 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Book Show. Alright everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show. On this Tuesday night, two shows in one day. You guys are getting spoiled. Alright, hopefully you're all having a great week and beginning of the week and look forward to the rest of the week. It's holiday season. Thank you everybody for joining me today and for joining the show. I appreciate it. A lot of you, some of you at least, are listening for the second time in one day. So I appreciate that in particular. But yeah, so today we are going to be talking about globalization, what it is, what it isn't. Maybe a little bit about what I think the outcome of globalization has been and whether globalization is dead. A lot of commentators, a lot of people out there, whether it's for some of the wishful thinking, for some of them it's a sad fact that claiming globalization is dead. So we'll evaluate that, we'll also talk about what it means for globalization to die if it indeed does die. Just before that, let me remind everybody that we do have the super chat, we do raise money in these shows and we have a super chat target which is $650 for our long format shows, $250 for short format shows. Today, tonight is probably going to be a long format show, we'll see. We'll see how long we go but it'll be, we've got a goal, hopefully we can meet that goal. Hopefully you guys can get excited about meeting it. Let's see, for those of you who don't know, we are doing these shorter shows, the newsy shows every morning. Sometimes it's around noon East Coast time but it's morning for the rest of the United States and it might be afternoon and evening in Europe. So those shows on, we'll have another one tomorrow morning, I think we're targeting 11am East Coast time tomorrow, we'll see. But every morning I will try to do a show, I'm not guaranteeing that there will be one every single morning but I will try five days a week and then on, right now the plan is on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday to do a long format show. So that'll be kind of the division of labor short format in the morning and five days a week and then three days a week in the evening long format show and we'll see maybe that's too much and we'll cut it down to two long format shows or we'll figure this out, maybe we'll cut the short format shows down. We'll see partially depends on you guys, how many people actually show up to watch the shows and also how much money we raise, how much money you raise using the super chat feature and using the monthly subscriptions. Alright, so I will mind out again our goal is 650 and we're talking about globalization. Before we get to that just a quick item of breaking news that just hit just before we started the show I was looking at my news feed and I guess the breaking news this hour is that the courts have found the Trump organization basically guilty of fraud, of tax fraud. So we'll see how that all plays out but the organization, the tax, the Trump organization, it's not individual members but the organization itself has been found to have committed tax fraud. So yeah, we will see how that all plays out. It's kind of interesting and how I think a bunch of these legal issues are going to make Trump's life very difficult in the next couple of years. Very difficult and hard to imagine how he's going to recover from it. I see Scott has noticed that Jordan Peterson has interviewed Alex Epstein. Yes, Jordan Peterson has indeed interviewed Alex Epstein. It was just a matter of time. I'm surprised Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman haven't yet but Jordan Peterson is almost as big as they are sometimes. So this is great, great news for Alex. This will expand the reach of his ideas. I think we got a question about how influential Alex has been in the super chat. I think he's been incredibly influential and I think he has the potential to be even more influential. I mean Jordan Peterson will open up a lot of doors for him, a lot of doors for him because I'm sure the conversation that Alex handled the conversation really, really well. I'm sure Jordan was generally positive and supportive of Alex and we will see it hasn't been published yet. It should be published in the next few days but I expect good things from it and I expect, I mean I wouldn't be surprised if Alex's appearance at Jordan reached a million views or maybe more. And that'll give Alex a massive platform from which to expand his influence. So I'm excited. I think Alex is going to be super influential, is super influential, going to be even more influential and has the potential to really change the debate about climate change, about fossil fuels, about energy in the United States. And let's see. Yuan should get on JPE show. Yes, I should. Alright. Anybody want to arrange it? Welcome to try. I'd be shocked if Jordan Peterson had me on but it's possible, it's possible. Ben Shapiro had me on so I guess anything's possible. And then we'll see where Alex goes from here. So all upwards and forward and all good stuff. So I'm excited, very, very, very excited for Alex and certainly I think he deserves all this good stuff happening. He's done the work and it's paying off. Alright. Let us jump in to the topic at hand. The topic at hand is globalization and I want to start by differentiating globalization from what I think is an anti-concept package deal which is globalism. So I think the Trump era, I don't know who invented the term but it became super popular, globalists, globalism became super popular during the Trump presidency. Maybe it was around before that but I never noticed it. So I think it's about five, six years old. Maybe it even didn't exist at the beginning of Trump's presidency. Maybe it was something that happened later. But globalism is a term that became very, very popular among the kind of right wing populists surrounding Trump and I think it could be that it's existed for a very, very long time. So what is globalism? Globalism is an anti-concept because it is a package deal. What is a package deal? A package deal is when you take a word and you put into it things that don't go together, things that don't go together and therefore you create confusion in the listener's mind because they don't know and what usually happens is that the things you put together into the same word, there is a positive and there is a negative and what happens is by association the positive gets a negative association because it's in the same file folder under the same category in the same concept in the same file folder concept as the negative. And therefore the positive gets infected by the negative and package deal is one of the conceptual errors or one of the conceptual tools that bad guys use in order to disrupt our language and in order to infect positive terms with negativity in order to take over our language. The left is super really, really good at this, right? They take a concept of liberal which comes from liberty and they inject it with the welfare state and regulation and controls and liberty and regulation and controls all mush together and they're trying to destroy the essence of the term liberty. You take the concept of self-interest or selfish and you put into it Steve Jobs, you put into it Carnegie and great industrialists, you put into it athletes who work super hard to win, to be super successful, to be the best that they could be and you also put into it Bernie Madoff, lying, cheating, stealing and backstabbing, you put into it the bad things and now you create the suspicion of the businessman, well if he's so focused on himself he must be also lying, cheating and stealing. It's a brilliant cognitive methodology, it's a brilliant methodology to undermine cognition, to undermine clarity and to undermine good concepts, to destroy good concepts, to destroy good ideas and as I said the left is brilliant at it but really we have a society filled with package deals and anti-concepts and you see them all around us. What is globalism? Globalism is, yeah one effeeman says it's easy, it's mixing truth and lies under the same banner such as if the same word represents both the truth and the lie. Now they don't have to be truth or lie, they can both be truth but they're unrelated. So for example, globalism, what does that mean? Globalism is the mixing of free trade, global trade, the globalization of trade and global governance. The idea of one world government, the idea that the United Nations or the Council of Trent or whoever should rule everything, should rule the world, that nation states don't matter, that individual sovereignty doesn't matter but we should all have one nation. Mixing up a good thing, global trade, free trade, trade across between people in different countries and