 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, what is it, Thursday? November 30th, the end of November. I hope everybody's having a great week, a great month, ready for the final month of the year, for Christmas, Christmas season already upon us. All right. Let's see, why is that only fair? I don't know. All right. Let's see. Supposedly, I'm checking out just the internet quality. It says it's only fair, not excellent, which is what it's supposed to be. All right. We have got a lot of news to cover today, seven different topics. So we're going to jump right into it, plus I have four super chat questions from Alex Epstein that we're going to cover as well as part of this. So he's just sending them to me now by text. So we will cover those as well. Of course, you all, I encourage you to submit super chat questions the usual way. So you all know how to do that. It's a way to support the show value for value. And it's a way for you to ask questions and to guide the topics and to give me to talk about the stuff you want me to talk about versus the stuff that just I want to talk about. So we'll cover those. Let's see. I might cover... No, I'll do Alex's questions in the super chat section rather than in the ceasefire section because they're not related directly to that. Alex is paying $25 per question and he's got four questions. No, he's doing $100 each. There you go. He's going first. So he's doing $100 each four questions. So he gets priority. All right. Cool. Let's start with Kissinger. Henry Kissinger, I'm laughing, but Henry Kissinger passed away yesterday. So I wanted to... I mean, there's a lot to say about Henry Kissinger. He is a fascinating character and maybe one of the most influential, maybe the most influential foreign policy thinker in the West and certainly in the United States over the last 50 years. 50? Yeah. 50. 50 plus. 55 years. So, but let me focus on two things. First, the positive. He died at age 100. Yesterday we talked about Charlie Munger who died at the age of 99. The thing that astounds me about both Munger and Kissinger is that they were sharp, really sharp, close to at least as far as I can tell to the day they died. I mean, they were active. Kissinger was in China recently. They were active. They were traveling. But even more crucial than that was they were mentally sharp. They were able to answer questions. Kissinger did interviews, TV interviews. He met with world leaders. I mean, wow. Wow. I mean, all of us should do that now. What's the secret? Is the real question? I mean, good genes. I'm sure that helps. Bad genes, hood, that's for sure. But what else? I mean, what is that? They stayed active. They stayed intellectually active. They never retired. I think that's a part of the secret. Did they exercise? Like, I'm exercising like crazy right now because Peter Thier has convinced me that if I exercise like crazy, I can be able to live to be 100 years old and super mentally sharp. I have this real suspicion that neither Kissinger nor Munger exercised as rigorously as I am exercising right now. So maybe I live to be 120 and be mentally sharp, right? So it is. Yeah. I mean, Charlie Lawrence says here that Charlie Munger said he never exercised once since he got out of the Army, which was a long time ago. He avoided exercise, explicitly said he avoided exercise. So maybe we're going around this all wrong. Maybe exercise is bad for you. I don't know. What did they do? So first, celebrate the fact that these people, both of them lived extraordinary lives, incredibly influential lives, very long lives, stayed mentally sharp until the end, physically mobile until the end. I don't think either one of them was in a wheelchair. So, you know, give him a way for that and for the potential therefore, for all of us to live such long, successful and mentally sharp years. At the same time, you have to talk about Kissinger as the foreign policy expert, as the guru of foreign policy. And, you know, here I'm not going to be complimentary. I think Kissinger has done massive amount of damage to the United States. I think he's done massive amount of damage to the whole field of foreign policy. Kissinger basically is what's called a realist, which you could translate philosophically into a pragmatist. Kissinger is a pragmatist in foreign policy, a pure pragmatist. No principles, no real long-term thinking. The long-term really doesn't matter. You achieve short-term goals. You go for it. You get them done and you move on. You know, realist means, oh, get off your high horse of idealism, of moral principle, of having a moral code that guides your actions. That's not the real world. In the real world, you have to put aside morality. You certainly have to put aside principle. And you have to really focus on getting stuff done. And that's the typical pragmatist policy about everything in life. So Kissinger really brought pragmatism to the world. He did a lot of harm, I think, to U.S. policy from when he was quite influential. He was, of course, Richard Nixon's foreign secretary, but he had an impact on the way people viewed foreign policy even before that. He was the foreign secretary in the Yom Kippur War, where he did a lot to help Israel succeed in that war, and win that war. Again, I don't think he did that for any principled reason. He did that more because of the interplay between the United States and Soviet Union and the pieces on the map and who's where and who's what. And so there was no particular love of Israel, although he did famously tell Goldemir this actually made it into the movie. He famously told Goldemir that when she was asking for help from America, he says, look, I am an American first, the foreign secretary second, and a Jew third. And Goldemir said, well, here in Israel we read from right to left, which I thought was an unbelievably clever line if she really did come up with it in the moment. That's pretty funny. But anyway, Kissinger got a Nobel Prize for peace. He got a Nobel Prize for peace for negotiating peace between South Vietnam and North Vietnam, a peace that was then, of course, disappeared just months after he got the Nobel Prize when North Vietnam invaded and took the whole of South Vietnam. I don't think he ever gave his Nobel Prize back because from his perspective he got his job done. He got a peace agreement which allowed the United States to exit and not pretend to not care anymore about the conflict when North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam. The U.S. basically tugged its tail between its legs and ran away. And that was fine. And if you follow Kissinger's career, that is pretty typical of his career. He basically, again, expediency short-term. He advised many presidents. He advised many experts in foreign policy. He wrote a lot of books. The one thing you will now find in those books is principal morality. So we could do without Henry Kissinger's advice on issues of foreign policy. So I admire his ability to stay cogent for 100 years. But I don't admire at all the actual content, right, his actual advice. All right. Let's do today or yesterday. COPE 28 started. And COPE 28 is a conference of the parties to the UN's framework convention on climate change. It is a conference where all the representatives of governments from all over the world meet to discuss what they're going to do about climate change, what obligations they're going to make about reducing the use of fossil fuels. Which it's kind of funny because it's actually quite entertaining that COPE is actually at the UAE, right? It's at the United Arab Emirates, which it only exists or has any say in anything about anything. And the only reason they have any money to participate and can build a city like Dubai and create whatever it is that they create, the only claim that they have to anything is fossil fuels. There simply is no UAE that has any significance and nobody would ever go to a conference there. If not for all the wealth that they've accumulated through fossil fuels. But it's even the fossil fuel producing countries and the ones that are 100% dependent on fossil fuels that are playing this immoral game of, yes, yes, we feel really guilty about using fossil fuels and will pretend to care about climate change and will play your game partially because they know that the world is going to remain dependent as negative connotations, reliant on benefiting from fossil fuels forever into the future, right? Certainly for the next 50 to 100 years until some really truly revolutionary technology changes everything. So they are willing to