 The Radical, Fundamental Principles of Freedom, Rational Self-Interest, and Individual Rights. This is the Iran Brookshow. Right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Brookshow. And this, I don't know what it is, Saturday. It's November 4th. Big, big dates. I'll tell you why November 4th is such an important date in human history. It is... Let's see. I can't do the math. 40, 40, 40, 40, 40 something years ago. 44 years ago, to the date, November 4th, 1979. Two really, really important things happened. One, which has enormous consequences on the world to this day. And the second has consequences only to your world, not to the world in general. But everybody listening to the show is affected by it. The first is that Iran took the U.S. Embassy and took hostage as 50 of the employees at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on November 4th, 1979. And if you followed my work and others' work on the whole Islamist phenomena, it is a major event in the evolution, if you will, in the rise of Islamism in the Muslim world and inspiration to every Islamic terrorist group since then. So that was a dramatic event. Changed American politics probably led to Jimmy Carter losing that election. He might have lost anyway, but he certainly, with this, he lost it, changed American politics. But changed the Middle East forever and we're still suffering the consequence of that. Partially because we won't actually admit that it had that impact. And therefore that Iran is at the center of all of this. The second major event, at least for you guys, less so for the world of November 4th, 1979, is that that was the day that I joined the Israeli military. That was my enlistment day. And today I showed up in the sorting facility for the Israeli army and was told that I would not get my dream job and that I was not going to be with the unit that I had spent my entire childhood expecting and working hard to join, which is basically the seals and turns out I'm colorblind and they weren't accepting colorblind people. And when I asked them, but you told me a year ago that you would accept me and said, yep, they changed the regulations three months ago. So that saved my life, probably the fact that I did not land up in the seals. So we're all better off for that. But I did have to spend, as a consequence of that, I landed up in the tank corps, blew out my back and landed up ultimately in military intelligence. So that is my story for November 4th. It reminds me of those days. And particularly today, particularly now when the news of Israeli military casualties keeps trickling in. It reminds me of being, you know, in that position at least. I remember some of, was it spring of 1980? The song that was more popular among our tank corps was the lyrics of it were basically, I know I'm going to die this summer. And it was the spring, we believed war was going to break out with Syria in the summer of 1980. And we would be the cannon fodder, because we would be the front line, we would be the 18 year olds who would take the first blast. So I think we were, yeah, it was, it was something, yeah, I mean, that was the song. It didn't relate to military, but it was, and it became kind of him. All right, enough about that. Were you aware of the injustice of the draft at the time? Like, did you feel that? Yeah, I was pissed off. But you know, I was also still very patriotic. I was probably still hadn't completely overcome all of my collectivism and tribalism, and I would have volunteered. I mean, the reality is I probably would have volunteered even if it wasn't a conscription army. The fact that I land up in a tank corps, which I hated, you know, reinforced my resentment towards the draft because, because I volunteered for the seals. I wanted to be a seal. I trained with the seals to be a seal the summer before that. And I fully expected to be a seal. But this change in regulations three months before I enlisted landed up saving me. So the little accidents of one's, one's life of accidents of one's history. All right, let's see, we have our panel here today. And so we're going to be taking questions from them. It is also an opportunity for you guys on the listening live to use the super chat to ask any questions you like. I see we've already got quite a few questions, but they're all like $10 or below. So consider doing some of the $20 and plus questions. We do have to fund these shows as well. And yeah, let people know on social media that we're on live. Encourage them to join us and participate. James Taylor says super chat won't let him write gun or weapon. That's bizarre. Put G slash N. Right. I mean, but anyway, that's weird. All right, let's see. We have let's let's start. I'm just looking my order on my screen. Let's start with Andrew. Andrew. Hey, you're on. So I see you're going to be doing a show on anti-semitism. So maybe this is kind of getting ahead of that, but wanted to get your thoughts on the role of envy in anti-semitism. Yes. Yeah. Oh, I think it's a huge role. Look, if Jews, if Jews were failed as individuals were failures, if they were suffering, if they were poor, if they were not in finance, I think there would be a lot less anti-semitism. It wouldn't go away completely because we did after all, and here I'll use we to denote myself only in the context of anti-semitism. Otherwise, I don't really consider myself Jewish, but we did kill Christ after all. So, you know, you can't overcome that even by through poverty. But there is envy does, there's no question, does play a big role in it. The success of Israel, the success of Jews generally, you know, in pretty much every field that they've entered, the Nobel Prizes, the finance, the number of CEOs who are Jews in the tech industry. People present that. Somebody came up to me. I think innocently a kid came up to me in one of my stops. I can't remember. Maybe it was Montenegro. I'm not sure. During this trip in Europe. And he said, I think completely innocently said, can you explain to me how white is the Jews always make money and they're so successful? And so what is it? What is it? What's the secret? It's a good question. And maybe he was expecting, you know, some conspiratorial thing about, you know, we control the world after all. So of course we'll make money. But, you know, so, but he didn't get that. So yeah, so it's, it's, it's definitely in people's minds. It's hard not. You've got a very small group, tiny, one of the smallest minorities out there in a sense of groupings. You know, and, and yet disproportionately represented among, again, Nobel prizes, wealth, finance, science, you know, really across the board, academia more broadly, including some of the most awful academics in the world. So it's not all good. But, but, but it is disproportion and it makes people wonder and it makes people envious. And there's no question that envy plays a role as as envy increases, anti-Semitism will increase as well. Got it. I can't help but ask what did you, what was the essence of your answer to the person who asked you why are Jews so successful? I said, I said because culturally, they, they do two things. They take, they take the mind very seriously. They take education in the mind very seriously and they work hard. You know, and I think that's right. I think that's the bottom line is primarily the first it is. It is a culture that venerates education and thinking. I didn't mention this to him, but generally it venerates arguing and debating and disagree, having an opinion and not just going along with the with the crowd. It's, it's, it's a, you know, Jewish get-togethers of debating societies and, and that's a healthy thing. It's, it, it encourages people to think for themselves and embraces the idea that people are going to think for themselves rather than expecting conformity. So, and that's definitely part of the culture, part of Israeli culture and part of Jewish culture more broadly. Do you think that Jews are more explicitly comfortable valuing money? Um, God, I don't, I don't know, um, because they all feel guilty about it. So guilt is also a big part of being Jewish, just, just like it's a big part of being Catholic. So I don't, I don't know. I think there's, I don't know how, how, how true that actually is. Okay. In terms of the comfort. Um, yeah. All right, Tom, welcome. Thank you. Good to see you. Yeah. Um, I have a question. I mean, I had, we could say on the anti-Semitism topic if people want to, but I have a question about the UN. Sure. Um, I'm Rand, I believe, I didn't do the research before the session here, but I believe she once referred to at least once as a sewer. Um, or a rat hole or something like that. Um, is, and it's, it's, it's, I'm sure it's a lot worse than it was when she was writing. But is, is, should we, should we leave the UN, should we pull out of the UN? And is that, would that be a good strategy? I mean, I can imagine there are ups and downs of that, but just, I, and if you talked about this on other shows, I apologize. No, no. What do you think? Yeah. I mean, absolutely we could move out, pull out. Absolutely we should pull out. And I really can't see any downsides, right? You know, I think, I think it would be an amazing moral statement, an amazing moral stand. I think a lot of people would be upset and, but, but odd. I think the world would condemn us, the global south, our European allies would condemn us. But over time, I think more and more countries would actually join us. I think, I think we would be, if the United States pulled out the UN's viability as an entity. I mean, not only is the UN an evil organization as is clearly an anti-American organization and one that often works against American interests, but it's also an organization that's almost entirely, not almost entirely, but it's a logic then funded by the United States. That is we fund our enemies. We fund this stuff. And so the United States should, could withdraw tomorrow and close down. I mean, that real estate in New York is super valuable. Ship them to Caracas or to Tehran or to North Korea or to somewhere like that. There are lots of places that deserve the UN, the United States doesn't. And you said it's a lot worse today than when I ran was there. There's a sense in which that's true. There's a sense in which it's not. That is it at that time, this, the UN Security Council included Stalin, right in the, in the 50s. Stalin was an equal to the United States on the Security Council. It doesn't get much more evil than that. And, and, you know, a lot of these countries, little countries all over the world were just as much of a hell holes then as they are now. And, but then they were also in the pocket of the Soviet Union and did a lot of the Soviets bidding. So there was a huge kind of communist block that, that was part of the United Nations and, and made it a sewer as she described it and it was. And then later, you know, in the 1970s, as a consequence of the deal that the United States cut with China, China got a seat in the, in the Security Council and as an equal of the United States. So no, it's always been a sewer. There's a sense in which it's gotten worse because, you know, just a number of countries that are in there and, you know, Taiwan, for example, is not a member of the UN. Taiwan isn't but because we can't recognize Taiwan as an actual country. But China is Russia is Saudi Arabia is Iran is the head of the Human Rights Commission right now. They just became had on Thursday, Thursday, head of the UN Human Rights Commission, Iran. And, yeah, I mean, we should leave. There was one senator who advocated for this for a long time, but he was awful and everything else. So it was hard to support him. The Southern guy, I think from South Carolina, I forget his name, super religious, super awful. But yeah, if the Republicans had a shred of self esteem and, and, and, and any kind of sense of America, they would advocate leaving the United Jesse Helms. Yeah, Scott is right. Jesse Helms was a huge advocate of this. And he kept, he used to raise this in a Senate regularly and have have votes on this and always was voted down. But, you know, Jesse Helms was an awful human being. So he had one thing that he was right on. Yeah, let's do it. Thank you. Thanks, Tom. All right. I'm one. I'm one. Can you hear me? Yeah, sorry. Thank you. The video froze. Yeah. Hi, Ron. Good. So I was, I was going to ask something, I was hoping to be a little bit more positive, but we're in Sarajevo right now. And just kind of, you know, walking around and going to the museum, some of them and stuff. It's very depressing. And watching sort of the impacts of tribalism that have impacted, of course, the world, but definitely this part of the world. You've been, you've been saying for, for some time about, you know, trying to be optimistic or be optimistic and all these things. So did you reconcile that with kind of what, what I see here, what I see happening in Israel, you know, the nonsense in Ukraine. I mean, it's all tribalism and. If context, if context with the Sarajevo is in Bosnia, it's a Muslim, it's a Muslim country, it's secular, but it's dominated by Muslims. There are radical elements in, in, in Serbia, radical Islamic elements in Serbia. Of course, Serbia is part of the Balkans, I ran wrote about the Balkans, global Balkanization. It's the, it's the post the child for tribalism. I think the Balkans are every little, I was in Montenegro not that long ago and Montenegro 6,000 and they will defend the fact that they are better off as a little country with 600,000 people and not being part of some bigger thing to the death. And then you have Northern Macedonia and you have Kosovo and you have Serbia and you have Croatia and you have all, you know, each one has a one maybe different in gene or one tribal cousin or something. And they hate each other and they're willing to fight and they have fought horrific, horrific wars over there where they've slaughtered each other. And, and it's a sad place in many, in many ways, a beautiful place, but it's also a super sad place. Can I still be optimistic? It's very difficult, you know, right now to be optimistic about anything, you know, maybe the most shocking thing of all, which should not have been too surprising but still is shocking in spite of the fact that it's not too surprising. Is the reaction of what happened in Israel on campuses, the reaction of what happened in Israel of Americans, the reaction of what happened in Israel, you know, by the, on the one hand, the global left and on the other hand, kind of the, the, and I know Scott is going to freak out now but on the other hand, people like Tucker Carlson on the American right. And, and kind of the meekness of the defense of Israel by so