 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Book Show. Oh, hey, everybody. Welcome to Iran Book Show on this Sunday night, Jonathan. We've seen Jonathan in a long time. There he is, getting our super chat going. Thank you, Jonathan, for the support. Thanks, everybody, for being here. I really appreciate it. I hope you've had a great weekend and looking forward to a fantastic week coming up this week. Today, we're going to be talking about finance and authoritarianism. We're going to talk about how modern governments use finance in order to control us in order to try to manipulate us. We see that. We have seen that over the last few days in Canada with the truckers. And I think it's an important, scary phenomena that, in many respects, is only going to get worse. In this context, we could probably talk about crypto and the potential for crypto to be a solution for that, or an alternative for that. But we'll talk about that. So we're going to talk about that issue primarily triggered by the Canadian government's attempts to really shut down the whole protest, not by means of freezing people's bank accounts, by means of not letting people transact, not letting people get access to their own money, taking their money away from them. No, no crime has been committed as far as we know. They haven't been found guilty of anything. There's no due process. And we can go on and on and on and on about that. But it's just unbelievable. Anonymous user, thank you for the support. I really appreciate it. So yeah, we're talking that context about the war on cash and the ever-increasing attempt by the government to control our finances and to get as much information about us and about our lives and about the way what we do with our money as possible. And that is only a growing phenomenon. We do something new in the Iran Book Show. We have a couple of sponsors. So this will be the first time we've got sponsorships. We've got two sponsors that are going to be with us, hopefully, for a while. But the first one is ExpressVPN. I use ExpressVPN. I really do. I actually do. It was very useful in a place like China. I was able to access the internet from China, access a lot of sites like Facebook that are banned in China. You can use ExpressVPN of VPN service in order to get around those bans. But more broadly, if you care about your privacy, if you care about your privacy in your business, if you care about your privacy in your finances, ExpressVPN is a great solution for you. I've been using ExpressVPN for years. I actually knew the founder and CEO of ExpressVPN. We actually had breakfast and dinner in Hong Kong. He was in Hong Kong. Now, he sold the company. As far as I know, he sold the company. And there's a bigger company that owns ExpressVPN. But anyway, you can get a discount. If you sign up through the link below, expressvpn.com slash Iran, you can get three months extra free, three, I'll get this right, three extra months free at ExpressVPN. So just use expressvpn.com slash Iran. And you can do that. The link is also below. As you know, as all of you know, I am a big lover of art and having art in your life and bringing art pieces into where you live and your life. And it's great to be able to consume music and see great movies and visit beautiful museums. But sometimes you want it in your house. You want to be able to look at it on a regular basis, on a daily basis. Well, now you can get, there's a website that has these amazing sculpture reproductions. It's called The Fountainhead. Ooh, I'm going to butcher this. Gypsoteca. Gypsoteca and Justin will correct me if I'm not. It's run by a Brooklyn sculptor, Justin Kedal, whose work I've seen and really, really like. And The Fountainhead Gypsoteca, it was founded with the goal of giving people a chance to have high quality and affordable reproductions of masterpieces in their own homes and spaces. You can view the collection at Fountainhead. Fountainhead casts one word. Dot com. Orders over $100 get free shipping within the US. And if you mention my name, me, if you mention me, when you order, you get 10% off on all your orders. So don't forget, again, the link is in the description. Don't forget to visit fountainheadcasts.com. All right. If you would like to sponsor the Iran Book Show, drop me an email, iranaturanbookshow.com. All right. Super chat. We all know how this works by now, I think. You can ask questions. You can support the show. An honest user, Jeff Bannister, best friend, Hank, have already used it to support the show. Darius has already used it to actually ask a question, which we will get to later. The more dollars you put on your question, the sooner I get to it, the earlier I answer it. We have a goal every show to get to $600 of Super Chat. We have Catherine Mendez on here, who is in charge of getting us to that goal of encouraging you of, because I'm not supposed to encourage you too much. We're supposed to just focus on the content. But we do have the $600 goal that hopefully we can meet again today. And thank you for all of you who use Super Chat to contribute to the Iran Book Show and make it feasible. And again, don't forget. Don't forget to sign up for ExpressVPN and for the Fountainhead casts. Super Chat questions. I don't see them. Bring them on. $20 or more. That is the ideal. All right. But of course, you can only afford $1, $2, or $5 free to do that. And don't forget it all supports the Iran Book Show and everything we do here, the interviews, the interviews or any of you other people when they interview me, and the lectures, the debates, and eight hours a week approximately of Iran Book Show content available for free on YouTube. All right, so I think everybody's been following what has been going on. In Canada, you know that I had misgivings about the whole demonstration. I'm not a fan of these kinds of demonstrations. And I had some misgivings about what was underlying motivation. And of course, ultimately, misgivings about whether they would go all the way, whether they were willing to actually sustain this. And none of us uses this. I'm buying ExpressVPN no more money for questions. I probably get, I don't know, one cent for every person who buys ExpressVPN. So don't assume that by buying ExpressVPN, we're going to get a lot of funds here at the Iran Book Show. It's going to be very, very minor until we grow, until we have like a million and a half subscribers. And then the ExpressVPN will be significant. Anyway, you know, I've added to the addition of whether it would be successful, how it would end. Unfortunately, it ended not surprisingly, as soon as the police got a little tough. Basically, most of the truckers backed off. A lot of the trucks were gone Friday night. And then the rest of them were gone Saturday night. And in some cases, the Canadian-mounted police primarily got pretty aggressive and pretty brutal, I think, probably unnecessarily. But I think it's over. I think the whole, and this was part of my point, is that this was not a revolution. It was not sustainable. It was not going to last. And it would not achieve its goals. And indeed, the goal, at least the narrow goal of getting rid of COVID mandates, most of that is being happening anyway. Most of the COVID mandates are going away anyway. Best of all, Hank, thank you. I appreciate the support. But I found one particular tactic that Trudeau, his government and his finance minister who announced it, used was particularly nasty and particularly evil and particularly bad in terms of setting a precedent. Because of the Emergency Powers Act, that I guess Trudeau declared or initiated, what they were allowed to do was to basically freeze the assets of people who participate in the protest, people who funded and provided funding for the protest. Now, it's true that these actions are illegal. And technically, you're not allowed to fund illegal actions. But all of this, freezing somebody's bank account is something really, really, really serious. This is where we all have, and we'll talk about this more in a minute, but this is where we all have our money, our savings. The money we need to buy food, to put it on the table, almost all of us are completely dependent on the money in the banking are being available in order for us to live, to survive, to have a life. And in order for the government to take an asset like that, any asset, but certainly an asset of importance like that, shouldn't this be some due process? Is it incumbent upon the government to prove our guilt? Isn't there something about the presumption of innocence? Now, it's always the case that emergency provisions, any law that's called emergency law, is scary and authoritarian and disruptive and bad and anti-freedom everywhere and anywhere. And that's true whether it's in the United States and the COVID national emergency order, that was originally passed, I think, by Trump and now extended by Biden, or whether it's in Canada's emergency order, whether it's all the emergency orders passed in Hungary that gave given Orban almost dictatorial like powers. Emergency orders are bad, and this is part of that emergency order, but there's something particularly evil and bad about the ability to take our money with very little recourse and certainly no immediate recourse. We see the same thing. We see the same, and I would say this, if this was just the emergency act in Canada, if this was just a one-off phenomena, you know, yeah, they declared an emergency, they did this and that's it, then okay, it's bad, it's evil, it's wrong. But this is an expression of something that is going on all over the world, going on in the United States in particular, that almost nobody talks about, that is expanding in its use, that is the confiscation of our wealth directly by freezing our bank accounts, by taking our money with no due process. With no thought about the issue of innocent