gain, what is it, moral credit? They're willing to play the virtue signaling game while they make a fortune off of the continued legitimate need of the world for fossil fuel. So this is a place where all these countries get together. They usually are commit to doing things, whether they do them or not. And of course on day one they've already announced a great victory for the cause of massive redistribution of wealth, which is a big part of what the whole climate agenda is about. And that is that they have announced that they have commitments for this creation of this big fund that is going to redistribute wealth from, quote, less poor countries, what the world calls rich countries, but if you consider what the future has in mind for us, we're not very rich as compared to where we could be 50 years from now. But anyway, from the world's rich countries today to the world's poor countries, and this is a vast amount of money, the UAE itself has pledged $100 million for this fund to redistribute wealth to the poor countries who are supposedly suffering because of climate change. And it's unbelievable if you look at this, 51 million, 51 million from the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom right now has massive budgetary problems. The economy is struggling, part of the problems in the economy is the cost of energy, and a big part of the cost of energy being so high is a consequence of the fact that they have invested heavily in wind and in solar, which is one of the funniest things in the world. I've mentioned this in the past, but do you have a beam to London? I mean, this is literally a place where it almost never is sunny. How are you going to get energy out of a non-sunny climate from solar power? Anyway, it's bizarre. It's also dark a lot in London. And I remember when I was a kid, we lived in London at 3.30 in the afternoon. It would get dark in the winter. And guess what? I don't know if you realize this. I guess most of you probably do, but maybe not. You don't get any energy from solar panels when it's dark. Anyway, the Brits feeling very guilty about all the... And you know why the Britain is giving more than anybody else? Other than UAE. The reason Britain is giving so much is because of, you could call it, I think, colonial guilt. The beneficiaries of this money, or the welfare recipients of this money, are its former colonies. And it feels guilty because it's... I mean, Britain, the United Kingdom is responsible for the Industrial Revolution. I mean, really, how much money are they going to have to redistribute to the rest of the world in order to redeem themselves from the very fact that they created the Industrial Revolution? Remember, the Industrial Revolution might have indeed raised standard of living dramatically. Life extension dramatically helped to increase the number of people in the world. 10X improved human life and the quality of human life by thousands of Xs. But in spite of all those benefits, the Industrial Revolution also introduced the world to the evil of fossil fuels originally called. And I mean, it's going to take Britain hundreds, thousands of years to redeem itself. Much more than $51 million to redeem itself from the evils that it brought to the world by introducing us to fossil fuels. I mean, it's just unbelievable, right? It's just unbelievable because I do think Britain is putting in a lot more money than anybody else or any of the other developed countries because of its sense of guilt over colonialism, its sense of guilt over the Industrial Revolution. And you think of the benefits. Unbelievable. I need to do a show on the benefits of colonialism, the benefits of... $17.5 million for the United States, $10 million from Japan. I mean, the United States seems a little stingy here. I don't know. I don't know what the Biden administration is thinking. That seems a little stingy. European Union is doing $245 million, $100 million just from Germany. Another party that generally is generally in life seems to be driven by guilt more than anything else. So anyway, already a success, COP28, because they've already been able to suck a bunch of money from countries in order to redistribute to others. But expect this conference to be filled with the typical nonsense about catastrophizing around climate. Expect it to be filled with, you know, scientists, pseudoscientists, you know, claiming that the world is coming to an end unless we redistribute wealth on a massive scale, unless we shut down manufacturing production, or unless we invest massive quantities of money into so-called renewable, but actually as Alex Epstein has defined them, unreliable sources of energy like wind and solar. More solar panels in UK and in Germany where the sun never shines. I encourage you as always to go to the, if you want to understand more about the agenda and what they're trying to do, go to Alex Epstein's website. You can also follow him on Twitter and read his books. The website is energy, is it energy talking points? Yeah, energytalkingpoints.com, energytalkingpoints.com. And of course the book is called Fossil Future, and I encourage you all to get it and read it. All right, I've been talking about this case for a while now that the Supreme Court finally heard yesterday. Really, really interesting. This is SEC versus Jacquecy, or something like that. I'm probably butchering the pronunciation. But this is one of four cases I think it is that could have a profound impact on administrative law, regulatory law, the regulatory state, administrative state in the United States. Jacquecy ran a hedge fund. He was sued for the SEC. He ended up having to pay a fine of, I think, $300,000. This is all in 2013, so it's taken 10 years for this to go through the courts. He appealed this, making three constitutional arguments. First, he said that it was unconstitutional delegation of powers for Congress to allow federal agencies to conduct administrative proceedings. Second, he alleged that these proceedings violate the Seventh Amendment, right to a trial by jury. And third, he argued that the administrative law judges who oversee such proceedings are unconstitutionally protected from removal by the president. So these are judges that cannot be removed by the president. I'm not sure other judges can be, so I'm not sure what the third one point is. Anyway, two conservative judges on the Fifth Circuit ruled for Jacquecy against the SEC, thus basically vacating theoretically the right of the ability of the SEC to run any kind of administrative proceedings with an SEC judge and therefore assign penalties. Of course, this was appealed to Supreme Court, and none of that has gone into effect. But now the Supreme Court has to decide on this. As I've told you in the past, there are at least two judges on the Supreme Court who are very, very eager to clamp down on the administrative state, and that is Gosig and Thomas. But from discussions yesterday, it really did seem like they might be a majority, six to three or five to four, for at least doing something here to reduce the ability of the SEC to run these legal proceedings. It's not clear how far the Supreme Court wants to go, how far these conservatives want to go. There is a precedent that's, I think, a 50-year precedent now around the ability of regulatory agencies to run their own, in a sense, administrative adjudication processes, but are they willing to overturn that? Are they willing—it's called Atlas Roofing v. Occupational Safety and Health Review Commissions. Are they willing to narrowly define for the SEC or a type of proceedings that have to go to regular court and have to be tried by jury? What exactly are the justices willing to do is not clear. It's clear that the liberal justices, the three liberal, are going to vote with the SEC, but it's not clear how far the conservative justices actually are willing to go or interested in going at this point. And to what extent are they going to overturn precedent? Just give it some caveats. This will tell us a lot, the ruling on this will tell us a lot about how they're going to approach in future rulings and in future years, I think, the whole issue of the administrative state. How radical do they want to be? Now, you know, the one hope we have to move towards more freedom in this country, at least in a short run, is this particular Supreme Court, at least with regard to economic liberties. There are some radicals here, again, Gorsuch and Thomas, with regard to administrative law. We will see. I think, again, this is going to be super interesting. I look forward to analyzing