 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Book Show. Back in Puerto Rico. So welcome everybody to the Iran Book Show. Hopefully everybody's having a fantastic week. It's been a real struggle. Did the music sound fine to you or was it just me? It sounded really off. So let me know generally about the sound. If you remember the last show I did from Puerto Rico last time, the sound was off. My sound board basically died. So I connected a new sound board. And I don't know if it's calibrated right. I just want to know is the sound too tinny, is the sound too echoey, is the sound too. Just give me any kind of input. Because I can adjust with the sound board and try to make it better. I've got a big sound board. So I'm going to have to get a new one. This is not one that I want to continue. So the music was a little too loud for you. It sounded off to me, completely off. Like the speed was off. Something was off. So I don't know. You guys will have to lay down. Anyway, it's been a while. So let me say I apologize for how long it's been. I really did expect to do a show yesterday. And I was very disappointed that I could not. I was staying at a nice hotel in Sa Paolo. And they had high bandwidth internet. And I think somehow they throttled the internet. Anyway, it's over. I will be traveling again starting next week. Well, the week after next. And I'm hoping that some of these technical issues do not repeat themselves as I travel to Israel and to Europe. A lot of that will be vacation. So I combine everything with vacations. I was on vacation for a week in Rio. And I initially thought I would do a lot of shows. I now think I should have just taken a vacation to begin with and not stressed about it and not thought about it and just taken a vacation and told you in advance. I feel bad because I promised you shows and I couldn't live up to those. But this next trip is part vacation, part work as well. It's my 40th wedding anniversary this year. So we're kind of going on a bunch of different vacations to celebrate the 40th wedding anniversary. So that's why I'm going on more vacations than usual. But be careful in Israel. There's nothing to be careful in Israel about. Is there you can do? I mean, I'll be fine in Israel. Israel's like, yeah, I guess when you hear and you hear about what's going on in Israel, it sounds scary. But when you're from there, it's like, yeah, OK, another day. It doesn't really sound like a big deal when you're actually from there. All right. So yes, we will try to do shows from Israel. We'll try to do shows from Europe. And I'll keep you updated on all of those shows. All right. So way behind on shows, way behind in the news cycle, way behind on super chats. We're just way behind on everything. So I'm going to try to do a lot of shows in over the next 10 days to kind of make up for the shows we didn't do and make up for the shows I probably won't be doing from the road. So expect pretty much a show every day through the weekend and during the week and more shows in the evening than usual. We'll just do a lot of shows and there's a lot of stuff that's been accumulating in the news and elsewhere. All right, for those of you still joining, I do appreciate any comments that you might have on how the show sounds, the quality of the audio, just because I'm using a new soundboard and I'd like to calibrate it right and get it to the right level. All right, today's going to be a full show. I did fly in this morning from Brazil. But today's going to be a full show. So the target for the Super Chat is $650. We're off to a good start. Thank you, Wes, for $50 without even a question. So I appreciate that. So feel free to ask $20 questions. I know Michael has been sitting on a bunch of questions. So Michael, jump in with those questions. Make as many of them as $20 as possible so that we can easily and quickly get to our goal and maybe exceed the goal. I want to start off, I want to talk about this issue of why Latin America is such a mess, which I've promised now. What is it? I've tried to do the show about that issue a week. But I did want to catch up a little bit on the news. There's a number of stories that I want to hit on. Basically, three, I want to talk about the Biden attempt at an EV mandate, electric vehicle mandate, the Defense Department leak that we've observed. And I'll just say a few, I want to say a few things about the abortion pill ruling out of Texas. And then some of it was overturned. Was it today or yesterday? I can't keep track of the days, but I want to do that as well. So I'll cover the abortion pill ruling as well. But we will talk much more about this. This is a big deal. It's a big issue. It's an important issue. It's an issue that's going to have massive ramification on our politics. And we'll talk about that. So Biden EV, Defense Department leak, and abortion pill, the three news topics before we get to what's the problem with Latin America. All right, as I said before, the show is funded from contributions and support from you guys. Trade value for value. You can use the super chat to support the show. You can use the stickers to support the show. You can ask questions using the super chat. You can also support the show monthly on your onbrookshow.com slash support on Patreon, Subscribestar, and locals. All right, let's jump in. So the Biden administration yesterday, not yesterday, a couple of days ago announced that they are going to basically they're not going to mandate that you buy an EV car, but they're going to mandate that gasoline cars have such high emission standards that basically they'll go out of existence. And with the goal, the goal is going to be to get to 67% of EVs in, I think, 2032 or something like that. So really, within 10 years, nine years, we get to 2 thirds of all automobiles in the country being EV. I can't remember what that number is right now, but I think it's under 10% as 6%. Only 6% today are buying electric vehicles. So I mean, this is just continued manipulation of us as consumers by the Biden administration, by our government. It is a massive violation of our rights. It is an attempt to force Americans to buy an inferior car. And we'll talk about why it's an attempt to buy an inferior car, why EVs are inferior, by what standard are they inferior. And of course, the second issue is that it's going to dramatically increase the demand for electricity. When we have a grid and an energy supply, that it clearly is in trouble and in decline. Now, of course, the best commentator on this issue is Alex Epstein. So I encourage you to check his Twitter feed out and his, of course, Subscribestar. Subscribestar, what am I talking about? His substack, I knew it started with an S. His substack, well, he talks about this and he has some great commentary on this and I'm basically taking Alex's talking points. But that's why he puts them out there. He puts them out there so people use them. So I am using Alec Epstein's talking points. Now, how do we know that EVs are inferior? Well, we know they're inferior because only 6% of you buy electric vehicles. The standard of quality for price is determined by you, by your values, by your preferences for automobiles, by what you want and what you don't want in an automobile. And in your actions, we, American people as consumers, are clearly indicating our lack of interest and desire to buy electric vehicles. You know, a big part of that is they're expensive. They might not ride quite as well. They have short range. We want to be able to, Americans like to drive and they like to drive distances. And if you live in LA and you live in Orange County, you live in California, you drive a lot. If you live in Texas, you drive a lot. You don't want to have to be constrained by where the charging stations and all of that. So clearly this is going to deny the American people the ability to buy what they want and force them into buying what the government decides is good for them, what the government decides they must buy, what the government decides they must consume. So this is, you know, this is coercion at its worst. This is the implementation of coercion in, as applied to our purchases. All right, what is going on? Is the video frozen? The video's not frozen, right? The video's fine, right? All right, so, you know, government is there to protect our rights, not to violate our rights. Government is there to protect our ability to choose from what the market makes available. The fact that today, with all the subsidies, with the tax credits, with the advantages, with the whole infrastructure that is now being created by the government subsidized by the government and provided by the government in spite of all that, EVs are still expensive and only 6% of us buy. So this is not a product that is yet ready for mass consumption. This is not a product that is yet ready for all of us to purchase. If it was, then the market would take care of it, right? I have nothing against getting to 67% except for .2, which we'll get to. I have nothing against people driving electric cars. If that is the choice they make and in a market where the choices that are being made are not being subsidized by people who haven't made that choice. So, you know, it is, you know, again, the range issue and the cost issue are probably the two dominant ones. And then, of course, what happens when electricity goes out? If you look at California, I don't know if this summer, but it was the last summer when they had the fires last summer or two summers ago when they had the fires and they had to do rolling blackouts. When they do the rolling blackouts, that means you can't charge your car during that period. How do you get to work the next day? How do you use the car the next day if you can't charge it overnight when they happen to have a blackout? What happens when electricity goes out because of other causes? Here in Puerto Rico, electricity is incredibly unreliable. Texas, we had the ice storm where electricity is out in vast parts of it. So, there were a lot of issues and a lot of reasons why people don't want to buy electric vehicles and forcing them to buy electric vehicles is basically forcing them to accept a lower standard of living and a lower quality of life, an inferior product. Now, the second issue of course is that we are struggling with a grid, with an electric grid that is in decline, an electric grid that can barely carry the load that is required today, an electric grid that is going to be provided for by more and more and more windmills and solar panels that are unreliable, an electric infrastructure, if you will, that is increasingly unreliable, both because the grid itself is old and unsophisticated and not modernized and unreliable. But we now have more and more electricity provided to the grid by unreliable sources like windmills and solar panels. And now you want to load up automobiles on top of that? You got to be nuts. Imagine if during the Texas ice storm or during, you remember it was two or three years ago when the grid collapsed in Texas and that was without electric cars? Imagine what would happen in California which is short on electricity anyway. They have a hard time providing everybody with electricity. Imagine what would happen in this case. If now you add on to the grid, the millions and millions and millions of automobiles we have in the country, it's just nuts. It is insane. It is undoable. It is a dramatic attempt to reduce our quality instead of living. And we should fight against it with everything that we have. This is pathetic. Now California already has a mandate that by 2035 they're gonna outlaw all oil-fueled vehicles. Do they have a program by 2035 to bolster the grid to provide more reliable energy sources, more reliable electricity? I doubt it. I doubt it. Here's a state with no electricity demanding that we increase our demand for electricity. Insanity and an important