many, the fact that a Democratic Congress woman can, can advocate, literally advocate for the genocide of Jews and the complete destruction of the state of Israel and she suffers no consequence in the House of Representatives. Nobody is sanctioning her the Democratic Party is not kicking out of the party, as they should. It's, it's very, it's very depressing. Young people I mean I shared yesterday I think the statistics from tick tock. So how many videos on tick tock are pro Hamas and how many videos are pro Israel and something like 10 to one in terms of pro Hamas. That's our young generation that's our kids 18 to 24 year olds are the stats that were pulled. It is very, very, very, you know, distressing and and hard to hard to imagine how we get out of it and it's hard to imagine. But I always fall back in terms of optimism to kind of the Mikey point about optimism and that is for most of us, we still have a we still have an opportunity to take advantage of the kind of world we live in to make our lives successful happy, enjoyable. We can travel around the world at relatively low cost and see the world and experience it. Yes, it's a little spooky in some places but but even you know but that that's we get first that experience of that which I think has real value we can. We can afford to live in nice places, we can we can surround ourselves with beauty we can we can do all the things I've talked about, in terms of making our lives as individuals better. And, and that's the core of my optimism right when that goes away when you can't anymore do that as right now you can't in Israel and and but in the United States you still can. And I think you will be able to again in Israel soon. When that goes away because we've got an authoritarian government because the culture is collapsing or we got anarchy or we got that real real. What did Trump call it. Not me because something in the streets right I mean real bloodshed in the streets. As long as that doesn't exist I'm going to stay up carnage carnage carnage in the streets of America. As long as there's no carnage in the streets of America you know and you have ability to move to somewhere where there's less carnage if there is some in the city you live in. Then I'm still going to be optimistic about my ability to live my life well in terms of the future. It's always been dicey right politically it's always been dicey and it's it's it's really just an issue of probability right when. I wanted to pick up for a dim hypothesis and he wanted to end with basically saying the world is lost it's over it's finished I convinced him to change that a little bit and to say we've got 40 years. And I don't know if we have 40 years we have 10 years we have 100 years I don't know how much time we have. Maybe now I think we have less time than I thought but I've I've been trending towards we have less time you know really since Trump got elected. How much time do we have I don't know. And we better get on we better get on but you know there's some positives. What's his name. What's the name of the late at the comedian. It's kind of left but on some things is very very good. God. Bill Maher. What's that. Bill Maher Bill Maher Bill Maher thanks. Bill Maher so Bill Maher had a really good video today. I mean he's wrong and a couple of things like he attributes that he says you know who so is a enlightenment figure and he mentions him three times. But but the video is to defend Western civilization I think it does at the level of comedian can do he does a really really good job at it and everybody's clapping and cheering and supporting and so it not all is lost. We you know most Americans are not marching in the streets with Hamas. I think most young people are not marching in the streets with Hamas. Most young people go to university particularly in the stem they go to study engineering and they don't pay attention or what else is going on on campus. But things are getting worse at the extremes at the extreme left extreme right. And then the question is can alternative rise out of this and politically there are no signs of that happening right now but you know it could happen pretty quickly and it could surprise us all. So am I optimistic you know in a sense yes in other ways no and and it's just I think we've got less time that we thought and it's quite possible that the United States and the West are going to be more authoritarian. As I've said many times I do not believe the Muslim savages will win. I don't I don't think they are going to bring the West down. But I do think the West is heading towards authoritarianism and part of that authoritarianism might very well be. You know, I said I said I said years and years ago I said this and I said this 15 years ago at least after 9 11. I said my expectation of the future of Europe is not an Islamic Europe. My expectation of the future of Europe is concentration camps in Germany in which they're annihilating Muslims. And that that is a scary thought because I'm pretty pretty confident I'll throw in the Jews for good measure into that as well. But I do think that ultimately if the if the Muslims keep doing what they're doing they will and the West keeps moving towards authoritarianism. At some point this is going to be become very very violent and the Muslims can't win because because the West is too rich and too strong and it will annihilate them. But in the process of annihilating them it will also recede into a really horrific place for the West. I don't know if I answered the question. I think I was just looking for some optimism in this after the events of the past few weeks. I mean this this will this this will pass in a sense that I mean and you know the Israel will win this they they might not completely dismantle Hamas. It might land up in some kind of stupid ceasefire. There were any hints of that. And then people forget Israel will build better walls better zones to protect itself. They won't be caught a second time with the same problem. And Life in America will return a lot of those kids who are marching now with Hamas in a couple of years will be embarrassed by the fact that they did that in their youth. It is good to see law firms and others rescind job offers to people who they've identified. But look the state of our universities continues to deteriorate so but there is a backlash now businessmen are now retracting their money from these institutions. Hopefully they'll stick to that they'll they'll keep their word and they'll continue to withdraw their sanction from these institutions and maybe we'll start seeing a shift. I just wish. Yeah, of course the taxpayer is going to pick it up right with long with tuition forgiveness and all this crap right so. To some extent. But you know places like Harvard and each other places. Yeah, they can survive without donors for a long time both government support and because they have endowments. But it'll take a bite. It'll take a bite. It'll cause them to because some people to rethink we're not going to replace those professors for a long time. But the other thing that might happen is a lot of these legacy donors might not send their kids. They might not send their grandkids. I mean, I know a lot of people are saying, you know, we've already done two generations in University of Pennsylvania. We might not send the third, you know, why support organization and why corrupt our own kids. So I think there's going to be a backlash. I just hope that ultimately the backlash is positive and not the backlash is authoritarian and bad, which often often happens in these things. I think I maybe, you know, like I reread the ominous parallels not too long ago, like maybe a year or so. And I think I think that didn't help, right? It's interesting. I'll share this with you. I'm not sure he'll be happy. I do. But I'll share this with you. I got an email from Leonard who said that he wants to edit some of the sections and ominous parallels because in the ominous parallels. He actually said that anti-Semitism was not going to be an issue or didn't expect it to be an issue in the United States. And now he wants to revisit that and make that change. But so, you know, so we're trying to work with him on trying to figure out how to get that into how to edit the book and do a new publication of the book, emphasizing all of that. So, so yes, the ominous parallels that do my process. I mean, we're heading in that direction. Ideas do shape history. The ideas in our culture are rotten to the core. Yeah. And therefore nothing good is going to come of them. And the real question is, can they be replaced in time? And I just, I don't see how, I don't see how. Yeah. Good. Thanks. All right. Let's see. Hello there. First time right here. Incidentally, you don't have to read off the super chats. I put I was just testing out, you know, you can't, you can't type gun and have it going as a super chat, even though it works in the regular chat. Really? I tried that with God because, you know, you said G dash and I read what I reminded you observant Jews will write G dash D, you know, we don't want to use the name of God in vain. No, we can't mention the name of God. Yeah. Heaven forbid. We can write gun in super chat. No, you can't write gun and it's a bit of a game when you get a super chat, it won't take to figure out what word didn't they like because there's a whole bunch of them. They will let you put them in for free, but they won't let you put money on it, which to me it should be the opposite way. If I'm going to put money on it, you think they'd give me more leeway. Strange algorithms. Yes. And I usually don't have any questions, as you know, most of my super chats are frivolous or trivial, but earlier discussion. Well, Israel, Israel requires a wall. I know folks like Scott are in the chat and they're going to say that's why the US needs a wall. No, Israel is at war. Israel has been at war for the last 70 years. They need walls. Here's a question for you though. Could you use a similar logic to say they need conscription? Yeah. No. And I'd actually say they don't need walls. I don't like the walls in Israel. I don't believe in the walls in Israel. I've said this over and over time. And look, the Gaza wall just failed. Failed big time. It was breached in 27 different places and caught everybody by surprise. And they had not just a wall, but they had, I mean, a fence, but they had the best electronic surveillance equipment in the world. They were surveying this. They were monitoring it. And it still failed. So no, walls are signs of failure. Walls are signs of defeat. You build a wall when you've given up. What Israel needs to do is crush its enemies. What Israel needs to do is bring them to their knees. And if they do that, you don't need a wall. They'll be so terrified of ever engaging with you. They'll never will. So no, I don't think Israel needs a wall in any of its borders. I never have. Every time I drive by the fence with a West Bank, I hate it. I think it's horrible. It's visually horrible, but it's also, it represents defeat. It represents giving up, giving up self-defense. And I think the same thing about description. I've said many times about Israel, generally about conscription. A country that cannot raise a volunteer army to defend itself doesn't deserve to exist. And Israel, I think, would be able to raise a large volunteer army, because I think people love the country they live in. They recognize the relative freedom that they have there, and they recognize it's under threat. And if they don't fight, it will all be gone, and that they are fighting for themselves and for their families and for their lives. So I do think Israel should shift to a volunteer army. And I don't think it would take a big hit in terms of the size of the army, particularly after events like what we talked over seventh. In that spirit then, do you think there's less resentment in Israel for conscription? I noticed they don't have, you know, on college campuses burning their draft cards. Yeah, there's a lot less resentment of it. There's a lot more acceptance of it. It's part of Israeli culture. It's part of, you know, you go at 18, you join the army. It's part of what you do. It's almost like college in the US. You meet new people, you get to know people from very different backgrounds than you. For really smart kids, it's an opportunity to get into tech and work in intelligence and do things like that. So it's just part of a culture. There's very little resentment of it. But there is a movement of volunteer army to move to volunteer army, led by objectivists actually in Israel. So, you know, one of the things the objectivists are known for in Israel is for being big advocates for volunteer army in Israel. Excellent. Thank you. All right, Steve. I don't know if you've plugged your series on the Middle East or the history of radical Islam today, but for those who have not dealt into that content, I highly recommend I'm going to be going through it again because it really gets, starts at the beginning. It works its way forward. And it's great long-form content. I wanted to ask you. Thank you. I mean, I've got two of those which I both recommend together. One is the history of the Middle East. One is the kind of history of the Middle East, which is just kind of a straight history from, you know, basically the rise of Islam all the way to today. And then the other one is the history of Islamism, you know, the kind of radical Islam, Islamic totalitarianism, which mostly starts with the Muslim Brotherhood. The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the early part of the 20th century and goes through al-Qaeda and ISIS and Hamas and Hezbollah and all of that. And yeah, those two are good to view and they're all free and they're available. They're audio only, but they are free and they're available on YouTube on the podcasting app of your choice. Thanks, Steve. Yeah, I wanted to ask you, though, about the relationship, like the relationship, our specific part of the relationship of altruism to what's going on here. So I completely agree with you. Like at the base, like at the base, altruism is like the dominant driving force that's like driving a lot of this forward. But this is unsatisfying for me in at least two different ways. One of which is, well, if it's really the only thing, then there's, I don't, it doesn't seem to be much to do, other than maybe what the work that the Iron Institute is doing, because you really have to attack these kind of things at the most fundamental level. But then the second reason is, and this is something I've been thinking about for a while, which is like the general lack of competence in many of our institutions. And for me, this was typified by an op-ed that