the decision, maybe having one of our legal experts come on to talk about the decision. They probably know a lot more than I do about this stuff. You know, Larry Salisman will probably be excellent for this. So we will do that because I think these are really interesting and important cases. We'll see next week there's another case that also deals with administrative law. So my guess is Larry Salisman would be the best for this kind of case. So to be reviewed, but this is the very fact that the Supreme Court, well, they had to take it because the Fifth Circuit was so radical in its decision. I doubt they're going to be as radical as the Fifth. My guess is they will still side with jocosy, but be a lot of the ruling to apply more narrowly than the Fifth Circuit Court, which was much broader, much, much broader. All right, talking about Supreme Courts, the Supreme Court of Russia today, basically outlawed today all LGBTQ plus activists. Activism in Russia. Now, I know many of you, some of you probably think this is a good idea. But this is in response to a lawsuit filed by the Justice Minister of Russia that has labeled the LGBTQ plus movements operating in Russia as an extremist organization, and therefore has banned it just for anybody who might have thought there was such a thing as free speech in Russia. They want to make it very, very clear to you that no, don't worry, there's no such thing as that. This is, of course, part of a really decades-long campaign to crack down on gay rights in Russia. Putin's whole idea of this, you know, this is part of his whole traditional family values push. This is to a large extent why I think the American right likes Putin so much. Anyway, in a closed door hearing that lasted four hours, that only the Justice Minister was allowed in, there was nobody representing the rights of LGBTQ. There was nobody arguing for freedom of speech. This is how they do things in the Supreme Court in Russia. The only journalists were allowed in only when the verdict was read by the judge. Anyway, just in case, just in case any of you had doubts, had misgivings, had questions about the possibility of having freedoms, your freedoms protected in Russia. No, no free speech. While this affects LGBTQ specifically, it's a reflection of the fact that there's no principle of free speech, even anyway, similar to a principle of free speech in Russia anymore. Let's see, quickly, Israeli ceasefire, just to give you an update, extended one more day so far. So today, so theoretically would end a first thing tomorrow morning, Saturday morning. Not sure if it's going to be extended a day, another day. It seems like they keep extending it by day and Hamas keeps finding more children and more women to release as hostages. So it does, and Israel is allowing them for every 10 hostages they release, Israel gives them a day of ceasefire. This has to end at some point. They only have so many hostages. They're not, as far as we know, haven't taken any new ones, but the ceasefire has been continued. I will also add that in the meantime Hamas, I guess the ceasefire didn't apply to this. Hamas terrorist attacked a bus station in Jerusalem earlier today, I think it was this morning. Basically this video of this, this video of the whole attack, you can watch the whole thing play out. They basically jumped out of a car with automatic rifles, started shooting people at the bus stop. They killed three injured a number of others, two off-duty soldiers who were on their way back to, I think Gaza, where they deployed, at least one of them was deployed in Gaza and on his way back to Gaza, waiting for the bus, but had their weapons on them as Israeli soldiers take their weapons home with them. Basically spaying into action and shot these guys and killed them on the spot. You can actually watch that. You can watch them being shot. So terrorism in Israel continues. Hamas continues to do whatever it can to kill random Israelis that just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And Hamas, of course, took credit for this, so this is not even stealthily Hamas. This is proudly Hamas. And so that is an Israel, in spite of that, is abiding by the ceasefire. Well, they are still active in the West Bank, so they are actively seeking out terrorists in the West Bank and killing them. They killed two Islamic Jihad leaders, I think, last night. So this war is not over. There's a way in which it is likely that this war will never be over, but Israel is, at least in the Gaza Strip, is abiding by, and so is Hamas, abiding by a ceasefire. And hostages are being released, and I'm happy for the families, of course, of the hostages and the hostages themselves that are being released, sad for the state of the world, the consequence of this release. All right. Quickly, I still didn't list, but I think it's kind of funny. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of the very well regarded CEO of JPMorgan Chase, is somebody who, there's been a lot of talk of him running for president. If he'd run as a Democrat, I think he would win. Both, I think he'd win, I think he'd be Biden in the primary, and I think he'd be elected on a national level. I think he would win if he ran, no matter who he ran against. Anyway, Jamie Dimon, basically, Wednesday at the New York Times, deal book conference that included a lot of CEOs and a lot of very, very, very powerful people from the business community. Basically, during this conference, he basically said that everybody should vote for Nikki Haley, that everybody should help Nikki Haley. He basically said, even if you're a very liberal Democrat, you should vote for Nikki Haley. She needs to defeat Trump so that there's an actual choice in the coming election. So he was really pushing for Haley. Anyway, today, this morning, Donald Trump on his truth network basically blew a fuse and went after Jamie Dimon and went after Nikki Haley. First of all, she's a non-maga person, but she's also weak. All the stuff you typically hear, and of course, he says, I've never been a big Jamie Dimon fan, but have to live with this guy when he had to live with him when he came begging to the White House. So Donald Trump, he got to Donald Trump, which I think is part of what he did. He was asked whether he would say that he would never support Donald Trump. And Jamie Dimon on the state said, look, I'm not going to say anything negative about Donald Trump after he just endorsed Nikki Haley. He says, I'm not going to say anything negative about Donald Trump. He might become president. I'll have to deal with him. I don't want to say anything negative. So Jamie Dimon being a politician or maybe thinking long term. Okay, quickly, before we go to the super chats, just a cool positive story, right? So this is about crystals, and you're all thinking, uh-oh, Iran's got new age on us and he's talking about what's this crystal stuff? What is he doing? No, don't worry. It's not that kind of crystals, but it is crystals. It turns out that most modern technology today, from computer chips to batteries to producing, you know, yeah, producing computer chips to batteries to solar panels, basically rely on inorganic crystals, manmade crystals, and to enable new technologies. We need, you know, what needs to happen is new crystals need to be created or need to figure out structures for new crystals that make possible new ways of doing things. And this is huge. This is huge, right? Anyway, there's a paper today in Nature magazine. And what they share there is that they now have the designs, the specifications of 2.2 million new crystals. Now, with all technology, old meaning a year ago, to figure out the structure of 2.2 million new crystals would have taken 800 years of work, of knowledge, of figuring stuff out. But using artificial intelligence, using artificial intelligence, there's a program called Graph Networks for Materials Exploration. Do you know me? The deep learning tool has dramatically increased the speed and efficiency of discovering and it discovers them and can predict which ones are stable enough to be able to be used. So other 2.2 million that they predict, 380,000 were ranked as the most stable and are promising candidates for experimental synthesis making them and they're trying to use them. I mean, this is just amazing. And this is a tiny little hint, I mean, literally a tiny little hint of what AI is going to make possible of the uses of AI, of the ability of AI to help research. I mean, I'm waiting for the papers to come out that start describing the benefits of AI to the study