before proven guilty. So it seemed like a broader topic for me. And of course, you know, you can talk about, we can talk about crypto as potentially being a solution here, but the challenge is with that as well. So think about, think about in the US. Think about the fact that we have the police, civil forfeiture laws. The police can stop you. If they suspect that you've done something wrong, they can seize what they find in the car that they've stopped. If you have to have a suitcase full of cash, they can seize it and take it. They can take your car, they can seize it. Do they need a warrant? No, do they need to prove that you've committed a crime? No, I can't think of anything more authoritarian than that. A policeman feels like you might have done something wrong and why the hell should you be traveling with a lot of cash and your car must have been used in some crime or another and they just take it. And what's interesting in the US is that part of their salary, part of their compensation of the police in certain localities is based on how much they bring in through the civil forfeiture laws. The certain counties in the US that you do not wanna be driving in, particularly if you have cash in the car, somebody's asking if the question's today specifically about the topic. No, you generally can ask questions about anything you want, anything you want. So the whole idea of constitutional protection, the whole idea of not being able to penalize you until you've been shown to be guilty, the whole idea of due process out the window. It doesn't exist in the US. And I have no idea, I don't know the legal history here, I have no idea how this has withstood the court system. I have no idea how nobody is overruled us. But that's not the only law. There was an act that was passed, I believe in the 1970s in the United States called the RICO Act. Now the RICO Act was passed in order to go after organized crime. And what would happen when they'd arrest somebody in organized crime? And by the time they prosecuted, by the time they found him guilty, by the time the fine was imposed on this person, all the assets that the person would have somehow disappeared. And therefore he couldn't pay the fine or he couldn't pay recompense to the people he stole the money from or whatever. The money had just gone. So with the idea of fighting organized crime, Congress passed a bill called the RICO Act. And the RICO Act allows the authorities to freeze your assets, to confiscate your assets once you're arrested for certain crimes. Not once you're proven guilty, not once you've been found guilty. No, as soon as you're arrested, they freeze your bank accounts, take your stuff. And then later if you're found innocent, supposedly they give it back to you. But a trial like that can take years. And during that period you have no access to your bank accounts and everything else. And the idea was, well, we need extraordinary measures, emergency acts to deal with extraordinary crimes, extraordinary organizations like organized crime, like the mafia. And most Americans go, yeah, okay, it's an emergency. You know, people forget the extent of which organized crime was prevalent in the 1970s and how violent America was during that period. So people accepted it. It was gonna be applied to Don Corleone and not to me, not to you, just to those guys, and the bad guys. So when we know they're bad guys, even before we try them, we know they're guilty before we even try them, right? So we have the RICO Act that we can take their money, freeze their accounts, destroy their lives. Before we ever, ever find out that they're guilty. That wasn't the end of it. And here I'm gonna tell you one of the many reasons why I despise, despise Rudy Giuliani more than probably any other politicians out there. I despise this man because in the 1980s, as the District Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the District Attorney responsible for Southern District of New York, which means Wall Street. Yeah, I'm more than Trump. I despise him more than Trump. And the two of them together make a wonderful couple, wonderful couple. In the early 1980s, as the District Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Rudy Giuliani started using the RICO Act for the first time on non-mafia cases, on cases that involved financiers and businessmen. He famously would arrest financiers in Wall Street, put them in handcuffs, tipped the press off in advance so the press was there when he made the arrest, dragged them out into the street in handcuffs, then freeze their assets, freeze their counts, use the RICO Act, claim that they had conspired in whatever the technical legal terminology is to use it. Now, these trials sometimes took years. Many of them were appealed, many, many, many, many of the cases that Giuliani tried, landed up being thrown out, landed up being reversed on appeal. Maybe five years later, Giuliani wasn't even there anymore. And yet for five years, people's lives have been destroyed, their reputations in Fragland, in Tatters, and their assets frozen, no access to money. Now, this to me, it was unbelievable, unbelievable abuse of power, unbelievable abuse of power. Now, the law is a bad law. It should have never passed Congress. It's a massive violation of rights. But then it was passed in a particular context and it was understood by everybody that this was the context and then Giuliani blew that up. He opened it up to this day. They use RICO Act to go after business leaders and businessmen and all kinds of people. Destroying people's lives, destroying their occupation, destroying their ability to make a living. And he's a good people, productive people, people who ultimately are found to be innocent. And yet it doesn't matter, their lives are gone, finished, destroyed. Now, who did Giuliani did that? He put in prison, he tried and succeeded, I think in destroying the lives of many people, many good people, many productive people, many successful people. And he's never paid the price for it. He never paid the price for it. I mean, he paid the price for it in his own internal hell in the fact that when you look at him, he looks like one of the most miserable people on planet Earth. But beyond that, he's become, after 9-11, he became a hero, a hero. So now you know a little bit more about why I despise Rudy Giuliani. I mean, you can't live down, that's something you can't live down, destroying the lives of productive people, doing it on purpose. Not caring whether they're guilty and innocent ultimately. And doing it for one purpose and one purpose only, which was Rudy Giuliani's motivation. One purpose and one purpose only, which was to gain political power. So you can see that this idea of freezing people's accounts, taking their money, it's not unusual. Think about the banking system. Think about banks, think about why we have banks and what we use banks for. And what assumptions do we make about our banking relationships? Before there were banks, you would have to have your money on you or bury it in the backyard or under the mattress. Usually it would be in gold coins or something like that. It would be unbelievably difficult to keep it, preserve it, protect it from thieves, protect it from loss. But money that you had in those days, in that reality, the money that you had was yours. Nobody had any business really in how you got it. Nobody knew how much you had. There was no paper trail. There was no way to figure out. You know, maybe some transactions were documented but many were not. And you didn't have your money in one place and it wasn't concentrated and you could have, who knows how much buried in the backyard. What you did with the money was completely private. You could have invested it. Maybe there'd be a document contract to prove that. But you could buy anything you wanted to buy. Your transactions were free. You in a sense were free to transact, not free to transact because of political freedom because there was none. You were free to transact because you had privacy. Because nobody knew what you had and nobody could follow you around and tell what you did with that money. Starting at some point, in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, people started depositing the money they had, motions, people who had a little bit of money with banks or the equivalent of banks and getting pieces of paper in exchange. They would deposit the gold in the bank. They would get pieces of paper that could be exchanged back into that gold and these people's paper became the way in which we buy and sell things. And still, pretty much everything was private. Now, there was one aspect of this that was not and that is that all your money was being held at a bank at a institution that had a recorative. Joe has $500 here and Sam has 50 and Joe took out 50 the other day. And again, it wasn't so much in dollars, it was in gold coins and things like that or so and so deposited this much and took out this much. So now, while we couldn't tell what you were doing with the money, what you were buying with it, what you were investing in, somebody who could get access to the records of the bank could actually tell how much money you had, could tell how much money you had, could tell what was going in and out of your account. Maybe they couldn't tell exactly to whom but they could tell a lot more about your financial life than they could when all we had was gold coins. Now, speed ahead to today. Today we have money in a bank. The money goes in, money goes out. It's not backed by gold anymore. It's just pieces of paper or really just electrons. Every one of those electrons is coded and anybody along the chain knows exactly where it came from and who it belongs to and where it's going. If somebody seizes my bank accounts, they know a lot about me. They have access to a lot of what I do but more than that. It used to be