story to watch and see how this develops and what happens. What is interesting is that in China where they are producing very cheap electric vehicles, they are seeing a dramatic increase in electric vehicle use. China also has a far better electric grid infrastructure. China also has much more reliable energy sources that are less obsessed with alternative energy. They're less obsessed with solar and wind, although they are investing in it. They're less obsessed with it. They're investing in nuclear. They're investing in gas-powered electricity. The Chinese can probably afford to have their automobile industry go electric. They're even building new coal power plants. The United States cannot afford it. China is actually going to see a reduction in demand for gasoline over the next few years because of dramatic increase in electric vehicles. Those cheap electric vehicles are not in the United States. They don't sell in the United States. These are the real competitors to Tesla, Chinese made. And of course, we don't have the kind of electric grid that China has, which at least in its major hubs is far superior to that of the United States. Sad testament, just that is sad. All right, so that I thought was an important story this week. Let's see, second one, you've all now I think read about the Defense League, this leak of massive quantities of classified information on the Discord channel, leaks that came out of gaming groups on Discord that suddenly started publishing top secret and secret documents from the Defense Department. In the beginning, nobody really knew where this stuff was coming from. It took people a while to figure out where it was coming from and the extent of it. All these disparate leaks about Ukraine and about Russia and then about Israel. Nobody quite knew what to make of it all. It ultimately turns out this afternoon, the FBI arrested a Massachusetts airman by the name of Jack Tishara regarding the documents leaks. It turns out that he, I assume it's him. We don't have all the evidence he had, but I assume it was him, that he worked at the military base, had access to this top secret information, managed to somehow take photos of it, and then for early this year started writing out from the photographs, typing out kind of what was in the photographs and distributing on his little Discord channel. It turns out that he has a Discord channel of teenagers and 20-somethings, most of them under 24, I think. People in the United States, but also overseas, Ukrainians, Russians, and from other places around the world. These were kids who, young people, all guys, as far as I can tell, enamored by this guy who had leaked the information. He was some kind of guru to them and they were all gaga over what he had to teach them and tell them, and part of what, in order to keep himself respected by this group, in order to keep himself as the leader of this group, he started leaking out this information to show them, look how important I am. I have access to this top secret information. This is all on the Discord channel. These are not people I think who've ever met each other personally. And he started, so it's not like he had any kind of big motive to leak this information, some social agenda to leak this information, or working for some foreign government, as far as we can tell. So as you can tell, he did this to show off, basically. And then this small group which had this information then started leaking it on other Discord channels. After a while, he got tired of writing out or typing out what was actually in the photographs of the documents he had printed. See, he just started posting photographs. And of course, those photographs led to the clues that are now getting him arrested. So I haven't read up the latest about everything we know about him and about, but there was a very good Washington Post article this morning. I think the Washington Post in some senses were maybe ahead of the FBI, where the Washington Post had interviewed some of the people on this Discord channel that had not yet been interviewed by the FBI. But it does look like about a couple of a few hours ago that the FBI had made an arrest and this guy is in jail. A couple of quick points on this that I've made in the past, but I think is worth repeating. One, there's too much top secret and secret stuff floating around that people have access to. I mean, presidents, vice presidents seem to be walking off with this stuff all over the place. Young national guard airmen have access to Pentagon secret documents that have to do with the Ukraine war and with the, you know, intelligence agencies assessment of what is going on in Israel, that's just bizarre. Why would anybody have access to this in a military base? I mean, this is intelligence that should be accessible by only people who need this intelligence. Clearly an airman in the national guard doesn't need this kind of intelligence. So something is fundamentally wrong with the way, you know, on national security mechanisms are working in the way this information is being kept, this information is being distributed. Again, this comes on the heel of the fact that we discovered that politicians are just walking away with documents. I mean, you obviously had clearance, but once you have clearances, I mean, you have clearance for everything. It doesn't mean it's not siloed. Don't you have clearance just for the stuff that's relevant for you? It just seems bizarre to me that this is so accessible and so easy and that it took the authorities so long to figure this out. And then the second issue is, which I've also talked about many times, and that is that there's just too much that is secret. And one of the things that came out of this is the extent to which the United States is spying on its allies, the extent to which we listen in in conversations of, you know, Israel's spy agency and Israel's politicians. And we know from Snowden that we listen in from leaks surrounding Snowden that we listen in on Angela Merkel. We know that we listen in on politicians and on defense department officials and others. We know that we listen into all this stuff. I think we're probably spending way too much time spying on Americans and spying on our allies and not enough time and not enough focus and not enough, and this goes to a bigger point that I've made over and over again, not enough strategic focus on who our enemies are and who we need to be dealing with, who we need to be focused on, who we need to be accumulating information about because they truly are a threat to the United States. We thought that it's so wide that we lose the focus on the real enemy. We lose the focus on what the real problem is. I think I told you that I was at the NSA, spent a day at the NSA, this is years ago, this is after Snowden, about six months after Snowden revelations. And it was astounding to me the amount of intelligence the NSA accumulates about so many different things and how non-strategic they are. And maybe they're not the ones that should be strategic. Maybe it's just the fact that they get requests from the people above, from the people in the White House, requests that are not strategic and have nothing to do with a real focus on the national defense and the national security of the United States. But it is, there's too much information, there are too many secrets. The government should not be keeping so many secrets from us. And then these secrets are too easily accessible, too easily accessible. I guess Michael A. says, if you have top secret clearance, you have clearance for everything. You know, I had top secret clearance in Israeli intelligence. I had access to a lot of stuff, but I was in a particularly department responsible for a particular country. And the intelligence I had access to was on that particular country. And yeah, I guess I could ask for access to intelligence on another country. I'd have to show why it was relevant to what I was doing. But there's no way I could just access, at least in those days, not so long time ago. I could access just broad intelligence that was top secret, just because I happen to have toxic clearance and was working on, in those days I was working on Jordan, right? And then I was working on Lebanon. But that didn't mean I had access on Egypt or I had access on Saudi Arabia or I had access on Iraq or Iran or something like that. It was top secret in the context of what I was doing. He has an eminent in the National Guard. What does he need information about Israel, Ukraine and all the other stuff that he released? There's no connection between them. So there's no, in other words, you shouldn't have regular access to stuff that is not immediately relevant for the things that you are working on. And yes, if you have top secret clearance and you show a need to broaden your access, then it should be granted to you. But you should be able, you should have to show a need. Otherwise, there are too many people with too much access. And who can walk away with it? Take photographs on the iPhone and walk away. Supposedly when you go into a room with top secret stuff, you're supposed to keep your iPhone out. You're supposed to not have a camera with you. So, I mean, the massive failures here of security and I suspect that there are massive failures of security throughout the entire system. And this is not the last or the least of the kind of security leaks that we have. These particular security leaks were particularly helpful to the Russians because they involved some pretty important information about Ukraine, its plans and what was going on. And Russia's benefit. Actually, one of these documents, I don't know if you saw this, it's just, it's kind of funny, but it tells you a little bit about how this all works. One of the documents that had to do with American estimates of casualties on the Ukrainian and Russian side, when it got distributed out there, one of these Russian propaganda, I don't know, entities out there took the document and then docked it, reduced the number of casualties on the Russian side and increased the number of casualties on the Ukrainian side and redistributed it as if it was the original document. So, the Russians were using some of this just as their own propaganda to try to show that, to try to pretend that they're in better shape than they really are. But the real damage here was that certain secrets about Ukraine's plans for an offensive in the spring were revealed that certainly helped Russian intelligence, certain information about Ukraine's anti-aircraft, anti-air defenses was also leaked, which is gonna have potentially a profound impact on Russia's ability to attack Ukraine. So this was very helpful to the Russians and very harmful to the Ukrainians and that is incredibly unfortunate. All right, let's see, final story and I'll be talking more about this in future shows so I'm not gonna spend too much time on this. But the ruling out of Texas on the abortion pill. So a judge in Texas, a federal judge in Texas ruled that the FDA, by approving myth with stone, the abortion pill, by approving one part of the abortion pill, the abortion pill is actually two different compounds but by approving one of those compounds, the FDA did a poor job of assessing all the science that is relevant for the potential damage that this pill can inflict. Now, this is the first time in American history where a judge has ruled that the FDA needs to pull a drug because the judge in his medical wisdom has determined that the FDA did not take into account all the relevant factors. First time ever. I mean, this is one of the most and I've read a number of legal opinions about this ruling. This is one of the most stupid evil rulings that we've ever seen in the United States. This judge basically is anti-abortion. So he ruled and came up with the most bizarre in his ruling, some of the most bizarre legal excuses in order to pull this drug