of the human genome, to the discovery of new medicines, the discovery of cures for various diseases, the use of medicines for new... The whole gamut of possibilities in terms of what is going to be possible because of the sheer number crunching ability, the sheer ability of an algorithm to look at all this data of all this and then quickly analyze the combinations and differences and the robustness of these statistical algorithms to be able to make predictions about what works, what doesn't work, what can be combined with what. It truly is stunning and amazing and this is just the beginning. This is going to get so much more powerful. As I told you, Microsoft itself, just Microsoft, is investing 50 billion dollars, 50 billion dollars into building what in a sense is going to be the next generation of supercomputer, an entire network interconnected that will serve for AI purposes. Who knows what that will make, what that indeed will make possible. I'm super excited about AI, even if you don't want to call it AI because it's not true intelligence, not the point, the technology that the world calls AI. I'm super excited about. All right, thanks everybody. Let's now turn to the super chat. A few things I want to remind you before we do that. One is, please like the show before you leave. It really, really, really helps with the algorithm. It drives views up. The algorithm really likes engagement and liking is engagement, commenting is engagement. Sharing is the best engagement. And of course, if you're not a subscriber yet and you're watching right now, please subscribe. So the likes should be double what they are right now. Please like it before you leave because if you don't like the show, don't like it. But if you do, then please, it's a cheap way of trading value for value. The other way, of course, of trading value for value is financially supporting the show. You can do so by asking a question and thus shaping the direction, the content of the show. But you can also do it with the sticker. And there, it's just a monetary support and it just stands on its own. So you can do that just by clicking the dollar sign at the bottom of your screen. All right, I have, Alex has sent me, Alex Epstein has sent me four questions to cover today that he texted them to me. So I have them in front of me. I need to find a way to, how do you, how do I, yeah. I mean, text, the one disadvantage of text on the Mac is I can probably, no, make text bigger. There we go. All right. Is the text is really, really small. So I'm making the text bigger. All right. One more. Yeah. No, that's the biggest it'll go. All right. So here are the questions. They all relate, I think, yeah, they all relate to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. And so happy to answer it. So the first question. Oh, I also wanted to remind everybody, also wanted to remind everybody. There will be a show tonight at 7 p.m. East Coast time. It will be on Europe's Islam problem. So Islamist problem, Muslim problem, however you want to define it. How to deal with what's going on in Europe vis-a-vis Muslims. And we'll be talking about that today. So super controversial. I think there might be some people disagree with me in the chat. But I think really interesting in terms of really thinking through the issue. Okay. We're in the situation. We're in. What do we do now? I'm going to start from here. I've said a lot about that over the many, many years, 20 years really. But it's in all a bunch of different places. Today's show will put it all in one place and aggregate all the information for one show. So I hope you'll join me tonight. It should be an interesting show. And don't forget to bring your questions and bring your dollars to be able to support the show for tonight. And don't forget you can still ask questions, particularly $20 questions today. All right. Here's the questions from Alex. Could you explain the truth about the moral status of the 700 Palestinians who fled as part of the 1948 invasion? How complicit were they or subsets of them complicit in, I guess, the violence against the Jews? How should they have been treated? How were they treated? Are any reparations owed to any of them? All right. So this is a great question. And it's a fairly complex question. So here we're talking about 700,000 people who were residents of what at the end of the 1948 war became Israel. The armistice lines of 1948, which became modern Israel. 700,000 Palestinians, 700,000 Arabs who lived in the land that became Israel, were either left that land or were kicked out of that land during the war that occurred during 1948. Just a quick history, because I think just a quick history in terms of the sequence of events here, because I think the sequence of events is important to understanding both practically and morally what happened here. In November 1947, or before November 1947, the British who had a mandate from the UN to basically run the territory that is considered today Israel and Palestine was called Palestine by the British, but included for much of that period included Jordan as well. The British decided they wanted out. They wanted to leave. It was costly for them. They were winding down their empire anyway post World War II, and they had enough of the Jews and the Muslims in the Middle East. And they were basically divvying up the Middle East and handing over power to local authorities all over the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is a country created by the British. Iraq, Syria, Syria and Lebanon were countries created by the British and the French. Jordan was created by the British. These are not countries that had existed. These are not countries that had any kind of reality. They were created by British and French post World War I because they were all lands that they had occupied as part of defeating the Ottoman Empire. Part of this was also what was called Palestine, the section between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And so they went to the UN and said, look, get us out of this. We're leaving. You decide what happens here. And the United Nations voted not overwhelmingly. It was close, but voted for the partition of the territory into two states, a Palestinian state for the Arabs and a Jewish state for the Jews and called Israel. And they drew up the borders. The borders were very restrictive. They basically tried to include population concentrations of Arabs. It would be part of the Palestinian state, the Arab state, and centers of population centers of Jews where Jews were dominant would be Jewish. Anyway, the Jews in Palestine celebrated. They went out the streets. They danced. The pictures of this. The next day the Arabs started a military offensive against Israel, not Arabs from outside, but what are called Palestinians, Arabs inside that geographic area. Started a violent activity against Israel, against the Jews. With the idea that before the British left, they wanted to create a reality on the ground where there were basically no Jews there, or the Jews had been so marginalized that it made no sense to give them any kind of land. So the idea that the Arabs had, that the Palestinians had that was to occupy as much of this land, to kill as many Jews as possible, to drive as many Jews into the sea as possible, and basically to be able to occupy this territory as, quote, a Palestinian territory. In May of 1948, the British basically said, we're leaving. And they packed up and left. On that day, the Israel basically declared independence. And on that day, also seven, as soon as the Israelis declared independence, the armies of seven Arab countries invaded Israel, and a war was begun. And interestingly enough, and it's always important to note this, that when those seven countries invaded, their goal was not to create a Palestinian state, not to create an Arab state. Their goal was to carve this territory up among themselves. Egypt wanted the south, Jordan wanted big chunks of what is today, eastern Israel, Syria and Lebanon wanted northern parts of Israel. They all wanted pieces of it. They all, you know, wanted probably if they would have won, they would have started fighting each other for who gets the word Jerusalem, let's say, and things like that. It's part of the Arab invasion, part of the invasion of these seven countries. The Arab countries communicated to the civilian population, the Arab civilian population within this territory. They told them, look, guys, get out of the way. There's going to be a war. It's going to be brutal. Get out of the way. If you want to