that invented air conditioning. So I'm thankful to those kind of people, the people who've invented and built and made stuff. Whoever was was like calling in and hung up, you can call in with an unrelated question. I will, I will take it. But so feel free to call in 888-900-3393-888-900-3399. Generally, the last segment of the second hour, I devote to a moment of reason. So you can call in with any question about anything. And feel free to do that last segment of the second hour. You can call in now and I might take your question or I might hold you off until then. But if you're interested in talking about things that you are thankful for and don't give me the cliches, right? We're all thankful to our family and friends and our coworkers and the people we love and respect and so on. Be original. Tell me who you're thankful for, you know, this wonderful Thanksgiving, the holiday of production that celebrates production, that celebrates, you know, not just material wealth, but the process of attaining material wealth. You know, so many people in our culture just take material wealth for granted. We need a holiday that says, stop. Think about the kind of effort that it took to create and to build and to make all the things that you take for granted, all the things that you consume on a daily basis, all the products that you use. So I'm incredibly thankful, for example, to Jeff Bessos for Amazon. I love Amazon, right? And partially why I love Amazon is because on Black Friday, I don't go to the mall. I can just sit at home in my pajamas and on my laptop and buy anything I want to buy. Anything I want to buy. How cool is that? So, you know, I love technology and I don't take it for granted. Somebody had to build this stuff up. I mean, I remember Amazon from the 90s, from its really early beginnings, all it did was sell books. All it did was sell books. And I remember thinking, these people are nuts. You can't build a business on just selling books. And then, and then they said, well, we're going to sell more than books. And I went, you know, because I'm, I'm, I'm, I pretend to be, I pretend to be a venture capitalist. I'm completely pathetic at it, but I pretend. And so I said, what are you going to sell? Well, we're going to sell everything. And I'm going like, yeah, right. What comparative advantage do you have at Amazon to sell everything when there's Walmart and there's Target and there's Sears and there's Costco and there's all these companies. They're going to launch websites and they're going to crush you. They are going to crush you. Yeah. Who is right about that? I was burnt so badly on that call. Oh my God. Amazon dominates, dominates all those legacy companies. It dominates everybody. And, you know, it's just, it's, it's, and I was completely utterly 100% unequivocally wrong. I would have never invested in Amazon and I didn't invest in Amazon. See, I actually shorted Amazon. I was, I was, I bought, put options on Amazon in 99. Now in 99, I was right because everything was overpriced. But I never understood the business model of Amazon and look at it today, dominates the world. I, everything, I buy everything on Amazon. The only thing I don't like about Amazon is that you have to pay sales taxes when you buy stuff. Right? That I don't like. Like you kind of deal with the government because the government was really going after them and you still have to. So, you know, the, the sudden vendors out there where you can still buy stuff and donate and they'll ship it to you and you don't have to pay sales tax. That's my one thing, knock on Amazon. Other than that, I mean, so, you know, so what are you thankful for? We're going to take a quick break. Then I'm going to take your calls about what you're thankful for. And the number is 888-900-3393. We'll be back after this break and you're listening to your run book show on the Blaze Radio Network. Stay clear. Alright, nobody's calling in to be thankful about anything. I don't know. It's, you know, we got callers but, but not about Thanksgiving. I don't know, maybe it's because it's a radio not passed. You've, you've already giving up on giving up on being thankful for anything. And you're moving on. That's fine. That's fine. But you know what? It's, it's maybe you did this some Thursday and Friday, sat back, really thought about it and really decided, you know, these are the things that I should be thankful for. And I bet you most people forget about the foundational, the foundations, what made the industrial revolution possible. I mean, we still call the great, the great benefactors of mankind. The greatest industrialists in human history. The 19th century industrialists, the Carnegie's, the Melons, the Rockefellers, the JP Morgan's bankers. We still call them rubber barons. Rubber barons, really? These are people who built America. They made America. You know, we build, we build statutes for politicians. We, we name streets after generals, but who actually made America possible? I mean, post founding fathers, who actually made the wealth possible, the influence possible, the jobs possible, the technology possible, everything that we take for granted in America, the cities possible, the railroads possible, the roads possible, everything possible. It was all made possible by the great entrepreneurs, the businessman knows so-called rubber barons. They were the people who made America possible. And they're the people we should be thankful for. And they're the people we should be thankful to. We should think about them, particularly given, particularly given that they are called rubber barons and our children are taught that they were bad guys, that they destroyed America. But there was no America before they came around. In 1776, America was a third-rate colony. One of the reasons the British didn't really fight. And by 1914, America had the strongest, most significant economy in the world. We were about to become the richest people in the world on a per capita basis. How did that happen? Because of politicians? Because of military leaders? Because of progressives? Because of who? No, it's because of the freedom that the founding fathers left us with that allowed great entrepreneurs, that allowed great business leaders to build America. And we denounced them in our history books, history books that are written by commies, that are written by commies, not written by anybody who understands what America is really about. So this is what your kids study. This is what they study in school. Barons, the greatest Americans who ever lived. And I consider those great entrepreneurs, the greatest Americans who ever lived. And we only know the names of a handful of them. And that's part of the tragedy. There were hundreds, there were thousands, there were tens of thousands of them. Building businesses all across the country, from San Francisco to New York, from Texas to Wisconsin. They were building America. And we don't study that. We don't appreciate them. But you know what, this Thanksgiving, I'm thankful to all of them. All right, we are going to have the three callers. The only one that is actually thankful to something is Jonathan. So we're going to start with Jonathan. Hey, Jonathan, how's it going? Hey, you're wrong. Great to be with you. And I'm thankful first and foremost to you and the Iran Institute for spreading reason and to the blaze for giving you a platform to do so. I hope that they do more in 2018 for you as well. We can hope. But I appreciate that. Thank you, Jonathan. My question is this, I mean, you've mentioned, you know, a lot of amazing inventors and entrepreneurs change our lives in terms of technology. And one of my great pleasures every morning is just having a nice woman give me a cup of coffee, you know, menial labor for lack of a better term. She always brightens that morning. So how is appropriate is it on this producer's holiday to kind of give thanks to the not so, you know, great entrepreneurs. Ryan Rand talked a lot about people in their own context being being great and being high achievers. So how appropriate do you think it is to kind of be thankful for the everyday Joe is the mean laborers, if you will, who make our lives better as well? Well, I think it's appropriate for the good ones. I mean, if somebody at the coffee shop is particularly good and, you know, they really make your day that morning because they give you the coffee with a smile and they, you know, they infuse what they do with with joy. I think it's absolutely appropriate. But at the end of the day, the amount of value that you as an individual get from the laborers is relatively small as compared to what you get from the great innovators. And if you have only a limited mental space for thank being thankful, right, I