off the market. It is a horrific ruling partially because of its political motivation but partially just because of the amateuristic way in which, I mean, the way he determined that the Texas plaintiffs have standing doesn't stand up to legal muster. The way he ruled that the FDA didn't take into account what didn't it take into account? Survey information that he Googled and found online about women who say they were impacted by the fact that they had an abortion. Well, they would also have been impacted if they didn't have an abortion. All kinds of weird surveys, unscientific materials that he claimed were relevant for this discussion and the fact that this is the first time in American history that a drug is going to be, was at risk of being pulled because of some judge deciding the FDA didn't do its job. You can't make this stuff up. And this is all motivated by a clear, unequivocal, anti-abortion agenda. This has nothing to do with medicine. It has nothing to do with caring for the woman's life. And this is part of this water. Now, it turns out that an appellate court has overruled this judge. I think this morning or yesterday, I get the two days confused. I think it was, maybe it was yesterday. Appellate court overruled the judge. At least when it comes to whether this can be distributed but what the appellate court didn't do, what the appellate court also did was it said that it's basically returning the availability of this pill, the abortion pill, to where it was before the Biden administration expanded its access and its reach. So if you remember earlier this year or was it, I think it was last year, the FDA and the allowed for the pill to be sent by mail. It allowed for pharmacies to be able to send it by mail all over the country. This was done partially in order to deal with the fact that so many states were outlawing abortion form conception. And in order to deal with that, this was a way to make sure that women could access at least the pill if they couldn't access an abortion clinic in states that did not allow abortion anymore. Now this idea of outlawing abortion from conception, this idea of outlawing an abortion pill is so despicable. It is so evil. It is so unscientific and horrific. The motivation here is so anti-life, anti-human and so theocratic. There is zero, zero rational reasons, zero non-theocratic reasons to outlaw an abortion pill. There is zero non-theocratic reasons to outlaw abortions certainly in the first trimester. Again, you can kind of debate the third trimester. You cannot debate the first trimester. Cannot debate this ridiculous idea that it's a human being at conception. So, you know, this is the Republican party. This is the Republican party exposing its complete and utter irrationality. This is the Republican party exposing its authoritarian nature. And this is the Republican party basically committing suicide. And it's committing suicide because the American people don't want an abortion bet. The American people don't want to see abortion outlawed. They certainly don't want to see abortion outlawed, you know, in the first couple of trimesters. And you can see this over and over again. This is the reason why one of, I think, two main reasons why the Republicans lost so badly in the midterms. I mean, these midterms were devastating for Republicans. They were supposed to, again, they were supposed to capture the House by a big majority. They were supposed to capture the Senate. They did neither. They captured the House by a tiniest majority. And a big part of this is because of abortion. We saw this in the Wisconsin victory of a leftist Supreme Court judge who ran on one issue, abortion. And she won by a 10-point margin, 55 to 45, in a state that is 50-50, a toss-up state. I mean, I think DeSantis, one of your favorites, DeSantis is basically committing political suicide by signing a law that is an embracing a law and advocating for a law that's going to outlaw abortions past six weeks. This law is unpopular in Florida. 75% of people in Florida oppose this law. And DeSantis is enthusiastically signing it. And the reality is, the American women, there's this great tweet by Richard Hananya. Let me see if I can find this tweet. Let's see if I can find it. Because it really, I think, captured this. Let me see if I can find it. That's it. This is Twitter feed. But basically, it's going to take me too long to find it, but basically it says, what is a woman? Conservatives are concerned about what is a woman? Well, it turns out a woman is somebody who takes their reproductive rights seriously. A woman is something who takes seriously their body and the need for them to make choices about pregnancy, about having a baby, about abortion. I mean, he is so good on this issue. He's brilliant on this. Here, with all due respect to the trans issue, I mean, at the end of the day, the trans issue is a minor issue in America. It affects very, very few people. And yet, the Conservatives and the White has blown this into the most important issue of our time. The defining issue of our time. Here's an issue, abortion, that affects 50% of the population. And indeed, the Republican Party has basically said and the Conservatives have basically said, we don't care about 50% of the population. We don't care about what they want. We're talking about women. We don't care about what they want. We don't care about their bodies. We don't care about their right to choose how to use their own body. We're going to completely ignore them and we're going to push this agenda which is mostly pushed by men of this ban on abortion at every stage, at every level. And Richard Hanani has this excellent essay which I encourage everybody to read Why Women Rebel Against Pro-Life. And it's really good and it emphasizes the whole idea of, you know, women have to carry a fetus and they have to give birth and they bear responsibility for what they're doing. And being a woman is hard. Pregnancy is really difficult. You know, and men have no clue. Pregnancy is really difficult. And it's a very, very tricky period. And to some extent, particularly if the pregnancy is not going well, women's life is at stake. And yet they're all with them. We don't care about them as they're saying. We don't care about women. All we care about is this abstraction of some version of, you know, life which they can't really define. All right. Anyway, I encourage you to read. Oh, here it is. Here it is. Here it is. No, no, no, no, no, no. Here it is. This is one of them. He's got a number of these tweets. I think they're very good. He says, conservatives like to troll what is a woman. They understand it's a human being with unique experiences based on biology. Then they turn around and want to regulate the most personal choices that are central to womanhood. Women aren't standing for it. They're not. And the reality is that the reason that Democrats are doing so well in so many of these elections is that women who typically vote Republican, Republican women are not going to stand for it. They're not anti-choice. They're not anti-abortion. I remember speaking once, and I'll end with this. I remember speaking once at a, in Colorado Springs at a very conservative, very Republican event. I don't know. There are a few hundred people in the audience. And, you know, I spoke about Iron Man. I can't remember exactly what it was. But the first question, the first question was this guy. It's always a guy. It's always a man. This guy who was a former congressman, former congressman jumped to his feet and wanted to catch me. He wanted to get me. So he asked me about abortion. And I just laid it out. I said exactly what I think about abortion. And you could, you could get a sense of the tension in the room. This is Colorado Springs. This is one of the most conservative places on planet Earth. And at the end of my talk, 50% of the audience clapped. I mean, clapped enthusiastically. But, like under the desk, under the chair, so you wouldn't see them. And it was all the women in the audience. All the women who were conservative, Republicans, and they clapped. They're not going to stand for this. And if Republicans want to commit suicide, if Republicans want to end their ability to be successful in elections, this is the path they should follow, ban abortion pills, ban abortion in your states. It's a, it's a, yeah, Michael H. says Colorado Springs is like Vatican for evangelicals. It is evangelicals. And yet the women were not having any of it. And this is years and years and years ago. This is 15, 16 years ago. And it was already that. All right, so those are three topics. Again, I will be talking about, I will be talking about the, the abortion pill as it goes through the courts, also about the ban abortion. This is going to be a Peter theme. To me, this is much more important than any, than the trans issues than a lot of the woke issues. This is such a clear violation of individual rights. This is such a, a violation of a woman's life, rights, values that we have to speak up about it. We cannot stay quiet about this. And if that means Republicans are going to lose every election going forward, so be it. So be it. All right. Let's see. Yeah, we got a lot of super chats, but I did want to talk about Latin America. So let's do that quickly. Let's talk a little bit about Latin America. And of course, we've got tomorrow's show. Tomorrow we won't do a morning show. We won't do a news roundup because there is a, I've got to be at a court hearing tomorrow. I'm a witness in a court case. So I'm going to be stuck at this court for most of the day. I'm hoping to do a show in the afternoon or the evening. But then I will do a show on Saturday and I will do a show Sunday and we'll try to do next week. We'll try to have shows in the morning on the news and then in the evening on more substantive issues. So let's jump in on this Latin America issue. I mean, I just came back from Latin America. I was in Columbia, Bolivia and Bolivia for the first time and Peru and then in Brazil for over a week. And you don't have to go to Latin America to see it, but to know this, but certainly being there emphasizes this. And then as a Latin America, is this amazing place? It's beautiful. It's got super friendly people. It's got fantastic foods on the best food in the world. It has some amazing entrepreneurs. You know, they are parts of Latin America that are quite, you know, well developed and doing quite nicely. And yet Latin America is overwhelmingly poor and you can see that when you drive around and you meet the people and you interact with them. You can see how poor people are. And you know, no matter what is going on, right? No matter what is going on, no matter who governs them, they keep going through the cycle of populism and socialism and a little bit of, you know, a little bit of deregulation and maybe a little bit of free market like they had maybe in the 80s and 90s and then socialism again. And then populism like they had Bolsonaro and then Lula again. So they never have good political leadership. And when they do get slightly better political leadership for a little while, they immediately go back to socialism in the next election cycle. I mean, Latin America is home to an example I use in many of my talks because it's so striking. It is such a striking example. And that is of, you know, Venezuela, who 40 years ago was the richest country in Latin America on a capital GDP basis. And then, you know, Venezuela who adopted socialism through Chavez and Maduro and now is the poorest country in Latin America by a long shot. And then the flip side of that is you have Chile who 40 years ago was the poorest country in Latin America and implemented free market policies and today is the richest country in Latin America. And if you look at that and you think, okay, well, everybody sees that. Everybody identifies that. It's easy to see. It's easy to