fight on the outside, join the fighting. But if you're just a civilian, if you're not going to raise weapons against them, just get out of the way. What we suggest to you is go to Jordan, go to Lebanon. Those are the primary places they went. Go to Egypt, but the primary places were Jordan and Lebanon, primarily Jordan. Jordan's the closest. And get out of the way so that when we, you know, start bombing these cities, when we start fighting these wars, you won't get in the way. You know, just like Israel is, told the Palestinians, go south, right? Because we're attacking in the north. And what you saw in the days following along in their photos of this long convoys of Arabs leaving their homes in in Jaffa, which is very close to Tel Aviv, Haifa, which was always a mixed city and still is a mixed city. The Galilee, you know, parts of, you know, parts of southern and midsection of Israel, just getting in their cars and driving away and leaving and going to where they were promised. And now countries said, look, we're going to win this very quickly. It's not going to take long. I mean, how many Jews are there? A few hundred thousand Jews? There are tens of millions of us. We're going to wipe them out. And when we wiped them out, and literally it was about wiping them out. You will be able to come back. So some of the 700,000, a big chunk of the 700,000 were Arabs who left because Arab countries urged them to leave under the idea that they could come back once victory was achieved. Now some of them left because the fighting started and indeed they discovered they were in the crossfire and maybe they were part of the people fighting and they discovered they were losing. And rather than suffer the full defeat, they ran away. So some of them just ran away, ran away because of the crossfire, ran away because they were losing, ran away because Israel was beating them. Indeed, Israel increased its territory from the UN partition to the ceasefire in 1949 of this war of independence. It had grown because it had occupied a lot of the territory where fighting was going on. And then a third category of people were actually kicked out of their homes by Israelis. And I would say here, I would split this category into two. One, some segments of the Israeli military, some units misbehaved. There were indeed very few, but a couple of occasions in which Jewish forces massacred civilians on the Arab side. Very few, once or twice, many such occurrences, by the way, of Arabs massacring Jews. And there were also occasions where they kicked people out of their homes and by pointed guns at them and forced them to run away. So that's one category. And a second category is there were certain villages, certain locations where they had fought against Israel, where their location was strategic in terms of the security of the state of Israel, and they basically told people to leave because they were in the way and they were strategically inhibiting their ability to defend Israel. So how do you think about these people? Well, you know, most of them, the ones who left because they were urged to leave, the ones who fled because they were in the crossfire because they were losing, the ones who left because Israel had a strategic interest in the location of where they lived. Well, we'll put that one aside. So the first two, I'd say those first two categories fall under the category of you started a war and you lost it. Their leadership, whether they supported it or not, and most have supported it. Their leadership started a war and they listened to their leadership. They followed the suggestions of the leadership and they were victims of war. Many of them are victims of the decision making of these seven Arab countries that invaded Israel. And therefore, Israel has no responsibility towards them. They vacated their land. They abandoned their property. The property is abandoned and can be used by anybody else for productive purposes. Again, when you lose a war, you lose a war. A war you start. We are victims of the wars that Arab countries have started against. There's not only the soldiers who have died in the war, Arab and Israeli, but the victims are these Palestinians who don't have a home. We're promised one, but don't have one. The more responsibility for taking care of them, the more responsibility for should be on those who urged them to leave. Instead, what has happened is that the refugee camps that the Palestinians established, first in Jordan and then in Lebanon and in other places around, some of them in the West Bank and Gaza, basically have 70 something years later still in existence. Arabs have kept them as second, third class citizens in their own countries. They're not citizens of Lebanon, even though they've lived there for decades. They're not citizens of Jordan, even though they've lived there for decades. They're treated horribly by Arab countries. And instead of resettling them, giving them citizens, making them, they've kept them as refugees, as something to dangle over Israel and as something to use, to elicit guilt from the Europeans for their support and Americans for their support of Israel. So there are two other categories. One category is people who Israel required them to leave for a variety of reasons. Now if these were people who were engaged in combat against Israelis, then again, I think they have no claim. Once you initiate violence, you can't say, oh, but property rights. Now you lose your rights and you use your claim to the property that you used in order to engage in the violence. And if Israel needed to throw some people out because the security demanded that this particular land be free of hostiles, then so be it. There is one group that I think does have a claim here. If there are cases in which the Israeli military was gratuitously forced people off their land, threw them out, murdered some of them like they did in Diri Yassin and maybe one other place, but Diri Yassin is the famous one, then those Palestinians have a legal claim against Israel. They have a legal claim against the government where it is clearly gratuitous, not as a part of a war action, not as an act of self-defense, or if after the war was over, the Israeli government confiscated land from Palestinians without giving them any compensation. Once hostilities were done, and that has happened, it's happened in the West Bank, it's happened in other places, they should be able to sue and get their land back or at very least under the idea of eminent domain in the United States, get compensated for it. But just to be clear, the 700,000 Palestinians that are out there, and some of them, those ones who were gratuitously kicked out, should have some claim to come back to their land and their property. But that's a fraction. Maybe it's 10,000, probably less than that. The 700,000 have no right to return to their land. They initiated force, they've lost all rights to that. Their government, their representatives, their leaders, their community leaders, their political leaders, their religious leaders, all initiated force in their behalf, in their name. They lost all rights, all claims. Now, the Arabs of the state in Israel won. They won the lottery. Because the Arabs who stayed in Israel, who didn't run, who didn't listen to their leadership, who stayed and didn't fight and weren't killed in a crossfire, they landed up living in the freest country in the Middle East. They landed up having their rights protected better than in any other country in the Middle East, better than any Arab country. They landed up hitting the jackpot in terms of wealth, in terms of freedom. Alright, that's probably a longer answer than expected. Alright, second question. This one's a long question. How would he answer this argument by a smart opponent of Israel who claims to be for property rights? Israeli Jews lived peacefully in Akko and elsewhere before Zionism decided to establish an exclusive homeland and kick Palestinians out and deny them their property. The idea of driving Jews out simply never existed in Palestine before Zionism. I don't think there's anything special about Palestine-Israel. If you turned any country into a national homeland for one group and kicked another group out and took away their property, they'd get endless conflict, too. If you had property rights respected regardless of religion and ethnicity, you'd get peace. I think there's room for all Palestinians and Israelis to live peacefully together, but if the ruling regime continues to deny property rights based on religion and ethnicity, unfortunately conflict