 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Brookshow. On this Monday morning, welcome to another one of our relatively new episodes on the news with the idea of doing these episodes regularly. Maybe every day during the week, we will see how that all evolves. But yeah, thanks for joining. And I hope the week is starting off well for you. Have a great week. So yeah, this week we'll probably do today, tomorrow, Wednesday, and Friday. We'll see. We'll give you a break on Thanksgiving. Next week, I'm traveling again. So I'll definitely try to do a show on Monday and maybe Tuesday. And then I'm not sure. I'll be in Austin, Texas next week. And then in Connecticut, so Austin and Connecticut. And then after that, the week after that, first week, four week in December, I'm hoping to get on an actual schedule or figure out when these short programs are going to be, when these news shows are going to be and when we're going to do kind of the evening shows. So that'll be the first week of the new experiment. And we'll keep that going through the month of December. And we'll see. We'll see into next year. Of course, next year is all about, is all about new travel. So again, everything will get disrupted. Alicia says she's going to be in Austin as well. Well, I'm giving a, I'm doing a debate in Austin. Inran versus, Inran versus CS Lewis. So you should come. It's on Wednesday night next week. Wednesday night next week. It'll be a fun event. Please come, I'm debating a very religious advocate of CS Lewis's views of the world. So it should be a lot of fun. All right, let's see. As always, we have the super chat going. You know, a target for the morning shows, a $250 a show rather than the $650 show for the evenings. So we can see, oh, Alicia's going to Austin for the debate. I didn't realize that. I thought you were just going to Austin and just by accident happened to be at the same time. So I look forward to seeing you in Austin for the debate. Thank you for coming. So $250 is the goal. Also, it's an opportunity for you to ask questions. Let's try to make the questions in the morning shows, news related, news related, news related. But you can ask anything, but let's try to make them news related. $250 is a lot to get done within a half an hour to 40 minutes, but hopefully we can meet those targets on average over time. So we have when we did them in the past. So we'll see. There we go. Len is starting us off with kind of a $50 Canadian dollar. So that gets us started on the right foot. That's great. Thank you, Len. All right, I'm going to jump in with some stories. There's a ton to cover actually, but of course I don't have to cover it all today because there's tomorrow and there's Wednesday and the news is not going to break quite. It's not going to be quite as busy as, I have to cover all of last week or some of last week. So a few things quickly before we get to the stuff I've listed in the title. I think it's important that we quickly just wrap up the elections because we talked a lot about the elections, the midterm elections. Republicans have taken the House. Republicans will control the House of Representatives. It's a very, very small margin. So I think they've got 222 or 223 seats. 218 is the majority. So this is one of the smallest pickups in a midterm election by the opposition party ever. So you have to say this is a complete failure of Republicans to leverage the fact that Joe Biden is super unpopular, that the woke agenda of the Democrats is super unpopular, that CRT is super unpopular, that the fact that crime rates are going up is super unpopular and yet Republicans barely made any kind of impact. Unfortunately, my least favorite congresswoman from California actually got elected. Katie Porter got elected in Amish County. So those of you who could have voted in Amish County and didn't because you couldn't bother because it's California or whatever, you might have been the deciding vote because she won by a very small margin. The Republican really challenged her. Hopefully in two years we can get rid of her. And then in Colorado, Bobbert, who is the crazy, Trumpist, conspiracy theory Republican, who looked like she might lose, landed up winning, unfortunately, by like 500 votes. So again, very small margin. Hopefully it's a wake up call for her and that whole wing of the Republican Party. But of course we will see, we will see if that is actually the case. So we already know, I think we already discussed the fact that Republicans did not take the Senate, the Senate at best for the Republicans will stay 50-50. At worst will be 51-49. Democrats picked up a Republican seat in Pennsylvania and Republicans didn't pick up a single Democratic seat. Not a single one, not even the one in Nevada. They might pick up the one in Georgia but we'll see. And even if they pick that up, they'll just be 50-50. So about as bad of a showing as imaginable. Polls turned out to be pretty good, pretty correct. Certainly didn't bias against Republicans this time, maybe a little too pro-Republicans the polls were. So polls are back as compared to their failure in 2016, 2020 and 2018, but Republicans did really, really, really, really badly, particularly given how poorly Democrats are thought