would start with the great innovators. And then I would boil it down to those manual labors who actually affect your life, like the woman who, you know, who gives you the coffee or the or the workman who are, you know, fixing up your condo right now or whatever they happen to be. So on a personal level, I will definitely do that. But I think it's funny to say I'm thankful to quote labor because labor is what we all do and labor. Everybody's a laborer in some extent. And the real the thing that makes labor productive, the thing that takes labor from subsistence farming to programming, you know, at Amazon are the great innovators, the great entrepreneurs and particularly in the world we live in. And you know this, Jonathan, because you talk about it quite a bit, they get so little credit right business gets so little credit. It's always under attack. And we'll talk about that when we talk talk later about antitrust and net neutrality always under attack. And as a consequence, I, I'm going to spend a disproportionate amount of time defending them and praising them, because I view myself as the only counter voice out there and labor everybody celebrate they even have a labor day when are we going to have a businessman day and entrepreneurs day and everybody gets to take a holiday for that. Right. And march down the streets of Chicago during entrepreneurs day. Imagine that. So I, you know, yes, I think for the people who touch your life, you should be thankful. And to the extent that certain laborers touch your life, you should be thankful to them. But I don't make a big deal out of it because I think they're ready made a big deal out of. And because I think the real people who move the world forward are disrespected so badly in the culture we live in. Well, thank you for all the great work. I'm going to check out iran.org. Have a terrific new year. Thanks, Jonathan. And that was Jonathan honing for Chicago, a good friend and a bring a reason and rationality the Fox News and God they need it. So thank you, Jonathan, for all the work you do to enlighten the people who watch Fox and Fox business to the ideas of real capitalism, not the kind of, you know, I don't know, what a down versions that that Fox and others so accustomed to. Okay, I'm going to take one more caller, a prepie from Pittsburgh. I'm not sure exactly how I guess it's prepie. I guess it's prepie. I don't know what it is. Hey, how's it going? Hi. So yeah, my question is not really related to Thanksgiving. All right. So my question was related to I've watched the UN Ransom to you and the Phil Donahue show. I think it was back in 1979. And then she said that money is not power in the political sense. Can you please explain that because we do see rich people all around us buying justice. Right? What? And I said that money is not power in the political sense. Yes. So this is the point. And so this is the point she's making political power is the power of a gun. It's the power of coercion. It's the power of force. You can't say no to a law. Once a law is passed, you either buy by it or you go to jail. A gun comes out and physical power pulls you away and forces you to do what the law says you have to do or you go to jail. That is the essence of political power. It's coercion. It's authority. It's force. Economic power, the dollar can't force you to do anything. You can choose not to use Amazon. You can choose to go to Walmart. You can choose not to be on Facebook. You can choose not to even use the Internet. You can choose to leave your employer and go to a different employer. So companies wealth gives you economic power, but it doesn't give you but economic power is not the power to cross. Economic power is the power to persuade to convince come trade with me, buy my products. Please, I'll even do a lot of marketing, but marketing can't brainwash you. Marketing can't force you. All marketing can do is induce you, but you're still in control. Whereas with government, it's not about inducement. Government, it's about you have to do this. So she's differentiating between political power, which is force and economic power, which is essentially voluntary. So you have rich people who all they can do with their money is encourage you to buy their products, but they can't force you to do it. Now. Throneism is when economic power is used in order to attain political power through special favors from government and regulations to protect you from competitors and so on. That she was against, but that is the problem with a limited government. All right, when we come back, we'll talk a little bit more about that and lots, lots, lots more to come. You're listening to your own book show here on the blaze radio network and we're going to go to a quick week. All right, there's one group, you know, we've been, we've been, I've been articulating that people are thankful towards. And there's one group I don't want to leave out. I don't want to leave out for a number of reasons, particularly because I know this will piss off so many people. But, you know, I'm really thankful to the bankers, the financiers, the venture capitalists, the investment bankers, the people who have really financed and made possible the modern world as we know it today. I'm thankful to the guy who meeting a stinky long head hippie Steve Jobs wrote him a check to make Apple possible. I'm thankful for JP Morgan, who saw the visionary, the visionary in US Steel in Carnegie and funded it. I'm thankful to all those people who made possible the funding of Google and Amazon, you know, because I wouldn't have funded them. Right. If I were venture capitalist, I would have passed on Amazon. So I'm thankful that other people are smarter than I am and didn't pass on Amazon and invested in Amazon so I can enjoy it today. And thankful to all those bankers who make small bank loans and make it possible for the plethora of businesses in my environment, in my community, that I can go and buy anything I want anywhere at any time of day. I mean, just think of all the wonderful things that you have around you that were made possible by some financier, by some banker, by some evil money lender, right? So I didn't want to, I didn't want to miss them out and primarily I didn't want to miss them out because I have a book, right, that celebrates them. And it's called in pursuit of wealth, the moral case for finance. In pursuit of wealth, the moral case for finance. It's with my co-author, Don Watkins. And where could you buy it? Well, of course you can buy it on Amazon. Amazon is actually the only place you can buy the book. And I encourage you all to go to Amazon and buy the book. You can get a paperback or you can get a Kindle edition. Kindle is only $3.99. You can get it for four bucks. You can get my latest book and it celebrates, celebrate the achievements of financiers. And it illustrates the profound, the profound, and I'm using profound on purpose, economic, cultural value that financiers provide to every one of your lives. Even those of you who hate bankers, even those of you who think finance is paper shuffling, whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not are benefiting enormously, enormously from the existence of these brilliant genius financiers and the stuff that they do, the activity they engage in. And if you want to understand that better, the book is called In Pursuit of Wealth, the moral case for finance. So just go to Amazon and put my name in. And you can get all my different books, just a list of them. And I'd buy them all for Christmas. Christmas is the next holiday we'll be talking about. Buy my books, hand them out to friends, family, workers, coworkers, the laborers at the Starbucks store who are doing such a good job. You know, everybody should get one of my books. Equal is unfair is another one that is very relevant to the world in which we live in right now. So I encourage you to do all that. Okay. If you want, if you want to tell me who you're thankful to, you can you can call in other nobody seems to be interested in that except for Jonathan. 