identify. Everybody's going to want to be Chilean. It's going to try to be Chile. And it turns out that, no, people don't want to be the richest place in Latin America. They want to be the poorest place. And what is the poorest place? It means everybody wants socialism. Everybody wants to be poor. Everybody sees the impact of socialism, Venezuela, sees the impact of free markets, Chile, and chooses socialism, chooses Venezuela. I mean, it's stunning. And the whole region is like this. Every single country now in Latin America is ruled by a socialist. Colombia, which had never had a left-wing president, now has a left-wing president. Bolivia's had a left-wing president for quite a while now. Peru has a Marxist. They got rid of him and his vice president is now president. But she's a pretty much a Marxist. Venezuela, you all know. Cuba, after years of having relatively poor free market presence, now has a socialist. Argentina, for the most part, has always had some form of status socialist or fascist. Brazil just elected a socialist. I guess the only countries I'm not sure about are Paraguay and Uruguay. But let's assume, because I think it's pretty safe to assume this, they're also socialists. So why is it? Why is Latin America stuck in poverty and why is Latin America constantly repeating the same error by electing over and over and over again? Socialists, leftists. I mean, one causes the other. Because we keep electing leftists, we keep staying poor. Or when we elect somebody who's not a leftist, what we elect is some or they elect some kind of populist. Sonica populist who is not Ecuador. As far as I know, even Ecuador just... Oh, Ecuador might be the one exception that do not elect a socialist. That's right. But it's... They elect socialists, bring them poverty. They elect a populist who brings them poverty. Then they elect a socialist who brings them poverty. And there's no end to it. So why is socialism so dominant in Latin America? Why in spite of all the evidence that people keep returning to it? Why in spite of all the evidence do people keep embracing the same political system that leads them to be poor? When they can see the alternative, they can't argue that they don't know they've never heard of an alternative. And the answer, as the answer always is, is ideas. Latin America is dominated by two sets of ideas that basically make it impossible at this point to win on a pro-liberty platform. It makes it impossible or very, very difficult to make headway with a pro-free markets, pro-individual rights agenda. And that is true. That is more so than I think any other region in the world. Latin America is dominated by two ideas, and the two ideas, two sets of ideas are one, Catholicism. Latin America is overwhelmingly Catholic. And therefore, it is overwhelmingly epistemologically authoritarian. Catholicism is an authoritarian ideology. It is an ideology that basically says that there is one authority for truth and knowledge, and that is God. He communicates to us, to the Pope and a few select others, and that that is how we discover truth. That is how we discover all knowledge. And it embeds in a population a real authoritarian-liking attitude. We are convinced by, you know, I think most Catholics, non-American Catholics, but in particular, are convinced of this idea that they don't have access to truth. They don't know reality. They don't know facts. And they are dependent on authority. So if the authority is there just for religious issues, who said that? Why should the authority not be there for secular issues as well, like governance? And therefore, it opens the mind to an authoritarian position. I don't think it's an accident. Italy was susceptible to Mussolini, Spain to Franco, and that I think the Protestants are less susceptible to authoritarianism because Protestants can't agree with one another. There is no authority. There is much more of this idea of an individual's relationship with God, which I think is much more individual-based and is much less authoritarian in its very nature. It's still authoritarian. All religions are authoritarian. But it strikes me that Catholicism in particular is that way. But so that's the authoritarianism. The second, of course, is altruism. What Catholicism inculcates in people is the idea of the moral purpose of life is sacrifice. The moral purpose of life is other people or God. Sacrifice to God. Sacrifice for the poor. Sacrifice the way that God tells you to sacrifice to. So you have cultures in Latin America, people who are open to authoritarianism because their religion orients them that way, and who find it offensive to think about their own well-being, their own happiness, their own flourishing, their own ambition because of the deeply altruistic nature of their religion. And look, this affects ambition. I was talking to somebody in Brazil who said, you know, he's got a problem. People come to him because they want to do better in life, but then they get to a certain level and their ambition stops. They say, okay, now that I'm making so much more an hour, I just want to work less and I want to spend more time at the beach. They have no personal ambition. They don't want to improve their life. They want to make it easier for them to keep the life as it is. And that comes from altruism. That comes from not taking care of self, not being oriented towards taking care of oneself. And that is a huge problem in Latin America. I think Ayn Rand in one of her essays mentions this. It's a lack of ambition among common people. And that is, again, inculcated through religion. So that's obviously one big issue that Latin America has to deal with, and that is Catholicism. And as long as Latin America takes, people in Latin America take Catholicism as seriously as they do, it's very, very difficult for them to escape this cycle of poverty, this cycle of authoritarianism, this cycle of socialism. After all, socialism is the political manifestation of a philosophy of sacrifice. It is the political manifestation of a philosophy of anti-individualism, collectivism, anti-taking care of self, anti-always thinking of other, whether it be God or other people or the poor, whatever, filling it. Religion sets itself for, particularly an authoritarian religion, and all religions are authoritarian. It's just a matter of degrees. It's a matter for socialism and authoritarianism. Somebody else makes the decisions for you, and you should not think too much about yourself. The second, the second, is, the second issue with Latin America is their secular philosophy. So, you know, it's one thing to just have a bad religion, but then it turns out all your secular intellectuals, all your secular intellectuals, are basically influenced by German and French philosophy. So one of the things you'll note in Latin America is that if you go to universities and you study at universities, there's almost no mention of British, you know, liberal thinkers of the French Enlightenment thinkers, Voltaire for example, Diderot, there's no mention of John Locke, there's no mention of Adam Smith, there's no mention even of Mill, Bentham, who are all flawed, but at least have a certain respect for individual liberty, at least have a certain respect for individualism, at least have a certain respect for human reason, up to a point, right? Not enough. So the secular philosophy in Latin America is overwhelmingly German. It's overwhelmingly influenced by the Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, and onwards trend in philosophy, postmodernism, existentialism. So modern you get French and German, but it's French-German. There's almost nothing, nothing being taught about the kind of the liberals of the 18th and 19th century, liberals in the classical liberal sense. So what you have is this deadly combination of philosophical thinking that is inherently, and this is among the intellectuals, and therefore the secular intellectuals, and therefore the ones who teach and who comment, who are specialists, who are advisors to the government. They're overwhelmingly Kantian or Marxist in ways that I don't think even in America the intellectuals are. I think they're much more committed to these kind of ideologies than even in America. You get some exposure to the founding fathers because of the American founding to British philosophy, to John Locke, to the Enlightenment. None of that exists in Latin America. It's all the bad continental philosophy. There's almost none of kind of the Anglo-Saxon better stuff, if you will. And as a consequence of that, you get Catholicism for one angle and secular ideology from the other. And that combination is deadly. And there's no space for a classical liberal agenda. There's no space for anything other than this horror. Gale says like the French, the difference is that the French don't have Catholicism to the extent that Latin America, neither the Germans, they have the bad philosophy, but they don't have as a governing, they don't have the dominance of religion that impacting the masses and destroying their capacity to think for themselves and to live for themselves and engage in life and sucks all the ambition out of them. Now, it has devastating effects even on the French, but the French do okay as compared to Latin America because they don't have the emphasis on religion. They do badly because they do have the bad philosophy. In Latin America, they get both. They get the double whammy. And as a consequence, so when you go there, it turns out that you have to talk a lot about religion. So the talks that I gave there landed up almost always viewing in the direction, particularly the smaller talks where I had more opportunity to talk to smaller groups where they had questions, always ultimately goes to religion and is religion compatible with liberty? Is religion compatible with liberalism? Is religion compatible with objectivism? Can you be an objectivist and be religious? Lots of questions along those lines from people in Latin America because of the dominance of religion there. And not so much influencing the people I meet with, but the rest of the culture heavily influenced by Marx and the continental philosophers more broadly. It's a battle of ideas. It always has been. Of all the countries in Latin America, the one I think that has the most upside, the most potential is Brazil. There are so many good people in Brazil. Now it's a big country, by far the biggest country in Latin America, 220 million people I think. But God, I meet so many young entrepreneurs who love Ayn Rand, so many young entrepreneurs who are interested in ideas, so many young entrepreneurs who want to make Brazil a better place, that it always fills me with energy going there and talking to them. I did three talks in Brazil. And yeah, fantastic. All for this one group called IEFL. And they all read Ayn Rand, they all have heard of her, many of them read Alashrug, the Fountainhead or both, or some of the nonfiction. They're engaged, they ask good questions, but they are challenged by these ideas that are in their culture, particularly religion. But no country, maybe in the world that I have been to, has so many young entrepreneurs interested in these ideas. So I think, I don't know, we need to find a way to have more impact in Brazil and to leverage the impact we've already had in Brazil. Unfortunately, I was supposed to speak today and tomorrow in Brazil as well. I was supposed to, tomorrow I was supposed to speak in front of 3,000 people. Unfortunately, I had to come back for this trial. I'm at tomorrow, so I couldn't attend. I had to cancel it the last minute, which I hate doing. But that's a form liberdade in Porta Alegre in the south of Brazil. I've spoken there twice, it's a fantastic event. I wish I could have gone again. But that's kind of, you can have an impact. You can get large numbers of people interested in these ideas in ways that you don't see anywhere else