global government and what that does is when you say globalization, whoa you're for one government, one world government because they've linked the two. And it's not that one is true and one is false, both exists. There are people who advocate for one go government, there are people who advocate for global trade, they're not always the same people, they're usually actually separate people, there are many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many more people who advocate for global trade, who advocate for globalization and there are very, very few people who actually advocate for global governance and yet we put them in together in the same package, in the same term, globalism, it means nothing, there is no such thing as globalism. It doesn't identify anything real in the world out there. So we're not talking about globalism because I don't think one world government is a serious issue, I don't think it's a serious proposal, I don't think it is a proposal that has kind of any legs, I don't think it's made any significant progress in the world, although the whole world mimicking China after COVID gave you a sense a little bit of what a global government would be like. And I don't think there's anybody really in American politics who actually advocates for global government, one world government, let's shut down the United States and make it completely beholden to the United Nations. So there's a debate, an argument inside the United States about how much deference to give to a variety of international organizations, some of them completely illegitimate, like the United Nations, and some of them with some legitimacy, like the World Trade Organization and some of them with a lot of legitimacy, whether you agree with the mission or not, like NATO. So the fact that a bunch of governments get together and establish treaties or like NAFTA that establish treaties does not make, and you support that treaty, I support NAFTA, not because I think it's ideal but I think it's better than alternative in the world in which we live, but the fact that you support something like NAFTA does not make you a globalist. You're not saying they should be one world government. And this is the problem with people, you know, that people like to extrapolate these things, but you know, go find somebody who actually believes in one world government. That's part of the issue is that we create monsters that don't really exist since we're social with globalization and lots of people support globalization while lots of people support globalism. And if globalism means supporting NAFTA or was it the TPP, which was a massive mistake for the United States not to enter it with all its flaws and imperfections, if you associate the TPP with one world government, then you don't know what you're talking about. It's a multilateral treaty. There's nothing zero wrong with multilateral treaties. Some monsters do exist. The United Nations is a monster. Putin is a monster. Xi, Xi, Xi, Xi, I think Xi is a monster. There are many monsters in the world. I like identifying them and I like condemning them. But to create monsters for the sake of, and to highlight monsters for the sake of destroying or, you know, kind of destroying our perception of something good is a really, really evil thing. All right, let's see. So I'm not talking about globalism, not talking about one world government, not interested in one world government, not interested in countries giving up sovereignty. Although some countries would be good if they gave up sovereignty, sovereignty, but not to the UN, God forbid. But some countries, sovereignty is a disaster. So I'm not a nationalist. I don't believe that national sovereignty is the be all and all. I'm talking about globalization and globalization means global trade. It means the opening up of the world to trade. It means since trade only happens between individuals and not between countries, it means facilitating trade between 8 billion people. Supposedly the right billion people on the planet right now. Nobody really knows, but that's what the UN, I guess, estimates that there are people on planet Earth right now. I think they overestimate the number of people in China, so they might be overestimating the total number of people on planet Earth. At least I've seen estimates where Chinese population has already started to shrink and India's already the largest country in the world by population. And that China's going to shrink much faster than what the UN and other organizations think. But anyway, we'll see. Anyway, globalization is this trend towards global trade, trading with anybody in the world, no matter where they live. And it is a phenomena that human beings are being engaged in really since civilization began. One of the advantages of a Roman empire, one of the advantages of empire is trade. Is that you suddenly open up the roads to trade. You set up a common system of law. You set up a common system of currency in a sense of money, which facilitates trade throughout the empire. And that is, that is a massive benefit because you would use huge transaction costs that are involved in difficulties in transport, difficulties at taxes, tariffs, difficulties in war, the associate violence that is associated with crossing borders. And so what you create is a trade zone, a free trade zone within your empire. And that is a massive, a massive benefit. It creates more wealth than if you shut everybody apart and they have fewer people to trade with. If trade is win-win, if every trade results in a gain, then you want to maximize the number of trades. You want to maximize the number of win-win transactions and you do that by allowing everybody to trade with everybody. So the Roman empire was to a large extent an empire for the sake of trade to open up markets and to be able to trade across those markets. During that period and before that period, the Mediterranean was a massive globalized trade zone. It wasn't global because it was just a Mediterranean, but it was where people, technology allowed far people could get. Later on, you got trade routes through into China. You got the Silk Road, which was a form of globalization. Again, America didn't participate because it was difficult to get there plus nobody knew they existed. But from China to Europe to parts of Africa, there was trade. People traded. The supply chains, we talked today about supply chains. We didn't invent supply chains in the 21st century. Supply chains existed in the time of the Silk Road. That's so quote is a supply chain. So everything's falling apart in my pocket. So globalization to some extent, or not globalization is probably the wrong term. Trade. Trade with far reaching people. Trade with people who lived far, far away. And far, far away depends on your means of travel, right? When you're just walking far, far away is not that far as compared to when you're flying far, far away is very, very far. Globalization in that sense has always existed, or global or trade extensively as long as human beings have had any kind of civilization or been producing stuff for trade. If you look at how far, you know, if you just follow the path that people have gone, the trading routes that people engaged in, it is pretty amazing. Even before they had sophisticated boats. And then of course, there was the explosion of trade that came with the age of discovery with the fact and the capabilities of large boats to travel large distances with navigation, significant improvements in navigation, which allowed people to adventurous to circumnavigate the globe. And then of course, with then the significant developments in things like railroads, roads, cars, transportation, trucks, and so on, that suddenly facilitate. And then of course, steam engines, steam ships driven by steam power, and then kind of the modern ships that can transport massive container ships. And I did a whole show a while back, one of my favorite shows, I think, and some of you might remember it on container ships. I mean, container ships was a massive, we think about innovation, we think iPhone, but container ships were as big in terms of the impact on life, maybe bigger, massive innovation, which is the container ship, containers and the container ships. So globalization started out kind of local, started out just with increased trade grew and grew and grew. And today, the beauty of the world today is the logic that what we have is a global network of trade we trade with everybody and everybody trades with us. It's stunning to see how many goods are moving from place to place, and how as the goods move and as the goods are traded, value is created. As we said, trade is win-win, both parties are beneficial, both parties are better off. So as poor people trade more with middle class people, poor people become