that we would go to the bank and take out cash and then go and shop with cash and then deposit what excess cash we had in the bank after a day of business or after we sold our stuff or whatever. And so the bank was an aggregator but there was no record of everything we did with the cash that we had. Well, today we barely have any cash. Most of our transactions are electronic whether wire transfers, ACH or even checks or credit cards, PayPal, Venmo, each one of which leaves an entire trail of not knowing how much money you spent, when you spent it but where you spent it with whom, who you paid, who paid you. There's an entire trail now of every single dollar what you made, what you spent, where you spent it, on whom you spent it. If you transfer money and Venmo to a friend theoretically the government could get records of that and could identify all of that. We live in a world in which all of our lives are completely available, completely available. To anybody who has the ability to access our bank relationships, get our credit card information, get our bank accounts, get our 401ks, our savings accounts, everything is electronic and if the government can access all these we have zero privacy. Now yes, some of us still take out cash, we still have a little bit of cash in our wallets, we spend on stuff that's cash but even that is slowly being diminished. I bet you nobody here remembers the days when there were $500 bills because the US doesn't have $500 bills anymore because they don't want you to transact in high-denomination bills because they don't want you to use cash because they can't track it. The European Union, the European Central Bank, I think used to have 500 euro notes and those are gone. Not because there's no demand for those notes but because they don't want you to. They wanna make sure that when you pay for something you pay with a credit card, with a check, with something that can be tracked, that can be followed, that can be identified. Cash is anonymous. Indeed one could argue that there is today what some people call a war on cash. The economists who advocate for doing away with cash, the politicians, the people at the Fed who would like to completely do away with cash. The only country where you can still get a high-denomination bill is Switzerland where you can get a 100 Swiss franc bill, still to this day, it's a little over $100. I don't know who is on the $500 bill, no idea. So this so-called war on cash takes four, four, what is it, forms, if you want. One is to abolish high-denomination banknotes to make it very, very, very difficult for us to do significant transactions, right? And so they limited non-nomination on the bills. Second, many countries, primarily in Europe, have legal maximums for cash payments. So this I found pretty amazing. I didn't realize this existed, right? 12 of the 28 European Union member states have restrictions on cash payments. For example, let's see, in Italy, you're not allowed to pay cash for anything for more than 2,999.99 euros. Like, it's illegal to go buy a car and give somebody $10,000 in cash. It's illegal, they don't allow it. Why? Why don't allow it? Because only crooks pay with cash, because cash is a way for you to escape income taxes, because the state, the state wants to monitor what you do with your money. The state wants to know how much you make. The state wants to know how much you spend. The state wants to make sure you're paying your, quote, fair share of taxes. So the state doesn't allow you to transact. Germany's tried to put a $5,000 euro limit, but it didn't go well with the public. But France and Spain have a limit, it's 1,000 euro. Supposedly in Greece, the limit is 500 euro. I'm gonna have to ask Nikos, if that's true. You can't pay for something more than $500 in cash. Now that's just bizarre. In the United States, of course, doesn't have a limit. You can pay whatever you want in cash. But if you pay a business more than $10,000 in cash, that business has 15 days in which to file form 8300, the IRS financial and the financial, whatever, authorities. 15 days, $10,000. If you deposit $10,000 or more in cash in the bank, the bank has to file with the authorities that you invested. If you come into the country with more than $10,000 in cash, you have to declare it and they will file. And if you don't declare it and they find it, they can confiscate it. In other words, the goal here is to prevent you from having any financial privacy, any financial privacy and cash provides for privacy. So first is a Bolshevik denomination bank note. Second is place the maximum legal value in cash payments. Third, require declarations of any party, carrying a cash amount above a specific value across national borders, we just talked about that. Fourth, require banks to report to authorities any cash deposits or withdrawals in amounts above or suspiciously near a specified value. Let's say you want to deposit $20,000 cash into your account and you're worried that if you do it all at once, they'll have to report it and you don't want them to report it. So you actually deposited in three payments, 8,000, 8,000 and 4,000. That is illegal. You can go get a massive fine for that. You can get prosecuted for that. In the United States of America, our free country, your own money. Not allowed to do it. Cash is discouraged, disincentivized or taxed. Now, it might be silly to own cash during inflationary times and maybe inflation is the ultimate way in which government prevents us from using cash. Because with cash, you lose value because of inflation. But think about Europe, where for the longest time, interest rates would be negative. Negative. You had to pay the bank to keep your money. Well, in a negative zero environment, why not have cash? But they don't want you to. They want to be able to tax you. The negative interest rate is a form of tax. They want to be able to keep the banks afloat by the banks taking a fee from you. We live in a scary world. We live in a world in which our bank transactions are all accessible to us. All accessible to the government. It doesn't take much for the government to be able to reach in. I'll give you one other example. Venmo, PayPal, Zell. You all use Venmo, PayPal, Zell. I certainly use Venmo. I love Venmo. It's easy. I move cash like that up to a certain amount. You can't do too much. PayPal, PayPal is great. Obviously, I get some of your contributions on PayPal. Zell, pretty cool. But you know that Venmo, PayPal, and Zell have to report any transaction over $600 to the IRS means who paid and who received it. So just know that anytime you're making a substantial payment on Venmo, PayPal, or Zell, the government knows about it. The government has a record of it. Now, mostly we don't care. But you never know. And of course, if they have a record of it, if they have access like that to PayPal, Zell, and Venmo, they can shut it down as well. They can freeze your ability to use those services. No, we're not capitalist guys. I've been telling you this for a long time. We're far, far from capitalists. We're far, far from free. We're far, far from free. And you saw when the Canadian government didn't like the politics of the protesters, they would have never done this to Black Lives Matter, right? Never done this to Black Lives Matter. When they didn't like the politics of the protesters, what did they do? They froze their accounts. They made it impossible for these people to live, to trade, to transact. Well, humans don't examine this data, probably. But the data is available for humans to examine. So God, if you get audited by the IRS, they will download all that data and ask you, where did you get so much money that you're moving money in this way or that way or whatever? Where did it come from? What's the source? What's the origin? Did you pay taxes on it? So sure, they don't have somebody there looking through the pieces of paper and checking everything, but they have the record. And when they need the record, they will use the record. And again, think about the fact that all these people, whether you agree with the truckers or disagree with the truckers, is irrelevant here. Think about the injustice. Think about the violation of rights of these people, money basically being inaccessible to them, in a world in which, how do you survive without a bank account? How do you survive without a bank account? How do you survive without credit cards? What are the financial consequences of all this? Two individuals, two living, breathing individuals. So we live in a world in which, and this is not just the US and not just Europe and not just Canada, this is global. Chinese certainly have access to all these things. We live in a world in which there's no financial privacy. In a world where our financial transactions are easily accessible, a world in which the legal system is amenable to great violations of rights, the confiscation of wealth, the freezing of accounts, to really painful remedies, we live in a world in which the authoritarians can flip a switch and suddenly, the money we thought was ours, the money we thought was in a bank account. In its house, I can use it, I can go buy stuff, I can live off of it. It's not mine anymore, it's gone. It's disappeared, poof, it's gone. Now, the advantage of having cash, even though it loses value every year, the advantage of having cash is it's hard for them to get access to it. But at least you have something. Imagine an authoritarian coming to power in the United States and saying, I don't like objectivists. That's your Ron Brooke, the stuff he says. All right, so they shut me up, that's one thing. I can't talk anymore. OK, that's bad, really bad. But imagine if they also say, we're taking away everything in your bank accounts. What do I do? How do I live? How do I cash out? You're finished. How do you survive? Unless you have some