888-900-3393-888-900-3393. But you can also call in with just a general question. I'm going to take one quick general question right now off topic. But but the segment to really do that is the last segment in the second hour, where we do a moment of reason where you can call in with anything. But we're going to take a call from Little Rock, Arkansas. James has some question about the military. Hey, James. Hello. Hello. Thanks. Thanks for having me on my show. Sorry to sorry to call off the topic and not not meant to like not realize it was for thankfulness stuff. I had been a late coming to the stream and hadn't heard when I called in. No problem. No problem. We'll take your question and see if I have an answer for it. All right. So I am. I followed you for a little bit and I feel that I think very similarly on many things, especially with regards to the Iran's Objectivism. But at the same time, I'm joining the military and I want to know, I know I'm going to be surrounded by people who think that service to one's country is a high like a high honor and that sort of thing. Yeah, I just I want to know how to kind of reconcile that or maybe even, you know, hear your take on it. So why are you joining the military? Let me ask you that engineering training and experience with it specifically what I want to work in. So I want to be an inventor and I want to I want to see how a specific item in the military works. Interesting. Okay. So are you joining? Are you going to be in combat or are you going to be kind of behind the scenes in this combat position? What's that? Say it again? Ground combat. Ground combat. You actually willing to risk your life in order to get the training and in order to see how this invention, I guess, works. Absolutely. Yeah. So, so I mean, look, I think, I think joining the military makes sense if our number of reasons one is that you've got a specific interest. And you're willing, you're consciously rationally willing to risk your life and you know there's a risk, whether it's small or large, there is a risk by joining the military, particularly in combat to your life in order to achieve the goal that you have set forward. And if you're doing it rationally, then it's appropriate. But it's also true that there is such a thing as of love of country which which justifies joining the military. But it has to be the right country. Right. So to the extent that America is still a free country, it's worthy to fight for that freedom. The challenge I find is that so many people that so many people don't understand what this country is about. If you truly understand what the country is about, then you can justify fighting for it. But if you don't really know what the country is about, you have this mishmash, barely understandable history, and you just love the country for some emotionalistic, empty reason, then then it's just emotionalistic and empty. It's it's meaningless. Patriotism is meaningless unless you know what it is you love about your country and that it's worthy of that love. Not every country, even America is under all circumstances worthy of love. And I would say today. America, there's a question mark about how worthy America should be is for love given given the rampant involvement of government in all of our lives, the decline of liberty and freedom, the attacks on free speech. The just the fact that the government is just out of control and that we as a people have completely lost the vision of the founding fathers and what make this country great. And then, of course, in the military, I'll just add this one point in the military. I don't recommend people join the military for one reason, one primary reason. And that is that I think the military has been treated almost treasonously by the last, I don't know, 10 presidents or something, the rules of engagement, the fact that they send you into combat with lawyers and with your two hands tied behind your back and inability to defend yourself properly and not giving you the tools to win the battle to win the war and to send you into being democracy to the world to build up Niger or to, you know, not win, not fight properly. To me, that's the biggest disincentive to joining the military. If I go into the military, I want to be given, I demand that I be given because I'm a US citizen and the government is responsible for protecting my rights. So the government should be, so the military should be giving all the tools, all the permissions, all the abilities to go out there and win and to protect the lives of the soldiers. And if it doesn't do that, then I think it's horrific and I think it makes being in the military much more dangerous than it needs to be. And I would not recommend it because of the rules of engagement. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, well, good luck. And I hope you achieve achieve the goal for which you're setting you're going into the military. And, you know, I think it's great that you've given it, you've given it real rational thoughts and you've come to this conclusion and hey, to some extent, in spite of all the rules of engagement, in spite of everything that, you know, the fact that our politicians trying to make the military as impotent as possible, you'll still be working out there to help protect your liberty and my liberty. And for that, I am thankful and grateful. So thanks, James. All right, thank you very much. My pleasure. Good to talk to you. All right, we're going to take a quick break here. And when we come back, we've actually got some people want to be thankful about stuff. So, cool. So we're going to take a quick break now. You're listening to your own book show, The Blaze Radio Network, and we'll be right back. Be clear. Is the Huron Brook show. The Blaze Radio Network. We're talking about being thankful today. It is Thanksgiving after all two days after Thanksgiving. But you know what? This is the day my radio shows on. So what can I do? And I articulated the case of being thankful to the producers, the inventors, the engineers, the scientists, even to the financiers who made the modern world possible. But you know, given their ass call, I'm also thankful for those men and women who have defended liberty and freedom all over the world in spite of the politicians and often the generals who try to hamper their ability to do so. So I'm thankful to them. Most of them should come home. There's only so many threats to liberty that really exists out there. But it's not their fault that they're being deployed to ridiculous places for ridiculous missions in ways that they cannot actually do anything. That's the politicians and the generals fault. So I blame them. All right, but we've got a bunch of callers who are suddenly interested in being thankful on Thanksgiving and sharing that with us. So Mark, in Michigan, I guess, not a city, but a state, Michigan. Hey, how's it going? Hey, you're on. Hey. Yeah. Yeah. So I wanted to say how I'm thankful for my parents. So this is a producer's holiday and both my parents, I think are very kind of productive people. They're computer professionals. They looked around back in the 70s and 80s when they were starting their careers, saw computers as the next big thing. And they both have very good careers making businesses more productive, one in robotic manufacturing and other. Oh, he's killing jobs. That's so good. Small business. Yeah, but they made the output rise dramatically. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Yeah, that's great. I think that's absolutely right. I think one of the things that we should be is objective about our own parents and not all parents deserve thank yous, but some do. And particularly those who are productive, particularly those who work hard, particularly those who have helped us gain the kind of values that are necessary for us to be good human beings and who've supported that. So yeah, I think that's fantastic that your parents are being so productive that they recognize the computer revolution when it was happening and, you know, took advantage of that and turned out to be so productive in that field. So that's great. And all of us should look for our parents. I mean, those who are productive parents, not all parents are productive, not all parents are worthy. You have worthy parents. That's that's fantastic. Thank you, Mark. Yeah, thank you. Sure. Good day. Sure. I mean, my father was an incredibly productive doctor. So medical doctor under socialized medical system. And I don't know anybody. I've never met anybody in my life who worked harder than my father. And and, you know, made a living made a decent living, not rich, not wealthy, not not because you can't in a socialist system. But but was an incredibly good doctor in spite of in spite of the system under which he worked. One of my one of the reasons I so resent socialized medicine is I've lived it. I've lived it. I know what's about. Okay, we got Cameron in Katie, Texas and actually nowhere Katie, Texas is it's like not far from Houston. Hey, Cameron. Hey, you're on. How's it going? I'm good. I'm good. So I just wanted to take a moment out of my day to be thankful for an art gallery called Quint Cordair Fine Art. I think you're familiar with it. Sure. And as a college student, I couldn't help but sometimes a little bit down, especially now during final season. So whenever I feel down, I always go to Quint Cordair, just the website and just look at all the sculptures