 Good morning everybody and thanks for joining us on the Iran Brook show on this post Thanksgiving morning. Hopefully you guys have slept off the turkey already, but hope you had a great Thanksgiving. I certainly did. I have to admit I kind of was in a good mood this morning, got up, you know, good Thanksgiving, had a great time, good meal, friends over, just had a good time, pretty relaxing day yesterday and then last night Fidel Castro died, yay, you know, so good stuff. It was all in a good mood heading into the show today and then this morning as I usually do, got up early to do the research for the show to prep and started reading about globalism and I'm all depressed again. You know, I feel like I need another shower to get the anyway, we'll get we'll get to discussion of globalism, but I have to admit to, you know, it's just it's just depressing. Sometimes these shows take a lot of it out of you because to actually research on this stuff is very unpleasant. Hey, but but let's start with the good news. Good news is Fidel Castro is dead. About 56 years too late. It would be nice if he died before the revolution or during the revolution or right after the revolution, but we have had to suffer. We'd have to suffer through not we, not we, we haven't suffered that much. The human people have had to suffer through 50 something years of his rule, his authoritarian dictatorial rule. So it's great to haven't gone. You know, I think it's it's something we're celebrating. You know, and people, it would be good if if the commentators out there recognize this. It's pretty amazing to look at the different stories about Fidel Castro and about his his demise. Very few people talk about the number of people he killed. Because nobody talks about the fact that Cuba is, you know, has no free speech that has no free media that people are poor. People are basically enslaved under this communist regime that is, you know, that is Cuba. And yet almost nobody is calling this, which is, you know, fits into our discussion of the media that we're going to get to in a few minutes. It's, you know, titles are like Fidel Castro, dead Cuban revolutionary leader dies at 90. You know, this one for the Washington Post, at least recognizes he's a dictator. Fidel Castro Cuban dictator dies at 90. You know, Breitbart even, you know, wasn't it was pretty respectful article on Breitbart. Cuban communist icon, Fidel Castro died at 90. And then the story is pretty, pretty lame. And bring out this issue at all really. What else? I mean, yeah, they will see you on Fidel Castro, former Cuban strongman, strongman sounds kind of weak, right, dies. How about brutal dictator now Marco Rubio, to his credit, came out this morning saying Fidel Castro was an evil, murderous dictator who inflicted misery and suffering should have had a death there. And inflicted misery and suffering. That's good stuff. That's good stuff. So good for Marco Rubio. Even Donald Trump, I don't have the quote with me here, but even Donald Trump called him like a brutal dictator and had pretty negative things to say about him. So I give Donald Trump credit for, you know, here it is, is that Donald Trump? I think I don't know if that's Donald Trump. Let's see. Here's Donald Trump. Fidel Castro is dead. Mike Pence wrote that Tywin Castro is dead. New hope dawns. We will stand with the press Cuban people for free Democratic Cuba, Viva Cuba Libre. So yeah, so basically some good comments out there from some, some of the Republicans from Donald Trump and, and Mike Pence and so on. So, you know, Obama, very moderate. You know, history will be the judge, you know, history will be judge. And then on some shows, I understand a bunch of leftist called up and were kind of praising Castro. You know, he, education was great in Cuba and, and in health care, health care was fantastic in Cuba and all this other stuff. And he inspired people in Latin America and so on. Yeah. In Latin America to, to, to murder and to oppress and Venezuela is, is Fidel Castro's inspiration. Chavez was inspired by Fidel Castro and people are dying in the streets in, in Venezuela. So yes, 56 years since the revolution in Cuba, since Fidel Castro came to power, 56 years of death, destruction, poverty, oppression, thousands, tens of thousands of political prisoners in jail over those years, horrific conditions. And not just in Cuba, I think, I think those who say the Fidel Castro is very influential, those who say the Fidel Castro inspired many of Latin America, absolutely right. And in that sense, you know, it's even more horrific because it's not, he doesn't just, you don't just count all the people Fidel Castro killed, but you have to count all the people, people inspired by Fidel Castro killed. And the number just skyrockets once you do that, the poverty, the, the oppression, the, the, the misery. There is no hell appropriate for somebody like Fidel Castro. He should, you know, maybe the Christian hell, this is, this is, we should resurrect the Christian hell. Unfortunately, he's just dead. It would be nice if he burns slowly while alive. So I, you know, this guy is a, this guy was a monster. It's good to have him gone. And it is interesting to see how the