cash, cash. Now, this is one reason. If you believe the world is going to hell, at some point in our future, if you believe authoritarianism is on the rise, if you believe there's a real risk of dictatorship, or real risk of authoritarianism, or real risk of the government penalizing its political enemies. This is why not keeping all your money in the bank makes sense. This is why, for a long time, it made sense to hold gold. But not to hold gold in a vault controlled by a bank. Not to hold gold in a vault where it could be confiscated. Not to hold gold in the form of gold bars. And yes, maybe gold protect you from inflation, but it cannot protect you from confiscation. Remember, FDR confiscated. People don't know this, but it's spooky. FDR confiscated all the gold in America, held by private individuals. He took it in 1933 after promising not to do it during the campaign. Converscated. You would expect it. First of all, the banks had the gold, so it was easy to confiscate that because it was held in a vault, and they knew where their vaults were. Now, they paid you for it, but they took the gold. Gold was gone. You didn't have access to it. It was illegal for an American, illegal for an American to own gold from 1934 until 1971. So now that it's legal to own gold, but it might not always be legal to own gold, I always recommend to people who worry, as I think most of us should, take some of that. Take some of your wealth and get it converted into gold coins. Why coins? Well, because coins are easy to use in an environment where for whatever reason, you cannot use cash because your bank accounts are frozen or because you're persona non grata or because the world has ended in this civil war and this mayhem in the streets. Cash is useless. Nobody will want the cash. Gold they'll always want. Why coins? Because of denomination. You don't want to be running around with gold bars to buy stuff. Well, can you give me change for this gold bar? What you need are gold coins. You need gold coins buried in your backyard or put away in a safe in your home or something, somewhere, put somewhere where nobody can get access to them, but you can have access to them in a time of an emergency. And to take a significant portion of your wealth and put it into that, very few people are going to do that, but that is what it takes in the crazy world in which we live today to preserve your wealth. Silver coins, anything that's transportable, that has value, that you think people will exchange stuff for. So just some financial advice. And of course, this is where you get to crypto. Crypto selling point, I would say crypto's major selling point is its anonymity or potential of anonymity. Not all crypto is anonymous. And so it's anonymity and its security, although again, not every crypto is truly secure. You can access it theoretically from anywhere. You can move it around, you can pay for stuff. As long as, as long as what? Well, as long as there's electricity, kind of necessary for crypto. And as long as the government will allow you to, in a sense, because, well, the government can't track your Bitcoin or some of your crypto though, again, it's not clear to me that they can't, but let's say some of them can. So imagine you have a bunch of crypto and you've got a grossie, you've got a guy who's willing to sell you a car and willing to sell you other stuff, crypto stuff. How is he in account for that? In his books, because he's being monitored by the government, because he's a business. Can the government tell that guy you cannot accept Bitcoin? Yes. Now, theoretically, they can't tell that he accepted Bitcoin, but they can tell that the car has disappeared from his inventory and there's no dollar associated with that car sale. It doesn't appear in his books. So how did, how did he get paid for it? It's very easy to stop you from using once they make it illegal. Now theoretically, you make gold illegal as well. But now that it is legal, it's, you know, maybe if you believe the world is coming to an end, maybe if you believe we are heading towards civil war, if you believe that the authoritarians potentially will go for your bank account. Crypto might be a reasonable place to put some money. You know, you have to understand that you are speculating that there is a chance that you will lose. Yeah, I know Charlie Munger thinks it's complete red poison, but Charlie Munger's very conventional when it comes to these things. He said something else today that was just ridiculous. I mean, Charlie says some ridiculous things. He's super smart. One of the greatest investors of all time, but doesn't make him. So what makes crypto feasible? What makes it reasonable in the world in which we live? What makes it, gives us reason to think about maybe we should use it. Maybe we should put some of our wealth into it. Is the fact that it provides protection at least until the government decides to shut it down, until the government decides to use force to really crush it. And then its use is going to be questionable, particularly if it's not just one government, but it's kind of a global effort to shut down crypto. So we'll see. We will see. I suspect that there will be cryptos. Some of the cryptos will survive. They will have value. And you will want some of your wealth in them. The question is, which ones? How much of your wealth? And is now the time or is 10 years from now the time? I'm waiting for now, but I suspect there will be a time. Okay, so bottom line is we gotta really be careful. We gotta really beware of how much of our financial life and therefore our life is easy for the government to shut down, easy for the government to just take, easy for the government to get information about. And you have to realize that you just don't have privacy anymore in terms of your trading. It's only when you use cash do you get privacy. And most of us don't use a lot of cash. But today, the government can't have access to everything that you do, everything that you do. So be careful and prepare. Because when the authoritarianism comes, it will have tools that the deterrence in the past did not have. It will not need your neighbors to be spying on you. They'll be able to spy on you directly through your bank account, your credit card account, and all your financial transactions. They'll be able to spy directly on you based on your behavior on the internet. Based on being able to access your phone, access your computer. They won't need neighbors to spy on you. So, prepare yourself, I guess. Or at least recognize it. And recognize how late in the game it is. How disastrous authoritarians would be. Oh, by the way, that's a good reason to get a VPN. Makes it harder for them. I don't know if it makes it impossible, but it certainly makes it harder for them to track you online. VPN, express VPN. You can expressvpn.com slash Iran. And you get a discount. An extra three months free when you sign up for expressvpn. So they're now a sponsor of this show. A great lead in there, Wonder Freeman. It's later than you think in terms of how bad things are in the world. It's earlier than you think in terms of the power, the strength, the size of the good in the world. Ah, all right. Iran is in deep trouble if authoritarians find him. I am. My life is completely exposed. My finances are completely exposed. My wealth is exposed. I don't have crypto. And I'm vocal. I talk here about revolutions. I talk here about the evil of our political class. Left and right. Will they one day want to get back at me? Will they one day come after me? I don't know. It's not worth thinking about. You gotta, as I talked about a few weeks ago, a few shows ago, you gotta function on the basis of optimism. Otherwise it shuts you down. It locks you up. You can't do anything. All right. Hopefully you guys learned something there. Hopefully you're thoroughly depressed after all of that. Let's see a few things I want to just remind you. Before you leave the show today, please like the show. Press the like button. I mean, assuming you liked it. I don't want you to like the show if you didn't like it. Press the like button. And it really helps with the algorithms. It helps expand. It's easy. It's cheap. It doesn't cost you anything except help me with the algorithms to get the word out. So like the show before you leave. I mean, if you really want to help the show, then share it. That's the best way to help the show. Not only do you get it to your audiences, but also the algorithm sees ooh. The show is shared by a lot of people. It must have had an impact on a lot of people. People really care about the show. And then they get elevated up. The algorithms are everything in YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and everything else. And then finally, you can support the show on your on-book show. .com slash support Patreon and subscribe star, and of course, here on Super Chat. So how are we doing in Super Chat? Let's see, Catherine. All right. We're at about $250, which is OK. We've still got at least half an hour. And we've got a bunch of Super Chat questions that I have to go through. But that means we still have to raise $350. And $350 is a lot. But we always manage to somehow do it. So I'm hoping some of you will help out and allow us to reach the $350 goal, the $600 goal, but get a $350. Of course. So let's make $20 questions now a priority. So please, if you want to ask a question, use the $20 amount. Of course, as Ashton just discovered and showed us, you can do $49.99, or you could do $99.99, or you could do $500. There's no limit. Well, maybe there is a limit on YouTube. But from my perspective, there's no limit on how much money you can use in order to ask a question on the Super Chat. And of course, the more questions, the more dollars you put on it, the faster I answer. Just give you a quick update. We are up to, God, 31,997 subscribers. So please, if you're not a subscriber to the show, if you're not a subscriber to the show, but you're listening, just press on that Subscribe button. I want to get to 32,000 while we're doing the show. Certainly tonight, we should get a 32,000. And again, the more subscribers we have, helps the algorithm, greater exposure, get more people, have an impact, teach people about what's going on in the world, and hopefully create the foundations for peaceful, philosophical, intellectual revolution, real revolution, revolution for liberty, freedom, and capitalism. But to get there, we have to get to 32,000 subscribers first. And then, of course, to 50, and 100, and a million, and all of that. That's the path. There's no shortcuts, really. All right. Wow, we're already over 300. So $280, $275, and we're already there. 