will continue until one group is eradicated. It's looking like we're getting close to the latter outcome. I mean, this gets a number of things wrong. The way it's conceptually framed is wrong and the history is wrong. It is true that under the Ottoman Empire, under the rule of law that was the Ottoman Empire, for whatever good that law was, there was a rule of some law in the territory called Palestine in those days. Jews and Arabs lived fairly peacefully. Jews had to pay an extra tax because they were Jews to the authorities ultimately in Istanbul or in Damascus where the regional government was. But there was no Palestine and there was some respect for property rights. Under Ottoman law, Jews had certain property rights and Arabs had certain property rights. But you have to take into account that there was an overarching legal system here. Now starting in the late 19th century, Jews in relatively speaking large numbers relative to the existing population in this territory. Remember Palestine in the 19th century was swamp land. It was an awful place. It had a very small population focused in Jerusalem and a few other cities. There was no Tel Aviv. There was almost nothing on the coast. Jaffa, Akko, Haifa, but these were again very, very small places. The population was very small and Jews started emigrating to this area. Now some of them had a dream of one day establishing a Jewish nation here. Some of them have a dream of, yeah, this is our ancient biblical land or whatever. But the fact is that most of them were atheists. Almost all the immigrants of the late 19th century were coming from Russia and Germany. They were secular Jews. They were atheists. And most of them were just escaping from horrors of what was going on in their native countries. The Russians were mostly socialists who thought they could establish a communism in what was Palestine before you could get it in Russia itself. They established Kibbutzium. They started farming communities. And the only reason they could do this is because they purchased property rights again. They purchased land from rich Arabs, or Arabs generally, Arab farmers. They purchased land from the Ottoman authorities that might have owned land. A lot of the land was owned by rich Arabs in Damascus or maybe rich Turks all the way in Istanbul. And the other way in which they gained land, they gained property, was taking possession of unused, unclaimed land, swamps, desert. Swamps were dried and they gained property rights over those. There was no way for the Jews during this period to take anybody's land. They had no political power, they had no weapons, and they had no facility for taking other people's land. But it is the case that starting pretty early on and certainly once the Ottomans left. But even in the late 19th century, early 20th century, during the Ottoman period, but accelerated after the Ottomans left, hostilities between Jews and Arabs increased. The Arabs noticed that these Jews were moving in. Yes, they were buying land, but they didn't like the fact that the number of Jews was increasing. And hostilities started increasing in the very late 19th century, early 20th century. Now in 1919, of course the Ottoman Empire lost the war and these territories fell into the hands of the British. The British got a UN mandate to manage these territories. And during this period, there were pieces of land all over the place. There were not a huge number of Arabs in the area defined as Palestine, and Palestine had never been a state, never been a country, not since before the Romans had been a country called Palestine. And Britain was in the business of divvying the territory up into states, into countries. And one of the considerations, and Jews all over Europe lobbied for, well, why don't we use this opportunity to carve out this piece of territory where there are quite a few Jews and there are not that many Arabs, the majority, but there are not that many, into a future Jewish state. The Arabs have lots of state around. You know, Arabs in Palestine, if they want to live under Arab rule, they can move somewhere else, but create a state that will be accessible for Jews to move into. Not to take anybody's land, not to steal anybody's land, just to move into. Move into by buying land and by cultivating land that did not existed before. I mean Tel Aviv was a city created on land that didn't belong to anybody. And some of the land was purchased from Arab landowners. But a lot of it was just sand on the beach that just wasn't owned by anybody. So in the Balfour Declaration, there was the declaration of a Jewish state, but not a state where land would be taken from private landholders who were Arab and given to private landholders who were Jewish. No, the idea was that the land that was not owned by anybody, not owned by any Arab landowner or any Jewish landowner, was owned in a sense, the extent that you can apply ownership to this, by the British now because they happen to occupy it and they had basically conquered it from the Ottomans. And remember that in most countries, sadly, even in the United States, 75% of all the land west of the Mississippi is owned by the state. So the Ottoman Empire owned most of the land in what is known as Palestine. And so the British inhibited that. So by saying, OK, much of this land, this land that will be granted to a new state that is going to be friendly for Jewish immigration and going to be a Jewish state, is not taking private property from anybody. There was no private property. Now then, just to fill in the history, then the reality is that from 1919, the end of World War I, through 1948, when the British left, Britain kept changing its mind about a Jewish state, yes a Jewish state, no a Jewish state. On a number of occasions in the teens, in the 20s, and in the 30s, Arabs took up arms and killed Jews, fought against the British, but mainly killed Jews, the British were trying to keep the peace. My grandfather was injured in one of these attacks in Hebron while he was a student there and left Palestine as a consequence. But there were huge Arab uprisings where Jews were killed, like they were killed outside of Gaza, and the British brought back peace. But there aren't these periods as Jews migrated into Palestine. And the rate of migration was not very fast. Not like millions came. They basically bought land. The British didn't give them anything. They bought land from Arabs, or they settled unoccupied land and turned it into productive land. The property rights of Palestinians or Arabs was never violated. And it has not been violated with the one exception I gave earlier about those who were kicked out gratuitously. The land of the Palestinians was either taken from them because they initiated violence, but those who stayed, even those who stayed who initiated violence, got their land back, their Arab villages all over Israel, Arab towns, Arab cities, the Arabs in Akko, the Arabs in Jerusalem, the Arabs in Haifa, the Arabs in Jaffa, all still lived peacefully with Jews and their property rights have all been respected. Indeed, the property rights of Arabs have never really been violated. So this is not an issue of rights violations. Never has been a property rights violation. That's not the issue. I agree that if the Arabs had settled with, yeah, if Jews want to buy property and they want to live here, fine. And, you know, as long as property rights are respected, who cares who the government is in Jerusalem or whatever? Yeah, none of this would happen. We would all be living happily, peacefully in Israel, or whoever would it be, right? There are millions of Arabs who live today in Israel whose property rights are fully protected. Now, granted, Israel, like most Western states, violates property rights in all kinds of ways, Jews and Arabs. Does Israel sometimes discriminate against its Arab population? Sometimes. But it's minor, and they have, again, more rights than in any other country in the Middle East, and their property rights are respected more than in any other country in the Middle East. This conflict has never been about property rights. If it was, it could easily be resolved. The courts in Israel are pretty good about deciding whose property this belongs to. To the extent Israel has violated people's property rights, whether as a state or whether individuals have violated property rights, then Israel should be held to account on that, and the Supreme Court has indeed, on occasion, done that. They've returned land, a property to Arabs whose land was taken from them illegitimately. But