in the world, not even here in the U.S. I'm not on trial, but I'm a witness at a trial and I have to testify tomorrow. All right, let's see. Cool, so that's what we have. I will go to the Super Chat now. We've got a lot of Super Chat questions, but we're $200 short of our goal. So first, I'm going to ask you no more questions under $20. There's just too many. We're going to be here all night just answering the questions that we have. I do encourage you to ask questions at $20 because we do need to reach our goal of $650. We haven't done shows in a long time. I have to try to make a monthly number. So I'm hoping some of you out there can do $100 or $50 and get us to the target. I know some of you haven't been, I know I haven't been doing shows in a while, so some of you might be out of shape in terms of clicking that Super Chat button. We have about 100 people watching live right now. So if everybody did $2 each, we could do it. So you could do instead of a $2 question, you could do a $2, what do you call it? Just do a $2 contribution using the Super Chat feature. If you want to ask a question, please make it a $20 or above question. But please consider value for value $2, $5, $10 as a sticker just to show support and just to help us get to the number we need to get to. All right, let's start with a couple of $50 questions. One from Michael. Michael says, I think the Democrats arresting the leader of the opposing political party is an all-time loaf of American politics. This is what is supposed to distinguish us from third world countries where you place the political opponents in jail. I mean, I think it's bad, but yeah, I don't think it's anywhere near as bad as you're suggesting. Or anywhere near as bad as Republicans are suggesting. Clearly, Donald Trump violated the law. Clearly, Donald Trump did something that was wrong. Clearly, there is a case here. I don't think it's a particularly good case. I don't think it's an important case. I don't think they should have brought this particular accusation. But it's not like you have some innocent president who didn't do anything wrong and the opposition party is going to put him in jail, you know, even though he's clean as a whistle. No, I mean, Donald Trump paid off somebody not to tell the gory details about his affair with that person. He did it to more than one. He did it to at least two people. He paid them off to keep them silent, which is a violation of certain campaign laws. He also violated laws in terms of bookkeeping. He violated laws in terms of taxes. He violated a number of different laws related to this. Now, these are all relatively minor, and most district attorneys I think would have looked the other way and Bragg initially was going to look the other way and then decided to file this lawsuit. I think it's a mistake on the part of the Democrats because maybe it's strategic for them because I think what this does is increases the chances that Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination. I think it decreases the chances that he wins the ultimate election. So, you know, it's sad that it happened and they're going to be more lawsuits against Donald Trump. They're going to be more criminal accusations. The one in Georgia probably for trying to influence officials to change the election results in Georgia, which I think is much more meaningful and has a lot more substance behind it and is such a serious accusation that, yeah, I'd like to see that go to trial if they have enough evidence against him. You know, there's the documents and him not just having the documents, which turns out a lot of people do, but the fact that he tried to, you know, he basically lied to government officials about those documents. So, this is not the only case that so-called Democrats are going to bring against Trump and he deserves it for the most part. Now, again, the accusations in particular are not great, but it's not like they're completely unfounded. It's not like he didn't do the stuff that they were accusing him of doing. We all know he did. We all know he had affairs with these women. We all know that he paid them hush money. It's pretty much well established and we all know that it's probably against, you know, whether you think this is a good law or a bad law, it's against the law. So, and then it's a question of does it rise to the level of being prosecuted years after the fact? Probably not. But it's not something I'm going to get excited about. This is the end of democracy in America. This is Democrats, you know, using the law for political revenge, even if they are, you know, in this case, I just don't think the case rises to that level. Again, because he did those things. I'm much more concerned about the Texas case of the abortion pill where the judge clearly abuses the law in order to get the political outcome he wants. Which Democrats do a lot as well, but you have to call them out when they do it. Okay, Richard, $50 question. Whoops, what did I do? There it is. I previously knew my girlfriend was religious, but I didn't know how intensely religious she was. After discussing it with her, she seems deeply irrational on certain issues, including original sin. It has started affecting our relationships. What should I do? You know, I don't know. It's not like I should be giving relationship advice. But look, original sin is a big deal. And you know, this is the kind of issue that is going to affect a lot of decisions she makes in her life. And that if you're going to be a couple together, you're going to make together. It has to affect her view of sex and it has to affect how she deals with sex. It has to affect her view of happiness and whether she's willing and able to be happy. And it has to affect the way she deals with other people, i.e. you. So it's something to be taking really, really seriously and be very, very careful to not overly commit to this relationship before you're really, really sure because original sin is a really, really, really bad premise to have in your psychology. In your explicit beliefs and therefore has to be impacting your psychology. And therefore your behavior and sex and romance and everything. So and you know, and that's just one indication of greater irrationality in the system and you got to generally avoid irrationality in life. Life's too short. Life's too short. Charles Butts says, what do you think of escape rooms? Have you tried one? I've never tried one. What are escape rooms? Escape rooms are these rooms that you... Is this a game or what is this? I don't even know what it is, I guess. I thought when I first read it that what you meant was like rich people have in their mansions a room where they can escape to if the house is burglarized or attacked or they feel under threat, they can go and lock themselves inside of some kind of escape room to prevent any harm from inflicting themselves. Is that what you mean by an escape room? Is a escape room referring to something else that I'm not familiar with? Enlighten me, people, so that I can better answer the question. It's a real life puzzle. No, then no. I've never tried it. Puzzle's a good thing. Games are fun to play. I can't think of any reason why it would be a negative unless there's something really malevolent about it. Okay, that's a panic room, Jean says. Okay, so escape room is you go in and you have to solve a puzzle in order to get out. Yeah, I mean that could be fun. So I have nothing... I can't imagine what I could have against it and it seems like a fun and challenging activity to stimulate the mind. All right, we're now only $100 short of our goal so five $20 questions will pretty much get us there or if everybody in the chat does $1 and sorry everybody listening right now does $1 we would get there. So please consider value for value just doing a sticker with a couple of dollars and getting us to the goal. James says... Well, the master says... No, okay. James says, Americans I discuss these ideas will seem more on the fence between egoism and altruism whereas people from Latin America and Europe are reflexively altruistic. Altruism is a non-negotiable to them. That's absolutely right and that's because of the religion. They take the religion more seriously and they have a form of religion which I think emphasizes quite sacrifice and emphasizes the need for sacrifice and the demand for sacrifice much more than American Protestants have taken their religion and morphed it into this pro-liberty ideology that is completely divorced from the actual content of the Old or New Testament. They've turned their religion into the founding principles of America and I often tell them that they love the founders more than they love Jesus and they love the founding documents more than they love the Bible. They've taken the Bible and they've taken Jesus and they've distorted them into the founding fathers and the founding documents. So, they are... But that's not true in Latin America. Latin America doesn't have... It has some liberal traditions from the 19th century with very few liberal again in the classical liberal sense but very few and they don't have kind of the founding fathers as a symbol of liberty and a symbol of freedom that Americans have and can carry. You know, we have the right to pursue happiness that doesn't exist in Latin America and again, they take the Catholicism i.e. the religion a lot more seriously than Americans do and in a cultural sense not just in a going to church sense but in a cultural sense. I think Americans don't take religion seriously in a cultural sense with the exception maybe of evangelicals and with the big exception of abortion. Abortion is the religious issue that Americans take seriously. Adam says, a federal judge reversed 4,000-year-old in the Code of Hammurabi principle when it's free to do what is not prohibited by law. Judge prohibited... Pristone because Congress didn't give the FDA permission to permit it. Yeah, so I've already talked about this. He really forbade it because if you read the thing, he basically says that the FDA did not take into account all this information about the harm that abortion pills do to women information that he discovered on Facebook or not Facebook but by Googling unscientific survey stuff but the idea that FDA is too loose in its drug approval is bizarre and particularly bizarre coming from conservatives who are always critical of the FDA being too tight on drug approvals supposedly, right? It's just... Yeah, it's just... It's theocratic horror of what we're seeing out of Republicans on abortion. And remember, this is what Einwand warned us. Einwand wrote, this is why she opposed Ronald Reagan. This is why she opposed the Republican Party in the late 1970s, early 1980s. This is what she warned us about over and over and over again. I don't think we were listening. I don't think some of you are still listening. Michael says, you notice it's standard practice for psychologists and intellectuals in general to discuss human behavior, not human ideas. Behavior is something that applies to dogs, not human beings with free will. Well, but that's exactly the point. Modern psychology, for the most part, does not recognize that we have free will. It does not recognize, for the most part, certainly not explicitly. Maybe some recognize it implicitly but they don't recognize explicitly the existence of free will. They don't recognize us as independent agents who can determine our behavior based on ideas, based on decisions we make, based on choices we have. So it's all about what's observable, our behavior, and it's all about changing their behavior by manipulating us or allowing ourselves to manipulate ourselves because ultimately that's all we are, which is the billiard ball being bombarded and being manipulated by either our genes or by the environment outside. So they just add their little stimulus to all of that. Andrew says, how does pragmatism