and paintings. And I feel inspired because all the sculptures and paintings are so utterly human. But the reason why that they're specialist because they're not they're human in a way that makes that because humans as they can and should be. Yep. And whenever I see it, I just I always want to make those paintings and sculptures real. Well, that's great. That's a great thing to be thankful for. And really, you know, the broader point is to be thankful to romantic art and to the artist who created be thankful for all the great art that has been created throughout the many centuries in spite of hardships, in spite of of societies that didn't respect that art and thankful to the people who today, in spite of the fact that our society doesn't always. Respect romantic art is still producing romantic art and still making it and inspiring us because when you look at great art, it inspires you it provides you with the emotional fuel with the emotional and spiritual fuel necessary to combat any everything and anything. And I don't think I could do my job. I know I couldn't do my job. I know I couldn't wouldn't have the energy wouldn't have the vitality to to go out into the world and do everything that I do being Poland last week and being. London the week before that and Wyoming the week before that and Atlanta before the week before that, if not for surrounding myself with great art and great artists and the spirit, the spirit that that they provide me. So absolutely great observation Cameron. Thank you for pointing that out. I you can really appreciate the production and all of that without being able to take some time off and read a great novel and look at great paintings and listen to great music and and you must yourself in in a in a spirit of benevolence and positive and energy and excitement and in a reflection of what is possible in the world what is really, really possible in the world. All right, as you probably noticed, you know, those of you who are watching this live streamed on Facebook and on YouTube. I am at home. Those of you who are on the blaze radio network. Yes, I am home. I'm Southern California. I've got my regular equipment. I'm not panicking because the connection might might not work. It's good to be home. I'll be home for the next few weeks and then I'm off for a new adventure. But I will tell you more about that adventure as as we approach the time. The time, you know, in January, I'll let you know about it in January because that's when we're going to embark on the new adventure. All right, let's see we have we're going to take one more caller we've got I think we've got enough time before the break. Mayanak who called last week I think wants to talk about finance go ahead. Hi there you're on. Thank you for taking my call again speak to you again. Thanks for calling. I guess in terms of, yeah, in terms of being thankful, I was going to say that I'm actually thankful for lawyers around the world. Oh, my God. Oh, not lawyers. Exactly. Well, I work in litigation support so they do make way. Okay, okay. I was going to say in light of your book, the moral defense of wealth. My question was, why, why is it that socialists insist that those who have done well and managed to become wealthy have done so by exploiting people and exploiting the poor, especially. Well, I mean, it depends on which socialist I mean the Marxist believe that because for Marx. Every act of production is fundamentally an act of of muscle. So he's a materialist. So the human mind, human innovation, the brain, if you will, but the mind that reason rationality have no role in production, all that is being produced is being produced by muscle. That's all he can see. So he is living in the middle of the 19th century with the mentality of somebody in the dark ages. Now, you could argue Marx still had an excuse because he was in the 19th century. But imagine today, anybody who thinks that all all production happens through muscle in the age of computers and the internet and biotech and with the fact that values come from the human mind is so blatantly obvious. I think in the modern time it's it's more to do with envy. It's more to do with the just just hatred of the good for being the good, which is what I meant to find the envy as it's also a lack of a real understanding. So it's a certain sense of inferiority and impotence as you know when faced with the genius that that are the great producers and the great financiers and the great innovators out there. I think that I think these people feel impotence and they lash out. It's a resentment for wealth and success. It's again, tinged with ignorance and a lack of understanding, but but they don't look fun to standing. They are motivated by the envy just to rip down and destroy. Two minutes. Does that make sense? More. Yeah, it does. I couldn't agree more. Yeah. So it's it's sad. I mean, there's a lot to say about that topic and I ran talks a lot about kind of the motivation of the left and the socialist. But I think the primary motivation is envy and impotence. It's their lack of self-esteem. It's the feeling of incompetence as compared to these giants that they can't handle. Let me just say about lawyers. One thing. Yeah, I mean, I'm thankful to some lawyers, but we have way too many lawyers because we have way too many rules and laws. And we have way too much litigation and we have way too big of a government and and and we have way too many lawyers in politics who exploit the system. Talk about cronyism. Is there any more crony in industry than lawyers? I mean, most legislatures in politics are lawyers. Most politicians are lawyers and they have the most to gain by the complexity and the number of laws that we have today on the book. So I'm thankful to some lawyers, those lawyers in particular, a place like Institute for Justice and places like that where they are defending my individual rights, where they're defending my right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. Those are the lawyers I admire respect and thankful to, but too many lawyers are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Right. You know, I'm on every Saturday from nine to 11 Pacific time noon to two Eastern time on Facebook live. And of course on the blaze radio network. Tell your friends 10 and and, you know, grow the community will be back after the top of the hour news break that we're heading into right now. Welcome to a discussion of radical fundamental principles of freedom, rational self interest, laser their capitalism and individual rights. The Iran Brooks show starts now. Everybody happy Thanksgiving and we spent the first hour talking about people we were thankful for plus miscellaneous other topics. And you know, I forgot one group of people I'm really thankful for and I'll start the hour with that. And that's you guys who who listen to my show on a regular basis, whether it's live on the blaze radio, whether it's on Facebook live, whether it's on YouTube or whether it's on one of the podcasting apps and you're not listening live, but you will listen at some point down the road. So thank you all for being a part of the Iran Brooks show community. I guess that we're forming here and and creating and I enjoy interacting with you. Most of you there were a few trolls earlier on on YouTube that no human being should ever be exposed to their garbage. But other than that, you guys are great. So thank you all for being here for supporting the show and particularly those. I want to thank particularly those people who are supporting me on Patreon. I have a Patreon account where you can all go and support the show financially. So thank you all who have done that and those of you who haven't yet gone to Patreon and supported the show. You can do $2 a month as little as that. You should be ashamed of yourself and this Thanksgiving, this holiday season when we all pay value for value, engage in trade, you should all go to Patreon and support the show. So thank you all guys for supporting me, for supporting these ideas and for trying to get out the ideas of objectivism, the ideas of Iran, the ideas of reason, of rational self-interest, of individual rights and capitalism, the ideas that should be at the foundation of American society, helping get those out to the world, help get those out to the people who need them, primarily young people. So help me do that. Thank you to the extent that you're helping me. Go help me to the extent that you're not helping me. There's still time to save yourselves before Christmas, before the end of the year. All right, I wanted to shift a little bit now to talking about two topics today in the news right now. One is net neutrality. The FCC is considering and probably will, at the middle of