David Petraeus wrote in response to October 7th, as though what Israel needs is the expertise of someone whose principal expertise is losing wars. And I guess I'd love for you to opine on that, but I have a specific question, which is are we way more altruistic than we were 100 years ago or 50 years ago? Like how is that playing out? So just say, you know, part of the lack of competence relates also to altruism. Like what made it possible for Petraeus to become, now, for example, Petraeus is considered one of this generation's greatest generals, right? He is considered a great general, because we live in an altruistic era in a sense where it's measured and evaluated based on, kind of based on altruism. And by those standards, yeah, Petraeus did very well sacrificing American lives for the sake of Iraqi lives and for the sake of Afghan lives. So are we more altruistic? It depends what that means, right? I think that in many respects, we have made altruism universal in ways that I don't think it was in the past. And we have made altruism and we take it more seriously to the extent that we don't have anything to counter it with. That is, I think in the past, in America at least, and we'll get to the other past in a minute. In the past in America, there was a certain sense of life which was fundamentally selfish, which was fundamentally about pursuing your own happiness and success and being achieving and making stuff and building stuff and doing stuff for yourself. And it wasn't explicit. It wasn't a demoral theory. It might have even been viewed as a moral, but it was there. In every aspect of the culture, this was the land where you came to seek opportunity for you and to make something of yourself. And that's a remnant of enlightenment. That is that enlightenment spirit of progress, of success, of individual achievement, and ultimately, of course, the pursuit of happiness. So, you know, that aspect is gone or at least diminished. There's a lot less of that in America today, that what I meant called the sense of life, or you could even broader, just call it the spirit of the enlightenment or the ideas of the enlightenment have just slowly decayed over the decades. It's slowly going away. So there's a sense in which what we're left with is the alternative, which is altruism. That's all there is. It's just there. We still don't like it. We still don't want it because I think most people want to survive and they want to live and they want to do positive things. But there's no counterforce. There's no counter ideology. There's no counter voice. It's all different forms of different variations of different levels of altruism in ways that I don't think existed during World War II or before that. And then the other part of this, when I said we've made it universal, altruism used to apply to your in-group. And so if you were Christian, yeah, you weren't going to be altruistic towards the pagans. They either converted Christianity or you slaughtered them. You know, there's no. So it was within the in-group sacrifice was expected and ultimately the sacrifice was to God. And in World War II, even you could argue, yeah, I mean, they're Germans, right? They started this. We're going to crush them. We're going to defeat them. We're going to do this. There was no altruistic consideration for what the Germans needed or what they wanted, even though domestically FDR's policies were very altruistic with regard to economics and regard to domestic policy. So I think what's happening modern times, it's been universalized. We now take, in a sense, love our enemy like theyself more seriously. We apply altruism to our enemies. This is what multiculturalism has given us, right? Everybody's equal. Everybody's the same. Everybody's deserving of a sacrifice. Why are you discriminating in favor of the West? When there's all this suffering out there, we need to alleviate it everywhere in the world. So I think in both those senses, things are worse now in terms of the altruism or more altruistic. How does that lead to, because we just have this group of generals and we've had them since definitely Vietnam, somewhere between the Korean War and Vietnam. They're not even interested in winning. It's like it's the furthest thing from their mind when they get into these things. Well, I mean, it really started with Korea, right? I mean, you had General MacArthur who wanted to win and it was committed to winning and basically was willing to do what was necessary to win and Truman reigned him in and basically forced him to resign. And since his resignation, America's not really won a major war. And at West Point, if you go in and look at what they taught at West Point, they taught just war theory. They taught how to lose. They taught altruism explicitly in war. They taught Augustine. Augustine has made a comeback. But you see, Augustine was kind of like, well, it's okay to slaughter civilians if it's in the paraphrasing, but it's okay to slaughter civilians if it'll lead to the expansion of Christianity. But once you get rid of that kind of in-group, out-group perspective, then it's never okay to slaughter civilians. That's Augustine. So the generals have just become part of the altruistic culture. They've embraced it and they taught it. They explicitly taught it. I mean, if you read just what they were, if you read Michael Walter, I mean, it's just altruism 101. Now he couches it in, you know, yes, this will also lead to victory and it's better for morale. But it's all bullshit. It's fundamentally altruism. It's the negation of your own interests for the sake of your enemy. It's the worst kind of altruism possible. And generals have embraced that because there's nothing else. There's often nothing else. You know, when I spoke in Just War Theory after 9-11 in front of military groups, they all supported me. But the higher-ups couldn't get it to the higher-ups. There's actually a video of me, talk about old videos, right? There's a video of me in after 9-11 at some point talking to the Air Force base for the Air Force Intelligence, I think it was, or something like that. And the group in front of me are all military people. I mean, nobody else was allowed in. And there's some very, very senior people in the audience. And it's worth watching. It's worth watching for the Q&A and everything, although I think we blanked out the section where they're asking questions because they didn't want to have that on video. But it's worth listening to because just to get the fact that the fact that somebody's in the military doesn't actually change them in any significant way. The last thing I'll say is I'm reading your and Elon's book on this. Because I guess it's written like 2004, 2005. It's Elon's book, but I've got three essays in it. So the prediction of the future of that book is like knowing what's going to happen over the next 20 years is absolutely shocking. I know, I've said this before on the show, but somebody once asked me what's the most frustrating thing about my job? And I said the most frustrating thing about my job is that I know how to fix the problems of the world and nobody will listen to me. And that's an expression of it. I made predictions in the 2000, which is always very risky and they've all basically come true and nobody cares. My profile is now risen because oh, wow, Elon was right. On the contrary, I have more enemies today than I've ever had, even within the objectives movement to have more enemies today than I ever had, even though almost everything I've said about the world and America has come true. So be it, that's the world in which we live and we make the most of it. But it's super frustrating. It's super frustrating to know that this death and destruction and the path the West is taking are not inevitable. And we know how to prevent it and it doesn't matter. All right, let's see, Nick. Yeah, I wanted to ask a question, a point that Elon Journal made in terms of defending Israel's existence. He said it's a big mistake to try to defend it from a tribal perspective. He says you got to do it from a moral perspective in terms of defending individualism, pluralistic society and so forth, right? Yep. My question is why can't you do both? Why can't you go back and say, to counter the settler colony argument BS and say, listen, Israel's been there for 3,000 years. You can carbon test coins, artifacts, synagogues, cemeteries, it all proves it. And you can also make the moral argument. You can do the tribal argument and the moral argument blended together that shows they've been there for over 3,000 years. The tribal argument is a tribal argument and you're granting the enemy its premises and I think you lose long-term by doing that. I think you can make the anti-colonial bullshit argument differently and that is that there is no colony. Who's colonizing? Are these Jews agents of what? Germany maybe? Maybe they came in the 40s as agents of the Nazis to colonize the Middle East. Are the agents of the British? Who hated them? Who are the agents of? Who are they colonizing in the name of? And secondly, colonizers didn't buy the property. Colonizers didn't, they just took what they wanted which is not, again, not true of the Jews. So I think you have to make them all through and through. You have to make the anti-colonial argument but you don't have to make a tribal argument. The only context in which you will make a tribal argument is the context of anti-Semitism. You know, in the face of anti-Semitism people who the world considers Jewish need somewhere to escape to. And that is, they need somewhere and Israel is the place that they have, that has been established for that purpose and it wasn't established at anybody's expense. They need the Arabs who recognized Israel and who stayed in Israel and who worked with the Israelis richer and better off than Arabs in any other Arab country. They have more rights, literally more rights than they would have if they were born in Syria or Jordan or Egypt. So I think that ultimately is the argument. By the way, what did you think of the 1.4 million views on that Mamie? That Ellen and Nick and Nikos and... Yeah, that's amazing. It's great. I mean, I wish I knew how they did it so I could mimic it. But God, I have no idea what it is about that particular video that generated 1.4 million. I mean, it's a good video. I'm not saying it's not but I just don't know how much better it is than all the other videos that don't make 1.4 million. Yeah, it's great. Good for them. And Nikos' other video is other one which was... 500,000. Got it like 500,000. Yeah, why the left hates Israel. I'm happy when my students do better than me. But the first one is, you know, it's visual. The map that's everybody's seen where Israel's gobbling up the land so it attracts you like a magnet. Yeah, if Christian is listening to this, why isn't that map on one of my videos? What the hell? Visual cues. Visual cues. We try with visual cues. My short videos all have visual cues but none of them have hit... none of them have hit out the park like that video does. It's good for Elon and Nikos. They did really well and the content is excellent so I'm glad 1.4 million people got to see it. Well, it'll hit over 2 million, I predict. Yeah, probably. If it took 1.5 now, it'll probably get to 2. Yeah. All right, Eric. Eric, you got to unmute. Sorry, I'm doing some work in my backyard. No problem. So my question was going to be basically did you see the news about the post Hamas once Israel gets Hamas out of... or Israel gets Hamas defeated? What they should do? And they saw their three bullet points are basically give it to the UN to negotiate, give it to the Arabs to negotiate or give it to the PLO. And it's like imposing a constitution or any kind of Western principles on them is just not even a thought. No, I mean it wasn't a thought when the US entity rock and then invited all the tribal leaders to form a constitutional convention and the idea of imposing Western values or Western constitution or Western political is... yeah, nobody thinks of that. I mean, that would be colonialism and that would be... what are you suggesting? Western culture superior in some way to these other cultures and arrogance and what... there's no way anybody would accept that in the world. But I have seen the different proposals and they all, for short, I think that the best proposal among those proposals is the one that least likely to happen and that is to give it to Egypt, right? I mean, let Egypt handle it and make Egypt responsible. Egypt doesn't want it. I think a pan-Arabic, you know, peacekeeping force in that area for them to deal with it would not be a bad idea. Take all the Arab countries to one piece with Israel and make them responsible for Hamas. It's certainly better than the UN. UN would just put it... you know, anytime there was violence they'd run away, all right? I mean, as they're doing... you know, the UN troops... I don't know if you guys know, but the UN troops right now prevent Hezbollah from launching attacks on Israel. And there's UN troops and the UN flags flying all over southern Lebanon. If you drive along the border, they were the UN. And of course, as soon as hostility started, they all hunkered back into base and they were all huddled around the campfire down in the base or whatever in the base and there's no way to be seen. They probably had the flags up just so Israel won't attack them accidentally. But... Yeah, UN is hopeless. And, you know, the alternative is for Israel to take over Gaza. But Israel's not really... I don't think Israel wants to do it, right? There's no will among these really people to do it. It would be expensive both in lives and in money. And it would be a long-term project and it would be a long-term project in westernizing them. I don't think Israel has the stomach to westernize anybody. Again, for the same intellectual reasons as before. We just don't believe in western civilization anymore. Bill Maher is the only guy out there who seems to believe in western civilization. The video of his is actually pretty good. But there's nobody else... Yeah, I mean, that would be ideal. And even then to really impose western civilization on them Israel would truly have to crush them first. I mean, really crush them. Bring them to their knees so that they would have to... The Palestinians would have to come to the realization that they'll never defeat Israel. It's a pipe dream. It cannot happen. They are complete losers. They cultures are losers. Only then can you hope to... move them towards western civilization. As long as they're committed to the idea that they can destroy Israel they just need another chance. They just need to do it a little differently. As long as Israel doesn't completely