of in the country right now. I mean, this should have been a red tsunami and it wasn't. And you know, I blame just the candidates, the quality of the candidates, the kind of candidates they put up, the focus on the past, the focus on Trump, the whole Trump phenomena, the whole Trumpism and the whole focus on the election denial of 2020, just the whole focus of the party, it was no positive messaging. You wanna inspire the American people, you wanna win elections, you wanna take over, you wanna take control, positive messaging. Give us a vision of the future, give us something to look forward to rather than bitching and complaining and yelling and screaming and crying. And I mean, you come off of that as the party of the entitled winers and that's what Republicans came off as and good for the American people for not buying into that. Hopefully some lessons will be learned and going into 2024 election Republicans will have a positive message. I'm not gonna talk today about Trump announcing. I might do a show on Trump either tonight or another night. We'll see, maybe tonight. That requires more time to really get into it and also more time to kind of analyze for you my views on Trump, although I think you guys know it. One other thing before we get to kind of a musk on Twitter, I do wanna recognize that in the news we're seeing a lot of kind of horrible violence. I don't usually say much a lot about it because there's not much to say about it. I mean, these murders in Iowa are weird and upsetting and really horrific. But they don't have a suspect. They don't know what's going on. I'm not interested in the rumors. I'm not interested in the conspiracy theories. I'm not interested in all of that once we know what actually happened. If there's anything interesting to say about it, I'll say it, but crime is usually just crime. It's usually some bad guy doing something horrible and that's a crime. And to some extent that relates too to the murder this weekend in Colorado at the LGBTQ club, the gay club where five people are murdered and I think 25 are injured, a lone gunman. When they're firing off with the AK-47, I think from what I've read in a PsyDOM, the people there managed to take the guns away from him and control him otherwise he would have killed many more people, but still five people killed. I mean, it's tragic, it's sad, it's horrific. This guy is obviously from a little bit we know about him, a seriously disturbed human being, but it is in Colorado Springs. Colorado Springs is the center of evangelical Christianity in the West at least. It is a bastion of the anti-abortion, anti-gay kind of evangelical community. It's not super surprising. What surprised me is there was an LGBT club at Colorado Springs and I planned. So it's sad and horrific. This, the monster who did this, his grandfather is a Republican, a Trumpist Republican in San Diego County, I think, but who knows if that has anything to do with it? So we don't have much information about what this is beyond an individual very, very disturbed. Democrats are trying to turn it into a political thing. They might be right. Republicans are trying to play defense. It's people like Matt Walsh, but of course in plain defense, they're playing right into the hands of the Democratic critics. So the whole debate over these kind of shootings I find disturbing and fairly disgusting. And this is just horrific. And to the extent that it was motivated by anti-gay sentiments, it's horrible. And to the extent that Republicans continue to disseminate just ugly portrayals of gays. And that is horrific. Drawing cause and effect relationships there is tricky and dangerous and particularly jumping to conclusions before we know much about the person that is wrong. So just wanted to acknowledge that all of these things are happening. There's just, there's a lot of violence this weekend. There was another university shooting with football players. We're shot in the head. Just, just, you know, hard to really tell where this is coming from. And very, very, very, very disturbing that it's all kind of clustering. It all kind of clustered around the same week or the same weekend. All right, quickly, let's jump to Musk and Twitter. As you know, Musk is trying to establish new guidelines, moderating guidelines for Twitter, deciding who can be on the platform, who should not, what kind of speech is allowed, what kind of speech is not. Some kind of moderation has to happen, you know? And even having a moderation policy that says any legal speech is allowed is still a moderation policy. So some kind of policy needs to exist. My complaints about Twitter have focused on the fact that their policies have not been particularly objective and not being predictable, have not been knowable in advance. I'd like to see all social media, whatever their political stance, whatever ultimately they decide is their business, it's their platforms, it's private property. They get to decide on the rules for what speech is acceptable and what is not on their platform. This is private property. What I would like as a user, as a content creator, as somebody who participates in this, I would like those guidelines to be objective, to be not knowable in advance. I'd like