press is covering this and how, how kind of moderate the press is how attempted, you know, they tell the story and with attempted objectivity, objectivity in quotes, instead of telling us the truth about what an evil, horrible person this is. And again, this is true. I was looking in the Wall Street Journal, Wall Street Journal didn't really have a strong, now I'm sure the editorial page will, but it didn't have really a strong claim about what, what Castro was really like, what he really did. And you know, people celebrating in the streets of Miami, I mean, people last night were out in the streets with little Cuban flags and honking their horns and dancing in the street. I mean, good for the Cubans in Miami, I mean, they know how to party. And they know, and they know a good cause to party for, right? If Fidel Castro's death is not a good cause for a party, then I don't know what is. That's me being insensitive, I know. All right. So I thought that was interesting and I thought the coverage of Fidel Castro's death was interesting and a good kind of segue into a discussion of the media. You know, I have to say, I am really troubled, really troubled by the fact that many are dismissing the media, not because they dismiss them as biased, I know they're biased, but he knows they're biased. I knew the New York Times was biased as she was reading it. But the idea that we don't need the mainstream media, that we shouldn't even look at the mainstream media, that the mainstream media are liars and corrupt and evil and bad, and that what we really need is alternative media and to focus all our attention on alternative media in which you completely ignore what is going on and what is being said on mainstream media. And what struck me was that last night, I saw a tweet by a friend of mine, a Bosch Foster, and condemning the New York Times for their headline, I can show you what the headline was, and I retweeted it because it was a stupid headline declaring Castro dead. And it was really, really stupid, it was moderate, it was flat, it was not condemnatory. And yeah, it showed the kind of bias that the New York Times have, which is the New York Times, the New York Times is sympathetic to a leftist agenda, they're not going to condemn communism the way it should be condemned, the way justice demands it to be condemned. But then what I did is I looked at other news organizations, I looked across the spectrum, from left to right, from Huffington Post to Breitbart, to the conventional, I'd say mainstream media left, right, the Fox, everybody else. And basically, basically, almost all of them had similar headlines, and if not similar headlines, similar stories. So the New York Times headline was Fidel Castro, revolutionary Cuban who defied US died at 19, right? Now, there's nothing, there's no lie there, he was a revolutionary, and he defied the US. And, but when I looked through the whole thing, right, almost all the media had basically the same story. And I say, I was surprised, even Breitbart basically said the same thing. There was always, there was almost nobody who called him for what he was left right now. We latch onto the New York Times, and we should condemn them. And it's a stupid headline, and it's typical of the New York Times headline, but it's not like anybody else got it right. It's not like, you know, anybody else nailed it. So, so then I look it out of the stories, and I just, I just browsed across the media and, you know, because I'm trying to do the show on the media and on the objectivity or lack of objectivity on the media and how to approach the media. And look, the bottom line is, and the bottom line is, there is no media to listen to. If what you're looking for is objective reporting. If what you're looking for is anything resembling the truth without, present it without philosophical political bias, then it's not out there. It's just, you know, it's just not out there. Not on the left, not on the right, not in the middle. The idea of objective truth, the idea of objective reporting, the idea of a media whose responsibility is to deliver the news, to tell you about what's happened, without interjecting its own spin on it in its own view on it, it just doesn't exist. The majority of the mainstream media is dominated by kind of a socialist, what we traditionally call leftist bent, but Fox, there's nothing objective about what Fox reports. There's nothing accurate about what Fox reports. Fox does the same thing, the same thing, with a Republican, establishment Republican, or in the case of Hannity, with a Donald Trump perspective spin on it. They're all the spinning, all of them. They're all taking the news and presenting it, not in an objective way, not in a way that reflects reality, but they are presenting what they want you to get out of it. They are presenting it with a clear philosophical, ideological, bias, all of it. Now you can go to alternative news media, real alternative news, and Bud-Bud is one example of it, and Drudge is another, and I go to Bud-Bud, and I go to Drudge, and what I see is an emphasis on hysteria, and on yellow-style journalism is applied to real stories. Used by Milo with ridiculous titles. Generally Breitbart's