lead to a country's disintegration? Perhaps with reference to what you think is the future of China. Well, I think what it does is it divorces a country and a country's policies and a country's future from any kind of principle. So basically, pragmatism is short-term, unprinciples do what flavor the month seems like it works. Seems like it works. And that is ultimately not going to work because to work you have to have some long-term thinking, you have to have some principles on which to base it. And when it doesn't work, then they just go and try something else and then they try something else. There's no guide. There's a complete disintegration, a complete fragmentation of everything that happens because they can't learn from their mistakes because you can't really learn from the past. That would imply a principle. That would imply some truth that you discover. The truth don't really exist. It's just our experiences. It's just the data that we have right now as applied to the future. And just what we have right now at this moment in this particular context, we can't learn from the past. And it slowly breaks apart and slowly disintegrates. I mean, China's pragmatism has led already to great authoritarianism and I think will lead to even more authoritarianism in the future. The pragmatism of China's leaders has to lead, ultimately, to fragmentation and a response to that fragmentation, a response to disintegration, which is, okay, we need to integrate around something. We'll integrate around Qixi. We'll integrate around what he wants. We'll integrate around, you know, a new version of Maoism or a new version of Qixiism or whatever they call it. So it leads to a counter-response which is a false integration what Lenin Pekov called the name to. But pragmatism is a way to disintegrate a culture because there's nothing connecting things. Everything is discreet by the nature. If you connect stuff, again, you're looking for principles and universals and truths and that's what pragmatism rejects. Andrew says, a psychological gold piece from Atlas Shrug, quote, Francisco seemed to laugh at things because he saw something much greater. Jim laughed as if he wanted nothing to remain great. Yes, I mean, Jim Taggart is laughing out of a sense of nihilism, out of a sense of wanting things to fall apart, out of a sense of wanting to destroy, of pulling the good down, pulling the great down, diminishing their greatness by making fun of them. Francisco laughs at things because they're trivial, because he sees greatness that cannot be touched by these trivialities. They're insignificant and therefore they're laughable and that's what makes him laugh. It's a fundamental psychological difference between those who want to tear things down and those who want to build stuff up. Jennifer, could it be because Enlightenment ideas were more understood in England and France and in Spain and Portugal? Yes, I think that's absolutely right and Spain and Portugal, of course, were much more committed to Catholicism, which is partially why they rejected the Enlightenment ideas. They were Enlightenment figures in Portugal and Spain, and they just were never that influential and they were always trivialized and in minority ways. In France and England, they, for a while, dominated an intellectual landscape. And of course, the other thing is that intellectually, if you're not from England or from the Enlightenment France, then you're completely dependent on basically German intellectuals and German post-Enlightenment, anti-Enlightenment thinkers. And that's what dominates. What dominates is German anti-Enlightenment, French anti-Enlightenment thinkers. The master, are these Brazilian intellectuals more likely to emigrate rather than improve Brazil? Well, the good guys are not intellectuals. These are primarily business people. These are entrepreneurs. These are young entrepreneurs. Now, you know, many of them would like to emigrate to the United States and if we had better immigration policy, many of them would come here. But, you know, many of them want to stay and many of them are forced to stay because of the immigration policies. But, you know, their duty is not to Brazil or to anybody else, their duty is to themselves. And in that sense, they should emigrate if they have a greater opportunity to enhance their life as individuals in the future. But, no, I mean, most of these people I've known now for years have been encountered in these groups for years. Most of them are staying in Brazil. They're not going anywhere. They're businesses in Brazil. They're family in Brazil. Many of them have family businesses. They've been inherited from their parents. They're not going anywhere. They're trying to make Brazil better. And hopefully over time, they will be successful. Many of them were very involved in the Bolsonaro government even though they did not like Bolsonaro. A lot of the people in his government were good people and these people helped influence them and there were a lot of good things were done in the Bolsonaro regime. But, of course, him being so weak is what caused him to lose and Lula to win. So, for example, in Brazil, while Bolsonaro lost, the political parties affiliated with him and the political parties affiliated with kind of generally liberal ideas, classical liberal ideas, one, Lula won the presidency but lost parliament. Lula has no governing majority in parliament. The governing majority is to the right of Lula or to the liberal side of Lula. And that is good for Brazil but it just shows that what really hurt Brazil in the last election was the personality and just the character, the personality of Lula just in a very similar way to what hurts the Republican Party is Trump. But in the differences that in the United States, Trump has so much influence that he got to decide who a lot of the congressmen and senator candidates were and in rejecting him, voters also rejected them. In Brazil, that was not the case. They voted for the congressmen and then voted for good congressmen and then voted for Lula at the same time because they rejected Bolsonaro completely. Partially because of Trump and Lula's really, really pathetic response to COVID. Themaster says, what do people really mean when they say this is cringe? On the surface it appears to be only an opinion but the more I see it used the less disagreement I see, me included. I don't understand who you're not disagreeing with. But I think when they say this is cringe they say this is bad, this is ugly, this is on the boundaries and it is an opinion that they're expressing. So I think that's what they mean by this is cringe. I'm not sure what about disagreement. I don't quite understand the question I guess, sorry Themaster. Maybe ask it in a different way. Kayfax says, what do you think of panic rooms? Just kidding, thanks as always. What I think of panic rooms is I don't really want to live in a society where I would need one. I don't want to live in a society for my life and my safety so much that I have to build a special room that I can lock myself in to protect myself against thieves. It's sad that one has to live in a place where that is the reality of living. My guess is a lot of wealthy people in a place like Brazil, Colombia have panic rooms because they need them. A big portion of the cause in Colombia particularly the cause of the wealthy are bulletproof windows. I wouldn't want to live in a society where you have to drive a bulletproof car on a day-to-day basis. Something wrong about that. Alright. Leirin asks, how do you think chat GPT will affect productivity? What do you make of alignment concerns? I mean, this is a big topic. Again, one of these topics we're going to be talking about for years. I actually think we're probably underestimating the impact of chat GPT particularly of AI. I think it might be one of the most revolutionary technologies we've ever developed as a species. I think it's going to have profound impact on human life and as a consequence I think it's going to have profound impact on productivity. It's going to raise productivity dramatically. It really is a revolution. We're right at the beginning of it. It's something to watch if you're young. It's something to get excited about. It's an area to go into. It's an area to investigate if you're young. This is history in the making. We're living through it. And we could see and this could save us in many respects. The productivity increases from chat GPT could mitigate to some extent the productivity losses that we'll experience because of government regulations and controls and everything else. I think the alignment concerns are overstated. I don't think the alignment concerns are that difficult to code. You remember that computers are not living beings. They don't choose and they're certainly not human beings. They don't choose their values at the end of the day. We set the principles on which AI aligns. It has to be done thoughtfully. It has to be done rightly. But this idea that AI is going to turn against us and kill us all is just watching Terminator too many times and too much fear mongering. It's something to think about. Just like you have to think about when you program at automobile to drive itself. You have to think about in a collision do you save the pedestrian? Do you save the driver? Do you save? Let's say you can't save everybody. So there's trolley-like types of questions that have to now be programmed into the AI. But the programmer does that. So somebody has to think these things through and different companies will come up with different solutions, different ways to do it. But it is a reality. You as a driver are going to instinctually probably protect yourself. Should the AI do the same thing? Should it be programmed to protect the driver? Because if the driver was driving you protect yourself. That's why by the way it's more dangerous to be in the passenger seat than in the driver's seat. Because the drivers will often swerve to protect themselves just instinctually and at the cost at the expense of the passenger seat. But what about a pedestrian? What about the person in the opposite car? These things have to be thought of because accidents are going to happen even with AI. So the same kind of alignment issues need to be programmed into every AI tool and I think they will be and it will be a competitive advantage. Gene says is it a grocery store worker's rational self-interest to lie if someone slips on a wet floor after he forgot to put down a red cone? The person could be fired and sued but seems bad not to help if the shopper was injured. Yeah, I mean if it's your fault, it's your fault. I mean part of being rationally self-interested is taking personal responsibility for the things that one does. It means being honest. Honesty in objectivism is a big time virtue. And it's you know, virtue dictates that one take responsibility for the actions that one engages in. And if you make a mistake then you should pay the price for making that mistake. And it would be unselfish not to. Again selfishness is not short term benefit. Selfishness is having integrity living a consistent life being honest with yourself and others and being rational in all aspects of your life not faking reality, not lying not cheating, not trying to get away with stuff. Taking responsibility for one's own life. So Rand is about taking responsibility for one's own life in a deeper sense of that in a real deep fundamental sense of I own my life and I need to take my moral values seriously because they will shape the rest of my life even if it looks like it can get away with it right here it's going to hurt me it's going to do me better than I am human being. No one writes a lot of freedom loving people I know discuss topics like wars in the Middle East Ukraine, lock downs and subsidies based on somebody else profiting from it what are the underlying ideas here underlying