them to know, whoops, I shouldn't say this because I'm at geek.off or I'm gonna say it anyway or just I know, you can't swear but you can be a communist, you can be a fascist, you can be a communist, you can be a communist, you can be a fascist, whatever. Just let me know, what are the standards? And I'll either accept them or I'll leave the platform. And the problem is with all these platforms, including Twitter, there has been no objective standard. David Arsenal, thank you for the support. Really, really appreciate it. There'd be no objective standards. The standards have been seemingly arbitrary. The standards have been biased, clearly biased towards, so some people in a sense inciting violence or presenting bad views of the world or particularly violent views or particularly just hate speech. But some, if they do it from a certain political perspective, Twitter has been lenient about and it's been fine, no problem, you can keep doing it. For example, maybe Islamists talking on there or certain parts of the left, that's been fine. But people on the right who have engaged in hate speech, they've been stopped, they've been limited much faster than it seems to be true on the left. For example, you can get hate speech out of Iran, which is fine to put on Twitter, but hate speech by individuals who in America is not acceptable, all kinds of standards, we just don't know, you have no clue, but there's clear bias, but it's not objective no matter what. Well, part of the hope was that Elon Musk would bring some objectivity to this, would enforce some new standards, more objective standards, standards that made some sense and were predictable, that Elon Musk would also take away some of the bias, eliminate some of the bias against, let's say, the so-called right versus the left. And early on, Musk talked about having some kind of committee that would establish these kind of standards that would determine what is acceptable and who was not and this committee would make these decisions and the committee would be balanced and there'd be people from different parts of it. But just in the last few days, I mean, Musk has basically shown us that he is just, his standard is basically his own emotional preferences. Unfortunately, Musk is abandoned objectivity just like it seems like every other platform has made his platform no different than any other platform. He has presented and reported no new standards. I don't know where this moderation committee is. I haven't seen anything new coming out of Twitter to give us some guidance of what is okay and what is not. But what have we seen? We've seen Elon Musk conduct a poll on whether Trump should be allowed on Twitter or not, back on Twitter or not. A poll, we decide these things based on majorities. We decide these things based on how many people voted on an arbitrary random Twitter poll. Really? That's how we make decisions? The poll was, I think, 52 to 48 for allowing Trump back on the platform and therefore he won the poll. So Trump was allowed back on Twitter. And you could say, okay, the new standard is polls. We're gonna poll everything. But people asked Elon Musk, well, what about Alex Jones? He can have a poll with allowing Alex Jones back on Twitter or not. And if you allow Trump, why aren't you allowing Alex Jones? And basically, Elon Musk is something like, well, Alex Jones hoots children and have a soft switch of children. So Alex Jones is banned and Trump is not. In other words, you know, I don't like Alex Jones. He upsets me. I feel bad and therefore, and therefore, you know, I'm not. So complete subjectivism, complete warm worship, complete whatever, whatever, you know, whatever Elon Musk decides. So just say that the moderating standards, that moderation standards at Twitter now are Elon Musk's whims. Elon Musk's whims. It's just ridiculous. We have less guidance and less standards right now than we had before Elon Musk took over. Instead of bringing us objectivity, what we now have is try to predict what Elon likes and what Elon doesn't like. Try to predict which threads on Twitter Elon follows and which threads on Twitter Elon doesn't. I suspect that I can pretty much say anything I want on Twitter because I doubt Elon Musk reads my tweets. I mean, it's pathetic, sad and pathetic. Come on, Elon, live up to the expectations you created. Give us objective standards. Give us standards that we can live by. Give us standards that we can understand I agree with those standards or not. It will enhance Twitter dramatically just to know what's acceptable and what's not. And if you ban too much content then people will leave Twitter and we'll be back to let's compete which is my view of social media anyway. Let competition go, let's do it, let's do it. Let's see which platform attracts the most users. And therefore provides the most value. All right, so that's Twitter. I really hope Musk gets his act together. I don't want to say too much about Twitter because I think a lot is going on. A lot is going on in the background. A lot is going on in terms of hiring and firing. A lot is going on in new features and trying to embed those. I don't want to judge Elon Musk's efforts in totality yet. I think there's still weeks and maybe months