December, reverse course on the Obama era policy of net neutrality, the FCC's rules about net neutrality. Now I know this is boring, but you can't all leave because we're going to get a little economic theory here. Well, not really economic. Policy wonky. But I promise to try to make it interesting for you so don't leave, right? I want to talk about that. I want to talk a little bit about antitrust, again a little wonky, but I think hopefully we can make this entertaining as well. Talk about antitrust. If this time, I'm hoping this time to talk about what happened in Egypt and a few interesting topics that relate to the Middle East, which I think is quite important. And also, what the hell? We've got tax reform coming down the pipe. The Senate will probably vote on this this coming week, so we should probably talk about that. So let's start with this net neutrality stuff, right? Net neutrality. You probably heard about it. You probably tune out when you hear about it. But this is the thing. It's going to affect you because I don't know of a single human being today in America or most human beings in the world who don't use the Internet. And this is going to have a direct impact on our use of the Internet. And it's more than that. It's our use of Netflix and what we see on television because the lines between television and the Internet are blurring. And this has both to do with net neutrality and with this antitrust lawsuit that the so-called free market justice department of the Trump is launching against AT&T and Time Warner Moja. So all this stuff is really messed up and all kind of scrunched up together and all related. It's all related and it all has a direct effect on you, on me, on our kids, on our grandkids, but on us right now in our lives every single day because we are consumers of the Internet every single day. And this is going to have as already had and will have a direct impact. Now what is, well, what is net neutrality? So net neutrality is the idea that the providers of the cables that come into your house or the airwaves, the bandwidth that you get on your phone. So AT&T and Verizon when it comes to phone, the cable companies when it comes to cable, even direct TV potentially, they have to give equal access to everybody who goes onto the Internet. They have to make it possible for anybody who puts stuff up on the Internet. They have to make that, let's say somebody puts up a new website or somebody starts a new streaming service, audio, video, whatever. They have to treat all producers of content and deliverers of services on the Internet. They have to treat them equally. They have to not interfere with the delivery of services. That's the idea of net neutrality. It's the idea that Internet service providers, including cable companies, wireless providers, should treat all Internet traffic equally, equally. Let me be really clear. This is government intervention into an area that government has no big capital and business in. Absolutely no business in if Internet service providers choose to be net neutral. They can be. If they choose not to and there's an advantage to being net neutral, then they will have an uncompetitive disadvantage. There is no business of the government to tell cable companies or wireless companies how to manage the traffic on their cables or in their spectrum. None of the government's business. Now, so this is government regulation. This is government control. Look, whenever there's a proposal for the government to do something, one has to ask oneself, is this pro-liberty or against-liberty? Not, is this good for the economy? Not, is this good for the Internet? That's secondary. And actually, if you're pro-liberty, if you understand what liberty actually means, that's always good for the economy and good for the Internet. But it's often not understood exactly how. But liberty is freedom. The absence of force over voluntary transactions. Every law needs to be questioned. Does this move us towards more freedom? Less government intervention? Less force? Less control? Or does this move us away from that? Or another way of looking at this. Does this law protect an individual right? Or does it violate it? What individual right does net neutrality as law or as regulation protect? None. None. It is a form of creating. It is a form of creating a right to Internet. A right to broadband. A right to receiving Internet at equal speeds. You don't have a right to any of that stuff. You can't have a right to other people's things. All you have a right to when it comes to Internet is the right to contract with whatever Internet provider you choose to to get whatever services you choose to get at the price that they're willing to sell them out to you. You don't have a right to get it at a certain speed at a certain price dictated by the government. Historically, the Internet has been neutral because it was Internet service providers interests to be neutral. And they didn't favor some over the others. They provided you with everything at about the same speed, but it's become more and more difficult to do so. You know, the 50% of all Internet traffic today is basically consumed by two entities by Netflix and by YouTube because the streaming video, which is very hungry for bandwidth. And because so many of us consume so many hours of cat videos, cat videos are really the problem in the world as today. So what Internet providers, some of them would like to do, not all of them, is to provide certain priorities to certain companies. Netflix gets a priority. They pay extra and they get a priority that they get to deliver. They content to you at some guaranteed speed. And if that slows down everybody else, so be it. It slows down everybody else. The Internet, let me just say something. The Internet is what people make of it under freedom. The only job of government in the Internet is to protect us from fraud as to make sure property rights are not violated. It's none of the government's business to establish what kind of business model works on the Internet or doesn't work on the Internet. It's not the government's job to decide what the quality of information or the quality of anything is on the Internet. That's our job as consumers. We get to decide, not the government and the companies get to decide. All involuntary trade and those business models that make sense will work and those that don't, no. So there was a period in which some of these Internet providers were floating with the idea of providing, in a sense, special access to things like Netflix. But more than just Netflix, think about emergency services, healthcare, like these bands that people have, monitors that they have on them that can alert a medical professional if there's a problem with their body. One of the things that startups that did that wanted from the Internet companies was they wanted to be guaranteed and they were willing to pay for immediacy because these medical emergencies and they need immediacy. And so they wanted preference in terms of the Internet traffic and ISPs were willing to do that. But then a lot of the big guys, a lot of the big Internet companies said, well, wait a minute, we don't want to have our content, we don't have to compete in order to get our content on there. We don't have to pay more than Netflix in order to get, we want equal access. It's always been that way, as if the way it's always been has to be continued. So they lobbied and it was interesting. President Obama got behind this net neutrality and under Obama, the FCC passed net neutrality laws and basically determined that ISPs, Internet service providers were public utilities. They were equal to the old phone companies. Of course, the government should have never, ever, ever regulated the old phone companies. The whole idea of an FCC is wrong. There shouldn't even be an FCC. They shouldn't be in the business of regulating any of it. But okay, but the idea of treating Internet ISPs, Internet service providers as telephone companies with the complete, I mean, it's absurd. The Internet is so complex as compared to a phone company that has one stream voice. That's it. And this allowed them theoretically to set prices to determine what content was appropriate. It gave them access to regulating every aspect of the Internet. They promised not to do it. They promised they would never do it. But we know those are government promises, empty regulators promises, meaningless. All right, I'm past due for a break. So again, I'm thankful to all of you guys for listening, watching, participating, supporting me on Patreon. And please, you know, support the Blaze. I'm thankful to the Blaze for having me on as a host and letting me do this show. So thank you to the Blaze. And hopefully you guys, you