31,997 subscribers. That's been a big pick up in recently. Many of you probably remember when it had 20,000 or less. Or some of you probably remember when it had less than 10,000, less than 1,000 maybe subscribers. Those are the long, long time ago. But still, some of you have been here all those years. Thank you for the support during all that time. So three subscribers. We're looking for three subscribers going. No, I'm kidding. But we are looking for three subscribers. Hopefully, we can get them during this hour. I think most of the people who listen are subscribers, but there are a few of you out there. All that happened, if you're subscribers, you get an announcement when I go live, or when I publish a new video, and you'll find out more about the Iran Book Show. So that's the cost to you of subscribing, not that big of a deal. Yeah, Stephanie says she remembers 5,000. I remember 5,000 too. We've come a long way. It's good. It's good. Growing influence, growing reach, growing impact. All right. Where are we? Where are we? Where are we? Yeah, I'll be giving more talks. Lots more talks in March. Dozens. I'll give you the schedule once I have it nailed down, but the schedule in March is going to be pretty outrageous. If you're in Europe, I mean, it'd be great for you to come to the Ironman Conference in London the first weekend in April, but you can also catch me all over Europe. We'll be giving talks primarily in the UK, even Edinburgh. I'm coming to Edinburgh, coming to Scotland. If you live in Scotland, come on over. Watch me speak. It'll be fun. I'm doing a talk in Scotland on art, on why modern art is not art. It's going to be fun. It's going to be a fun talk, I think. I mean, I haven't prepared it. That one I actually have to work for, but I think it's going to be a lot of fun. It's going to be really cool. All right, let's see. Ashton, 50 bucks, so Ashton gets priority. Do you hear the people sing? Singing the song of angry men. Is it the music of the people who will not be slaves again? When the beating of your heart echoes the beating of the drum, there is a life about to start when tomorrow comes. Who wrote that? Did you write that, Ashton, or is this a famous song? Should I know where it comes from? But it wasn't a question, but certainly was a statement. Do you hear the people sing? Singing the song of angry men. This is revolution, guys. It is the music of the people who will not be slaves again. When the music, when the beating of your heart echoes the beating of the drums, when you're aligned with the revolution, there is a life about to start when tomorrow comes. Yeah, we all get a renewed life on the other side. That's pretty cool. I like that. Who wrote that? I'm curious, is he going to tell us who wrote it? Songs from the French Revolution. God, don't tell me that. That's depressing, because the French Revolution is like the model for the worst revolution ever. We'll have to do a show about the French Revolution. But the French Revolution is awful, because the French Revolution is not about freedom. I mean, no question, there were people who were involved in the French Revolution who were pro-freedom, and there were people in the French Revolution who had justified cause for the revolution, and wanted good things, but it turned very quickly, very, very quickly. Into an anti-man, anti-freedom revolution. It turned into nihilistic and destructive and death and bloodshed for the sake of death and bloodshed. So no, no, no, let's not use the French Revolution as our example. The American Revolution is the noble revolution. Luke, are you the one from the school, from the college in London who wants me to come and speak at the college? She spoke to your tutor. Let me know, I'm waiting for your emails about speaking, or Luke as somebody else. I don't know which Luke Luke is, but send me an email, uranaturanbrookshow.com, I should get it, unless it goes to the junk folder. All right, let's look at the emails. $20 starts, $20, $20, there's one. Does the truth not matter to most people outside of making their own living? I mean, I think everybody thinks the truth matters to them. Everybody would declare that the truth is important. But I think for a lot of people, maybe most people, on certain issues, when the rubber hits the road, when it matters, they are happy to ignore the truth, evade the truth, not even think about the truth in order not to feel uncomfortable, in order not to rock the boat, do rock the boat in their own mind, never mind outside there, in order not to challenge their pre-existing assumptions. So too many people are willing to give up on the truth in the name of maintaining a comfort level, in the name of, again, just going along with the flow. So truth does not matter to a lot of people, unfortunately, in certain types of situations. And it depends for different people, those situations might be different. And some people don't care about the truth, even at their jobs. They often screw up, they often watch other people screwing up. They often deceive, evade, deny, reject, pretend that it didn't happen, and live that way. So truth can be a victim. All right, Corey and Jeff have just stepped in big time. Corey with 50 Australian dollars, and Jeff with 100 Canadian dollars. So let's start with Jeff. You don't have to comment on my previous statement. I don't know where your previous statement is. Not trying to cause an argument, see Bradley Thompson has a very different take on our situation. He also has a great series on the right to an education. Would you consider having him on to discuss this series? What was the previous comment? Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, I don't see what this previous comment was. Yeah, I mean, I've had Brad on the show many times. We agree on most things. I've had him on the show as much as I've had pretty much anybody. You know, I haven't yet read his series on the right to an education, but just on conversations we've had in the past about it, I have some disagreements with him about certain aspects of it, particularly with regard to parenting, right to parents. But, okay, but again, we agree on most things. We disagree, I think, on certain aspects of politics. We disagreed on the truckers. I don't know the source of that disagreement. And I don't think that disagreement is very deep. It's not like I am hostile to the truckers or ever was. So I don't know how deep the disagreement is, but yeah, I'm sure I'll have Brad Thompson on again on the show sometime in the future. I've just promised slots to other people and I have to get through that list first before I have Brad on again. Corey asks, I came in a little late, so sorry if you have already addressed this. Did you happen to see the clip going around of Justin Trudeau explicitly stating that he's going to violate people's rights in the context of COVID restrictions? No, but it doesn't surprise me. I mean, look, the left in particular of it, I think the right, true, neither one of them have any conception of rights. And to the extent that they have a conception of rights, it's rights is something the government grants you. Rights is something the government gives you and it gives you and it can take it away. And it's no big deal. The government does that all the time, right? They tax you, they take your money, they tell you you can't do certain things, you can't consume drugs, you can't consume this, you can't consume that. So from the perspective of a leftist and most people on the right, rights are just like laws and like other things that the government does. It can take it away, it can give you, it's, so yeah, he's gonna say, look, in the name of your health, and I don't know exactly what Justin Trudeau said, but I can see politicians saying this, and I'm sure many of them have and will say this, in the name of protecting your health, protecting your right to not be exposed to this virus, we're gonna have to violate your rights to travel or your rights to decide what to wear on your face and what not to wear on your face, or your right to get a vaccine or not to get a vaccine based on your choice. We're doing it for the common good, we're doing it for the public interest, we're doing it to protect another right, which is called the right to healthcare. And they see no conflict, no contradiction, no problem with this because they don't have an absolutist, principled perspective on rights. Doesn't exist in our modern framework. Almost nobody has it. Almost nobody talks about rights. I mean, did Donald Trump ever mention the concept of rights? The word rights? No, because then it doesn't matter. You do what you have to do. You do what you have to do to get the job done. That's pragmatism. And the more intellectuals use the term rights, but they're basically pragmatists and you do what you have to do to get the job done and if some rights have to be violated here or there, so what, that's okay. Nobody cares about rights is my point. So it's not surprising just that you do have said that and if you showed that video to a leftist, they