ideas is Marxism a lot of freedom loving people libertarians let's call them what they are libertarians and some conservatives are influenced by Marxist view of the world as being shaped by economics everything is shaped by economic incentives everything is shaped by muscle by material by economic will be and so it's always about follow the money it's always about find out who's going to benefit from it and that's all that matters ideas are too intellectual ideas are spiritual if you will the things of consciousness and they don't matter they don't count that's Marxist view Marxism materialist and a lot of libertarians this is why they're against intellectual property rights they are anti-intellectual anti-philosophical anti-ideological anti-spiritual in the real meaning of spirit not in the sense of religion and therefore they're materialists and I get the same thing and unfortunately we don't have a Q&A for my Zurich talk on the war but I got a lot of libertarian pushback about the war in Iraq was all because of the military industrial complex or the oil companies or Halliburton wanted they didn't do that well in the war in Iraq I mean if they wanted it they would have fought the war very differently than the way they fought it yes it's all now not to say that economic considerations are not part of the considerations impacting it Russia doesn't want southeast Ukraine because it has a lot of natural gas fields and it has important ports and it has logistical reasons but the war wasn't fought for that if you're going to fight a war that's the area you want to focus on because there are clear benefits for it but the war was fought for all the reasons I've already articulated around fighting a war but there is this definite streak of materialism among libertarians Richard, what are the South Americans you've met have to say about Venezuela have they expressed a fear that they will happen to their countries? Yes I tend to meet people who have more respect for free markets have more respect for classical liberal ideas and they're terrified of becoming the next Venezuela every one of those countries Peru, Colombia a long border with Venezuela Brazil, Brazil, they're all terrified of becoming Venezuela they're all petrified of Lula and petrified of their own socialist presidents and what they might do they are terrified and they don't understand why it's happening they don't understand why it's happening and that's where I step in to try to explain it to them they fight their battle purely in economics and politics and they never address the religious and philosophical elements and I tell them that without addressing the religious and philosophical issues they have no chance they're not going to win alright, we have reached our goal so thank you to all the superchatters really really appreciate that of course you can still contribute and you can still share value for value you can do a sticker, you can do a question I haven't asked at all questions from now on it would be $20 questions just because I have so many questions right now but please feel free to make a contribution via sticker or to ask a $20 question I'm going to go through five and $10 questions now left I'll go through these fairly quickly I'd like to finish before the two hour mark Andrew forgot so he asked a $10 question that's fine we'll forgive Andrew this once but yes feel free to send a love over with a sticker and a couple of bucks alright, Lewis says you might answer to this in your show I'm not a Latin American roots don't like the idea of freedom, economic liberties and self-interest well because they all rely on two fundamental pillars and I'll do this very quickly but my talks in Latin America cover this in greater detail the two fundamental pillars are one reason in a sense rejection of faith reason as a means of knowing truth, knowing reality knowing facts and that's rejected through faith or through Kantian-like rejection of reason in favor of other forms of mystical knowledge, categorical imperatives like categorical imperatives and they reject self-interest because they adopt Christianity through Christianity or through Kantian or through the French or German philosophers the idea of altruism the idea of sacrifice the idea of negation negation of self negation of self-interest virtue is to be self less self less there's no room for you in ethics for your well-being in ethics and by doing that they make it impossible to hold freedom and economic liberty because freedom and economic liberty rests on those two foundations you can think for yourself because she has the tool for thinking and you should think for yourself to pursue your own happiness your own interests both of those concepts the idea of pursuing your own happiness and the idea of thinking for yourself are foreign to the philosophical framework from which they have embraced which the whole continent in a sense has embraced people in the continent Michael says curious New Hampshire has no state income tax or sales tax why isn't its economy booming New Hampshire has no sales tax how do they generate revenue there are lots of reasons New Hampshire does fairly well it's not the freest state in the country I think Florida is it's probably heavily regulated it's probably got other controls it might have other taxes it probably has high property taxes or other forms of taxes that make it difficult maybe to start businesses there so there are other factors other than taxes that impact economic liberty and economic freedom and I don't know where New Hampshire falls but it's not number one or number two in the economic freedom index of states I think it's quite regulated even though I don't know why you would think given that supposedly they have a republican governor that they wouldn't be but they are it's nice that we lived long enough to see the fall of communism will we live long enough to witness the fall of the mixed economy well in favor of what we might live long enough to see the fall of the mixed economy for pure statism but it depends who I probably won't live long enough to see the fall of the mixed economy in favor of liberty some of you might some of you are younger very very hard to tell not your average algorithm how long can numbers suppress truth you know I don't know for a long time I guess numbers I don't think numbers suppress truth I think ideas suppress truth I think bad philosophy suppresses truth I think numbers are just a tool just a tactical tool but the strategy is all philosophical and ideological it's not going to fall a long time clock says is the main reason I in Rand is rejected because most intellectuals don't want what's good for humanity no I think it's because they don't believe that humanity can really truly in every dimension benefit from what Rand has to offer because they don't believe again in those they don't believe in reality they don't believe in reason and they don't believe in egoism so they reject Rand because for whatever reasons they reject those fundamental ideas the ideas of reality reason and rights or individualism or egoism why they reject those ideas for a variety of reasons because they're not cool because they're not popular and they can't get published because everybody else accepts the other ideas they accept them too because they're second handed or because they're religious or because they come to it with false ideas or because they don't have the self-esteem to stand up for something new or they don't have the self-esteem to challenge or they don't have the confidence in their own mind and in their own reason and if they don't have the confidence in their own mind so it's basically the rejection of Ivan Rand's ideas not because they don't care about humanity but because they maybe don't care about their own life enough or because they don't take their own life seriously enough Liam says if a man knows more than others he becomes lonely really? I don't think that's true and knows more than others in what field every field more than others in math sculpture and music and knows more than others in what so no I don't buy that at all Gale in California the toll roads are free for EVs government twisting our arms yeah in all kinds of variety of ways Harper Campbell says were the 90s a little bounce back to the 19th century everyone seemed happy and good looking in movies and TV shows the stock market was booming 90s were definitely a good period kind of the deregulation of the 70s and 80s and and the Reagan change and cultural attitude you know people's self-esteem I think got a boost and the baby boomers were the me generation there's a lot of good things about the 80s and 90s and you saw that in among other things you know movies and TV shows not so much in the music Liam says is everything implicit knowledge until you focus on it no I don't think so I think you know I think you can gain knowledge by focusing you gain knowledge by focusing on reality and in that case it's not implicit it doesn't have to start as implicit it could start as explicit it's a good question to ask somebody like have you been swaying CCP EVs suck the best ones routinely catch on fire okay I have no detailed information about China EVs just I know they've become very popular in China and some of them are super cheap like four or five thousand dollars for a vehicle alright Michael asks has humanity gotten a lot more selfish since World War II including South America I don't think so I don't see why how you would make that case is there more individualism today or back then in some case some areas there's more but what you don't have is consistency you don't have consistent collectivism or consistent individualism but I humanity has gotten more selfish yes in the sense that more people are free today than after World War II more people are focusing on their own individual happiness more people associate think about owning their own life think in terms of self-ownership all of that is a positive so yes on average globally the number of people absolutely things have gotten much better since World War II James if the Constitution of Bill of Rights were really dead the Institute for Justice wouldn't be as successful as it is in getting courts to overturn unconstitutional laws the Institute for Justice the Institute for Justice is successful and I love what they do and everything but it's at the at the margin and it's really ridiculous laws and it's it's nothing big and it's nothing that requires too deep of an interpretation of the Constitution it really is at the margin you know they couldn't get eminent domain for example in favor of private corporations overturned maybe they could today but they couldn't back in the day you know they get they get narrow issues they clearly are unconstitutional but it's not they're not getting big cases that change the trajectory of the country yet maybe they will at some point but not yet not Javijago who says why is there something instead of nothing there just is there is no why there is no answer to that question other than there just is this is what there is again a good question to ask I think you'd say the same thing Harper Campbell did you see any wealthy communities while you were in South America are there any legitimate millionaires and billionaires there or is it all currently no there certainly are I know some legitimate millionaires I don't know if they're billionaires and certainly know a lot of wealthy and I saw a lot of wealthy communities in Rio there's some amazing homes there's some gorgeous condominiums there's some of the most expensive real estate in the world there's on the beach in Rio Sao Paolo has many beautiful neighborhoods with very clearly very very wealthy people live with big homes most people in Brazil live in condominiums and very nice modern condominium buildings and you can tell big apartments like Bean and very big apartments there Lebanese gabas