to go before we can do that. But on this issue about what is allowed and what is not, he clearly has failed and so far. And I hope he gets his act together. I hope so. All right, that was Elon Musk. Let's quickly Iran. I know we've been following the story from the beginning. I want to keep following the story. I think this is a crucially important story. It's a story I at least care a lot about and I hope you do too. It is a story of a fight for liberty, a fight for freedom. It is the story of an underdog of basically girls and women trying to fight against a brutal totalitarian regime, a theocracy, not a theocracy in potential, not a theocracy in theory, but a theocracy in practice. Maybe the only theocracy, well, the other theocracy is in the world, but probably the most dominant, most oppressive theocracy in the world. And it's amazing that the demonstrations by the girls and the women and those men who support them are continuing. They're continuing all over Iran in small towns in large cities, but they are continuing. They have not grown yet and have not to the size of a real revolution. There's no sign, sadly, that there is any real change brewing within the regime itself. There's no resignations of prominent people, though at least one prominent person has disappeared. So maybe that's an indication that he was too supportive of the demonstrators and has been disappeared. There's no rebellion within the army. There's no rebellion among the police or the national guard. There's no rebellion within the clergy. Although there is one Sunni Imam, big shot Sunni Imam who is supporting the demonstrators. But he's Sunni and Iran is Shiite, so that doesn't really help much. And we'll see what happens to him. So the demonstrations continue, but no signs that they are going to lead to an actual revolution, to actual change. The demonstrators, if anything, are getting bolder. They're calling more and more and more for regime change, not just for outlifting this law or that law, but actual regime change. So I give them huge amount of credit for that. And again, they're all over Iran. There are some indications that this weekend, the Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, has given a green light to the security forces to become a lot more violent and to use a lot more violence against the demonstrators. Supposedly, demonstrators machine gun down in parts of northern Iran, particularly in the Kurdistan, in the Kurd area. And in the borders with Azerbaijan, these are ethnic groups that are not part of the majority of the Iranian population. There is also some evidence that the regime is now engaged in for-fledged attacks on the Kurds. Interestingly, just as an aside note, there was an attack yesterday, coordinated attack by both Iran and Turkey. Who both view the Kurds as enemies. Turkey attacked the Kurds because supposedly a terrorist attack in Istanbul last week. And the Iranians attacked the Kurds because of, I think, these demonstrations. Both attacked the Kurds in a coordinated effort. They attacked the Kurds in Iraq, in a third country, in terms of both artillery and missile attacks. So, you know, Kurdistan in Iraq is one of the freest and more prosperous areas in the Middle East because of it is free. But now it has two very powerful enemies, both Iran and Turkey. So something to watch for. So no big news in Iran. Demonstrations continue. Crackdowns will probably now intensify. Still no cracks in the regime. Nothing to indicate anything is really gonna change. All right, again, shifting gears. Yesterday, the World Cup, the premier sporting events in the world, probably more watched by more people than any other sporting events in the world. I think more than the Olympics, certainly more than the US big sporting events like the Super Bowl. The World Cup started yesterday in, of all places, Qatar. Now, there are lots of reasons one should be skeptical about a World Cup in Qatar. It is in the middle of the desert, so it is super hot. Even in November, it is super hot. It is not exactly a country with a long tradition, a playing soccer or football in the rest of the world. And it is an oppressive Islamist regime. Qatar was probably one of the major supporters of ISIS in the, you know, in the last decade. Qatar is on and off again, an ally or not of the Iranians, in spite of the fact that Qatar has a massive US military presence. Qatar is, has been funding terrorism for ages, and there's no reason to believe they have stopped. Yes, they have air conditioning in the stadiums, but still, I mean, you have to go to a place that has to air conditioning in stadiums to play soccer. Qatar is also one of the more oppressive places in the world. Dozens, if not hundreds of people, have died in the construction of the stadiums and in the construction of a variety of buildings in Qatar. Much of the construction in Qatar, or almost all of it, is done by people who come in from places like Pakistan, India, and elsewhere, and they are treated as semi-slaves. They are treated horribly, and again, many of them die in the construction because of the way they are treated. There's no reason in the 21st century for anybody to die while constructing a football stadium or constructing even