less poor. As poor people trade with people in other countries, poor people get less poor. So globalization has brought probably 2 billion people out of extreme poverty, maybe more than that. It has brought poor people into middle classhood. It has changed the world in which we live in terms of our ability to produce, to create value and to create wealth. Troy just came in with 500 Australian dollars. Thank you, Troy. Really, really appreciate your support. You know, it's the end of the year. It's getting close to the end of the year. So thank you, Troy, for your support the entire year. You've been one of our steady supporters and more generous supporters, so really, really appreciate that. I'm glad you're getting value out of the show. So globalization basically changed the world because of increased wealth, reducing poverty, improving our lives, making things like the iPhone possible. You know, I think we've talked about this, that the iPhone has parts from something like 40 plus different countries. They all get brought to China and ultimately assembled there. But it has raw materials from Africa. It has chips from South Korea and from Taiwan. It has, in order to design those chips and put them into computers, you have to use software that was basically written in the United States, you know, in the software to design the chips. There's no end to it and the interconnectedness of the world. And the more interconnected we are, the more opportunities there are to trade, the more opportunities there are for win-win situations, the richer we get. So open trade, open trade, free trade, not free trade in terms of incentivized trade or unmanipulated trade. I mean free trade in the sense that the trade itself is not hampered by anything. Zero tariffs, zero regulations, let people buy and sell whatever they want. That is the strategy, one of the strategies to maximize material well-being. That is one of the strategies to maximize wealth creation and to maximize prosperity and at the same time minimize poverty. And to the extent that the world has done that, it's thrived. We had relatively free trade in the 19th century under the banner of the British Navy. The British Navy basically kept the sea lanes open, made sure that trade, you know, flowed. The consequence, part of the consequence of that was the massive increase in human well-being during the 19th century, the massive increase in wealth, life expectancy and prosperity. The United States has basically served that function. By the way, all of that, not completely, but all of that shrunk significantly with the advent of World War I and then World War II. And a world of war is not a wealth-creating world. A world of war does not create many win-win situations. Indeed, war by its very essence is a lose-lose situation. So war is lose-lose and it spreads lose-lose across the board. World War II saw trade collapse, standard of livings collapse, wealth creation collapse, destruction through the roof. At the end of World War II, the United States established a global regime, the World Trade Organization being a piece of that later on. But basically, it's set as one of its top foreign policy priorities, the re-establishment of global trade, similar to the way it was in the 19th century. The U.S. Navy was basically mobilized to secure the shipping lanes, the shipping lanes all over the world, and I'll show you shipping lanes in a minute. And much of American fall policy was dedicated to convincing countries to reduce tariffs, to lower barriers, to increase trade, to facilitate trade, and to engage and participate in this global trading system. So I want to show you kind of the results of all of that. And I mean, these are truly amazing little maps. Let me just, yeah, there we go. So this is a map, this is actually for 2012, but I think it reflects life. These are basically all the ships in the sea. This is right now, this is 7th of April, 2012. So it's kind of going through, you can see the timeline over here on the right. And you can see all the lit up dots of the ships traveling through the oceans. This is spring of 2012. We're going to travel around the world a little bit to see the different flows, but you can see the intense light all along the coasts of Europe. You can see it through the Mediterranean, Northern Africa and the Mediterranean, where ships are flowing. There are basically many of them are coming from the Suez Canal. I'll show you the Suez Canal in a minute. And they're going to Northern Europe, but you can see the ports of Northern Europe and the activity all across the shores of Europe. If we could actually zoom in, you would actually see a bunch of dots. You can see it here on this river, but you would actually see a bunch of dots traveling through the rivers of Europe, rivers and the rivers of the United States. You can see it here in the Great Lakes, between the United States and Canada. You can see it up to Mississippi. You see the dots as ships also traveling. You can also see it, by the way, if you look at South America, you can see the dots traveling into the Amazon and bringing cargo up the Amazon. But look at just the number. We're talking about 14 million containers at any given point in time. 14 million containers. That doesn't make any sense, because we're talking about more than one car and one container. I don't know, but we're talking about 18 million vehicles being transported. So I don't know what KT means, 9 million vehicles. Anyway, so it's 10. It's not 18. 10 million vehicles. That makes more sense. So look at this. This is truly an amazing map. Look at the activity. Again, look at the United States. You can see the major ports, Texas in Houston there, Jacksonville all along the east coast there. You can see it all lit up. But then, if we move this, if we move the map, oops, I can't move it there. If I move the map and we move into Asia, you can see all the ships. You can see very few ships crossing Asia through, crossing South America from the south. The seas there are super rough. It's not a place you want to really be. This is June, so this is winter in that part of the world. And then no ships traveling there. Almost all the ships, let's see if I can zoom in here. Maybe you can zoom in. All the ships traveling from the Atlantic to the Pacific are going to go through this tiny little thing here. You see that little light over there? That string of light that is crossing? That is the Panama Canal. And that is the ships that are moving from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And you can see them right there. Unfortunately, you can't see my coast. I'm pointing here. But you can see them moving. But nobody goes below South America because they do under Africa. That's Cape Town over there. The whole South African coast is lit up because it is a training hub. For Africa and a production hub, South Africa still produces all that stuff. You see the whole coast of Africa is filled with lights. I think if you actually did this for 2020, you would see more lights because Africa has become more active, not less active. KT is kiloton, Eddie says. Possibly. All right, now let's move to Asia. Let's look at Asia. Look at what's going on there. Look at that. Look at East Asia. Look at the China coast, Japan coast, the South Korea coast. And then look at from there. It crosses the Pacific in all kinds of ways, mainly through the northern route to LA. But it crosses the Pacific all over, those little dots. But look at the trail that it goes for all the traffic going to the Middle East and to Europe. So a lot of those dots trailing in from the Middle East towards China, that's oil. That's oil being supplied to Japan and China. So you can see one of the interesting things here. Let's zoom in a little bit. You can see the passage between Singapore and Indonesia. Look how narrow that is. Look at that whole region, how narrow everything is. It's what makes Singapore such a strategic location because so much of the world's shipping goes through Singapore. And a lot of that shipping is crucial because a lot of that shipping is oil. A lot of that shipping is oil and maybe even natural gas, LNG, liquefied natural gas. But you can see that is pretty narrow. And then you can see that trail moving west, India up the Indian coast into the Persian Gulf, where you get that oil. But then another branch, which is not the oil, although some of its oil going to Europe, is the ships going up into the Suez Canal. And you can see right there is the Suez Canal. It's that line that kind of crosses that splits Europe and Asia. Europe and Asia. And let's see if you can see, again, here in the Mediterranean, you can see how busy the Mediterranean is. Thousands of ships all the time. You can see the Black Sea. This is before the Ukraine War. It would