know, listen, listen to the show on theblaze.com slash radio to show your gratitude. All right, we're going to take a break. You're listening to your own book show on the Blaze radio network. Into the Iran book show. Hey, so we're talking about net neutrality. And let me just say, if you're for liberty, you should be against government interference. You should allow ISPs to discriminate. Yes, you should allow ISPs to decide how much to charge websites, how much to charge service providers or not. But they get to make a decision on how to use their fiber or their broadband, not you, not the government. So would I like them to treat everybody the same? Yes. But that's just my preference. I don't have a way to use government force in order to achieve my preference. Neither do you, neither does the FCC, neither does President Trump, neither does anybody or President Obama in this case, more appropriately. So no, I am for dismantling the FCC one regulation at a time, getting rid of their controls on ISPs and internet companies and so on. And if it turns out that I don't know, one of the ISPs says we don't like anything that smacks of free market right wing stuff. And we're going to stop broadcasting that then they'll stop broadcasting that. All right, then you'll have to go to some other speed to get the stuff that you like. You have no right to content. You have no right to be provided with the service. You have no right to be provided with anything other than the only right you have is to be left alone, to be protected from those who would use force against us, against you. Sorry. You know, Stuart's saying, some libertarians say, some libertarians say, I'd oppose net neutrality, but local regulations give monopolies to ISPs so we need more regulations in the form net neutrality to rein in ISPs. No, you don't solve regulatory problems by creating more regulatory problems. You go fight the regulations. If people have local monopolies, fight the local monopolies. So it's this is how we get statism as it is today. There's a regulation we don't like. There's everybody has more than one ISP because you have your phone. You're getting broadband on your phone. You've got a cable. You theoretically you could get DSL theoretically you can get satellite internet. There is competition even on ISPs and that competition is going to intensify. Without net neutrality. So with net neutrality since Obama put put this rule in place the FCC under Obama put this rule in place. Investment in broadband has gone down. Yeah, I'm not going to invest in broadband if I don't get a control pricing over my lines. So if you want investment, if you want competition, if you want a variety of different ways in which to access the amazing internet that we have, then you want ISPs to have complete pricing control. But you'd never ever increase government power in order to solve a problem of too much government power. Now in this context, let me just say the government did not invent the internet. The government did not invent the internet. It was DARPA plus a bunch of university professors who invented the network that then became the internet. Universities also exist in private markets. So the internet would have existed whether there was a government intervention or not. And while DARPA is a government entity is that it's a defense department and it's a legitimate function of government. But the idea that the internet was invented by government by government is ludicrous. It's just not true, right? It's it's it's repeated many, many times and there's some legitimacy to it in the sense that the universities are public universities and DARPA was a government is is a government entity. But the idea that it wouldn't happen without government is ludicrous. Government sucks out all the capital from our economy and once in a while does something worthwhile. But the internet as we know it today was a consequence of the fact of the commercialization that happened. On top of this network that was established at primarily the universities level hooked in with the defense department. And that's great. That's great. So no, the government has no rights over it. The government doesn't regulate it. The government doesn't get to control it. This is a free market. If those those service at those universities, the hubs of the internet should be sold off. The government should have public entity should have nothing to do with the internet period. It doesn't matter that the fact is that that certain certain engineering feats or certain science was discovered using during the government investment in the Apollo project doesn't give the government the right now to regulate all technology. The government should slay their hands off. Let this develop organically. Don't we believe in markets? I thought we believed in markets. I thought people believed in markets now. The government intervenes to get so let's fight those places where the government intervenes. You don't secure rights by violating rights. You don't secure freedom by violating freedom. It's well, I was going to give an analogy, but the analogy would have caused more heart attacks and heartburn out there than I wish to engage in right now. Now this relates to, you know, another issue, right? There's this antitrust. I don't know if you're familiar with this. The Justice Department and the Trump, the so-called free market president is suing AT&T and Time Warner against it to try to stop. Just to try to stop the merge of AT&T and Time Warner. This is a vertical integration. It's not forming a so-called monopoly because nothing Time Warner and AT&T do is actually overlapping. They're completely separate industries, right? Time Warner produces content. AT&T delivers the content. The worry here is that they will discriminate and give AT&T better terms on the content produced by Time Warner than they will give a competition. So what? Again, why is it the business of government to decide under what terms I do business with anybody else? It's none of their business. Now I am a huge opponent, and this is what makes me radical even in free market circles. Huge opponent of antitrust laws. I don't believe in antitrust laws. I believe in the markets. I believe if you can attain a huge market position, good for you. I believe that if you can merge a number of companies together and create a big old company, good for you. And you know what? If you're too big, then you will fail. Not too big to fail. If you're too big, you will fail. There's economies of scale, and they're diseconomies of scale. They're disadvantages to size. You don't have a right to not have competition or to have competing goods provided to you or to get stuff at a price that you deem reasonable. You don't have a right to any of these things. These are not rights. These are violations of rights. I mean, I can say a lot about antitrust laws because they're the worst laws in the books today. I mean, the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act are some of the worst violations of our liberties of our freedoms ever invented. And the Justice Department is using these acts to go after a legitimate merger, a legitimate business decision. There's no fraud. There's no hiding. There's no deception. There's no stealing. There's no fevery. There's nothing wrong with this. Get your hands off of my business. This is all about rights. It's not about a deal. It's not about dealmaking, Donald Trump. Government is about protecting rights. Period. 