skyscrapers, and yet they do, and that is because of the kind of conditions that they're being placed under. Qatar is a horrible place, a horrible country, led by horrible people. It is a monstrosity that the world community, any world community, sanctions the Qatari regime. It is a monstrosity that FIFA chose them, and there's every reason to believe, and I think there's a lot of evidence to suggest, that this was pure corruption that the FIFA, the World Organization, the manager of soccer globally, was basically bribed. The Qataris came over there with suitcases full of cash or whatever, the way you bribe people these days, and that is why FIFA is known for its corruption. It's known for bribery cases. A lot of people have had to resign over the years and quit their jobs. I find it disgusting, and it's making me not really get excited about the one soccer event every four years that I actually get excited about and actually want to watch. Actually want to watch the World Cup. This is one of those sporting events that I enjoy. I don't watch a lot of soccer generally, but the World Cup I like. I'm heavily rooting for Brazil. To win, if not Brazil, I hope England wins. So those are my two favorites, England and Brazil. But I don't know if I can bring myself to watch any of the games, given what I know about the conditions under which these games are happening. So truly disgusting, truly offensive, and really reprehensible. And I hope the people at FIFA who put this together, what is it, Rod and Hal, or are prosecuted for the corruption that I think is almost guaranteed to be found, because there's no way based on any logic of soccer, based on any logic of actually sporting logic, one would have the World Cup in Qatar. All right, and finally, let me say a little bit about the Climate Change Conference that just ended in Egypt, Cup 27. I'm not gonna say a lot here about it. You know, I'll read up about it some more and see if there's reason to do a whole show about this. But I'll just say a little bit about it in terms of just updating you so you know what's going on in the world. This was the Global Climate Change Conference that was supposed to come to some kind of big deal about emissions cuts and about, you know, cutting the acceptable temperature increase and about making sure that emissions are cut to the extent that they need to be in order to achieve this goal. All of this is, of course, based on these models that, you know, one has to be skeptical about the meaning and about the legitimacy, about the legitimacy. So, but here's the thing, they couldn't come to an agreement about emissions. They couldn't come to an agreement about any kind of targets. And the main reason for that is that countries like China and India and other countries like that are not interested in Western-type altruism, not interested in Western-type, you know, self-punishment in order to achieve some amorphous, undefined, unrealistic, and unscientific goal. But what did they agree to? They agreed to what, you know, to the West actually suffering and sacrificing itself. So the one thing, the great achievement of COP 27, something that they've been trying to do for decades now, basically Western countries have agreed, and this is a huge issue, right? Basically, Western countries have agreed to a massive wealth transfer. We don't yet know what exact numbers are going to be, but they are pledged to engage in a massive wealth transfer from rich countries to poor countries to, quote, handle all the effects of climate change. Effects of climate change that the West is, it takes responsibility for, because it emitted all this carbon while it was growing rich, and now these poor countries are the ones that are gonna suffer, and therefore the West feels guilty about that, so the West has created a fund. Your money, your tax money, is gonna go into a fund that is then gonna be distributed to poor countries to help them deal with the bad, bad, bad, bad impacts of climate change. I wonder if they're gonna net out the positive impacts of climate change. I doubt that. So this is the point. The point is that developing countries, in Asian countries, are generally philosophically healthier than the West. They feel less guilt, they're less likely to sacrifice, they're less likely to hood themselves. The Chinese have no interest in becoming poorer. The Indians have no interest in not developing at max speed, and therefore they won't commit to cutting emissions. Remember, China is the largest emissary of CO2 in the world. They won't commit to that. Good for them, I say. But the West, filled with Christian morality, filled with effective altruism, filled with altruism and sacrifice and a Christian ethos, even when they're secular, they're willing to sacrifice, so the manifestation of that sacrifice right now is we'll give you dollars. We too are not gonna cut emissions right now because we got this energy crisis in Europe, but we'll give you dollars. We'll buy ourselves into heaven. This is Christianity implemented. This is Christianity undisplayed. And this is the West today. This is the West today, groveling before the rest of the world, asking for forgiveness and using dollars to buy themselves into heaven. Nothing has