be interesting to see this map right now with the Ukraine War and what's going on in the shipping lanes in the center there. You have to find the source of this, the ultimate source of these maps and try to find an updated one. I find these, I love maps. I find this kind of stuff interesting. It gives you a visualization of just amount of stuff. Look at the coast of Africa. Look how active it is. Look at the ships going in and out of the coast of Africa. A lot of this is raw materials. Some of it is production. Some of it's trade between African countries. Some of it's trade between Africa and Europe. Nigeria is going to be a hub for oil. It's going to be exporting oil to Europe and probably more now. So again, it would be interesting to look at a map like this pre-war and post-war. Pre-war and post-war in terms of looking at how the impact it has had. And looking at this from the perspective of is globalization shrinking? All right. So there's a lot of talk right now about this massive global trade. Massive global trade that has had unbelievable benefit to humanity. Primarily to people in poor countries, but they benefited more than we benefited from, but we have still benefited from it as individuals. Now there are going to be some people who lose. The people who are relatively unproductive are going to lose. People who have jobs that are going to be replaced by computers or by robots are going to lose. People whose jobs are going to be replaced by people in Mexico, people in China somewhere else are going to lose. There's one other aspect of globalization that I think is really, really important. And I think people have not in the past talked about it enough. And that is what we've discovered with China, but particularly with Russia and the war, there's an aspect that people talked about in the 1980s. People talked about it in the 1980s because in those days there was a Soviet Union and its globalization was limited because there was no trade with Eastern Europe. There was very little trade with Russia. There was no trade with China. There was very little trade with Vietnam. Today trade with Vietnam is extensive. Again, that was part of that lit up coast of Asia with Vietnam. It's certainly a member of this kind of globalized world. Vietnam is not as lit up as it probably is going to become. Well, it wasn't lit up as lit up in 2012 as I'm sure it is in 2020. And that is political risk. I think people forgot about political risk. They forgot about war. They forgot about the potential of bad actors. And so political risk became, has become suddenly. And you fact about, I remember when I was studying finance, teaching finance, we talked about political risk. We talked about foreign investment. When you do a foreign investment, you have to take into account what the political risk is. You adjust your expected rate of return based on that level of political risk. And I have a feeling that that concept of political risk disappeared with the idea that, oh, everything's fine. The world is fine. There are no bad actors. Only good things can happen. And I think what we've discovered certainly over the last year, but we'll be discovering for a few years now, is that that is not necessarily the case and that there is a cost. There is a cost to trading with bad guys. There is a cost to relying too heavily certainly on trade with bad guys. We're seeing that with Russia and the cost that Europe is paying for relying on trade with bad guys. So the idea was, if you trade, you create mutual dependencies and you won't get war. But trade is not what, I think generally everything else is constant. Everything else being the same. Trade reduces the possibility of war. No question. Reduces these centers. But it doesn't eliminate them. It doesn't turn them into zero. Bad guys still exist. Bad guys don't care about the benefits of trade. Bad guys don't care about inflicting pain on their own people and on your people. And what we've rediscovered certainly since Russian invasion, but we should have discovered this a few years ago vis-a-vis Xi and China, is that bad guys still rule some of the biggest countries in the world. And over investment, if we invest too much of our resources, too much in trading with them, we become dependent on bad guys. And by becoming dependent on bad guys, we lose our independence not only from a national security perspective, which is true particularly when the bad guys are big and potentially powerful and have strong militaries, although Russia obviously doesn't. But we create uncertainty for ourselves into our future. And we limit our tools in a sense of dealing with bad guys. You know what we should do? Let me just do this. And this again is underestimating the issue. Let's zoom in, not Japan, but let's zoom into Taiwan. That's Taiwan, that island over there, off the coast of China. You can see how close it is to China. Again, in 2020, that coast is far busier than it was in 2012, because in 2012 Taiwan was not yet the kind of chip dominant powerhouse that has become today, where the entire world depends to a large extent. I think that's also true of South Korea. I think you would see today that South Korea is even more dominant in terms of trade, in terms of the number of boats that are coming in at South Korea, not only in chips, but in autos and everything, South Korea has only gotten bigger over time. But you can see how vulnerable Taiwan is. And yet, if you look at that Taiwan, I think it's 60%, 70% of the manufacturing of the most advanced chip in the world, the most advanced semiconductors in the world, happens on this island, so close to the Chinese coast. That's scary. That's scary. So the one caveat to global trade is, trade is win-win. Do you want the bad guys to win? And by creating trading networks and by investing in other countries, which trade necessitates as significant investment, and that's part of what has brought people out of poverty, is by making those investments, you're making yourself to some extent somewhat dependent on these bad guys. What would happen tomorrow if we shut down trade with China to a company like Apple? It would be destroyed. It would be destroyed. It would take them years. And that kind of political risk, I think, has really hit home with COVID and with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And that's why companies are frantically diversifying their supply chains, which means diversifying their production facilities across different countries. And that is not a movement towards reducing trade. Notice that companies are not on-showing. That is, Apple is not building facilities to build the iPhone in the United States, or for them, out of computers in the United States. They can't. There's no capacity. Maybe Mexico, maybe they are qualified engineers and qualified skilled employees. Cost of labor is lower, but Mexico's cost of labor is not really that low, although cost of transportation from Mexico to the United States is much lower than it would be from Asia. So it's not globalization that's going to shrink. It's not globalization that's going away. What is happening is globalization is going to shift, trade is going to shift away from some of the regional bad guys, away to some extent, although it's going to take a long time, away to some extent from China. China is also going to be hampered by the inability to now buy advanced chips. There was a story the other day in the paper about a woman who was arrested, I think, leaving, I can't remember if it was Singapore, and she had a fake pregnancy stomach, like a prosthetic, like a fake thing, and inside the prosthetic were semiconductors. There's a massive shortage of semiconductors in China, which was also going to hamper the ability to produce. But the point is it's going to shift from China. It's going to go to a place like Vietnam. It's going to go to places, probably even more so to India. It might go to the Philippines. It might go to Indonesia and Malaysia, but it's definitely, you're going to see much more diversification. In terms of supply chains, in terms of production, in terms of these dots, they're not all going to go to Shanghai. They're not all going to go to St. Gen. They're going to start going across a variety of different places in Asia and even in Africa. So while some countries, like the United States, intent on engaging in trade wars and raising tariffs and limiting trade with Europe and limiting trade with China and limiting trade with other parts of the world, other countries are opening up for the first time ever. So for example, I've talked about this before, but in Africa we've got a 54-nation African continental free trade area, which took effect in January of 2022. And now it's pretty limited because Africa doesn't produce that much, but trade is win-win. And