10. Keep your hands off of my business. All right, we're going to take a break. You're listening to your own book show on the Blaze Radio Network. You're clear. Hey, everybody. I don't know. I think I need a three-hour show, maybe a six-hour show because every time I think I don't have enough content to fill a show, you know, and I'm running out of time and I'm not even going to get us on the topics I plan. But let me, I want to finish on this because somebody on YouTube is making this comment. It's bad for consumers. I don't care. And the government shouldn't care. The government's job is not to protect consumers. The government has no business in consumer protection, except to protect you from fraud and force. Consumers have nothing to do with this. What about producers? Everybody who's a consumer is also a producer, or most of us are anyway, because we have to produce enough to consume. But it's irrelevant. Whether it's good or not for consumers is irrelevant. This is why I hate antitrust laws, because they set the consumers as some kind of utilitarian standard and we have to figure out what's good for consumers. How do we know what's good for consumers? Net neutrality does not benefit all consumers, because if there's less investment in bandwidth, then I will suffer if I have limited bandwidth today, because they're not going to invest, and I'm not going to get as good as bandwidth in the future. But that's not the point. It's not the point. You have no right to a particular bandwidth. You have no right to get at a particular price. You have no right to consume anything that you haven't produced yourself. And if you go out there and you buy stuff, it's completely up to the producer how much he sells it for, and who he sells it for. And the idea that any of you, or anybody at the FCC, or any central planner knows what the future is going to be like, what the future is going to determine in terms of innovations and progress of what impact this law or that law will have is absurd. This is part of why government should just stay out of it, because you can't predict it. It's impossible to predict. They didn't predict the internet. It's not like the government set out to create the internet. They accidentally create the internet. You do not have the general welfare clause in the Constitution. It's not about what we today perceive as the general welfare. The general welfare clause was about protecting the individual rights of all Americans, not of some, not at the exclusion of some. It was about protecting everybody. And government needs to lay their hands off of any economic decision, any business decision, unless there's fraud involved, unless there's coercion somehow involved. And part of the reason is, other than it's not protecting rights, is that they can't predict the future. They don't know what markets will come up with. Yeah, there might be some bottleneck of the internet. And because of that bottleneck, some genius might come up with an intervention that changes everything as we know it. Who knows? It's not me to speculate. It's not the chairman of the FCCs to speculate. You can speculate if you want, but at your own time, at your own dime without a gun pointing at my head, telling me that in the general welfare we should do X and Y. I wish, I really wish that the founding fathers had not included a general welfare clause in the Constitution because it's so open to misinterpretation. And anytime you talk about the public interest, the common good, the good of the nation, America's interest, you're opening yourselves up to a disaster. Yeah, Stuart has a great quote from Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt said, the public be damned. I'm working for my shareholders. Now, of course to work for your stockholders, you have to care about the public because they're the consumers and that's how you make money for your shareholders. But your primary is not consumers. But again, that's a businessman. The business could have said, I only care about consumers. I don't care. It's his voluntary decision. But the government has no business. Government has no business. Now, people say, but everybody uses the internet. Yeah, everybody uses the internet. Everybody consumes health care. Everybody eats. Everybody sleeps. Maybe the government, we should have a sleep police dictating how I sleep because everybody sleeps. The government, everybody has health care, so we should have a right to health care. The government needs an education and gets an education, which have a right to education. No, rights about freedoms of actions. You cannot have a right to my stuff. You cannot have a right to my money. You cannot have a right to my services. You cannot have a right to my time. All you have a right to is live your life as you see fit free of coercion. That's it. The rights are there so that you can pursue the rational values necessary for your own success as a human being. Own success as a human being. You do not make decisions make sense. Some fictitious hype, you know, a made up utility function about what's good for society because there is no such thing as society. All they are individuals and therefore all we do is protect the rights of individuals to live their life. We protect their freedoms and leave them alone. All right. You know, there's a lot to say about this. There's a lot to say about anti-trust. I'll have to do a whole show about anti-trust. I want to say something about Egypt. Well, yeah, there's a few things I want to say about foreign policy, which we'll do now and we'll spill into. So those of you who call us, Skyline, I'm not going to get to you today, buddy. Yeah, so sorry about that. I think I'm pronouncing that right. Who's from Miami and originally from Brazil by his first by his name. I will get to you after the next break. So, so stay on. But Skyline, I'm sorry, we're not going to be able to make it. Let's see. Yeah, I want to say something about Egypt. What happened in Egypt? You probably know ISIS went into a mosque in Egypt and killed 305 people just slaughtered them butcher them. I mean, I don't know if you've seen the stories about it. They just women, children. Oh my God. And just just a massacre. Wave one of them at least was waving a ISIS flag and this is ISIS is the MO. But what's interesting, of course, is that we're seeing Muslims killing Muslims here. And and that makes it somewhat interesting. But also to me is indicating how desperate and how weak ISIS is at this point. To the extent that what they're trying to do. I don't know what they're trying to do, but they're trying to turn the whole Muslim world against them on top of everybody else. Who did they kill? They killed practices of the Sufi. It's not a it's not it's an interpretation of Islam. The Sufis are typically mystics. They're typically passive. They're typically pacifist or relatively pacifist. They are they they shun materialism. They're mystics. They sit around and you know, they they they yearn for the afterlife for the perfect world that comes later on. They are they have had periods where they've dominated Islam more so and other periods where they've dominated Islam less. They're very popular in Islam today, but they're certainly not a majority. They are just to make things interesting. They are Shiite Sufis and they are Sunni Sufis, but mostly they are Sunnis. But these are they they're considered by ISIS. They're considered heretical because they missed because the form in which they practice their Islam is considered heretical. So they're not, for example, Sufis accept the state. They're not rebellious against the state, whether it's Egypt or whether any one of these countries they live under. They just accept it. That's this world. Who cares about this world, right? What what for the for the Sufis is important is the afterlife. It's the next world. This world they're willing to tolerate anything. They're not going to rise up against the state and they're an anathema to ISIS, which is rebelling against existing Muslim states, which is advocating for an overthrow of existing states in the name of, you know, Akhalifat ruled by Sharia law, the strictest interpretation of Sharia law. And the Sufi support there for the government of Egypt. And here comes ISIS and just slaughtered 305 of them, 100 injured women, children, babies, everything. And to me, this indicates a weakness, right? Because you would think that the primary focus of ISIS would be to kill infidels, real infidels, right? To kill Europeans, Americans, to kill Jews, to kill. Here it's killing, in a sense, their own Muslims. You know, what are they going to achieve by this other than greater wrath of the Egyptian of the Egyptian military and a greater number of Egyptians hating their guts? I mean, one of the great, one of the, one of the, one of the things to be thankful for is the fact that our enemies, ISIS and al-Qaeda are just so damn stupid. The idiots, they have no strategy. They're weak when it comes to strategy. And as a consequence, they focus on the wrong things, they invest in the wrong things. And, you know, they, Islam could actually take over Europe if it wasn't violent. That's the thing about it, right? If it was just peacefully smuggled in, it could probably take Europe. But its violence is probably going to result in a real counteraction. And this kind of violence is going to cause a counteraction in the Muslim world, which is, which could annihilate them, which could crush them, which is a good thing for us, I guess. Two other found policy things quickly before we take a break and then we'll go to Joao who wants to talk about Brazil. One is the Kurds. The Kurds in Syria and in Iraq have been friendly to the United States and to Israel for dozens of years. They were the only parts of the Iraqi society that completely supported the Americans when the U.S. invaded Iraq. They have supported, they have tried to fight ISIS and they have been very successful in fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria. And