titles are fairly, what would you call it, just provocative for the sake of being provocative. Again, there's an agenda. They're trying to get an agenda across, not news, not tell you what's really happening, but an agenda. Then if you go all the way out to something like Infowars, and I'll talk more about Infowars when we talk about globalism, now what you're getting is just nutty stuff. Conspiracy theory, crazy, nutty, manipulative, so-called news, and there's the equivalent on the left. If you go to Slate, what you're going to get, or Slate is a little bit better, but Salon is completely nutty, what you're going to get in Salon is completely biased from a socialist, leftist, hardcore leftist agenda perspective on the news, and everybody else is kind of in the middle, but all of them are slanted. What I find, so how do you approach this? What do you do with it? You have to recognize it, and I see too many people out there, including people who call themselves objectivist, or who might be objectivist, relying as news on some of these right-wing websites, whether it's Byprod, whether it's Drudge, or whether it's even more so, what did I call it, the Alex Jones, I forget what it's called. Anyway, and pretending that they're getting objective news there, Infowars, that's what it's called, Infowars, or there's a Canadian website called The Rebel, I was watching some of their videos, again presenting information as news, as if it's objectively presented, and what you find when you're looking at all of these is just even on issues that I don't know that much about, but certainly when I know an issue, when I know an issue, I can go to these websites and say how they present it, and what you see is just massive, unequivocal bias on all sides. So this is not a leftist conspiracy to take over the mainstream media, indeed, there are more alternatives to the mainstream media today than ever, ever existed. It used to be, for those of us old enough to remember, it used to be three networks, all basically dominated by left of center kind of political agenda, philosophical agenda. The New York Times, The Washington Post, you know, the major newspaper LA Times, the Chicago, all the major city newspapers, and that was it. Today there's a gazillion sources of media, and some of them don't even pretend to tell you the truth. And the ones that scare me are the ones that do pretend to tell the truth. But there are many out there that are not even pretending to tell the truth, and yet people take them as the truth. There was a, I read somewhere, that the most shared story on Facebook before the elections was a story declaring that the Pope had endorsed Donald Trump blatantly false, but looked like a real news story, and everybody, everybody was sharing it. So it went around, it was viable, right, because, and this is what, there's a lot of discussion now about Facebook and Twitter trying to screen out so-called false news. How they're going to do that, I have no idea how you do that, and it's going to be tricky for them to decide, given the bias that almost all these news organizations are involved in, what is false news and what is not. But the fact is that there is stuff that's clearly false, clearly ridiculous that's being hocked out there, and that people are not being diligent about screening out, and sharing, and it's all over the place. All right, if you want to talk, you can call 347-324-3075. Remember to press the one button, and I apologize to those of you on Facebook Live, that I still don't have the, it connected so that you can hear the calls, I think I figured out how to do that, and I've ordered what I think are the right cables, I tried all kinds of cables yesterday to try to make this work, but none of them worked. So it requires a special cable that goes into the iPad that the iPad will recognize at a sound in, and if I can get the iPad to recognize sound in, then I can make this work, I've ordered the cables, it should work, so we will have this, one of the future shows, I'm actually leaving on a long trip starting on Tuesday, and I'm not sure where I'm going to be broadcasting from, but I'm hoping that if I get the cables in time, we can make it work, so Facebook Live will be able to hear all the questions and everything on this show, and on my AM560 show, which has a completely different setup, but I think I figured out how to solve the problem for both. Let me also note that if you want to call in and talk about Silicon Valley, we can do that, I think it fits in nicely with some of our discussion today, but so it's 347-324-3075, and that includes those of you in Facebook Live, if you want to call, that's fine. 347-324-3075, just remember, when you're dialed in to press a one, if you actually want to get on the show and ask questions, and I know I caught off the discussion of Silicon Valley last week kind of short, and a lot of you wanted to talk about it, so feel free to feel free to call in. All right, so we're talking right now about the media on its lack of objectivity across the board. In a minute, I want to defend the mainstream media and talk about why I think it's so, so important that you not dismiss it, that you not overly ridicule