you're going to start seeing an increase of trade, an increase of production, and an increase of wealth and a reduction of poverty in Africa, I predict, over the next decade. The trading block itself is now a quarter of the population of the continent and has access to the Atlantic Ocean. So it has ports not just on the Indian Ocean, but also on the Atlantic Ocean. If they can expand this to the Mediterranean, to the North, and if they can improve the infrastructure within Africa to deliver goods from place to place, I expect great things from Africa. I think Africa is an untapped market. I think there's an incredible opportunity over there, and we will see. I mean, a lot of it will depend on, again, the bad guys, how many of these African countries are run by bad guys, how many of these bad guys will be overthrown as these countries become maybe a little wealthier and property rates become more important because wealth is being created. You know, how do they control their natural resources? They do it through private enterprise. We will see. So there's a lot of uncertainty about what's going to happen in Africa. But anytime you see countries embrace the concept of free movement of goods and of trade, that is a good sign. That is a sign again. While the United States did not join the TPP, CP, TPP, whatever it's called in 2017, that treaty exists. It is a treaty that binds much of the Pacific Rim from Mexico down to Latin America and across to Australia and New Zealand and up through Japan and Korea. It does not include China. One of the reasons the United States should have joined. But of course the United States have NAFTA and the United States is working on trade deals with Japan. The United States have been negotiating trade deals with Africa, the UK, even though it's left the eurozone and trade with Europe has plummeted. Trade with Europe has declined significantly. A lot of industries in the UK are suffering substantial damage because of the lost trade with Europe. Trade with Atlantic, trade with the US is increasing. I think the UK is trying to negotiate deals with places like Kenya and Africa and other places around the world. Australia, New Zealand, Canada in order to enhance trade with other places. And I think we'll see more and more and more of that. So what we're really seeing is a reshuffling of globalization, a reshuffling of trade deals and trade agreements. Now my view on trade deals and agreements is they shouldn't exist. My view on trade is that every country in the world should just lower tariffs to zero. I think the United States should lead the way. Actually, I revise that. I think the UK should lead the way. I think the UK, what the UK should do is just basically lower tariffs to zero. I think it is the path for the UK to avoid a recession and what the Bank of England I think is calling a lost decade. They're expecting the next decade to be recession and stagnation and basically a loss. Actual standard of living quality of life in the UK declining over the next decade. I think that's easily avoidable. One piece of avoiding that would be reduction of tariffs to zero. Make England, make the UK, the United Kingdom a free trade zone. Encourage investment locally and export out. Because as the UK, I think lowest tariffs to zero, other countries will lower tariffs vis-a-vis the UK. But the UK will become this amazing hub. You'll be able to import into the UK intermediate goods, intermediate goods are unfinished goods that then get finished. You'll be able to import into the UK intermediate good at a tariff of zero. So zero tariffs is the only legit trade strategy. Unfortunately, it's not going to happen. So next best is trade agreements that unilaterally lower tariffs. I know part of the trade agreements also involves subsidies and favoritism and all that other stuff. That is a tragedy, but it's better than nothing. It's better than just having the favoritism and everything else and high tariffs as well. So what we're seeing today is a re-globalization, a shift in globalization, a shift in supply chains, a shift in where production happens. Nobody bringing production home. There is no reshoring. It's just not happening. People can pretend, people can play at it. It's great political rhetoric. It's great populist political rhetoric. It's just not happening and it won't happen because the advantages of building overseas, the advantages of unbelievably cheap shipping, the advantages of trade just way outweigh the benefits of producing locally. And what COVID taught us is not that we should not rely on overseas markets. What COVID taught us is we should rely on more overseas markets. That is that we should diversify supply chains but still have them. The fact is that we shut down, we did lockdowns in the United States. The only way we could survive during lockdowns in the United States is because other countries didn't lock down and they continue to produce. The fact is that we couldn't have produced enough to cover all the needs that we had. We can't produce enough to cover all the needs. And the standard of living would drop dramatically if we aren't short and everybody knows that. And indeed in the United States today, there is a massive shortage of labor. There are millions and millions of job openings that go unfilled. Who's going to take these jobs when you bring quote, manufacturing back? Robots. But it's cheaper to run robots in Asia or in Mexico than it is in the United States. Why run the robots here when you can run them over there and then ship them here? What you want to make sure is not to run those robots in countries that are ultimately going to be hostile to you, where you're benefiting them, where you're allowing them to become to gain the revenue to produce militaries that will threaten you, where you're allowing them to potentially hurt you in time of conflict. So what's happening now is it doesn't need politicians, it doesn't need politics, it doesn't need Congress. All it really needs is companies to pursue their own self-interest. And companies in pursuit of their own self-interest are going to diversify their supply chains. They've learned the lesson this last few years, this last three or four years, and they are doing it. And these maps are going to change because these maps are going to show a significant diversification. Globalization is not dead. Globalization is going to have another massive, I think, increase as we move into the future. The economics of it just are too obvious, are too straightforward. The alternative, the only alternative for a country like the United States instead of globalization, is massive increases in immigration. What do you think? What's more likely? That we increase trade with other countries or that we lower immigration barriers to zero? I think it's pretty straightforward. We're not going to increase immigration dramatically. We will instead increase trade dramatically with the rest of the world. Scott says follow the money around the world. No, it's not about following the money because it's not about the money. This is Trump's big mistake when he views trade. It's about follow the goods. Follow the goods. The goods are what matter. The goods hold more value than the money did. Money is just paper. Goods you can use. Goods you can consume. Goods you can use to produce. It's the goods that matter, not the money. When you trade dollars for something of value that is a physical good, that you did it because the good is more valuable to you than the money. Globalization is just amazing, stunning. It doesn't matter if China subsidizes companies. It doesn't matter the distortion of provision. It matters, but it matters at the margin. It doesn't matter in the obvious ways. It matters in terms of the allocation of wealth. It doesn't matter in terms of the actual creation of wealth. It matters in the sense that it's sad that people subsidize and redistribute and that people have restrictions because they all hamper wealth creation. I want to say one more thing just because I saw this article. It's an NBERR National Bureau of Economic Research article, NBERR. It's a working paper published now in December 2022. But it's a really, really interesting paper. Who are the authors? A couple of economists. But the paper, it's an economics paper. I don't know the authors. I'm trying to see if there's a bio. I can't find a bio. I could download the PDF. It's there, but let's see. So the name of the paper is Picking Winners, Government Subsidies and Firm Productivity in China. So basically, the study is the government good at giving subsidies. That is, the subsidies actually help the companies that they're provided to. Do subsidies improve productivity? And you could argue that subsidies don't improve productivity. If subsidies actually reduce productivity, then