humiliate them it cannot re-educate them. But, Iran, is that even enough though? Given that the wellspring for this ideology is not the Palestinians, right? It's Iran and Saudi Arabia and all these places. Yeah, Iran has to be taken out. Certainly Iran in particular has to be taken out. And if Iran is taken out properly I think Saudis will become more restrained. And, you know, MBS would like to move I think Saudi Arabia... He wants to be a dictator. He would like to turn Saudi Arabia into a fascist state. I don't think he's religious. I don't think he believes in Allah. But he's power hungry. He wants to control everything. He would love to make it a more secular state if he could. But he's got a certain reality there. But crushing Iran would send a clear message that would I think start changing things. But it's not going to happen. Nobody is going to crush Iran. Iran, do you agree with the notion that... or do you think it's incumbent on Israel to figure out how Gaza is ruled after the war? I don't see how it can't. Because it's not like you're going to a distant country and you're doing this in a distance. It's right there next to it. Israel needs to sign off on whatever happens to Gaza afterwards. It cannot accept Gaza being continued to rule Bahamas. It cannot accept Gaza sending missiles into Israel constantly and being violent towards Israel. It needs some mechanism to guarantee that those things won't happen. And one mechanism is to occupy it and to just be there and to prevent it themselves. Another is to find a third party who they trust to police it. I just object to the notion that Israel has to, in order to proceed with the war, needs to figure out a whole structure of government of Gaza post-war. That's what's being set up. I don't think it should worry about that. I think the only thing to worry about right now is crushing Hamas. And it needs to do much better on that front. I don't think it's doing well enough. But ultimately, they'll need to solve that problem. Not now. I agree with you that shouldn't be the focus now at all. Right now, the only focus should be destroying Hamas as quickly as effectively as possible while minimizing Israeli casualties. And Israel has already lost too many kids in this war. And it just needs to be more brutal. It needs to be more aggressive. It's not because it's succumbing to Western pressure and influence, and pressure and influence within Israel. Even within Israel, altruism is strong. I just want to say that we, in World War II, we nuked Japan and we wrote their constitution. Yep, we did. For them. MacArthur wrote that constitution for him. And he crammed it on their impasto. And yeah, that would be great to do. But nobody, there's nobody alive today who has the balls to do it. Why, when we have the historical examples of what works, why do you think we still refuse to do what is plainly obvious? Why are we not lesbic capitalists? I mean, we've got millions of examples. We know exactly what works. Why are we not all super rich? We know exactly what works. Freedom works. And nobody cares. You know, people shape their experiences based on their philosophy. They don't accept reality as it is. They interpret it through the lens of the philosophy that they have and a rotten philosophy, which is what the West has today and what the world has today. They can't see what's right in front of their eyes. They can't see capitalism. They can't see Hong Kong. They can't see what worked in World War II. And even if they acknowledge, yeah, it worked, they then condemn it as evil. And look at our friends in quotes, the libertarians. I mean, you think they're on the premise of individual liberty and look, you know, they think I am the most evil person they've ever met because I support the bombing of Yoshima Nagasaki. Yeah, that actually brings me to my second question, which was about, like, I'm younger generation, so I never really understood how it was possible something like the Holocaust could happen. Like, how could people be so evil? And I'm just shocked. Even rational people are just so, like, the Jew hatred, the Jew conspiracies, it just, it blows my mind. I don't know where it comes from. And I guess people read too much zero-hedge or something. I don't know. How of ideas? I mean, look at ominous parallels. I mean, it's really, it's all there in ominous parallels. And the parallel is now real. America is heading in that direction unequivocally. Adam. Yes. For a change, I'd like to point to something positive, which is what happened in the elections in Poland. The Donald task, the new prime minister is what Europeans call a neoliberal, that is, he is for markets, for free immigration for anyone who has a job offer. His five eyes, which he made into his election slogan, are actually from English. They include free information, free investment, free innovation, free immigration, and free integration. Now, as president of the EU, he had to accept the French regulatory system. And as long as France is one of the two major powers in the EU, I think you can get rid of that. But having a free market for all of Europe is certainly a very good way to develop industry. And the other phenomenon in this election is that the theocratic party that made abortion illegal lost big. And the reason they lost big is that people under 30 who didn't used to vote, typically the voting percentage was 60. Now it's 80 because all the young people voted and they voted specifically against the theocratic party. Yeah, so, so yeah, I mean, I think the election in Poland are very good sign. Primarily for the second reason you mentioned, I think that getting rid of the theocratic party that was leading Poland is excellent. I think it's primarily because of young people. This was a party that was against abortion, against gays. And, you know, a pro pre-Ukraine war, you know, pro the kind of government that Hungary has, the kind of government that Putin is established in Russia. They were they were also taking over the media. They were taking over the Supreme Court. They had done judicial reform to put the Supreme Court in Poland under the authority of the government. So I think the defeat of the political party in power was fantastic, was really, really good. Unfortunately, there's still the biggest political party in Poland. That is, they still got more votes than any other single political party. So it's still popular. I'm a significant portion of the of the polls. But since Poland, like most European countries, you have to form coalitions. They lost enough seats where they cannot form a coalition government. And the opposition is forming the government. You know, I'm not optimistic about the government that they're going to form. I think it's going to be better, obviously, because we're getting rid of theocrats. But whether they are going to move towards a free market or not, how much they'll move, whether they're going to try to push the European Union towards a free market. I don't know, you know, it's a coalition. And my guess is they're going to have to form alliances with a variety of leftist parties that may be a less supportive of free markets. But it's going to be interesting. It's going to be definitely a country to watch. Poland is also under the previous government, but I think this government is also committed to it. It's growing the military. They will have the large military force in Europe. And they're investing in the best technology in the world out there. They're buying weapons systems in the U.S. and South Korea and Sweden and other countries in Israel and other countries like that. And Poland is going to be a major force within Europe, both militarily and intellectually and politically in the years to come. And it's good to get it out of the grips of theocrats. Now, the other country next to Poland, the Czech Republic, they're going to have to fight headlines because their defense minister came out explicitly against the U.N. recently. Well, they put it there. One of the few European countries to vote explicitly against the ceasefire. And the Czech Republic has been very supportive of Israel. Again, I think the government there and the president there are relatively good. Of course, to counter that, you've still got Hungary where Oban keeps winning elections. And you got Slovakia, where the election went in a terrible direction towards a pro-Putin political party, which is going to form the government there. So that's the main reason the Czechs and the Slovaks separated because the Czechs were the first majority atheist country in Europe. And the Slovaks are very Catholic and they used to be a part of Hungary, which culturally they still are. So they're very different countries that were sort of joined together by geography and not much else. Yep. I still don't get while these countries keep splitting. Let me take some super chat questions because we're running late. We've got a lot of people on. Let's do a few of these. Liam has a long, okay, two part question. Let's see. Part one. Recently, AII has made a big deal out of reaching 100,000 subscribers in YouTube after 16 years of posting videos. Contrastingly, Mr. Beast passed 100,000 subscribers after two years and 200 million subscribers after 12 years. If no one is asking what the essential differences are, they ought to be. Part two. In essence, Mr. Beast provides mass market entertainment value. AII does not. One can write this off as being an impossible goal to achieve for AII, but I and myself achieved mass market entertainment value by writing fiction. Yes. And absolutely, it's great to achieve mass market entertainment value. The problem is you need talent for that. That is, you need specific kind of talent. You need to be an artist in order to achieve that. Ayn Rand was a genius and she was primarily a genius in literature. If one of you is a genius who can write novels like Ayn Rand, please do so. Please write those novels. And if any of you can go out and make great movies, not propaganda movies, not stupid movies, not movies with trying to copy Ayn Rand, but great arts, great movies that will help change the culture. Please go do it and I will support you and I'll encourage you and everything. AII, that's not its job. It doesn't have the skill. It doesn't have the talent. It's not, that's just not what it does. And hopefully what AII does is it provides intellectual ammunition, the philosophical context, the philosophical knowledge for those entertainers slash artists who can leverage that into their art and into their entertainment and the things that they do and to garner the gazillions of views and subscribers and so on. But, you know, Mr. Beast is an entertainer. He has no intellectual agenda, no philosophical agenda, although there's often a philosophical agenda implied by what he does without him even knowing it. And, you know, Steven Spielberg is an entertainer. If there is an objective of Steven Spielberg, please step forward. And don't step forward and tell me you're a Steven Spielberg. Step forward and frigging make the movies. And then tell me, you know, be a Steven Spielberg first and then tell me you're an objective. It's not the other way around, is my point. That is, go out and create and build and make and do stuff. But it's not AII's job to do that. It's not AII's job to entertain. It's not AII's job to create the great art, but somebody should. And if you've got the skill, the talent, the ability to do it, go do it. I don't, I'm not funny. You know, and I'm not, I can't write and I can't come up with a story if my life depended on it. And I can't paint. I can't sculpt. I can't write music. It's not my shtick. So somebody else, if this is what we want, somebody else has to do it. So I agree that it's required. I've often said we will not change the world until we have artists and a lot of art on our side. But that is going to have to come from outside the Institute. That's going to have to come from individuals taking the initiative. The Institute can, again, provide the intellectual education to get there, but not more than that. I guess there's a part three. Liam says ideas absorbed into the zeitgeist from art, not from textbooks. They come from TV shows and movies, not lectures in Rand's world. Art is the technology of the soul. Absolutely. You know, I've been saying this. You couldn't have had enlightenment without, without the Renaissance. You have to have a movement in art. But wait, so why aren't you doing it? That's, but that's not what I meant. It's not what the Institute is for. It can't be for you can have an organized, organized, funded attempt to create Michelangelo's David. It just doesn't happen. You can say, if there's a genius like Michelangelo, we could create, we could provide some of the funding to help you get a good education or to help you learn objectivism. So when you say, you know it, when you sculpt, you can integrate it into your sculpture. But I know an institute cannot identify and create the Michelangelo's of the world. That has to come organically from the people, from the culture. And, you know, if financial support is lacking, that can be resolved. But I just don't see the skill and the talent out there. I've not met yet an artist who claims to be an objectivist. Who has the kind of skill and talent that is going to really shape the culture of the future. I'm still waiting for that. That'd be fantastic. And movies and TV would be great. And nobody's disagreeing about their importance. Nobody is disagreeing about the fact that you have to have it to change your culture. It's just the question of who to lay the responsibility on. And the responsibility here is not on AI. It cannot be AI. AI is not that kind of organization. Never has been and has never claimed to be. All right. Let's see. Lawrence says, what is the latest daily wire making at the shrug? I don't know. I haven't heard in quite a while the latest from it. I assume it's stalled. Otherwise, I probably would have heard something. But and they have to renew their option soon. So we'll know more once we know if they renew the option or not. Here I'm you on took the words right out of my mouth and did a better job. Jewish people are culture of learning. No one is going to end up in hell or any kind of eternal damnation. That's right. Jews don't have hell simply because they don't believe that there's a God with no. Oh, he didn't put the oil in. So don't worry. All right. Rob, something positive. You gave me a virtual slap in the face on the show 18 months ago. Wow. After I expressed a lack of interest in anything. I think I remember that I've since quit my job, started my own business and I'm happier, more productive and financially successful than ever. So thank you. I appreciate