would say, well, yeah, of course. Rights in conflict, they would argue. In order to preserve some rights, you have to violate other rights. That's just the way it is. So it's not, you know, these videos circulate among people who care about rights and we get all upset, but the world out there doesn't care because they don't have the conception of rights. Okay, Michael, oh God, why do you have to ask insider questions, Michael? I don't like these questions, you know that. Did you hear David Hammond's speech about election fraud and how 9-11 was an inside job and how Bill Gates and George Soros are evil? I read Logical Leap. How about any guy that brilliant be this nuts? Why are you asking me? I don't know, I don't know. I have no idea. I've not seen that speech. I did not know that Dave Hammond now, and I believe you, but I just don't know that he believes now in 9-11 conspiracy theories and that both Bill Gates and George Soros are just evil. That is a new low if he believes that. Michael asks, how long should you feel guilty after you committed any justice? Well, it depends. Have you apologized? Have you paid recompense? Have you identified in your own mind why you did it? How you're not gonna let it happen again? Have you fully accounted for it to yourself and to whatever victims you inflicted this justice to? So it very much depends on the context. Even after you've apologized and made a recompense, then I don't think you have to feel guilty depending on the level of the crime. Certain things is, apologies don't matter. If you murder somebody, it's done. I don't care. You should feel guilty forever. So it depends on the size of the crime, the size of the injustice. So you combine the extent of the injustice, whether you've done anything about it, to what extent have you come to terms with what you did, to what extent is your apology real and true and a recompense, and that you have internalized a lesson from it. But the type of injustice matters. Certain injustices, never. You never stop feeling guilty about it. Okay, other $20 questions. Just by the way, we are what? We're $115 short, $115 short. Should be able to make that pretty quickly. So I encourage any of you who can make it up quickly to do it, and that would be great. Michael asks, Michael's asking a lot of questions as usual. 20 years from now, will we have put a dent in altruism's monopoly on ethics? I think we put a dent all the time. I think there's constantly a dent being put on it. Yes, I think 20 years from now, we will put a dent, not a big dent, a little dent, but a dent. So yes, in 50 years, a big dent. Big, big dent. Michael again, have you seen any of these mafia guys who've just got out of prison running highly successful YouTube channels like Michael Fanceze or Sammy the Bull? Should they legally be allowed to profit from discussing their crimes? Yeah, I don't see why not. They've served time in prison. If they discuss a crime they weren't prosecuted for, they should use this as evidence to prosecute them for the new crime. But I find it disturbing that people give them an audience. That people give them an audience. But yeah, I don't see why they shouldn't be able to profit from discussing their crimes. But I haven't seen their channels, I don't know anything about them. And I don't know, were these murderers, were these drug dealers, what were they? I don't know. Let's see, Tom asks, Thomas Schumann. We wanna create a more rational society. Can this happen without one, destroying the popularity of religion to abolishing government schools? Obviously, we also need a positive agenda as well. No, it can't. I mean, I don't think it can. I think whether you abolish government schools or you create a large, massive substitute for the government schools. So certainly government schools have to be crushed. You're not gonna get a free society. You're not gonna get people thinking who can be influenced well enough without a massive push into the private school space and trying to get rid of government schools. So I think the project to get rid of government schools is a number one priority. And I think the best way to do that is through education saving accounts. And I think that should be in everybody's agenda in terms of political activists. That should be the things we spend, most of our time promoting. We should really push to abolish the government schools in any way possible. And yes, I also think that we ultimately have to destroy the popularity of religion. I think that one is going to happen in and of itself that if you get rid of the government schools and you teach kids in a sense how to think, then getting rid of religion will be easy, will be relatively easy. So I think the second one, the abolishing government schools, is the number one priority. But yes, challenging religion, challenging religion is really, really important. Ashton asks, how is capitalism doing these days? What do you mean? You mean as an economic, political, social system? Not well? Whereas I'd say before 2008, I would say generally the world was moving on a global scale towards more and more capitalism. I'd have to say since 2010, the world has been moving systematically away from capitalism, including in countries that had moved quite a bit towards it. And generally capitalism is in retreat all over the world. And government power is on the rise. I'd also say that a lot of people used to be defenders of capitalism. On the right, have now turned and become statists, fascists even, and are now opponents of capitalism. And again, it's not doing well in terms of its popularity among intellectuals. Not that it was ever popular, but at least they gave it lip service. And of course it's in retreat. And as there's no real, there's no actual capitalism anyway in the world, but the elements of freedom are all in retreat, are all shrinking. Ali asks, Iran, yesterday you said strong and good culture prevail. But from what we see, the religious freak and woke leftists are spreading while objectivism doesn't hold ground as these bad cultures. Yeah, but we don't have a culture. Objectivism isn't a good culture because it's not a culture yet. It's just a set of ideas. A goal is to influence the culture, impact the culture, change the culture. But I believe that once it's changed, once it's influenced, and once it has pride, self-confidence, self-esteem in the culture, if the culture projects a sense of self-esteem, then it is sustainable, it can withstand any threat. But today, Western civilization, the good culture, is under threat, not from the outside, but from the inside, it's rotten inside. And it's lost, the good parts of it, have lost the self-confidence and the self-esteem. And therefore allowing external cultures to just decimate it. So we have to save Western civilization. And a lot of saving Western civilization involves providing Western civilization with the self-esteem, with the confidence to defend itself. And to do that, they need Iron Man, they need her philosophy. All right, Justin says, I'm told by a friend that although there was a correlation between innovation and wealth, they may not in fact be a causal relationship. He asked me to be open-minded and test my assumptions about the parent causality. Oh my God, is right. Where does wealth come from, he thinks? What's alternative hypothesis? How do you measure? How do you even, how do you imagine wealth without innovation? So no, not only do we see in terms of inductively that innovation is the source of wealth, but we understand the causal relationship between innovation and wealth and how innovation leads to wealth. It's not a mystery, we can actually see it and understand it and see the sequence of actions that lead from innovation to wealth and how wealth is created by innovation. I don't know why today the camera seems to be taking me in and out of focus as I move around. Gonna have to check the settings of the camera and make sure that doesn't happen anymore. All right, Thomas Schubertum asks, what is your opinion of Substack the Dispatch? Writers such as David French and Jonah Goldberg have big flaws, but they seem as giants against most other people in the right today. Yes, I agree. I subscribe to the Dispatch, I read it regularly, I like Jonah Goldberg and particularly even though he doesn't like Ain Rand. I like David French even though he doesn't like Ain Rand and is very religious. I think Jonah Goldberg is probably completely secular, David French is quite religious, very religious, evangelical, but he approaches, but he is, if you could separate, he approaches most issues rationally. He doesn't let his religiosity on most issues affect. He's wrong on abortion, he's wrong on a bunch of different things. But I think they are some of the best writers, best thinkers out there on politics, on cultural issues, at least some of them. So yeah, I would sign up for the Dispatch for your news. They also do a lot of fact checking and you know they're not fact checking from the left. So I still track the Dispatch primarily because they actually do news stuff. So it's another source for me to read the news. So I recommend the Dispatch. All right, where are we? Guys, you always put me in this position where you have to spend the last few minutes asking for money, which I don't particularly like. All right, we're at $505, we showed 100 or we showed 95. So I don't know, $520 questions, we'll do it happy to answer $520 questions if anybody has them. $250 questions, we'll also do it. But let's try again to get to the 600. Let's try to do it every show. Let's try to do it early so I don't have to ask so much. All right, what do you like most about Ben Shapiro? What I like most about Ben Shapiro is that he's got a quick mind. He's smart. He's got a very quick mind. He's got great one-liners, great zingers. Thank you, Frank. And he's definitely smart and he does