it, that you don't buy into the evil liars that I am, I promise, going to defend mainstream media today. I think it's crucial that we do that in the name of free speech, but I also want to talk about the other aspect of this, is I want to talk about how to consume the media, how to consume news, how to do it in a way to where you preserve your objectivity, how to do it in a way where you don't get corrupted by the fact that there's almost no real objective media out there, that there is, it's very hard to trust the media that we are consuming. So how do we deal with that? How do you live in a world and how do you come to conclusions and decisions about the world when obviously the media is not objective? How do you tease out what's true and what's false? And we'll be talking about that. In the meantime, we're going to take a call. Hi, you're new on Bookshow. Who's this? Hey, Debbie from Silicon Valley. Good to hear from you. Okay, go for it. This is perfect. Can you email it to me? Can you email me your link for that? Yeah. So, so for those of you on Facebook, what Debbie is telling us is that for real sociopaths like Fidel Castro, they don't have to wait to die, you know, to go to hell. They are actually in hell while they're alive. And I've been saying this for years and years and years. The dictators don't have fun. They don't enjoy life. They're not happy human beings, that they are actually, you know, suffering. They're actually miserable, pathetic, unhappy, fearful human beings that really do live through hell while they're alive. So, they get the justice they deserve, whether they are killed and tortured or not. The killing and then killing is just an added benefit that I would like, just for my own, you know, sick pleasure. But yeah, I agree with you completely, Debbie. And, you know, it's really hard because objectivists believe in an objective reality, which basically says that there are certain virtues and values that human beings have to pursue in order to achieve happiness. And if you don't pursue them, then you don't achieve happiness. And if you pursue the opposite of them, then you actually pursue death. In other words, real misery and unhappiness and destruction, psychological mental destruction. And it's good to see that there's a psychologist out there that are now showing that that's a reality. That is, you know, objectivism is always said in theory, that's a reality. And we kind of have these examples out there we can see as a reality. But it's great to have a psychological theory and psychological evidence that that it really is exactly works like that. If you pursue values and virtues that are anti life, likes expecting others to sacrifice for you, then your life will be a miserable hell. And I think that's what the book you're describing actually illustrates. Good. Absolutely. Absolutely. Good. Well, I need it. I needed some good news. Thanks, Debbie. I really appreciate it. All right. So Debbie's absolutely right. And here, here's a good segue into, it's a good segue into talking about some of the mainstream media, the last points you made. There are a lot of people out there who might have crazy political ideas. I don't know. There might be pretty leftists, so might be in the middle, or might be right wing, or might be whatever, you know, I don't even know what left and right means anymore. I use those, those terms in quotes, because from my perspective, everybody in politics today, everybody taking political views, all of them on the left, the alt right is actually alt left, bright body is as left as it comes when it comes to individualism, the collectivist, which is a leftist ideology. So the whole left right, and I keep saying this on all the shows, and I'm going to keep saying it in shows to come, I don't buy into the whole left right thing. It's collectivism versus individualism, they're all collectivists. So people might have all these collectivistic ideas, they might have bad philosophical ideas that doesn't prevent them from doing good work. It doesn't prevent them from doing good work. Yeah, right-wing collectivists, they are nationalists, they're not individualists, they're not interested in individual rights, they're not interested in protecting the individual from the state. They're interested in the state imposing itself on the individual in the name of the nation, in the name of nationalism, of one form or another. We'll get to discuss that more when we talk about globalism, whatever, that's a package deal if ever there was one. So the whole left-right thing is rubbish, but Breitbart's certainly a collectivist, so is Alec Jones. So all these guys who say they're for individualism in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but we'll get to what they really mean in a minute. So I went off on a tangent and forgot where I was heading. I was heading, you know, Breitbart collectivism threw me off. Anyway, you can be a collectivist and still do good work. We talked about this last week when we talked about Silicon Valley. They're left as state collectivists, they have bad philosophies, and yet they do phenomenal work and they work hard and they produce great things that make our lives better in significant