subsidies actually hurt the country that is giving the subsidies. Because we've always assumed in popular discussion that, ooh, China is subsidizing X industry or X companies. That gives them an advantage. And this paper kind of asks, is it an advantage? Does it work? Government officials, bureaucrats in China, good at subsidizing firms and thus increasing productivity. And it turns out the answer is no. I'm reading from the study. We find little evidence that Chinese government consistently picks winners. Firms X anti-productivity, that is, the productivity of the firm before they get the subsidy, is negatively correlated with the subsidies received by firms. So the worse the company is, the more subsidies it gets. The better the company is in terms of productivity, the less subsidies it gets. So Chinese government is subsidizing its least productive companies. It's least productive companies. You can find this on the nber.org website. Let me do this, copy URL. I just put it in the chat. You can find it there. And you can download the PDF and read it. So the Chinese government is subsidizing the least productive companies. And the most productive companies, the best companies, don't get any subsidies. Right? But this is the interesting thing. And subsidies appear to have a negative impact on firms' exposed productivity growth throughout our data window, which is 2007 to 2018. So firms that get subsidized are firms of low productivity. And the subsidies actually, when controlling for bunch of factors, reduce their productivity growth in the future. In other words, the subsidies are harmful to even the worst companies. In other words, subsidies are lose net loss. They're not net gain for anybody. So everybody who claims, oh, we have to subsidize iPhones because China subsidized theirs. No, no. There's subsidies. I mean, put aside the rights issues, put aside the free market issues, just an empirical study. Subsidies diminish value. They don't add value. So if we're in, quote, competition with China, we want them to subsidize more. Because it makes their companies less productive, not more productive. I don't know if it applies to chip manufacturing as well. Probably. I mean, China's chip manufacturers have been horrible. They've been incredibly unproductive. They've been incredibly inefficient. China is two generations behind on chip manufacturing. It doesn't have the equipment to build the chips. It can't get that without importing it from the U.S. or from the Netherlands. China's attempts at chip manufacturing has been very, very meagre. And its subsidies of chip manufacturers have been very, very, have been failures. Failures, you know. Taiwan's subsidy to TCMC, TSMC, has been, is the one success story of a subsidy. But that only is one company. You don't know what Taiwan's other subsidies are like. But generally, subsidies are net negatives, net negatives across the board. What impact the subsidies actually have, and this is the political benefit of subsidies, subsidies increase employment. That is, there's a positive impact of subsidy on current year employment, both for aggregate and employment-related subsidies. So subsidies encourage people to hire more people, not to be more productive. And because hiring more people is politically, quote, good, because politicians can say, look, we created jobs through the subsidies. But they've negatively impact productivity. And that's crucial to understanding why even if China subsidizes its industries, the United States should have a zero tariff policy. Their subsidies don't change the fact that it's in our best interest to have zero tariffs. Now, I'm putting aside the national security issues around China. I'm just talking about simple economics. Or maybe not so simple because nobody gets it. Just some interesting facts. Did you know that before Brexit, the UK exported huge amounts of power close to Europe? I did not expect that. But since Brexit, UK exports to the EU decreased by 14%. So exports have decreased significantly. On the other hand, trade has increased between US and Europe and US and the UK. Even Chinese companies are diversifying where they make stuff so they can ship it out of different countries, even though it's an American, it's a Chinese company. All right, I think I've talked enough. So we're about $200 short. Thanks, Troy, for getting us this close. But we're still about 200 short for our $650 goal. So hopefully you guys will step up. Ryan is doing his part with some small contributions because I think he likes the stickers. And then a $28, all Canadian dollars, thank you. Ryan, really appreciate it. You brought us a little under $200 now. So under $200 to make up in the rest of the time. All right, let's do the super check questions. We've got three $20 questions and then we'll move to the lower-dollar denominated ones. But feel free to jump in with $20 questions any time. And they'll, of course, be bumped up in priority. Liam says, did you tell your parents when you were almost raped? Oh, God, this rape story is going to make you. Or your relatives in DC, what did they say? How did you survive without a cell phone? You couldn't communicate with anyone for months during your road trip. No, I didn't tell my parents. I don't think I've told them to this day. Why would I tell my parents? It would just upset them and shock them. I did tell my parents that I was hitchhiking. I did that when I arrived in New Orleans and I did that with a pay phone. Dropping quarters in and talking on the phone. Or maybe I called collect. Maybe I called collect. Probably called collect, in more sense, even though it cost a fortune for my parents. They were horrified. They were shocked. They said they'd send me money, anything so I wouldn't hitchhike. But I was having in a weird, crazy, insane kind of way. I was having fun, so I didn't stop as you heard. I wasn't going to relatives in DC. I was going to friends of my parents and no, I did not tell them. Again, what's the point? What would be the point in telling them? I find this whole complaining and victimhood kind of attitude. I don't see the value of it. There's nothing you're going to achieve. There's nothing you can be gained from. Yes, I survived without a cell phone. Everybody survived without a cell phone. Didn't even conceive of a cell phone. You just didn't talk that often. When I moved to the United States in 1987, I barely ever called my parents. Probably once every three months. Not that I call them that often today, but maybe once every six months because long distance phone calls were so expensive. So expensive that we never talked. We almost never called. And yes, didn't talk to people for a long, long time. I mean, yeah, that was life. Today everybody's on the phone constantly talking, chatting, texting, emailing. I mean, we are overloaded with communication. Indeed, we spend more time communicating than reading, more time communicating than thinking, studying. Our whole world is dominated by communicating. Yeah, people wrote letters. People wrote postcards. I think I wrote, I sent postcards home. But yeah, no phone calls. Phone calls were way too expensive. Way too expensive. I've got a funny story about arriving in D.C. at my parents' friend's place that I arrived at. But for another time, I'll tell that story. James Taylor. Five years ago, you were the only objective show in town. I think that's what Amy had a show. Amy Peacock had a show five years ago. So, you know, she actually had a blog talk radio, blog talk radio show before me. I actually mimic my show after hers. Technologically, technology-wise. And I think there might even be true about video. And of course, don't forget, Leonard Peacock had kind of a podcast, Q&A podcast, that he had. And don't forget also that Leonard had a radio show on terrestrial radio in the 1990s. So, no. I mean, certainly Leonard was the trailblazer in terms of doing this. He had a huge following. I'm not sure that my following is as big as Leonard's was in the 90s or the early 20s. But, and then I did, if you remember, I took over part of Leonard's show. I did all the politics for Leonard's show. And so that's how I really got started with the whole podcasting, internet kind of stuff. But yes, the point is there were very few shows five years ago. And now there are half dozen YouTube and Discord channels promoting objectives. I mean, you inspired a lot of young people to take up arms intellectually. Yes, I think that's true. I think I was inspired by Leonard, by what he was able to do, by his radio show, and then by the podcast, and by practicing on that podcast. I think Leonard inspired me, and I've inspired, I think, dozens. And while there's a half dozen YouTube channels and Discord channels, it's probably more than half a dozen YouTube and Discord