that. Rob and happy to slap people in the face as often as necessary. If we'll get the kind of results Rob gets. So yes, as I've often said on the show, it's one mind at a time, one mind at a time. And I heard you were your own in my head at a depressed moment when you just you popped in and said, listen to some good music. There you go. Good. And I did so and it lifted my spirits. Excellent. Excellent. All right. Michael says, I've come to realize it isn't so much that people evade or dishonest when engaging with the objectives ideas. They don't even think long enough to recognize that ideas matter to begin with. We've got a long way to go. Yes, we do Michael. We do have a long way to go. Clark says, do you see the pink? Did you see the pink head college professor in New York ripping off the posters of kidnapped Israeli children? Yeah. People doing that all over the country. I wonder why kidnapped children get met. Get them so mad. She should take that pink head to Gaza. I will talk about this tomorrow when I talk about the left and Hamas and and why I mean part of the part of what I want to address on tomorrow's show is how can they be queers for Palestine when Hamas deals with queers by killing them? And they know the quiz know this. If you tell them, if you went to Palestine, they kill you. They know they're not ignorant. They're not completely detached from reality. They know they would die. So something else is going on. So the question is, what is it? And so we'll talk about that tomorrow and the same with pink hair and the same with all this stuff. They know exactly what's going on. They know what's going on. Yet they hold these ideas in spite of that. So we'll talk about that. So we're going to talk about quiz and we're going to talk about some of the other slogans that they have and how they can evade their meaning. But yeah, I mean, what the kidnap children get these kidnaps, these kids, these kids represent oppression. These kids represent evil. These kids represent everything bad in the world. And she has no sympathy for them. And as far as she's concerned, if they died like the other 1400 that died, who cares? Because she doesn't care. On the contrary, she views it as an act of justice. So you have to understand their mentality of how they view, how they literally view Israel, Jews, and a lot of us. Anybody who's kind of successful and is not being oppressed. So we'll talk about that. Got a whole show for that tomorrow. Daniel says, would you say that hypogamy is an anti-concept? I think the term attempts to put together Dagny Taggart and Laura Bradford. I don't even know who Laura Bradford is. In the same non-essential way, the socialization put together how it will all compete at Keating. Wow. So hypogamy is the idea that women want a man of highest status. The women always want to achieve highest status through marriage or through a relationship with a man. And yes, I definitely think it's an anti-concept. It means nothing. And you're right. It puts together Dagny Taggart with, I don't know who Laura Bradford is, but whoever it is, I think I know who that is. It puts together the ditzy woman who just wants to marry for money with Dagny who wants to marry the best man in the world, the most moral man in the world, the man of ability, the man who she can look up to given that she's already a genius, she has an already incredibly competent. Somebody that she can look up to given all that, it completely eviscerates. It also, what does it mean status? What does status mean? So a big issue here is what does status mean? Does status mean money? Does status mean, quote, social class, which might be related to money or might be related to a family name? What does, or does status mean smart? Does status mean ability? Does status mean self-esteem? What does status means? And everything is, you know, so it equivocates on status. Status is everything. Where, you know, what status means is here the most important thing there is, right? You know, yes, a woman is looking for something good, right? A man who represents good from her context. And if her values are centered around materialism and money, the good in that context is somebody who has money. If her values are centered around happiness and self-esteem and productive work and achievement, and she's looking for somebody who represents that. But isn't that everything? Isn't that the most important thing is what is the context? What does status mean for her? So it's a meaningless statement without filling in status. In that sense, it's completely an anti-concept. It means, it really doesn't mean anything. And in some ways, it means to undermine the real attraction between, and the role of ideas and the role of character and the role of moral character in female male attraction. Right? It tries to get rid of that completely. It tries to viscerate that. Like most anti-concepts, it's trying to get rid of something good. And that is the woman wants to find a man that she can look up to, but why? Right? Tajikin, one thing that is, last question before we go back to the panel, one thing that is getting more glaringly evident is there are so many people that think in quotations they are thinking, but are really just feeling. Do you also see this? And do you know of a way to make them aware of this, wake them up? I don't know how you wake them up. I mean, yes. What's obvious in the world in which we live is that people are not thinking, that are engaged in the activity of thought, they're not observing, integrating, looking for commonalities and differences, doing the cognitive work that is required to constitute thinking. That just doesn't exist in the world in which we live, sadly. And I don't know how you wake them up. You wake them up by doing the thinking yourself and maybe showing the contrast. You wake them up by showing them that what they're doing is not thinking, is the opposite of thinking. It's emoting. But other than that, I just don't know what you can do because they're not thinking. And you need to think in order to evaluate your own thinking. And I don't think they're capable of self-evaluation in that sense. All right, let's go back to our panel. Andrew. You gave a really good talk, excuse me, talk on happiness in Tbilisi, which I know is posted as a YouTube video. And afterwards the professor said what I thought was well, I don't think I agree with him. And I want to know what you think. His one postscript comment was, it's enormously important to forgive yourself. Yeah. What do you think of that formulation? I mean, I don't like the formulation. You know, there's a sentiment there that I agree with. That is, and it really depends on what you mean by forgive. If what you mean by forgive is that you recognize your errors, you recognize your mistakes, you fix them, you do what is necessary to compensate anybody you might have heard of any damage you might have done, then yeah, then you need to move on. You need to forgive yourself in that sense and move on. But if forgiveness just means, yeah, I screwed up. Okay, I forgive myself. I'm going on. Then obviously I don't accept that. I think that is wrong. But look, he had a very different view of happiness. It came across in the latest session that we did that he participated in a later that day where we had a panel and I gave a talk on the virtue of selfishness. And he talked about selfishness and he of course rejected the concept and thought it was awful and terrible. Nobody should be selfish. And then I gave a talk on selfishness. So it was obvious that, you know, we deeply have disagreements. And my happiness is you have to be selfish to be happy. But I don't remember the talk I gave about happiness. Can I give you a talk, but I don't remember any of the content. I'm glad you thought it was good because it was good. I think it was only an 8.5 out of 10, I think. So anyway, I'll take 8.5 is good. Can I just say that like, I think the one of the problems with this forgive yourself thing is like, there's a perfectionism underlying it to me where like, if you go out and you try to be an entrepreneur and build a business, you're going to make mistakes because that's part of the nature of the process. You don't have to make such a big deal out of it every time and beat yourself up and say, oh, I've got to forgive myself because I made a mistake. Yeah, I think that's right. But you do have to learn from it. You have to face it and learn from it. You have to recognize the mistakes and learn from them. That's what you need to do. And that's what I think forgiveness in that context. Yeah, forgiveness is a bad word. It's a bad way to think about it, I think. Okay. Thank you. Eric. I'm just going by the order of the screen now, which is different than before. Eric. Yeah, there we go. All right, everybody. All right. I only had just a follow-up basically on how you would basically tackle talking with people that you know that express these crazy beliefs and how, I guess my question is like, when I've seen argumentation done, like, objectives tend to outline the arguments of the opponent for a real long time. And then, I don't know, not as much time on articulating the position of objectivism itself. So I guess I'm struggling and trying to get through to these friends of mine that are expressing these crazy Jewish conspiracies, I guess you could call it. I don't know. It really depends on whether you think you can reach them or not, right? Because the people just now were talking to that they're forgotten. But, you know, just, I would say with conspiracies and things like that, I would just say, I'd say that is complete and out of nonsense, complete and out of nonsense and it's bullshit. And, you know, and if you can't see it, I don't know what I can say to you because conspiracy theories are like that. There's no facts that you can provide that are going to change their mind. And, you know, if there are people that you really want to invest the time in, then you can walk them through why, what they're saying is just not true and how, and in what sense, why they're saying it's not true. What the alternative explanation is, why there is a rational explanation for what they're observing and leave it at that. Give them the positive and let them struggle with whether they want to adopt that or whether they want to hold on to their conspiracy theories. There's not much you can do. And the wackier the idea is the less there is you can do. Present the positive. You can't prove that a conspiracy theory is wrong because it's not based on fact. It's not, there's no, you say, look and then they can't see. They're blind. That's the essence of conspiracy theory. Facts don't matter. All right, thank you. Yeah, so I wanted to ask you, you're on the dichotomy I've noticed in Europe about risk. And I think you've mentioned this too before around risk for business startups and things like that, that there's much less acceptance of failure if you do a business and so forth. But on the other hand, personal risk seems to be much more accepted in Europe than it is for sure in North America. Like in driving or just walking around, where we would have guardrails and 50 signs and three people standing there to warn us and all this kind of nonsense, we'll be standing at the edge of a platform at a train station in Europe and the train goes by 300 miles, 200 kilometers an hour. And do you know why there is this difference? Because you would think that with all the welfare statism and everything that Europe would be like, you know, a super nanny state of this stuff, but it isn't, it seems. Yeah, I mean, there's something in the U.S. that is very paternalistic. I mean, it's surprising, but it exists. So on the Autobahn in Germany, you can drive as fast as you want. There's no speed limit. And we have highways in the U.S. that are just as good as the Autobahn and they have a speed limit. And there are other examples of this. Of course, in other countries like China, there really no restrictions on, and you know, and there's just no guardrails anywhere. You know, I think it's a disregard for human life. So there's some, you know, there's some, but you know, it's a good question. I've never thought about it, but you know, I encountered this, this is an example of this. It wasn't Europe, but it was Argentina. You know, in Argentina, we visited the glacier in the south of Argentina, and we hiked on the glacier. And you're hiking on the glacier, there's no guardrails, there's no ropes to hold on, but at the end of the hike, you arrive in this like ravine within the glacier, like a thing, and right there, there's a table, and there's a bottle of whiskey and glasses there. And everybody takes a shot of whiskey. Can you imagine in the United States, somebody offering you alcohol on a glacier, like where you could slip and die? I mean, now, I think a lot of it, okay, so it just came to me. I think a lot of it has to do with the craziness of our legal system. So the United States has a completely insane liability system. And the history of it is really, really, really interesting. So in the United States basically has now what you call, you know, has had since the 1970s, a deep pocket theory of liability, right, that you slip somewhere, you look around, who has the deepest pocket and you sue them. And it almost doesn't matter if they were anyway related to the fact that you slipped, were responsible for the fact that you slipped or anything like that, there's a good likelihood that a jury will award you money. And in the old days, pre-1970s, a judge would have thrown that out and said, look, you have to show, you have to show cause, you have to show liability, you have to show, in most cases in those days, you had to show gross liability, just simple liability wouldn't cut it in order to get real damages. What happened in the 60s? And this happened, and this is interesting because it's the wall of ideas in history and the wall of academia. At Yale University, at Yale Law School, a number of professors were super frustrated that the United States was not redistributing enough wealth. That is that in spite of the war on poverty and everything, all the social programs that were instituted in the 60s, there was just not enough wealth redistribution happening in the U.S. And voters wouldn't vote for it. They just wouldn't vote for high taxes and a higher welfare state, whereas in Europe, the way you took care of this is you just redistribute wealth through the tax system. And what they decided to do explicitly, there were articles about this, is they said, let's use the legal system to redistribute wealth from those who have to those who are suffering. So if you slip and break your leg, in Europe, the state will pay you. The state will pay you for everything, your healthcare and your loss of job and loss of everything in America won't. So all we need to do is create a legal system that forces somebody to pay for it. And it doesn't really matter who, as long as they have the money in a proper system, they would be taxed to pay for it. They would be paying it for it anyway. So some evil corporation or some rich guy, they will pay for it. So we built a liability system that basically is redistributive. It's basically, it's basic function is not justice. It's basic function is not compensation for damages when there's real responsibility. But where it's just redistributive and there's a great book about this that unfortunately, I don't think it's in print anymore, but it's by Peter Huber. It's called Liability. And it was never popular, never made the rounds because I think it basically was too honest and too straight. I mean, he basically cited these professors, he get the citations and he showed, if you want conspiracy theories, this is it. This is the real conspiracy of Yale professors to change the legal system in the US. And he shows how they succeeded within 10 years. They completely changed our whole liability, all the liability basically approach of the legal system in the United States. So what's the response to that? Well, if I'm going to be sued, I am going to create all kinds of things to make sure that nobody slips. So it provides incentives and it provides incentives to over invest in safety because I don't want to get sued. And that's, I think that's the ultimate cause of this. And in Europe, you don't have this liability system. You can't sue people because you fall down or because you slip or because you fall off a cliff or something. Nobody's going to be, but in America, and this is true government, you can sue the government, you can sue anybody for anything pretty much. And you will be compensated if you are a victim, if you are suffering, if you are a hurt, the legal system is oriented towards helping those in need and taking from those who have. And that creates the one kind of, that creates all these incentives for safety. Okay, so I figured it out. I'm glad. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, too bad we didn't, in North America, we never import some of the better stuff from Europe. It's always the worst stuff. Well, the problem is that importing here would mean the welfare state. And the real solution is the American solution, which is no personal responsibility. And, you know, if you slip, you slip, you know, unless I put the banana peel there on purpose for you to slip, you just can't sue me. There's just, I didn't do anything to cause you to slip. So what we need is a proper legal system. So we shouldn't import anything from Europe. But what we should do is just, you know, remember what we stand for, what America really is about. Well, we could bring in the no speed limits though. Let's do that at least. The no speed limits, I'm all for that. Although the older I get, the older I get, the less useful they are. So the more hesitant I am to drive as fast as I would like to. All right, Adam. According to a person who seems to be well informed in the field, the only system in the world that can jam the Israeli surveillance system as it did before the attack is a Russian jamming system. And of course, right after October 7th, there was a meeting between the top two Hamas officials and Putin. What do you think about the Russian connection? Yeah, I don't, I don't know. We don't have enough intelligence yet to know to what extent, you know, how badly it was jammed, what exactly happened there. Israel hasn't yet revealed what happened to its surveillance system. You know, I think there was, I'm pretty sure it must have been jammed because I don't understand otherwise. But there are also other things that were going on like the troops weren't on the border. So there was nobody monitoring the surveillance system. That's part of the problem. They had stopped monitoring it for a variety of reasons. But look, Russia supporting Iran. Iran is clearly involved in spite of the fact that Nasrallah yesterday, the head of the Hezbollah yesterday said, no, no, Iran had nothing to do with this, which I found interesting. You'd think they take credit for it, but they're afraid, which is interesting. So Iran clearly was part of it. I wouldn't be surprised if Iranian hackers did it. It wouldn't be surprised if Iranian hackers did it with Russian equipment, because obviously Iran and Russia are coordinating and cooperating. It could very well be that there's some deal where, you know, will jam Israel and you help us jam the Ukrainians or something like that. They're obviously selling them, what do you call it, drones. The Iranians are selling the Russians drones. So it wouldn't be surprising at all if there was a Russian connection, particularly on the hacking side, which the Russians are particularly good at. And it flows through Iran rather than there. I don't think Russia would do this directly with Hamas. I think it would have to go through Iran. I think that's the connection. And, you know, the Russian Foreign Minister has visited Iran several times in the last few months. So the relationship there was quite close and they're coordinating a lot. So I think that's the relationship to watch. Thanks, Adam. Tom. Okay, this is really out there question, but I was thinking about AI and national security. And there have been some rumblings recently, like probably excuse-making for regulating AI because of the national security implications of state actors and non-state actors getting hold of that. But also I was thinking of the, and I think it may not be totally related, but the hypersonic missiles, I was shocked to find out, and I don't know if it's true or not, that the Russians and the Chinese have this capability. And I've been reading from reputable sources that we don't have it and we've been trying to develop it for a long time. And I just wonder, are we falling behind in because of our lack of, I mean, you know, look at what's happening at Harvard. They're not doing math and science. They're doing Palestinian, you know, protests and that sort of thing. Are we falling behind in military technology, do you think? And would it make sense? And I mean, this is probably the topic for a whole show about AI and military intelligence and all that. So I don't want to wrap you around the axle with that. I just thought those two topics just came to mind. Yeah, I mean, I don't think we're falling behind. I think on this one technology, we clearly are. That is the supersonic Russian Chinese have it. And we don't because we haven't really tried to build it for a long time. The United States just wasn't investing in that. It's hypersonics are an offensive weapon. And also the United States has spent a lot of money on aircraft carriers and submarines and a lot of very, very big projects, which are dubious in terms of the quality of the investments being made. The F the F 35 and the F 22, which were unbelievably expensive. And we didn't invest in the things that I think we should have supersonic being one. Russia. Russia supersonic missiles don't seem to be that impressive. And the patriot. What was interesting was the patriot battery seems to have knocked down some supersonics over Ukraine, which nobody knew if they could do and they managed. So I'm not a Chinese supersonics might be more impressive. We just don't know. They would supersonic sorry supersonic. So how we know how fast they are, but how accurate they are is going to be important. The reason China is building supersonic missiles is to take out our aircraft carriers, which means they need to be very accurate, right? You know, whole ocean, they have to be able to identify one ship and take it out. We don't know how good they are. But you know, so they again, the, the, the, okay, hypersonic. I'm not sure what they're telling me it's called hypersonic hypersonic missiles. The US is now investing in them. I think we'll have them soon. What I really think we should have been investing in and we haven't is the technology to knock anything in the sky out of the sky. That is, which is a basically a defensive system, whether that is lasers. There's a lot of talk about using lasers on hypersonic missiles, high powered lasers that would knock them out from ships or from land, whether it's more anti missile defense systems. Israel is supposedly going to be launching a laser, laser based system as part of the iron dome. Israel just used to the first time its arrow to miss anti missile technology to knock down some missiles, some ballistic missiles that were sent over its way. I, you know, the US should be investing heavily and then placing it on a lot of it in Taiwan in and on its own ships in anti missile technology that can take down hypersonics. That's more important than building your own hypersonics because the real if you can stop their missiles, then you can take them out. You can take them out because so, so I think that's where the US should be investing. All right, Nick, you're muted, Nick. Gotcha. All right. All right. I wanted to ask you, what would you do? We all know all this anti semitism and nihilism comes out of the universities. Now, you know, the obvious solution is donors should pull out, but you know, there's endowment funds. What would you do to change, you know, other than the obvious philosophy? Is there anything you could do in terms of tenure in terms of to get rid of these props? How do you get turnover? Well, I mean, getting rid of tenure would be great, although again, nobody's going to pass those kind of bills. I think Texas is trying to get rid of tenure at the University of Texas in Austin or University of Texas system. It's very hard to do even in a place like Texas. Can you start to span the Palestinian student group as associated with Hamas? Yeah, I mean, you have to be very careful there, particularly when the Santas does it because his tendency is to silence people in disagrees with and use government in order to violate people's freedom of speech. So, you know, I think that's a very dangerous thing. It's like banning CRT from school curriculum. I don't think that's the right approach. You know, I think getting rid of tenure, I think stopping funding universities, government should just stop funding universities. How about how about the Santas saying that University of Florida is going to get zero dollars in the future? Period. No matter what they teach, it's just not the world of the state to fund university systems. I think government getting out and letting the system collapse on itself, encouraging donors not to give money, encouraging students not to go, starting new universities, like supporting the University of Austin, starting other universities, alternative universities, maybe taking over some universities, getting some big gazillionaires together and buying a private university and taking it over and replacing the professors. So, there are all kinds of things you can do. But at the end of the day, you know, people are going to have to make the decision about whether they send their kids to these universities and the kids are going to have to make a decision about how seriously they take the curriculum, the stuff that's being taught to them. There's nothing you can do outside of that. You know, the government shouldn't start new universities. The government's job is not to start new universities. Private individuals should start new universities. Should start universities to replace the existing ones. The government starting its own universities is just fascism. So that's it. I don't think this, but there's no simple solution because they're very entrenched. It's a very entrenched system. All right. Thanks, Nick. Steve. Maybe building on that ever so slightly, like one of the things I've been wrestling with over the last couple of weeks is, like, when, like, where is the actual line of when we're actually headed toward actual violence? Because I would say that, like, a lot of people protesting for Palestine, like, don't necessarily understand what they're doing. And they're not like, I'd say a large percentage of them don't hold that they're actually advocating for violence, even if they actually are. But there have been people that we have, you know, seen that, like, they're, they're very okay with raping, torturing and killing their opposition. And I don't think that opposition has to just be Jews in Israel. Seems like it could be a lot of people in a lot of places. And I had, this is something I had like projected much further off into the future. But like, it's really been rubbed in all of our faces, like there's, and they don't have to be a majority, like, and I get that most people aren't willing to strap the vest on or pick up a machete and head to the streets. But it doesn't have to be a majority. It can just be a vocal minority. It's like, how do you think about this? No, definitely. I mean, the left today is is egging for violence. I mean, they are, they are promoting violence and they are, they are very close to initiating violence and it's going to happen. And in that sense, you know, we're going to see political violence in America. And they're justifying it. They justified like they justify Hamas. I mean, if you kill a white person, you're just killing a colonizer, you're killing an exploiter, you're killing a racist, we're all racist, right? Unless you're anti-racist and being white, you probably can't be anti-racist really. So the whole ideology is an ideology of demonization, of dehumanization. And that is usually the precursor to violence, right? If I can convince everybody, Steve's not a real human being. He's just an animal. Well, then killing animals is acceptable, right? And that's just how the Nazis did it with the Jews. You dehumanize them. You create and it's what CRT and much of the left is trying to do with whites and trying to do with successful people, with CEOs and everybody else. And that is, we're heading towards a time where that manifests itself in violence. And again, I don't have a time scale. I don't know how long that takes and how it evolves. I mean, we went through a period where a lot of this was starting to happen in the 70s and then everything turned around and things were good for 20 years and now everything's kind of continuing the path that we started in the 60s and 70s, right? As if there was no, Gabbana, we might have a 20-year pause and things will get worse. Of course, I think that what ultimately will happen is if the left does that, I think the right is much more effective at violence than the left and will teach them a lesson. It's the same as my argument