substantial ways. And they exhibit, many of them, exhibit the virtues of a good successful life as defined, as described by Inran, as discovered by Inran, right? And yet they have a philosophical belief system that is wrong, that is wrong, and yet they compartmentalize that when it comes to their work. Now you see that also in academia. You see that also in the media. You see people who might have a particular agenda, who might have a bad philosophy, a bad politics, but who compartmentalize aspects of that and still produce and create good stuff. And Debbie gave an example of a good psychologist. I don't know what the psychologist's political theory is. I don't know what his epistemology is. I don't know what his ethical theory is. He's probably an altruist. Almost everybody is. And when it comes to an explicit ethical view or complete subjectivist, one or the other, but they produce, they can still produce good work. And it would be ridiculous for objectivists to believe in objectivity, who believe in the truth, who believe in seeking the truth, to dismiss the truth because its source is somebody we happen to disagree with on other stuff. That would be nuts. And this is to me, you know, why I think it's so important, that we not just dismiss the mainstream media. The mainstream media actually has the best trained journalists in the world. They actually have the resources to actually produce journalists and send them all over the world and within countries and to do investigative reporting and to do all this stuff. Much of their reporting is biased. Some of it is not. Even when it's biased, it is often interesting and illuminating once one takes into account the existence of the bias. So I listened to NPR. I've said this many times on the show. NPR is biased. The way they talk about Republicans, the way they talk about capitalism, the way they talk about particular issues, there's no question that they are biased. But they also produce some of the most interesting, stimulating, challenging stories I have ever listened to. And it caused me to think. And many times they tell me stories about things that are going on in the world that nobody else discusses. That nobody else discusses. Science, they cover science. Brightwell doesn't cover science. Thank God. Wall Street Journal sometimes covers science. New York Times sometimes covers science. Wow. But I get more science news from NPR and even the New York Times and the Washington Post then I do from so-called right-wing media sources. They're not interested in science. They're interested purely in politics. So to view the mainstream media say, ah, that's garbage. It's nuts. Now, do I trust them? Am I going to live my life based on an article published in NPR? No. If it's important, I do more research. And this is the point I want to make. This is a crucial point. You read a story. I don't care where you read it. It's interesting. It might even be important to your views on XYZ. On trade. You read a story that says trade is causing unemployment in the Midwest. It's written plausibly. It's written without hysteria. So it's obviously not written at some of these crazy places, right? And you go, well, is this true? Could this be true? How do you decide? How do you decide? Well, you look at other sources. You look at a variety. And the more important story is, the more relevant it is to your worldview or to your perspective on the world, the more you research you do. You look at people who are against this article. You look at people who support this article. You look at who they're basing it on. You integrate that with the rest of your knowledge about free markets, about trade, about how trade works. You may be asking an economist friend of yours, but you don't just accept the story and you don't just reject the story. You actually have to do work to determine if these stories are true or not. And you actually have to do more work today than you would in a culture where the media was objective. But even there, you can't just accept something because somebody told you you have to do the work to figure out whether something is true or not. And the fact is that the mainstream media, as it's called, presents you with lots of alternatives, lots of perspectives. And then you can dabble with those on the left. You can dabble with those on the right, and you can figure out what's true or what's not. It's not that hard, but you have to work at it. The problem that I see is that we're fundamentally lazy. We don't want to do the work. So many Americans don't want to do the work of figuring out what's true or what's not. The mainstream media is often offered by us, so we just ignore it. We just reject it. Indeed, now we're at the point of demonizing it, which is very, very dangerous, because the next step after demonizing is attacking and then shutting down. And there goes your freedom of speech. So we can't just be passive consumers of the news. And you can't only read everything to the right, to the right again. These terms, it's hard to get rid of, to the nationalist right of a buck. You have to be willing to read different people. And you have to be willing to use your mind based on your experience, based on your