channels. There's probably many, many more than that. There's a bunch of objectivists on, you know, very quality, but there's just a ton of content. I mean, one of my goals, a long time ago, was to get Harry to have a show. Now, Harry has a show, Harry Binswanger. I mean, Greg has a podcast now out of the University of Texas. So Greg Salamieri has a podcast. I hope you all sign up. He has a YouTube channel and a podcast. So you should all be signing up for Greg's channel. The Institute, of course, has a podcast and a YouTube channel. ARC Europe has a variety of different shows. They have shows every day, I think, with a variety of different people. And then there are people who are not affiliated with me and the Institute of Good. And then, of course, Alex. Alex has a podcast. Alex has a show. And Alex is doing all these amazing things. So, yes. And it's only going to grow. And I expect whatever number we have now, I expect in 10 years to 10-exit. To 10-exit. Everybody is in Austin now. Austin's a place to be. Adam said, I never understood being anti-free trade. Those that want only made in the U.S., why stop day? Why not made in your own state? County, house. Lots of us wouldn't have oranges and avocado. Freedom, AIDS, wealth creation. I mean, once you understand that trade is really fundamentally between individuals. And once you understand that trade facilitates specialization and trade therefore facilitates people becoming experts at things. And you understand, you know, the value that individuals create by being able to specialize and to trade. I mean, Adam Smith understood this, right? This goes back 250 years. And, you know, the benefits of trade are astounding because it's not just the trade. It's the specialization that the trade makes. You know, you can be in Idaho making memory chips as micron, micron semi-computers was founded in Idaho. Do you know who the venture capitalist, the venture capitalist who funded micron semiconductors that produces memory chips? It wasn't Silicon Valley, it wasn't venture capitalist. It was the potato king. It was the guy, the billionaire, the Idaho billionaire's name, I don't remember, the Idaho billionaire, who made his billions on selling potatoes, growing and selling potatoes. And he invested in micron. So you can sit in Idaho and specialize in memory chips because you can ship those memory chips all over the country, all over the world. I mean, it's not just oranges and avocados that you wouldn't have. You wouldn't have computers. Nobody in your hometown is going to build computers. Nobody in your hometown is going to manufacture microchips. Nobody in your hometown is going to build automobiles. You have to import the automobile from Detroit or from Michigan or from Germany or from Italy or from Japan or South Korea. Yeah, the potato king. He's the guy who funded the guy and he became a billionaire by figuring out how to sell potato chips, how to sell basically potato for fries to McDonald's. That's when he made his big bucks. He became the supplier potatoes to McDonald's for their potato chips, for their French fries, sorry. I mean, think about what it means in your own town. I mean, people say buy a local. Really? I can't buy a computer. Nothing on my desk was built locally. Nothing. I don't know where these headphones were built. Probably China. The company is European. It's just insane. There's just no way. A whole way of life, a wealth, a prosperity, a standard of living, a quality of life depends on globalization. And one of the things, a global trade, and one of the things I didn't talk about, I meant to, I didn't talk about is the transfer of knowledge, information, the internet, digital assets, the ability to trade digitally at a marginal cost of zero, it's stunning. And by the way, this is why, I don't know, LeBron James makes more money than Michael Jordan. Because LeBron James is in the NBA at a period where the NBA has watched all over the world because of digitalization, because of advanced modern communications. It's why, you know, it's what made the NBA as wealthy as it is and made it possible for them to pay the kind of salaries that they paid. Globalization. The fact that we've taken an industry, the NBA, and made it possible because of the internet to a large extent, but because of satellites, to sell it globally. And that's through music. Music is global. It's a global industry. So you can put out a song out there, but the streams can be listened to anywhere in the world. And therefore, instead of having a market of 300 million, you have a market of 8 billion. And you can go on and on and on and on. There's just the insanity of, you know, made in USA or made in Austin, Texas, or made in my little neighborhood. It's insane once you realize that it's impossible. Not only is it expensive, but it's impossible. It wouldn't happen. It's like the objections to immigration, and then you look at the extent to which innovation in America was produced by immigrants. And you go, whoa, we need more of these people. Not less, a lot more of these people. All right, thanks, Adam. Appreciate it. All right, we, about $170 short. Catherine's not here to kind of get you going, so I kind of have to do. Mark, what do you think about the fact that there have been no further arrests a year after Ghislaine Maxwell's trial? I mean, I was surprised how long it took them to arrest her. So we'll start with that, right? It took them a long time to arrest her after we knew pretty much everything about Jeffrey Epstein and her role in that because it took a long time to accumulate the evidence to build a case and to do all that. I have no inside information, and I don't know. I am hoping that prosecutors are continuing to investigate this case to build out that the web of exploiters and the web of facilitators so that they can be brought to justice. We will see. It's been a year. These things take time. But I also think that a lot of the energy around this case has gone with the fact that Jeffrey Epstein, his dad, Ghislaine, is in prison probably for the rest of her life for a very long time. And the powerful people that clearly participated in this, I'm sure, are pouring resources, lobbying in order to suppress any additional investigations and to suppress any additional media. But I also think the public is kind of lost interest in it. I don't see, I mean, it's no excuse for the prosecutor. But the fact is that, but it is maybe for journalism. You know, I think there were a lot of stories. A lot of those stories were pretty condemning of some influential people. And nobody seemed to care. Like nobody seemed to care. Some of the cases on civil courts, I mean, we'll see what happens with some of the cases around Dushuets in civil court. And I think prosecutors might be waiting to see how those pan out. I think the other difficulty is that a lot of the victims are silent for a variety of reasons. A lot of it is shame. A lot of it is guilt. A lot of it is just difficulty of admitting that you participated in some of what was happening. But the people involved who exploited young girls and potentially participated in rape and other things, many of them are very powerful people, and I'm sure they're voting significant resources to try to kill the story. And unfortunately, we live in a world in which we have very short attention spans, and we don't follow through on the stories. We don't follow through, and we don't insist on justice. And I think it's a tragedy. It's a tragedy. We should insist on justice. We should follow through. We should be devoting significant resources to catching all the bastards involved in, you know, the challenges that a lot of the sex that was involved here might be, we might think as not being particularly good, was probably legal. A lot of the women were over 18, over 16, or whatever the legal age is in these places. A lot of the women, you know, were probably not raped, although the cases of, I think, sexual assault involved here as well. And it's hard to build a case. It's hard to build a case. You'd have to get the girls young enough. They'd have to admit that they were young enough. They'd have to admit about their age, and then they'd have to be willing to name the people. These cases are not easy to put together. They're not easy to put together. I think effort has been made. How much I don't know. I didn't say victims shouldn't tell. I said, you shouldn't complain about situations. There's nothing you can do about it. So this guy, you know, tried to rape me, let's say. But there's no way I could ever find him. There's no way I could ever identify him. There's no, nothing actually happened. One second. Whoops. Nothing actually happened. What am I supposed to do about it? Complain to relatives? Complain to family? That's not it. I think