about Germany and the Muslims, right? But none of us want to be in a world where that's going on, right? None of us want to be in the circumstances where it's just like I've always said, if the left wants to play identity politics, I know some people on the right who want to play identity politics too and they happen to be a much bigger, more powerful force than the people on the left. They can play that game. It's not going to be pleasant game for any of us if that game gets played out. But I think that's where we're heading. We're heading towards longer term violence and violence will lead to one thing. Violence will lead, political violence will lead to authoritarianism in the name of order, in the name of peace. We need to get control of our own citizens. We can't have people rampaging out in the streets. This was the instinct that I think Trump and some others had, they couldn't implement it, but it was the instinct they had during the BLM riots was okay, right? We need to take control. We need a strong man. We need a really... And he couldn't do it and the country wasn't ready for it and the country is still not ready for it. But this is the ominous parallels that if we live through the Vyma Republic, which we could be heading towards, then we'll get the Nazis and none of us want to be there. And I think Glenn is right, the Nazis will wrap themselves around religion and an American flag. They won't invent something new. They'll leverage off of what is already in the culture. How would you compare the violent inclinations now to those during the 1970s with the Black Panthers and everything? Well, I mean, in the 60s and 70s, the violence was more explicit. It was actually, you know, we had a president assassinated. We had a presidential nominee assassinated. His brother, the two Kennedys, we had Martin Luther King assassinated. We had riots. We had whole cities burning. It was as bad if not worse than BLM, but more systematic, more frequent. And then we had street violence, but that was just political violence. Political violence was horrific in the 60s and 70s. And we had shootings on universities where the riots got so bad that police were shooting. I mean, it really, really, really, people don't have an appreciation of how bad political violence got in the United States back then. I think today, if we return to that, I think we're much more, and in that circumstance, I don't think Americans were ready for authoritarianism as the solution. I think they are today. So if we get back to that level of violence where presidential candidates are being assassinated, where the cities are burning and everything else, then I think, you know, back then they voted for Nixon, nothing pragmatist. Today, they vote for the next, you know, for somebody a lot more authoritarian and a lot more dangerous than Richard Nixon was. And that's what scares me. The doubt demands somebody like that. And that's what Donald Trump's presidency has taught us is and in his assent now is teaching us is the American people a significant segment of the American people want an authoritarian thug. Trump can't live up to that. He's just not smart enough. But he's just not competent enough. But that's what they want. It's clearly what they want. And they're voting for that they're voting for somebody who can't complete a sentence that yells and screams and panics and is emotional and irrational. And, and who has every tendency of authoritarian. And, and that's what they're willing to vote for. And that's what they what and that's what they want. Imagine somebody with all those tendencies and competent that that is the scary part. All right, so I have a lot of super chat questions at the at the $10 or less level. So no more super chat questions, because otherwise we'll be here until tomorrow. Let me run through these fairly quickly. And then, and then we'll see where we go from there but we're already almost two hours in. So Daniel says do you see any influence from Plato's laws in Islamic law, whether peripheral or direct. I think there's a there's a probably a peripheral and maybe even direct. But that's true of all law because Plato has influenced, you know, everything. Now, can I actually draw a line to particular laws. I can't but the general attitude of the need for philosophy Kings the need for guidance from above the need for an authority to dictate what is right and what is wrong. In many respects all comes from Plato. And I think you see that in the West you see that in Christianity for for the hundreds of years and you definitely see it in Islam as well. Daniel asks rationalizations. I've heard from leftist regarding Israel Palestine one, your ignorance of the history if you haven't read any Palestinian authors to Israel funded the creation of Hamas. So with the first one, you know, Palestinian authors don't have a monopoly of a truth. And you're not ignorant of Nazis because you haven't haven't read any Nazi literature. You're not ignorant of communism. If you haven't if you haven't read Marxist capital, you can still criticize communism based on its performance based on what it's done and based on the the the immorality of its fundamental ideas even if you haven't read the details. The same is true of the Palestinians. The same is true of Hamas. You don't have to read them in order to see what they become in order to see who they are in order to see the kind of political systems they've embraced and the violence that they have incorporated. You don't have to read it in detail. Now if you want to be an intellectual who comments on it. Sure. You know, this is why I read a lot of the Islamists in order to completely understand them. But most of you don't have to. You just have to look at what the manifestation of their ideas is in reality and that you don't have to read to discover. And then is off funded the creation of Hamas is literally true. Is all made a mistake. Is all made a mistake. It hasn't funded Hamas in many, many, many years, 40 years, probably 35 years, at least, it hasn't funded Hamas. It stopped pretty quickly once it realized it made a mistake. And too bad when they stop funny Hamas, they didn't turn around and destroy it. But who funds it doesn't really, you know, who funded it once doesn't justify anything. Doodle Bunny says is the mixed economy and unspeakable evil. Well, it's an evil, but it's not unspeakable. It's definitely speakable. We should speak it. We should talk about it. Ryan says have a great show everyone. I should be there today, but I can't. Right. Thanks Ryan. All right, let's see. James says watching all these poor Hamas protesters outside my window, right. For the first time in my life, I decided to purchase a piece for self protection. Yeah, I think it's sad when you feel like you have to purchase a gun. In order this is the this is the one way they wouldn't let you put a gun in there. I think it's sad when you feel like you have to purchase a gun in order to protect yourself. It's a sad state of the world in which we live. Clark says a man cannot be comfortable without his own approval. That's Mark Twain. Yes, you need your own approval to be comfortable. That's self esteem. It's called self esteem. Hoppe says is everyone who has read ran and doesn't become an objective fundamentally dishonest. No, I don't think so. I think a lot of people who are still mistaken confused mistaken and confused. You can be mistaken and confused. This is a test of faith. God, are you there? Good luck with that, Robert. Robert's kidding. This is all him testing YouTube. Michael says, are you only are the only cultures in the world who have valued the mind, the Greeks and the Jews? No, I mean, I don't know how much the Jews, the Jews don't value the mind in the same way as the Greeks that the Greeks are far superior in terms of value in the mind to the Jews. But, you know, the periods in which Christianity value the mind, certainly the American American in the lightment, the lightment period, the culture of Western Europe and the United States value the mind. There are lots of cultures that value the mind. Otherwise, we wouldn't have survived as a species, but Greeks and the Jews among them. Justin says, can IDF collapse Hamas tunnels from the surface? Mostly, yes. You can throw explosives in there and bomb the hell out of them. Partially, it depends on how big of an explosive you want to use and exactly and whether you're willing to take the casualties that are inside the tunnels. Yes, you can collapse Hamas tunnels from the surface. Michael says, Jews make up 2% of American population, but account for 60% of the hate crimes. Yes. A lot of anti-Semitism in America right now. Liam says, when I talk to Israelis, I get a strong sense their altruism has been burnt up. They don't have a problem killing civilians this tour Hamas. They've had enough. I think that's right. They were voting to entribe in group altruism and not caring about our group, at least not caring about the one out group that's out to kill them, which is Hamas. So they're becoming less Christian in that sense. Jews were never universalists. So they're becoming less Christian. Yeah, but I think that's right. Israelis for now, at least, I don't know how long it will last for now are willing to do what it takes. James says, Dennis Pega always brings up how most people in the West don't understand evil. They can't believe it exists. Is there any truth to this? Yes, but Dennis Pega doesn't understand evil either. That is, Dennis Pega thinks evil is a force. It's the devil out there. It's something. It's a thing. It's a metaphysical reality. Evil is evasion. Evil is the lack of thought. Evil is not thinking. Evil is the irrational. Evil is the mystical. Evil is negating your own thinking. And yeah, he doesn't understand evil. Religionists don't. They assume evil is like God. It's a force in the world. Just like good is a force in the world. Michael, just like most nihilists, don't know they're nihilists. Do most jealous, envious people not know they're jealous and envious? I would separate jealousy from envy. I don't think jealousy is necessarily bad. Envy is always bad. Do most people not know? Again, they evaded, but they shouldn't know. Yeah, nobody thinks themselves. Yeah, I'm an envious person. I think very few people think of themselves in those terms. Michael, did you see Obama's disgusting comments on Israel? Was he always a far-left egalitarian nihilist in hiding? Yeah, from his first speeches, you could tell he was an egalitarian. I think he's not as bad as some people on the identitarian left. He was a much better president than that kind of attitude would present itself. But his sympathies have always laid with egalitarianism, particularly when it comes to American Israel, who he has always thought are no better than anybody else. The fact that the Western does not make them special in any kind of way. Justin, Iran has one of the most powerful militaries in the world we should be cautious to engage in. I don't understand that. I hear that a lot. I have no understanding of that. Iran has one of the weakest militaries in the world, in my view. Iran fought a war for eight years, eight years. A million people died against Iraq to a stalemate. They didn't win. Iran didn't win. Iraq didn't win. Stalemate. So you could say Iraq's military is about as powerful as Iran's military is about as powerful as Iraq's. How long did it take the United States to defeat the Iraqi military? I think three days in the first Gulf War and the second Gulf War, three days. No, Iranian military is super primitive. It could be destroyed in hours. The United States could crush it. Today, they have more missiles. These missiles can be knocked out of the sky easily and the United States could destroy every missile-launching facility they have. It's just no competition. It's a joke. Israel could defeat them easily. I think there are quite a few militaries in the world. Every military in Europe, the Ukrainians would beat the Iranians. Almost any European military could beat the Iranian military. I thought it was like Ayn Rand playing out when she said that Soviet production is so bad like the missiles might blow up before they reach, before they catapult them. That scene in Hamas, they hit their own hospital. Look, they launched thousands of missiles. Thousands of missiles. How many casualties in the Israeli side? Almost none. That's because they can't aim them. Israel has defensive weapons. This is the incompetence of evil. They're incompetent. The Iranians are super incompetent. The idea that Iran has this powerful military and we need to be very, very careful. This is the same hysterionics of Jordan Peterson. World War III and oil is going to go to 300. It's just nonsense. The libertarians and the right are really promoting this. Both the libertarians and the far right, both of them are promoting this nonsense. Harper Campbell says, is there a strong anti-Semitism in just the Muslim world or the world in general? Clearly the world in general. What's those pro Hamas demonstrations? Half the people there are white. They're Europeans. They're not Muslims. No, this is a global phenomenon. Right now, anti-Semitism is on the rise dramatically in China. Joshua, I agree it's difficult to be positive and optimistic, but what's the alternative? The gulch is fictitious. There's nowhere to run. If unfreedom is inevitable, then what do we do? You make the most of your life. You escape to the freest place you can. You do the best that you can to survive and to thrive to the extent that you can. You go to where there's even a little bit of freedom. James, you think you can do a sit-down with Ben Shapiro, Yom Chazzoni on Israel? Maybe Dave Rubin could arrange it. I did something with Dave Rubin at the John Peterson Conference last week. Short, 20 minutes. I think he didn't like the fact that I criticized Trump, so I think he cut it short. But it was good. Hopefully, he'll put it up when he does. I'll link to it. I emailed Ben Shapiro asking if he wanted to do a sit-down to talk about Israel. I thanked him for his position on Israel and then asked him about sitting down and doing a show or an interview on it. And he basically responded to me thanking me for thanking him for his support for Israel but not addressing the issue of a sit-down, so I assume he doesn't want to do it. I'm sure I could do something with Yom Chazzoni. We'd agree mostly on Israel in the context right now, so I don't know what the point would be. I don't like sitting down with somebody who I disagree with about fundamentals and appearing to agree with them, which is what would happen. But what is Putin thinking right now? Does the conflict in Israel help him win? Yeah, it's huge. Does the