don't forget, what does it mean to say Palestinian land? There is no such thing as Palestinian land if you believe in property rights. Then there's a land of Palestinian of Muhammad, his land. Nobody took his land away. Now, adjacent to his land was land that was owned by the Ottoman state, and now is owned by the Israeli state. That was never his. And it doesn't belong to, quote, the Palestinians. And I don't think it should belong to these Israel, the Israeli state either, I think, should be privatized. It should be sold to the highest bidder. But we live in a world in which land is not privately owned, not all privately owned. We live in a world in which states own, in quotation marks, a significant portion of the land within their own country. Israel is no different than any other country in that regard. And to assign that land, that unclaimed land, if you will, to the ethnicity of the group that happened to be a majority at any particular point in time, is completely arbitrary and random. Israel established a country, and it's, again, the more basis of Israel is the fact that it's a free country. It didn't just establish any country, establish a free country that actually respects property rights, including the property rights of Arabs. All right, question number three. I'm going through questions, those of you coming in and out. I'm going through questions submitted to me. It's a super chat question, but they were submitted through text. And they were $100 each. I'll do those first, and then I'll go to the super chat, submit it online. Answer this by the same person. Ethnic cleansing of Palestine started 50 years before Hamas was created. It was entirely premeditated in an only possible way to build a Jewish homeland on a land that was 90% non-Jewish. That's just not true. It's just not true. In the 1930s, there was no ethics, so 50 years before Hamas was created in the 80s, the 1930s, there was no ethnic cleansing going on. Indeed, if you look at migration patterns in the late 90s century all the way into the 1940s, vast numbers of Arabs migrated into what is now Israel. They were new immigrants just like the Jews who were coming in were new immigrants. Nobody was being kicked out of Israel before the state of Israel was established because quite the opposite. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who today call themselves Palestinians were actually completely new immigrants who came from Jordan and Syria and Lebanon and Egypt and other places around the area to what was called then Palestine, and why did they come? Why did they come? Why suddenly was there massive in-migration into this area? And the Arabs don't want to hear this, but the reality is that the Jews were created massive economic opportunities. They were building cities. They were farming on a scale that had never existed. They were using land that had been swamped and desert that nobody knew how to use. They were literally drying swamps. They were building industry. This even Israelis don't know this because the socialists don't want you to know it, but it was private industry. The electrification of Palestine happened because of Jewish enterprise. So Jews were building industry, farming, cities, creating jobs. And Arabs in Syria and Jordan were looking at themselves and going, yeah, I can earn a lot more by going over there. There's a lot more job opportunities over there than over here. And they did. And they were the manual labor that built much of Israel in terms of the actual construction, right? They built the homes, the buildings, and they worked in the industries. So the exact opposite of ethnic cleansing happened before 1948. Post-1948, and during 1948 I've already answered, there was no ethnic cleansing. 1948 saw them run away. You run away, you lose, tough. I don't see any more responsibility of the people defending themselves to respect your so-called rights to come back, particularly when you continue to hold a world view that once they eliminate the very state that you demand a return to. So, yeah, there was no premeditated. There was no plan. The Arabs left without Israel asking them to leave. Most of the asking to leave was done by the Arabs. Now, again, were there cases? And should the Arabs be compensated where you could show proof of it? Okay, fine. But those are the exception, not the rule. The rule was that it wasn't ethnic cleansing. The rule was that it was people losing in a war and running away. Or running away in anticipation that they would win and be able to come back. Either way, Israel owes them nothing. And it wasn't ethnic cleansing, period. Alright, last question. What's the proper policy towards Hamas hostage-taking? As far as I can tell, Israel's current and long-time policy is to pay reward Hamas for hostage-taking by senses that a government should only retrieve hostages by escalating punishment on the enemy, never by rewarding the enemy. But I haven't thought this through and there may be considerations I'm not aware of. No, I absolutely agree with you. I think there has to be a fundamental principle of one does not negotiate with hostage-takers. One does not negotiate with the enemy. One does not negotiate with people committed to your own destruction. The attitude towards the hostage-takers need to be for every hostage you take will take a whole neighborhood. We'll take everything away from you. We'll destroy you completely so that nobody ever takes hostages from us again. And I said this right after the hostages were taken. Israel needs to function and act moving forward as horribly as that might seem. Israel needs to function and act as if the hostages are dead. If they can free them, if they can put together missions to free them, if they take land and it turns out that they find the hostages great, fantastic, wonderful. But they cannot and shouldn't slow down for one second. They shouldn't resist bombing any location out of consideration for the hostages. They should make Hamas pay for the fact that they have hostages. The problem is, of course, why did Hamas take hostages? Because Israel in the past has appeased them. In the past, Israel gave them a thousand to one. A thousand prisoners were released to not to get one hostage. So they figured we take 200. We could get everybody. We could empty Israeli prisons. And we could probably get them to stop the fighting, which they did, right? They got a ceasefire, which Hamas needed. Israel didn't. Hamas needed to replenish supplies. Hamas needed to reorganize. Hamas needed to set booby traps. Hamas needed to get their command and communication and command structure right so that they could kill more Israelis once hostilities started up again. Hamas is a massive winner of the ceasefire. I've talked about this quite a bit. So Hamas got what they wanted from the hostages. They got a ceasefire. And they'll get more in the future. Right now they're only doing women and children. They're keeping the men to release the men. They'll want something as well. So we'll get another two weeks of fighting. And then Hamas said, oh, we'll give you another 20 hostages. If you stop, give us a breather. Let us breathe a little bit. And of course, every time that happens, it makes it more difficult for Israel to start up again. The world pressure becomes more intense. So no, you should never negotiate with terrorists. Never negotiate with the evil. You don't negotiate with Hitler. You don't negotiate with Stalin. You don't negotiate with Hamas. You crush them. And if Israel had done that 20 years ago, then the whole idea of taking hostages would never come about. But when you appease, you appease them once. You appease them twice. You appease them three times. Then the fourth time they're going to take 250 hostages. Why just take one? All right. Thank you, Alex. Really, really appreciate the questions. Now we've also got them on tape. So that whole section should be its own separate video. I'm sure Christian will do that. He was on here earlier, probably left by now, but he's on here earlier. So we'll do that. So thank you, Alex, for giving me an opportunity to get all that out in one place. And of course, for the financial support, really, really appreciate that. Thanks for the super chat. All right. Let's go to all the other super chat. First, we got, wow, $500 to review a movie, which I've never heard of. That's always interesting. Please review 2013 sci-fi thriller, Coherence. Wow, never heard of that one. It utilizes the boring multi-verse idea, but does it in a way that highlights society's fear of the other. Characters