victims should tell. I think victims win this real victimhood, and where, God, I hope, I hope what I said did not imply victims should just suck it up. That's not what I implied. Victims should seek justice, but should seek justice where it's possible to seek justice. Where justice is possible. And where harm is real. Yeah, I guess I can see why you could misinterpret what I said. So I hope all those people are brought to justice health monthly. Michael asked, does good always win or does evil always lose? Well, it depends what you mean by win and lose, right? Evil certainly wins in the sense that good people die because of evil. So good sometimes loses. I mean, you can't say that people died in the Ukraine war because of Russia and that Ukraine won. Even if it wins in the battle, a lot of people died because of the evil. So it doesn't pan out that good always wins and evil always loses. Neither of those statements is true, not when it comes to individual cases. It might be true in the grand scale of things. Russia will lose, but a lot of people lost their lives. In the meantime, a lot of those people were good. And it's not like, and this is the important point, it's not like there is a force of good in the world and force of evil in the world. And evil always defeats good. A good always defeats evil in their fighting. It's not how evil and good work. Evil and good starts at the individual level and it's about your actions. It's about whether you're rational or not. And irrationality generally is losing for you, but your irrationality could be also losing for somebody else. Irrationality means loss for a lot of people and that's evil. That's evil. Evil causes losses for everybody. It doesn't just lose itself because there is no such thing as evil in and of itself. Yeah, I disagree with David Deutch about evil being a lack of knowledge. I think that's a crucial mistake David makes, which is connected to other mistakes he makes epistemologically, but no, evil is not a lack of knowledge. Evil is a choice. Does, yeah, we did that. All right, Michael asks, did you see Nathaniel's interview with Jordan Peterson? I did not. The entire comment section was taken over by anti-Semites. Really, that's pretty disgusting. Do all these racists just not have lives and have time to swarm? That's exactly right. They don't have lives. They have time to swarm. But they're facilitated by people who do have lives. If we really went after anti-Semitism and really made it and treated it as despicable as it really is, then ultimately it would go away. But the problem is that we apologetic for it. And I see this on the right. We don't want to condemn it completely as evil, complete evil. And yeah, I haven't seen Jordan Peterson and Nathaniel. I probably won't watch it because I really can't stand watching Nathaniel. Hopper Campbell says, what is this conservative anti-pwn crusade? They think this is a winning strategy. Yeah, I mean, conservatives are very anti-pwn. They have been forever. This crusade has been going on for a long time. It's not a new crusade. It has its ups and downs. But yeah, there is a major anti-pwn crusade. There's a major anti-sex crusade, which reminds me. I think it's Indonesia just passed a law that criminalizes adultery or criminalizes all sex outside of marriage. So in Indonesia, sex outside of marriage has been criminalized. Scary stuff, scary stuff. So yeah, the anti-pwn crusade has been going on since the 80s, 70s probably. Ed Meese versus Playboy is a famous case. But they arrested, what's his name, the guy for Hustler magazine. But on and off over the years, there's always been these attacks on pornography, legal and moral. Michael says, when your doctor thought you had an Ashkenazi Jewish disease instead of appendicitis, was that anti-Semitism? No, that was science. Was your father furious and report the doctor who misdiagnosed you? No, I mean, he was furious about the fact that the guy misdiagnosed me, not because he misdiagnosed regarding... The fact is that this particular disease that I think only Ashkenazi Jews get has symptoms that are very similar to appendicitis. So it wasn't a completely nutty idea that I didn't have appendicitis but had this disease. It turned out I did have appendicitis and these idiot doctors with health treatment from me for hours. I was withering in pain. And by the time they found, my dad found a senior doctor, because my dad knew it was appendicitis. My dad is a doctor, but he couldn't diagnose because I was his son. By the time he found a senior doctor to come in and say his appendix was boosting, my appendix was boosting, and I had to stay in hospital for like a week with antibiotics in order to get rid of all the junk that comes out of your appendix when it bursts. But that's not anti-Semitism. Discrimination is not always anti-Semitism. If you know that people of a sudden, you know, genetic makeup, sudden heritage have a tendency to have a particular disease that's important to take into account. It's a fact. It's a fact about them as individuals. They have a particular DNA. That DNA is common with all these other people. And people that have this kind of DNA tend to have these kind of diseases. That is an important medical reason. The only legitimacy for... I mean, the only legitimacy studying DNA type issues and, quote, racial issues is to figure out, you know, health issues, you know, related to disease. It could be that if your skin is darker, I don't know, you need more vitamin D supplementation because your skin does not absorb into the blood as much vitamin D from the sun as it does if you have white skin. And if you're white skin, you come from colder climates where there's less sun, so you've evolved to be more efficient at producing vitamin D, which I think is all true. But that's important. And that's not racist to say dark-skinned people need more vitamin D. It's just a fact. All right, we are running out of time. And it looks like we're not going to make a goal. So we're about $166 short of a goal. I have two last, two last super chat questions, and then we will call it a night. Apollosus asks, any opinion on the Ross Albrecht case? I don't know the Ross Albrecht case. I've missed it somehow. So I will look it up. I will look it up and try to answer your question on another show. Let me copy-paste it. All right. Let's see. There it is. Thanks, Apollo. Okay, Frank says, do you think California really has $560 billion to pay black people for reparations? California has nothing to do with slavery and Jim Crow laws, waste of dollars? Yeah, I mean, it's not just a waste of dollars. It's a massive injustice. It's a massive fraud. You're not redistributing wealth from people who were slave owners to people who were slaves. So the people who benefited directly from slavery to the people who suffered directly from slavery, you're redistributing between people who had nothing to do with any of this. California is a land of immigrants. Almost all the residents of California immigrated to the United States post-slavery. So no, I mean, this is just virtue signaling. I don't think California will do it. I don't think it would pass a ballot initiative. It's just not going to happen. All right, everybody, thank you. Really appreciate the support. If somebody wants to jump in and get us to our goal, that would be amazing. But I think we're going to end the show here. Do you remember tomorrow we've got a news headlines or news overview. And Thursday, we'll have another show like this at 8 p.m. in the evening. And then potentially on Saturday, we'll have a show. Josh says for $20, I appreciate economic commentary during the morning shows. I like the new format. Excellent. Hopefully you guys will also stick around for the evening shows as well. Otherwise, we'll just shift to all morning shows and cancel the evening shows. So we'll keep mixing it up and we'll see what kind of combination works best in terms of both viewership and in terms of financial support. I do think that YouTube is playing around with the algorithm to my detriment. So I really appreciate it if you'd like the show before you leave, if you comment, if you share, because those are all things that help with the algorithm no matter what they're doing to the algorithm. But clearly it seems to me that lately YouTube is being, I don't know, suppressing my show in some way or another. I'm getting fewer new people. As we said, we're getting fewer subscribers. And the only way to combat that is to show the YouTube algorithm that no, people engage, people involve. The chat is great. The fact that we've got a very active chat during the show is great. But comments are great and thumbs up are great and sharing is the best. All right, everybody, have a great rest of your week. I will see you all tomorrow morning.