they have, they've been fighting the Assad regime. So they've both fought Hezbollah and the radicals, not the kind of nuts on the Shiite side and the nuts on the Sunni side. They've fought them both and been our allies in every respect. They're relatively speaking for the Middle East, individualistic and freedom-respecting, it's in the Middle East. Yeah, I'm exaggerating a little bit, right? So what do we do? What is U.S. policy? Stab them in the back or at least turn our back to them. We objected violently to the attempt of the Kurds in Iraq to establish their own independence from the barbaric regime in Baghdad. And now we are stopping any help to the Kurds in Syria. Why? In order to appease the Turks who are moving significantly to become our enemy, are moving significantly to become more and more Islam-mists. And even though they're part of NATO, they're going to become Islam-mists. And the Iraqi government, which is in the hands basically of Iran, our biggest enemy in the Middle East. So the Trump administration, in the name I guess of America First, is dramatically turning its back on America's number one ally in that part in Syria, Iraq region, which are the Kurds. And this is again what I've claimed all along. Donald Trump wouldn't know what America First looks like if it bit him in the face. Finally, last little point of foreign policy, which is just of interest, is on Monday will be the 70th anniversary of the U.N. resolution to establish the State of Israel on November 29, 1947. The Jews of Palestine at the time, which was under British rule, went out into streets and celebrated and danced all night because they were granted by the U.N. a tiny little sliver of land. Tiny little sliver of land. Much smaller than Israel today. Much smaller than Israel, even pre-67. And they celebrated. The Palestinians spent the night arming themselves to the teeth, resolving to kill every Jew they could find, and launched a war against the Jews the next day. At that day, the Palestinians renounced any right they might have to their own state. They renounced any right they might have to any sympathy. They were granted a state instead of celebrating that they chose to engage in violence in their attempt to kill as many Jews as they could. And Israel since then has been since then and even previously arguably has been engaged in a war of self-defense. This is one of many aspects that makes Israel the just party in this conflict and the Palestinians, the bad guys in the conflict. All right, we're going to take a quick break here. When we come back, we're going to talk to Joao. He's going to teach me how to pronounce his name when he gets on. You're listening to your own book show on the Blaze radio network. We're in our last segment. It's actually a short segment because I went over a little bit before. There's a lot I could say about the topic I just introduced about Kurds and about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Suddenly, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict we could talk hours about and I know something about. I'll just say Israel's in the right, the Palestinians in the wrong, and we'll talk about it sometime in the future. All right, we're going to go to, you're going to have to tell me how to pronounce your name because in Miami because... All right. How do you do it? Can you hear me now? Yeah. Okay, my name is Joao. Joao. You said it right. Yeah, I got it right. I've been to Brazil often enough, I guess, to have encountered some Joao's in the past. So what's up? I bet. So yeah, I was watching this video of yours when you were in England. Actually, that video went kind of viral in Brazil. It was that two Chinese kids making two bucks a day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if you're aware that it went viral in Brazil. Are you aware of it? I think so. I think I am aware that it went viral in Brazil. Generally, I'm quite popular in Brazil. So on Facebook, you know, most of my followers on Facebook are from the U.S. but number two by far is Brazil. And number three is Poland. Oh yeah. So there's this Facebook page in Brazil called iPhone Socialist. So they're like this comic page and they just shared your video. Oh, great. And it just went viral. Yeah. So anyway, so I got very interested because in that same speech, or I don't know if that was when you were in Korea, you said Brazil, you said you had a hard time speaking in Western Europe, but you had a lot of attention in Eastern Europe. And then you mentioned Brazil. You said Brazil was some sort of a hotbed for libertarianism or economic liberalism. And so I was actually asking you if you're aware of the next year, Brazil was having the presidential election. Yes. And in the last four terms, so 16 years, actually you could even add two more terms on the last six terms, we've had socialists in power in Brazil. They were declared socialists. Yeah. So then now the socialists, they bankrupted the country and then people are looking to the other side. So next year we have a bunch of candidates who used to be leftists. Now they're kind of positioning themselves as right wing candidates and et cetera. But I still find it very, very challenging because I think most people that are older than 30 year olds in Brazil, they're still very much into collectivism. Yeah. No, I agree with you. So we're running out of time here. And say this, I mean, I agree with you. So, so, yeah, anybody over 30 in Brazil is still a collectivist and still an avid with socialism and all these socialists who are turning to the so-called right. And I don't trust any of them. So I wouldn't trust a single one of them. What I find inspiring about Brazil is there's a youth movement, a young people who were promised kind of that they would be part of the middle class and yet they're still poor, who have been rallying towards kind of a liberal economic point of view. And Students for Liberty, this organization of, I guess, libertarian students is bigger in Brazil than they are in the United States. I've spoken to very large audiences in Brazil and always with very positive responses. I'll actually be in Brazil, I think, in April of next year before the presidential elections to give a couple of talks. So, you know, I'm inspired by the youth, by the focus on liberty. And I think there's hope. I don't think that hope will manifest itself in this election. I think it's too soon. I think it has to infiltrate into the culture and these young people have to grow up in a sense and take positions of power and really have a ability to really impact things. But, you know, I think there's reason to be optimistic about Brazil. Are you going to be there in Sao Paulo in April or? I will be in Porta Lega in April for the Liberty Forum. I expect. And they're expecting 6,000 people this year at the Liberty Forum. So expect to have one of the largest audiences I've ever spoken in front of. Two minutes. Wow, that's awesome. Yep. So if you're there. Actually, I was calling you to actually ask if we're going to go and then if you said he wouldn't, I would encourage you to go before the elections, but you've already answered my question. So I'm going to go in April. And if there's demand for more, I'd go back. So a lot of it is a lot of his funding and, you know, and having the funds to be able to go there and spend time in Brazil because I love the place. I love the people. And I really think there's energy there that can really make an impact that can make a difference in the years to come and more so than I see in the United States where all young people are socialists. I think there's possibilities in places like Brazil, maybe Poland, other places in Eastern Europe that they aren't in the United States. All right. Thanks, Joel, for calling. Really appreciate it. You know, and as we said, you know, we started out with Thanksgiving. I want to be thankful to all of you again for listening. Thanks you for those guys who stuck with me on Facebook Live and on YouTube. Thank you for all of you listening live on the blaze. And of course, everybody who listens on a podcasting app later on. Thank you. Those of you who want to support what we are trying to do here, little thing like change the world, change people's attitudes towards everything from from antitrust laws to net neutrality to the Middle East and how America should defend itself. You can support me. You can support the show. You can support our efforts to market this show on Patreon. Patreon.com. P-A-T-R-E-O-N. Patreon.com. Just look for the Iran Book Show and you can make a financial contribution to the show. All right. We're here every Saturday. And I'll see you. I'll see you all next week. You're listening to the Iran Book Show and the Blaze Radio Network.