shy away from certain issues as so many other commentators seem to do. And at least when I've seen him, he hasn't also just towed the line. He tries to be somewhat original in the way he approaches issues. All right, Frank, just put a $50 dent in there to only looking to raise $45. Another $50 would get us over the top and we'd be fine. Frank says, leftist elites have the right to rule by accepting the duty of controlling society. Isn't this a legacy of Kant and legal positivism? Yes, yes, absolutely. But that's this whole conception of what does it mean to write to rule? Nobody has the right to rule. Ruling is not something you do by right. Indeed, to rule is to violate other people's rights. To govern is to protect their rights. So government is there to protect our rights, not to rule over us. And it's not the government that has rights. It's we as an individual have rights. The rulers don't have rights. It's all of us who have rights. It's like my bookshelf is in focus and I'm not. If I stand really still, I am. I'm gonna have to fix that. Something in the settings. Maybe if there's any photography buffs out there who know something about photography, if you wanna email me how you think I can fix this, maybe changing the F-stop or the ISO or something, let me know if I can change it to make it so that the focus stays on me and doesn't keep focusing on the bookshelf and doesn't take me out of focus. All right, back to the questions. Best I can, would you eat that turtle in a soup? You're still swimming out your window. Yeah, absolutely, why not? I mean, I don't know that I eat that turtle. His name's Joe, but I'd eat a turtle. Yeah, I have no problem with that. Shay Livy asks, support for Institute for Justice if you wanna fight asset for opportunity in the U.S. Yeah, Institute for Justice does, I mean, second only to the Ironman Institute, I would support the Institute for Justice. It does phenomenal work and they do good work on good cases in the right kind of way. F-stop is four, I can't tell, ISO is 5,000. It's 30 frames per second, I think, and it's one over 500, whatever that is, 1,500th. The Legend 27 asks, what is a good practice to start doing in order to start distancing yourself from a very altruistic authoritarian upbringing cultural influence? I'd say, you know, listen to your own book show, the episodes on Iran's rules for life. Redine Rand's ethics, but remind yourself always, I would say the habit to get into is to remind yourself constantly that your life is what matters and that your judgment is what counts. And then any second you waste on these people or on altruism or on these other things is a second you'll never get back. And you gotta find a way to shrug them off and to live your life in pursuit of your values. And it's gonna be hard. Altruism is very hard to get rid of and you're gonna feel guilty and when you feel guilty, you're gonna have to remind yourself, I shouldn't. This is what the culture has done to me. I shouldn't feel this guilt. I should be enjoying my success. Read out the shrug, read the fondness, read them again, read the virtue of selfishness. But really the work is not the reading. The work is the internalizing. The work is the making this yours by having clear what your values are by taking pride in achieving those values. By constantly working to identify values, pursuing values and give yourself space in a psychological room to enjoy them. And if it's still hard after all that, then there's some good psychologist who could help you with it, but that's a good start. Just constantly think about it. Think about what it means to be selfish, self-interested, to be rationally self-interested, what that means, why you're doing it, what's the importance of any particular action to your life, to your happiness, to your success, how difficult it is, and how rewarding it is, and how it's the only thing that's rewarding in the life in which we live. Scott says, you said if Trudeau passed all this stuff that you'd be for the truckers, did you mean if his emergency powers passed to the Canadian Senate? That was part of it, but if you remember yesterday, I think it was yesterday or the day before, whenever it was, there were a couple of provisions that had to do with free speech that were just horrific, and I don't know that those passed, I don't think they ever got voted on. But if those would have passed, I would have been an advocate for anything to get rid of Trudeau, because those were true. You know, once free speech goes, everything goes, those would have eliminated free speech in Canada completely, political speech in Canada completely. So I was focused on those, but yes, I think the emergency app hours act is awful, and yes, the more Trudeau, and I said this the other day, the more Trudeau does, the more they use emergency powers, the more they suggest limiting free speech, the more they confiscate people's money and banking accounts, and so on. The more inclined I am to support their enemies, which are the truckers. And I've always supported the goals of the truckers. It's the means that I've questioned, and ultimately what I've questioned is the success, whether this would have any impact, and I think the answer is to that. No, it has had no impact, and will have, I think, no impact. Michael says, given how rule oriented authoritarian Germany is, how come there is no speed limit on the Autobahn? Well, I'm not sure Germany is today as rule oriented as you think. If you go to Berlin, it doesn't seem like a very rule oriented city. I don't think it's that authoritarian any different than other countries. I think that Germans also are very good at, if we build a car that can go 300 kilometers an hour, why would we limit on the highway it to only go 100 kilometers an hour? Like if the car can go that fast, and if the highway is wide and built to take high speed cars, they're too organized and in some senses, rational to allow that to happen. Blake asks, big story in golf right now, a new professional golf tour is being formed and the primary funding source of Saudi Arabia, is it ethical to get funding from the Saudi regime? No, I don't think it is. I don't think it is, but everybody does it. It's very difficult to avoid it, and they're everywhere. But I don't think it's right to get money from them. They're funding the killing of Americans, or half. Adam says, your take please on switching from pragmatist to conceptual education for pragmatist to conceptual education versus the government prescribed curricular to parental, usually religious options. By the way, Montessori was a card carrying member of the Fascist Party for a while. I don't know how long she was. I don't know if she stuck to it. And again, politics is secondary. I always say politics is secondary. Your take of switching from pragmatist to conceptual education versus government prescribed curriculum to parental options. I think conceptual education is the ideal. I think parental options are better than government prescribed options, even if they're religious. Because I think parents, even if they're religious, there's a better chance they'll use phonics. There's a better chance they'll use decent math curriculum. There's a better chance that they'll teach the kids the classics. Yes, they'll screw them up in other areas, but those areas, that once they have these other tools, the kids can get around. So I'm a big believer in homeschooling, a big believer in conceptual education, a big believer in private schools, a big believer in giving the parents as much options as possible, even if that means some of the parents will send their kids to crazy religious institutions. Firstly, it's their freedom. They have the freedom to do that. They should have the freedom to do that. And secondly, I think that a system that allows them to do that allows everything else and that everything else dominates the negative effects that the religious education gets. And then I think that parents, religious parents, are probably gonna teach other subjects that are unrelated to religion, particularly in America, better than the government schools. Catherine says, wow, Catherine's asking a question and putting dollars onto it. And she's urging you to promote, this is great. In a relationship where each partner value and priorities is each other, second to themselves, how do they work through habits and behaviors that hurt or bother them that affect their happiness? Asking for friend, laugh, out loud. Well, Catherine, it'd be easy if you gave me some examples of what you mean, right? Because it's hard to tell kind of at what level are you talking about. So there are two issues here. I mean, there are probably more than two issues, but two things come to mind. Your partner does things, habits and behaviors that hurt or bother you. The first question I ask is should they hurt or bother you? Maybe it's not the habits of the problem, maybe you're the problem. Maybe you need to think about what they're doing and change your attitude towards them because they're not really hurtful and they shouldn't really bother you. And that takes work that doesn't happen in a day, it doesn't happen easily. And I think it's important to communicate to your partner what hurts and bothers you and why they do what they do and to what extent it's rational for you to be hurt or bothered by it. But it's, I think all of those things are primarily about communication. If the other partner loves you and the behaviors are not that important to them, then they probably would be willing to change them. If they are important to them, then maybe it's you who should not be bothered by them. And you should work on not letting those behaviors bug you, but again, it's hard to do. It's hard for me to dig deeper here without some examples of the kind of things you're talking about. So leaving dirty socks on the floor, talk to