changed. In 2000 years, the morality of altruism is as evil today as it ever was. And it's impactful on our politics and on the world as it ever was. So as we learn more about your commitment, you as a taxpayer's commitment to this nonsense, to this sacrifice, I will let you know how much it's gonna cost you. And you can thank your political leaders for making it all possible. All right, that is my quick update of the news. It took a little longer than I'd like, so next time I'll have to cut it a little shorter. I have maybe fewer news items. We'll see tomorrow how I do this because I've used up a bunch of news items. We'll see what happens between today and tomorrow. I expect tomorrow, the new show will be at about the same time. I will let you know certainly in the morning, but I expect it to be tomorrow at around 11 o'clock East Coast time. But as I say, I will let you know as the time gets closer. All right, quickly, quickly let's go through some of the super chat. So we're about $85 short on our goal for the day for the $250, so hopefully we'll get a few more supporters. Thank you, Mike, for the $50 that helped a lot. Thanks, Colt, and thank you, Gail, for the support. Any one of you can help support the show by just, you don't even have to ask a question by just doing a sticker with any amount of money that you would like. We have 113 people watching. If each one of them put in a dollar right now, we'd make the 85 to get to our goal. So it doesn't take a lot to get to the 250 goal. It just involves you being willing to be traders. Are you getting value for me? I hope that's why you're listening and you can give me a value by going on the super chat and making a small contribution. All right, Len, for $50 Canadian dollars, he's got two questions. Let's take them both. He said, Jordan Peterson interviewed Danielle Smith in episode 306, the new premier of Alberta. She calls herself a libertarian conservative and came to power by Canadian Trumpists. She seems less harmful than alternative leftist populist. Vote for her, question mark. I don't know, so let me watch the interview. I've noticed that Jordan Peterson has done a series of interviews now. I intend to watch his interview with Newt Gingrich in his interview with, not Lex Friedman, with Yoram Chazzoni. And I'll add his interview with Daniela Smith to the list. But to the extent that she is pro free markets, to the extent that as a Canadian, I doubt she's super religious. She's not like the kind of super religious people in the United States. I think Canada is saner than that. To the extent that she doesn't advocate for stupid things like tariffs and other kind of limitations, big limitations in immigration, Canada is one of the few countries in the world which has a very expansive immigration and that allows for a lot of new immigrants. I hope that is sustained. I hope the Conservative Party in Canada sustains that. As long as she doesn't have any really, really horrific policies, oh, I see you have an addition here, let's see. Add on is Daniela Smith really appealed to anti-vaxa activists that's really sad. And is a social liberal and economic conservative? I guess that's good, depending on how you define economic conservative. While being an intellectual pragmatist, she did work in right-leaning economic foundations and media, lots of baggage politically. Yeah, I mean, you know, there was real potential that she could be good, that she will do enough good to overcome the bad. Again, you have to measure how bad is she and on what. The fact that she appealed to anti-vaxes is kind of sad and does not bode well. But on the other hand, okay, I mean, the leftist appeal to really horrific ideas as well. And, you know, really look at her, what does economic conservatism mean to her? If it really does mean limited government and it does really, she is for protecting rights and for deregulating and allowing business to thrive and for trade and for immigration, then yeah, I would vote for her given the alternatives and give them what's out there. All right, latent prion, 20 Australian dollars, we've got a lot of Australians and Canadians dominating today. So, all right, so we're 70 dollars. Thank you, not on the Qatar channel. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Jupiter, all contributing and chipping away slowly at the number now up down to $60. So, you know, keep it coming and you know, maybe three people do $20 and then we're done and that way we can end on a high note, we can end at $250 and everything is good. Let's see, I've solved, this is like a pion, I've solved both the problem of induction and volition and I'd like to get Dr. Binswanger, Salmiyari, Gode, Peacock or someone trusted to read my book, Still in Progress, how do I, how can I contact and talk to an ARI expert? Just send an email to ARI, I think Harry Binswanger's email might be public, you might be able to find it, maybe you can contact him directly, certainly you can probably contact him directly through HBL, his kind of newsletter, chat kind of thing that he does. You know, I think you can probably get, you know, Salmiyari's information from his position, his UT, so I'm sure there are ways to do that. And ARI, there is, I'm sure there's