says he's Lebanese-Brazilian yeah I know a number of Lebanese-Brazilians I know Arab-Brazilians more broadly but Lebanese I think Salim Matao who might be a billionaire but certainly he's a very wealthy man businessman in from Belo Horizonte is I think he's Lebanese there's another food chain that is run by a very wealthy Lebanese-Brazilian so there are colors, Gaussian but so there are a number of of very wealthy Brazilians and who've been very successful and a lot of the people I meet are not who I talk in front of are very well off are doing very well and a lot of the successful wealthy Brazilians have read Ayn Rand or inspired by Ayn Rand love Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged in particular being sending some of your talks to my freedom-loving friends a lot of people who have stood for liberty here still fail to understand the principles that make it possible I agree thanks for sending them my videos I really appreciate that should drinking and doing hard drugs when you're pregnant be illegal? No is an abortion still illegal in most of Latin America countries despite the government being so left to socialist I don't know I thought that was that it started changing in the last couple of decades maybe somebody in the chat knows better than I do but yes I mean you have to be very careful when you talk about abortion in Latin America I mean even when they are left as a socialist or free market doesn't really matter almost everybody's anti-abortion because of the Catholicism they're all dedicated to Catholicism but I'm not sure exactly which countries I think yeah somebody Emiliano says Argentina legalized abortion I think some Latin American countries have indeed legalized abortion recently James says is nihilism a bigger problem than altruism in the culture no I mean nihilism ultimately is a consequence of altruism altruism is the source of nihilism to a large extent because nihilism this resentment and hatred of life and to a large extent results from the fact that people are taught that they should live for others and they don't want to live for others and why should they live for others and what's the point what's the point of life if you're just going to live for others and they can't contemplate living for yourself rationally so all they're left with is kind of a nihilistic view nihilism altruism is the much bigger problem James says don't you think that it's odd Soviet Russia got the first man on the first satellite in space no other communist country has or had a space program well China but China's not really communist anymore no I mean they stole the technology they either stole it from the west and they also had a lot of German engineers and scientists that they captured during World War II that they brought over to work with them they could do the basic stuff they could get man into space but they couldn't take it to the next level couldn't take it to the next level because of lack of freedom because of willingness to fail and experiment which the Americans had but they could get a satellite into space they get a man into space because of technology they stole and because of the scientists they captured from Germany Michael says is skepticism designed to incapacitate the mind I don't know that it's designed to do that that's the result it has but you know I don't know the Hume thought ooh I want to incapacitate the mind so they fall design skepticism Kant might have done it on purpose but I don't think somebody like Hume did Frank says what was the market system like in Jesus' time and watching some Jesus movies that looks like everyone was living in poverty why was it like that because there was no freedom there was no innovation there was no entrepreneurship there was no knowledge there were no scientists because of lack of freedom basically the Greeks had been defeated the philosophy had been rejected particularly Aristotle Plato dominated Rome was top down authoritarian basically Jesus' time everybody's poor because everybody's being poor all of human history until 250 years ago let me say that again everybody's being poor for all of human history 50 years ago what made people not poor is the scientific revolution and freedom and capitalism that's what made people not poor businessman, entrepreneurship industrialization taking science and using it to make human life better Michael asks any thought on the bud light boycott I think it's a great thing because it's showing the customers can make their own choice and government doesn't need to be involved to mess with the economy yeah but what's motivating them you know this again I think I'm not a big fan of trans and making a big deal out of trans I'm not a big fan of the left using or Budweiser making a point of bringing out a trans person to advertise Budweiser light but why are people objecting as much as they can it's more based on hatred and more based on than anything else it's more political than anything else it's ugly in my view so yeah I mean if you're offended by it don't buy Bud Light but the big deal that all the networks are making of it and all the people on the right are making of it and the I just find it and again these are the same people who support bans on abortion from moment of conception ugh I find it disgusting I find these people disgusting their priorities disgusting so while I'm not particularly a fan of elevating trans to be a model and seeking it out and making such a big deal out of it that the left does I'm also not a fan of the way the right has responded in Florida they're trying to ban drag shows absurd and ridiculous no one says is it reasonable to limit immigration as long as the model has it of a welfare state still exists I mean you could make that argument but I think the data shows that immigrants on net contributors to the welfare state not net extractors from the welfare state and limit it how and in what way the way we do it today is absurd and ridiculous any model and it's a lose lose lose lose lose proposition there are no winners other than the bureaucrats and it's again it's brought to you by the same people who want to ban abortions from day one it's a horrible horrible horrible system and you could easily make the system better and you could easily make the system resistant to model has it and still offensive in the sense of immigration so you could limit it somewhat by the standard of the welfare state so limit it to people who get a job but any kind of job but they won't do that that's not what it's about it's about keeping them out with regard to Latin America or the Middle East shouldn't some people just be left alone to their devices can't make a host drink water I don't know what that means nobody's trying to make a host drink water but you can change people's minds you can change their ideas we're talking about individuals and they're always good individuals in any culture the people who really can't be led to water leave them alone but that doesn't mean you leave a whole region alone because they're individuals who are quite capable of being good people and living good lives adding to your life so why leave them alone if they had banned drag shows in Florida then we would never have gotten the birdcage Robin Williams yeah that's one of the funniest movies ever but they're trying they're trying they're making it very very difficult to do drag shows in Florida there's a completely screwed up if that's what you're focusing on Daniel says let's not forget Germans brought polka to Mexico and Mexicans fell in love with polka I endured so much pain as a Mexican-American because of polka polkas polkas I can see the pain okay theme as this says one in football soccer the players at the front officially judged by their goals and assists but should they also be judged by their goal contributions i.e. skillful difficult passes to the players who assist the goal scores well I mean you would think that they are you would think that every player on a soccer field in in today's statistics in intensive sports world and where we can accumulate statistics and pretty much everything a player does you would think that there would be ways to calculate your net contribution to the game on the offensive side and on the defensive side you know how many passes you made that contributed to a successful offense or to a threat on goal you know I don't know I'm not an expert but suddenly you want something that statistically captures the contribution of every player to the game as a whole including for example defensive effort you fall back you stopped an offensive player but you want to emphasize the offense for them so you wait that more but there should be stats that capture pretty much everything James there was that book that landed up in a revolution in baseball I forget the name of the book about how to use statistics and revolutionized the way managers and the way managers recruited players and composed teams so I think such a revolution is impacting football now I mean because of statistics in football in American football some teams go much more often a fourth down they go for it it used to be you never went for it in a fourth down now they go for the fourth down all the time because statistically it's been shown that that is the better strategy and I'm sure they can Moneyball was the name of the of the book thank you Moneyball I'm sure those kind of statistics can be applied to soccer as well like James asked what do you think about beheading of Ukrainian POWs done online do you think that it is similar to ISIS will this create terror or the opposite I think it's horrific I think it's absolutely ISIS I think it's barbarism and it won't I think if you know what it will create is much more commitment on the other side to kick these people out of your country and not to fall prisoner to them to fight to the death rather than to be decapitated I think it's going to increase the rage against them and so I think it's bad military strategy how is Russia's brutality similar to terrorists well in a sense that they're trying to inflict terror on the population so beheading for example I think you just asked a question about the beheading I don't think necessarily bombarding civilian populations or the infrastructure is the same but the beheading is such a ritual thing it's such a broadcast on TV kind of thing clearly aimed to terrorize just like terrorists do there's a lot to say about targeting civilians and so on for another time in war Catherine says okay so withdrawal was almost subsided welcome back thank you Catherine really appreciate the support and Andrew has the last question the same rightist who bemoaned the cowardly fear of leftist recovered a cowering in fear of AI fear is the form of aggressive oppression opposition not that the leftists are welcoming but seemingly more so yeah I mean right is suspicious of technology the right is suspicious of I think they're afraid because they don't trust their own because of their religion they don't trust their own reason yeah I mean the right today has become a status almost the status of the left in so many regards and yeah there's so much fear mongering around AI it's going to be fodder for the Iran Brook show for years to come this is exciting times it's interesting times depressing times in many respects but also super interesting for a show alright I'm exhausted I'm going to go to sleep I will see you all probably tomorrow as I said I have to attend this trial so we'll see when that ends and when I can do a show so I will let you know during the day thank you don't forget I like the show before you leave to support the show on www.uranbrookshow.com Patreon, subscribe, start local please become a monthly contributor I really really appreciate it it's how we keep the show going I will see you all tomorrow and in the following days bye everybody and sorry to have kept you without Iran Brook show for so long