conflict in Israel? Yes, I mean, Putin is loving this. He is rubbing his hand with glee because the world's attention is focused on Israel. It's distracted from Ukraine. The House of Representatives now is led by a man that does not want to support Ukraine, that will not put a bill in front of Congress to support funding Ukraine. The world's attention is completely distracted. Putin is relishing this. He loves it. America seems weak. Israel seems weak. They look like they're killing babies. I don't know if you saw Putin's statement about innocent civilians. I mean, he's killing innocent civilians left and right in Ukraine. He doesn't give a shh. He doesn't give a damn. But he's all upset because Palestinian innocents are dying. He presents himself as being on the moral high ground. No, little could happen that would be better for Putin than what's happened with Hamas and what's happening in the House of Representatives of the United States Congress. This is all great for Putin and for Qixi. This makes the authoritarians of the world happy. Not happy because they're not incapable of happiness. It makes them experience joy and glee for a moment. Clark, did academia always take the virtue of being a victim? No, this is very much a new phenomena. The extent to which it is, it's a new phenomena. Altruism has a whole new dimension in the modern left. The left has taken altruism to a new place. I'll talk about that tomorrow and on Monday when I talk about the left and Hamas and the left and anti-Semitism. We'll talk a lot about altruism. Ari, you mentioned previously that healthcare is expensive because of government intervention and it would be cheaper if it was privatized. Do you recommend any books where I can learn more about this? I don't have books at the top of mind, but there are quite a few free market books out there that you can find. There are obvious examples of this. There's a massive shortage of doctors in the West, including in the United States, because of government controls of medical schools. They're working with the AMA, the American Doctors Association, to restrict the number of new doctors to come on board and provide competition. That's just one example of why costs would be high. If you restrict supply, prices go up. But there are a million ways in which government intervention raises prices. But look for free market healthcare on Google and you'll find some books that deal with these issues. There's plenty of resources. I don't store book names well in my brain. My brain doesn't work that way. Michael says, is it more rational to vote for Biden than over Trump in 2024? If that's what it comes down to, Biden is a nothing. He hasn't caused that much damage, whereas Trump could set the country on fire. I still advocate for not voting for Trump. I'm not advocating for voting for Biden, but I would still advocate for not voting for Trump. I think Trump would be an unmitigated disaster. I think he would hand Ukraine over to Putin. I think he would be much more aggressive in forcing Israel to compromise and come to some kind of so-called peace agreement. And I think that's on the foreign policy stuff that's going on. And I think into the US, I think that the people he puts around him this time. Last time, the people he placed around him were basically free market types. But those people are gone. Those people don't like him. He put around him really good, relatively good, farm policy people. Those people are gone. Those people won't work with him. You know, he had John Bolton as his advisor. John Bolton will never work with him again. Nobody liked John Bolton will ever work with Trump. The people Trump will move into the White House to work with him this time are going to be vetted based on whether they are members of the new right, whether they're members of this new populist right. They're going to be anti-capitalist, anti-market, and fundamentally anti-U.S. individuals. They're going to be an anti-liberty, anti-freedom. They're going to be the worst of the worst of the right. And I can't imagine a worst outcome. You know, Biden did it and he's brought some awful people in. But for somebody on the right to do it is worse. Because again, as I've always said, you expect the statism from the left to get it from the right means there's no opposition party. It's all over. Apollo Zeus, my favorite bodybuilder. I don't have a favorite bodybuilder. I don't like bodybuilding in particular. I don't like the physique of a bodybuilder. I think it's too exaggerated. It's too material. That doodle bunny is having a threesome immoral. It's a profoundly intimate spiritual activity that can only be properly experienced between two people. God. No, I don't think a threesome is immoral. For a number of reasons. For the same reason as having sex with somebody who is not your soul mate and is not the love of your life is not immoral. You can have sex with somebody who you share values with, who you like, hopefully. But it's not the love of your life and always. Otherwise, you wouldn't have sex until you found the one and I'm against that. I think you should have sex young and you should have sex often when you're young. And you should experience and experiment and learn. Now, you shouldn't have sex with random strangers. You shouldn't have sex with anybody, but you should have sex with people you like and share something with. And you can imagine a scenario when a pickup lunch came up with one where a threesome was viable. There was somebody who you liked and you shared values with or maybe more than one. There were two people like this and you had sex with them. Now, the problem with a threesome, the main problem with a threesome is that after you have sex with somebody, your relationship with them changes. It's never going to be the same. You can just go back to being just friends. It's very hard to do that or put it that way. So that in a sense, having inviting them into a threesome or having sex with them means and you don't intend to do this on a regular basis means you're not going to be friends with them again. So Leonard's solution for that was it's somebody who you like and you're friendly with but they're leaving and they're never coming back. They're getting on a plane and they're moving to Singapore and they're never coming back. So what's there to lose? But generally, look, I'm worried that if I say this, you guys will take it wrong or that I'll try it out and figure it out. What's the downside? That you'll have bad sex or you'll feel bad about it or you'll, you know, you'll fail. It won't be good. But it's not going to do it. Evaluate it. Judge it for what it is. You know, you probably have sex with a one night stand. Evaluate it, judge it. Should I have more one night stands? Come to a conclusion about it. There's no dogma with whom and how to have sex and objectivism. It's just be rational about it. A lot of the rationality is be open to experiences but also be evaluative. That is evaluate them. Think about them. Was that a good experience? A bad experience? Was that good or bad? Now it's sex is important. It's significant. So you shouldn't trivialize this. But it's not like bad pizza, as Scott would suggest. But it's, it's still not, you're not going to lose your life. You're not going to destroy your life. You're not going to, now you might destroy the relationship with the, let's say it's your wife when you're having a threesome or your girlfriend and you're having a threesome. You might destroy your relationship with your wife or girlfriend. So be very, very careful. Because if you value that relationship and you bring in a third party, man or woman, you don't want to destroy that relationship. Your primary relationship, the one you came most about. So that's something to really, really think about if you're going to have a threesome. So there's a lot to consider. It shouldn't be done rashly. But there's no, like Dogma says, no, you can never do that because sex is this thing. What about the love triangle you're on? Do you think there's something about the nature of a serious relationship that it should be between two people? I think that yes, but it's not clear to me that you always know who the other person is. You might be confused. You might be falling in love with two people at a given point in time. And therefore, you might not have made the decision yet. I think a long term, more than having one partner is not stable. It's not sustainable. But it might take a while to figure out who the one among the many is, the one in the many. Who the one among the two or three it is that you want to be committed to over the long run. But if we're analyzing this subjectively, if the moral is the practical, and you look at the consequences of it, unlike forensic files, for example, and 90% of the episodes are about some love triangle going bad, does that make it not moral? So what goes bad? A threesome. If you're watching forensic files, a TV show, like 90% of the episodes are about a threesome that one person killed the other. Really? Yeah, it's crazy. Don't have threesomes then. Look, life is risky. If whatever you do with other people, the more intimate it is that you do with other people, you have to be careful. And the more intimate it is, the more care you've got to take. So again, I'm not suggesting being frivolous about this. And look, a lot of violence occurs because of, what do you call it, lovers that are being shunned or relationships that have gone bad. A lot of violence occurs around that. My suggestion wouldn't be don't have a relationship. My suggestion is be value oriented in all your relationships, at whatever level, and the more intimate the relationship is, the more you need to be careful, the more you need to be sure of what you're doing, and the more you need to think it through. I think it was... One thing you have to have, if you're going to do it, is you have to make sure everybody has the kind of self-esteem that can handle it. Because again, intimacy is one that could easily cause one of the three to feel unwanted or not living up to whatever. So self-esteem is important. Other than that, have fun. What can I say? All right. I'm going to get into trouble on that one. Cookspot, Bone, Scotty, or Zulu. Oh, if those are the choices, I have to go with Cook. Yeah, no question. Cook is the perfect integration. Justin, Dave Smith has challenged you. Yeah, Dave Smith can go to hell. You know, lots of people can challenge me. It doesn't mean I have to pick up the challenge. I will not debate Dave Smith. I don't think he's worthy of debating. You know, and my decision not to debate Scott Horton has just been vindicated by the fact that he posted a tweet about the fact that... What's his name? Jeffrey Epstein, the pedophile, the horrible, who was actually an agent of the Mossad, and the Mossad had him rape all these little girls so that they would have video on all these powerful people in power and they could control them. So it's all a Jewish conspiracy. It's all an Israeli conspiracy, not just a Jewish conspiracy to control the world, and that's what Jeffrey Epstein was doing. Can you really debate somebody like that? You can't debate people like that. They're not interested in facts. They're not interested in reality. They're the worst kind of scumbags. They're the worst kind of... You know, and he's an historian. He presents himself as an historian. You can't deline... They're lying, they make stuff up, and they are, you know, just irrational. So you can't debate people like that. There's no foundation from which to debate. So there's no way I'm debating Dave Smith. Dave Smith is part of the Scott Holden gang, and they can all go to hell. Jacob. Skiing is so much more expensive in the United States than Europe for this reason. Liability, yes. So much safety protocols, absolutely. Frank says, Palestinians say that Israel keeps expanding settlements in the West Bank. Aren't they the acres of land in the south desert of Israel for Jews to live in? They purposefully want to live in what is considered Palestinian territory, but... And part of it is unjustified when they steal land or they take land, and part of it is completely justified. If they buy land or if it's land that's owned by the government, why shouldn't people settle there? They have every right to settle there. They're going to be productive, they're going to do something, and they're going to build factories, create communities, and if people around there were actually... If people around there were actually valued life and prosperity, they would want more Jewish settlers there. The Jews being civilization and being productivity, and they being jobs, and they being industry. Daniel, do you know how much Iron Man's... much about Iron Man's last days in 1982? Have you ever asked on a pick-off? No, I actually don't know much about Iron Man's last days. Finally, Justin... Taka seems impressed by Iranian military. Taka's an idiot. Taka has now become a stooge for Putin, the Iranians, the American far-right. Since he left Fox, he was awful, horrific at Fox. He has become just disgusting since he left Fox. The worst. The people he interviews, the quality of the interviews, the conspiracy theories he's willing to embrace, the nonsense he says, it's just disgusting and despicable, and it makes you really... I mean, we see what the left has come to, to the extent that Taka is much worse than O'Reilly. O'Reilly was a million times better than Taka Kaulson. Taka Kaulson is a thousand times worse philosophically and intellectually than Bill O'Reilly. He is the pits and the fact that Taka thinks that the Iranian military is strong is good enough reason to think the opposite. But no, it's just not based on facts, not based on reality, zero reality. But much of what Taka Kaulson does right now is zero reality. It's a divorce O'Reilly. All right, guys, thank you. We've gone two and a half hours. I appreciate everybody's support. Thanks to the panel. Thanks to the questions and the support. Thanks to all the superchatters. Thanks to all the viewers. Don't forget to like the show before you leave. Shay, do all the other stuff. And what else? Yeah, I'll see you all tomorrow. Tomorrow at 8 p.m. No, it's 7 p.m. I keep up to remember. Clock's change. Puerto Rico stays the same. The world moves on Puerto Rico. So it'll be 8 p.m. My time at 7 p.m. East Coast time tomorrow. I'll be talking about the left and Hamas. And then on Monday at 8 p.m. I'll be talking about the left and anti-Semitism. Although I have a feeling the two are going to overlap quite a bit, but I'll try to separate some of the content out. Anyway, tomorrow at 8 p.m. The left and Hamas. I'll see you all there. Have a great rest of your weekend. Bye, everybody.