an email address on the website where you can send it to. By the way, I think Glenn and Peacock already solved the problem of induction in his induction course that he did a few years ago. All right, thank you, Rob, appreciate it. We're chipping away here, Andy with $20, I hope chip away quite a bit. We're now only $38 short. How does a NatCon, Khazani, reconcile with morality, with morality the poverty of traditional tribal life with the prosperity that liberal rights theories have brought, industrial evolution or the tyranny of Iran? Well, he would argue that all of that is not a consequence of, so all of that is not a consequence of liberalism. All of that is in spite liberalism and indeed all of that progress, all of that success, happened in relatively traditionalist countries like England, where there was a monarchy and that what England happened in England during the industrial revolution is slow evolution and not anything radical. The Church of England is still formally part of the English state. I think he would say that economic progress is not the be all end all of everything that moral values are more important than economic progress and some countries might choose not to have economic progress and rather prefer their traditionalist, religious values instead of economic progress and maybe that is the case for Iran. Although I find it hard to believe that he would defend Iran, but he might. I mean, it would be interesting to ask him about the hijab and whether he thinks Iran is right and whether these goals protesting are revolutionaries that should be suppressed and a bad for the world and a bad for Iran and Iran should have the right to suppress them and we shouldn't be arguing for them. It would be interesting to ask him what his position is on that given that he basically says every country should be able to choose its own way and there's no universalism. So there's no universal statement I can make that the Iranian regime is evil and these goals are right. That would be universalism. All right, Michael asked, did Musk buy Twitter for impulsive narcissistic reasons? Why doesn't he focus all his capital on sending man to Mars? I don't know. I mean, certainly it seems like based on his tweeting on Twitter that there is a certain element of impulsive narcissism in his buying of Twitter. But let's wait and see. I don't want to judge Musk yet. I want to give it some time. Right now it does look like impulsive narcissists. Now, why doesn't he? Because he is brilliant and he is all over the place and he does like to do more than one thing and there was only so much effort and time and energy you can put into the Mars issue. That's going to develop slowly and he was passionate, I guess, about electric cars. Electric cars subsidized by the state, of course. And now he wants to fix the world by fixing Twitter. Exactly what that all means, how that all plays out. Again, don't want to jump to judging him before we see more of the consequences. Svika, thank you. Svika put us over the goal. Happy Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving to all of you and thank you, Svika. Look forward to talking soon. That was Michael. Let's see, now we have another Michael. Have you listened to Mike Mensa's interview on Objectivism? It was surprisingly excellent. No, but as I think I've said in the past, I actually talked to Mike Mensa a little bit before he died. I have, there's no reason to think it wouldn't be good. I mean, he seemed like a committed Objectivist and somebody who really, really loved Objectivism and tried to apply it to his field, which was weightlifting. I see we've got a lot of Europeans on. This is great. So I guess it's rare for you guys to actually have the opportunity to listen live. So thank you, Frederick Olsen. Thank you, Oliver Sandberg, both in Norway, I guess, SDK. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you, Paul. And let's see, two last questions, one from JB. If pro-Europeans rebelled further due to current crisis, which direction could it take, more socialist, conservative, and or surprisingly liberal? I mean, I think it's gonna likely, you know, Europe is tricky. And Europe, different countries have different dynamics, but I think the dominant view outside of the conventional view is right now the energy, the excitement, the youth is on the right, not on the left. The only places where the youth is on the left seems like is in the United States and the UK. But if you look at Europe, at the heart of Europe, if you look at across the board, I think European countries, what you will find is that the energy and young people are primarily on the right. You see that in Sweden, you see that in France. I think you see that in Italy. They're on the right, so, you know, Europe seems to be heading towards a kind of a nationalism. But Europe also has a history of socialism, so that's always possible. But I still think that the more likely outcome for the United States and probably Europe is kind of a right-wing nationalist, semi-full-on fascist future. But we will see, we will see. I don't see the energy young people among poor or other Europeans coming around the idea of a liberal society, a free society. I just don't see, I don't see that