in the movie identify themselves by the color of their glow sticks. And when that's not enough, they find other arbitrary ways to isolate themselves from the other. Ending kind of lost me. It sounds like, I mean, a multi-verse sci-fi movie cannot have an ending that makes any sense since the old premise makes no sense. So yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. So, okay, great. I will do that. Thank you, John. Really, really appreciate the support. And if you know where I can watch it, like if it's a Netflix prime or something like that, let me know. Just put it in the chat or put it somewhere. All right, James. What do you think about David Goggins? Have you heard of him before? How does outlook on life reflect objectivist values? Do you think our society is growing weaker mentally and physically? I don't know, David Goggins. So I don't know. Is our society... I think I can answer this without knowing who he is. I'm just googling David Goggins to see who he is. Oh, no. I don't know who he is. He's this young guy. He looks really, really puff. He looks... Yeah, right. I'll take a look at it. He's 48. He looks much younger than 48. It's good for him. Is our society growing weaker mentally and physically? Yes, absolutely. Now, physically, it's compared to what? Right? It's compared to when? Certainly, we were stronger physically. 300 years ago, we were all farmers, and we all were workmen, and we all did physical labor, and we had to be physically strong, but we were also physically weak in the sense that any disease would kill us. So we're living much longer. So in a sense, we're physically stronger in that sense. We're living much longer. And... But we're not physically strong because we are not active in the way that we were in a pre-industrial society. I think the wealthier we get, which I find interesting, right, the wealthier we get, the more time we now spend on exercise on getting ourselves physically strong. I think there are a lot... I mean, I think that's on an uptick. Particularly, you know, as it happens, it's on the coasts, in America's coasts, in California, and on the East Coast. You see a lot of people working out a lot, and who are generally, yeah, quite physically strong. And I think those of us, those people who work out more physically strong than I think our ancestors were because we're healthier. We have, I think we have a better diet. I think, because we think about it, I think we exercise in a more scientific way. So we're stronger in a more... in a healthier way. We probably don't have kind of all the back problems that you have from working in the fields, which people underplay. But, you know, but the main thing is we're healthier. Mentally, I think we're weaker than we were maybe a couple of generations ago, but are we mentally weaker than we were 300 years ago? No. I mean, 300 years ago, I don't know what it means to be mentally strong, right? In terms of thinking, thinking was not particularly valued. Muscle was valued. And you didn't have time to educate yourself. You didn't have time to do the things that are necessary to become intellectually strong. Now, mentally might not be the same as intellectually. I don't know what you mean by mentally strong, capable of dealing with pain, capable of dealing with effort. You know, I don't know. I don't know how... Yeah, there's a sense in which we're mentally less strong than maybe we were a long time ago. And... But the nice thing now is that we have the time, the wealth to be able to make ourselves what we want to make ourselves. Make ourselves into what we want to make ourselves. And that didn't exist in the past, and that's only possible because of the Industrial Revolution. Because of... Are we mentally lazy? I don't know. I think all these things exaggerated. I mean, our educational system sucks. That's a problem. But I think people consume a lot of content today. They might consume it in different ways than they did in the past. People know a lot. Think about how many engineers they are in the world today. So I don't know what mentally lazy or mentally weak really means. And I'm not sure. You know, it's not like life is worse today in any kind of sense. Life is better. So we might be weaker in some things, but much, much, much stronger in others. We're not trained mentally. It's hard to make long-range decisions. That's not mentally... It's intellectually... I mean, if an instance may be short, then I trained to think long-term and to think rationally. Yeah, all that is true, but that has to do not with training. That has to do with our educational system. That has to do with learning how to think. The biggest deficit we have today in the world is learning how to think. Learning how to use our minds. That's the biggest deficit. It's not a problem of physical strength. I don't know what mental strength means. It's an issue of thinking. All right, James G, are you going to make more clips to go viral next year? I surely am going to try. Can't guarantee, but I will try. Robert said, you once mused that you might have your own rules for life compiled into a book. Any more thoughts on that possibility? Maybe it's time for Christmas 2024. Yeah, I mean, it's always a possibility. It really depends on my co-author more than it does on me. I'm ready to do it. My co-author has a full-time job, so... I'll talk to him. We've talked about it in the past, so it might be something we can do. Catherine says, anti-Trump Coke-aligned Super PAC announced Haley endorsement. Yeah, I talked about that yesterday, I think, or the day before. I talked about the news roundup, but that's great news. Wesley, people report having fewer friends than 30 years ago. Is this a positive trend, people being more individualistic and will this continue? I don't know if it's a positive or negative trend. It's hard to tell. It also, I don't know what it means. The quality of the friendship matters. Are they deeper friendships? Are they closer friendships? The whole issue of loneliness and lack of friendship. The empirics on it are dubious. The way the questions are asked and so on. What's reported? I'll do a show on loneliness, and we'll talk about this some more. I have to do a little bit more research before that, but I don't think it indicates much of anything, unless we can dig into the data a little bit more and discover what's really going on. I don't think it's more individualistic, but I don't think it's less, necessarily. All right. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Alex. Thank you, John. Thanks to all the Super Chatters. I will see you all tonight. Europe's problem, you know, Islamic crisis, what to do about it. Join me 7 p.m. East Coast time. We blew away our target. So we're in great shape going into tonight, last day of November. But yeah, join us and bring questions with you. Okay, Silvanos, last minute says, I was brushing up on Roman history and came up with this question. Do you think Islam, and it's possible, rise against the West, could parallel the sacking of Rome by the Vizygos? I really think that that is a great question for tonight. So I hope you come back tonight and ask it again. But no, I don't think so. Partially because the Vizygots, when Rome was sacked, Rome was Christian and the Vizygots were Christian. So Rome was actually sacked by Romans, sorry, by Christians. By barbarian Christians, you could argue, but by Christians. And Islam is a different religion. And I don't think my belief is that Europe is not going to be sacked by... I mean, we'll talk about this tonight, but the barbarians could... Suddenly, the challenge that Europe faces is similar to the challenge Rome faces. It's got barbarians at its borders and it's got barbarians inside the empire. But Rome is a lot weaker than Europe is. Rome is a lot weaker than Europe is. And as I said, most of the barbarians inside Rome were already Christians. Were already Christians. The barbarians on the left, Scott, we all know that. Why are you even asking the question? The barbarians in this case are the Muslims inside. The barbarians in Rome were the barbarian tribes. So there's certainly some parallels, but they only go so far. They only go so far. All right, we will talk tonight. It's a great question for tonight, Savannas, and you'll get an hour-long answer to that question tonight because that's really the topic of what I'm going to be talking about. Thanks, everybody. See you. Don't forget to like the show before you leave. If you're not a subscriber, please subscribe and join us tonight. I will see you all later.