him. I mean, that shouldn't be that hard for him, for her, assuming to him. I don't think girls leave dirty socks on the floor. I think that's a guy thing. I don't do that anymore. There's a thing for dirty laundry. I'm not used to, but you work on it. And you know, it's a lot about communicating and how much does it bug you? Is it like how much of an offense is it? How much worth, how much anger upset is it worth? I mean, drinking is a big problem. If drinking is one of the things, then drinking is a huge problem. And drinking is assigned, that's their problem. And that you really need to work with the person and they need to understand why they drink as much as they do. And what it is that it does to them, why it's harmful to them. But that's not dirty socks on the floor. That's an issue about themselves. Well, drinking and cheating. These are big ones, Katharine. This is not, I'm a little upset. Like you shouldn't be with somebody who cheats on you. Cheats on you in a sense of, I mean, if you wanna have an open relationship with somebody, that's fine. If you wanna have a relationship that allows them, but if they're doing it in spite of the fact that they promised you not to, then they're liars. And they're dishonest. And you just shouldn't have a relationship with a dishonest person. So cheating is not something you can just deal with. Drinking, because it's so addictive, is something you have to work with somebody on. If they're valuable enough to you, if you care for them enough, if it's worth the time, the effort, the struggle and the pain, because it's gonna be painful. But cheating should not be tolerated because it's lying and deceiving. Drinking is something you have to decide how much you're willing to tolerate and how much you're willing to work with a person. And if they're drinking and cheating, and they keep doing it, then yeah, it's time to look for someone new. For the friend, of course. All right. James says, how have the German people managed to progress so far from the days of supporting Nazi atrocities while 75 years later, the nation with the most mystical genocidal fascism turns out to be America? Well, I don't know if that's true if the most mystical genocidal fascist is gonna be in America. I'm not sure that's true. We'll see how it all evolves. Germany has its fair share of mystical genocidal fascists as well. But Germany has done phenomenally well and the reason it did well is at least at some level because of the way Germany was crushed, because of the way Germany was defeated, because of the fact that it was brought to its knees, because there was no question in the minds of the German people after World War II about whether Nazis could have been good, maybe it was a little good, maybe it was okay, but it was gone, defeated. Well, maybe they didn't get the right philosophy that understood what the wrong one was and at least for a while, they're not gonna be tempted by that wrong philosophy, not a majority of them, not a significant number of them because of how thoroughly it was proved to be a failure. See, people don't want support failure. I've said this many, many times. I said this about the Islamists and about ISIS and I have been so right about these things. I'm surprised we don't have like a whole list of all the things you run was right about that everybody condemned him for because I was so right about this. Like nobody wants to die, nobody wants to fight, nobody wants to devote their life to a cause that is a loser and once Nazism became a losing ideology, it went away. Now, Contianism didn't and Contianism's still a live war, but Contianism can manifest itself in many, many different forms. It doesn't have to only manifest itself in Nazism and indeed it doesn't. And indeed in the United States, I think that mystical genocide of fascism is just more of Contianism manifesting itself in a particular way and taking longer because of the American sense of life and the American spirit. It's taken longer for Conti influence America. In Germany, they took a haters. Conti's still influencing Germany, but not quite in the same way as they did on the Nazis. And part of that is the existential lesson that the Germans learned from what happened to Nazis. I think a lot of the world learned from that. So America's behind the curve because of its virtues, because of its great constitution and because of the sense of life of its people. Ali says, why smart people like Ben Shapiro believe in religious nonsense? I mean, Ben Shapiro, born, raised, indoctrinated into, can't imagine an alternative and is irrational in certain aspects of their life. Smart does not mean rational. Smart does not guarantee a proper good use of their mind on the right topics, on the right topics. Thomas, did you ever get back to me on an F-stop? If you did, I missed it in the chat. All right, and summer. FYI, you can still get $100 US worth in Japan in bills. 10,000 yen notes extremely common. Yes, Japan, good, good. Many countries want to ban cash. I didn't mention that. They outright want to ban cash. There was talking Scandinavia at some point about banning cash in Scandinavia. In the name of efficiency. A young lady in BC working minimum wage donated $50 before it was labeled illegal. She did not do anything else. Her banking out was frozen today. It's disgusting. It's absolutely disgusting. It's authoritarian. And I hope there's a way in Canada to sue these people. I don't know if there is, but I hope there's a way to sue them. Jeff Oster says, a coffee shop located in the area of Ottawa blockade that the lockdowns almost decimated is being threatened with closure because they sold coffee to protesters. It's just horrible. People are so vindictive and horrible and petty. Shazabot, have you considered asking ARI's YouTube subscribers to join this channel? I'm asking. ARI YouTube channel, join my channel. No, I really try to separate this channel from ARI. I don't speak for ARI. I don't represent ARI. My views on the show are not my views. Qua, chairman of the board of ARI. I support ARI, but I do not speak for the intellectuals at ARI. I do not speak for the institution of ARI. The Iran Brook show is named the Iran Brook show because I speak for Iran Brook and Iran Brook only. And I try to make that separation. And I don't want to confuse anybody and I don't want to go on the ARI's channel and say, hey, go over here, because then it starts lacking confusion. Thomas says a high of F-stop number will create a great depth of field and will allow the books and YouTube to be in focus at the same time if that's what you want. So so much that that's what I want. What I'm noticing today, which I haven't noticed in the past, is that I'm going in and out of focus, that sometimes the books are in focus, sometimes I'm in focus, rather than holding that setting. I don't mind the books and the sculpture being a little bit out of focus because that keeps the focus on me. And I know that if I raise the F-stops, then we're all in focus. But I'll play around with it. I'll play around with it. Yeah, one of Freeman says only if you have more light. And this is about all the light right now that I have. I'll play around with it. The camera is exhibiting signs of free will. Vegan zombie says. All right, Charles, we did that. Charles Butler also says, there was a funny Blackadder episode about the French Revolution. Huh, yes, I vaguely remember it. Now that you mentioned it, I'm gonna have to go see it. I love Blackadder. Blackadder is one of the funniest shows ever, ever, ever. Last question, and we are at $658.06, so thank you everybody. Bash Branigan, great name. Would the obvious success of COVID vaccines reinstate a broad belief in science in the US? Yeah, I wish, I wish. But look how many people oppose the vaccines. Look how many people who supposedly are rational oppose the vaccines. Look how much propaganda there is against big pharma. It's pharma objective is sometimes. So, people like, and non-objectivist, like Canada, so on. So I just don't see it. And so as long as science is politicized, which it was during the COVID, I don't think it can gain respect again. I don't think it can gain that belief again, because it's associated with politics. It's your science and my science. All right, everybody, thanks for joining me today. Hope you had a great weekend. I guess tomorrow's a holiday, so happy holiday, happy Presidents' Day for tomorrow. I will see you all again at 7 p.m., 7 p.m. East Coast time on Tuesday and then on Thursday. And don't know what we'll be talking about. I'm sure it'll be interesting. Thank you again for getting us to the goal. Thank you for all the super chatters. Thank you to the people who support me monthly. You're on bookshow.com slash support. Patreon and subscribe. And thank you to our two sponsors. We have two sponsors, VPN Express. Just do, VPNexpress.com slash you're on, you're on, not you're on book, you're on. And you'll get a special discount, three months free, additional three months free. And Fountainhead, what? God, that's not good. I forget the name of the sponsor. That's really bad. I have it right here, though. Yeah, fountainheadcasts.com. Fountainhead cast, just go check it out. The beautiful cast, even if you're not gonna buy anything, go check it out, cause you'll see some beautiful sculpture. Beautiful sculpture. So fountainheadcasts.com, Fountainhead cast one word. All right, just the good news. 32,001 subscribers. We did it, by the end of the show. We got to the 32,000, so thank you for those of you who are new subscribers to the show. And we keep on pushing out those one minute videos, so who knows how fast we can get to 50,000. Express VPN, not VPNexpress. Thank you for correcting me. ExpressVPNoneword.com slash you're on. ExpressVPN.com slash you're on. I will get the sponsorship deal right. I will figure it out, I promise. Bye.