yet. Maybe it'll happen. I'm suddenly working for that. Certainly that is the goal, but I don't see it yet. All right, last question. Ryan asked, can you explain why tariffs are so bad? Anti-trade conservatives claim big deal. You only have to pay a little tax or something overseas, but it's worse than that. Well, it's bad on so many different dimensions. Let's take steel taxes. So, steel tariffs, sorry, steel tariffs. So steel tariffs mean that the price of steel is more expensive in the United States because now every piece of steel imported, there's a tax on it, which you, the American consumer of steel and every product made of steel that is produced in the United States, you now are paying. So it's all your goods are more expensive. But on top of that, it means that all the manufacturers like automobile companies who use steel in their manufacturing, now have to pay a higher cost for steel and therefore become less competitive with their Asian and German competitors. And therefore, when you buy an American car, you're paying a higher price because now you're paying, it's the form in which you pay for that steel and that hurts the auto company. Somebody did a study that showed that for every job saved in the steel business, multiple jobs are lost in the companies that use steel to produce other stuff in the United States. That's caused by tariffs. But more than that, what a steel tariff for example does is it reduces competition for American steel manufacturers, which encourages them to become lazy, less productive, less efficient, less competitive. And therefore makes their steel even more expensive long-term and makes it so that if ever the steel tariffs go away, now they certainly won't be able to compete with global companies out there. And generally it makes American industry less effective, less efficient, less productive. I'm reading a book right now and I will talk about this much more in a future show about the chip wars going back to all the way to the invention of the chip, the electronic chip. A fascinating, one of the best books I've read in a long time, I'll be talking more, I'm in the middle of it, I wanna finish it. I wanna get to the whole China pod before I do a show on it. But it is amazing and one of the things that it illustrates is exactly this, how uncompetitive you become when you're protected. Whether you're in Japan or whether you're in America or in China, wherever you are, if you're protected, you become uncompetitive. Competition is so crucial to innovation. Competition is so crucial to keeping up and to really pushing yourself. So that's another aspect of tariffs. And then of course what happens is that once you institute a tariff on steel, every industry out there that feels quote threatened by foreign competition now has them all high ground and the political capital to go to Washington and demand tariffs on their competitors, to demand protection for themselves. And now you get not just one tariffs on steel, but you get dozens of tariffs on everything else. And of course in the Trump presidency, what happened was because, and then there's the other aspect, and this will be my last point, I hope because we're going late. The other aspect of it is that if you raised tariffs on steel, let's say from China, China then raises tariffs on, I don't know, soybeans in China and therefore you are now exporting less soybeans or you're exporting, if it's caterpillar, you're exporting less tractors to China or whatever, they put a tariff on that. So now that industry is getting hood because they export less. And Chinese consumers getting hood, maybe you don't care about Chinese consumers, but American companies that export to China getting hood. But then what you land up doing is bailing them out. So the government then says, oh, and this Trump did several times. In order for the farmers not to go bankrupt because they're not selling as many soybeans to China, we're gonna now give increased subsidies to farmers to compensate. And you can see how this spirals out of control and it just increases ever increasing role of government in the economy and it grows and it grows and it grows and it grows and it just is unstoppable. And you start with one little tariff and soon the government is in every aspect of our world. That's what we have today. That's what we have today. And no president has been immune from this, but Trump was particularly bad on this, partially because of what he did and partially because of what he said, he was particularly bad on this issue. All right, that's what I have to say about tariffs. Thanks, Ryan. All right, we made our goal. Thank you for everybody, particularly Tzvika and Mike and Len who gave $100 Canadian and everybody else really, really appreciated. And let's see, yes, we probably will have a show tonight at 7 p.m. Eastern time. And let me also say, Rob asked if it's Chip Wars by Chris Miller. Yes, that is the book. It's excellent. I highly recommend it for everybody, particularly those people in tech. It's just a very well written and fascinating, really, really interesting book. All right, thank you. See you all. Hope you enjoyed this. Hope you enjoyed this format. I'll see you all tonight and I'll also see you tomorrow.