philosophy, based on objectivism, based on what you know about economics. You cannot be lazy, but everybody out there is lazy. They want soundbites. They want images. That's why everything's moving to video. Everything's moving to video. Everything is now just what we're doing on Facebook Live. It's a screen with somebody yelling into it. That's news. That's information. This was started by Fox News, you know, with what's his name, or Wiley, and now it's expanded all over the internet. Angry guys yelling into the screen is what, I guess, angry guys watching the screen really click with. They really click with that. Knowledge is an achievement. Knowledge requires effort. It doesn't just hit you. You just don't know it. You can't just read the New York Times and say, okay, I know the truth. Now, all of you say, well, we know the New York Times is biased, but you can't read anything like that. Now, I read a bunch of newspapers. I don't read one. I read the New York, the Wall Street Journal is probably the one I read the most. And it's mixed. It's pretty good, but it's mixed. The story, the people who write the actual newsy part of the Wall Street Journal tend to be coming at it from a leftist collectivistic perspective. The editorial page is a mixture. Some of it's more individualistic, more capitalist, right? But it's mixed. And it's really hard to tell. Then you have, then I read, I read the Washington Post periodically. I read the New York Times. I look at Breitbart. I look at, you know, I don't look at Alex Jones, I have to admit, but, you know, I will go to Drudge just to see what are they doing? What are they thinking about? What are they engaged in? But do I take what's written there as truth? No. This is why you read multiple sources. I listen to NPR. I don't watch television news. I can't stand television news. I hate television news. So you have to engage with the media and you have to engage with multiple sources. But look, if you demonize the media, if you, for that matter, demonize the left and we'll get to that when I talk about globalism, you're demonizing a lot of intelligent people. You're demonizing a lot of people who could do good work. A lot of people who break great stories, important stories. A lot of people who actually present real facts. You're going to miss out on most of what's going on in the world if you just completely reject and completely ignore the mainstream, at least the written media. You just have to know how to interact with it, how to adjust for the biases. But if you don't, then if you just consume the right-wing stuff, then you're not getting news. And you're so flooded by the same message over and over and over again that you lose all objectivity. And when you re-bend the New York Times, you dismiss it immediately. And I've seen this so many people now. You know, like, phew, that was in the New York Times, that's garbage. That was in the Washington Post, that's garbage. That was in the Washington Journal, that's garbage. Mainstream media. Now, the mainstream media is going to be very critical of Donald Trump. Now, they want as critical as they should have been of Obama. And they certainly want as critical as they should have been about George W. Bush, right? They want. They want critical of Bush and they want critical of Obama, nowhere near as critical as I would have been. But they're going to be very critical of Trump. And Trump has a tendency to lash out against his critics. And now he'll have the full force of government in support of him. And in a battle between the president of the United States and the media, even garbage media like the New York Times, Tim, I am with the media. I am with the New York Times. The president should never comment on the media. It's not the job of the president to police the media, quite the contrary. The job of the president is to leave the media alone. It's to protect the media from people policing them. So we care about free speech. We do not want Donald Trump deciding which media is okay, which media is not, who he's going to support, who he's not, calling the mainstream media evil and liars. I mean, he could do that in the campaign. Fine. But now that he's president of the elected president, he has to stop it. This is a clear attack on freedom of speech. Certainly if he was president, it would be an attack on freedom of speech. Anything the president says, and this is what I said about Obama, I said the same thing. Anything a president says has the backing of a gun behind it. That's the essence of government. Government is a gun. Anytime the leader of a government says anything about anything. It's a gun. And as such, the president shouldn't ever talk about these issues. Leave it alone. Let the market for ideas sort itself out. You are not part of the market ideas of ideas, particularly you can't criticize the media for criticizing you. So it's completely in my view inappropriate for Trump to talk about the Hamilton show, whatever you think of it appropriate and appropriate for them to criticize Pence, either Pence dealt with it brilliantly. He told his kids, you see the booing me, freedom of expression. This is what America's about. And then afterwards when, you know, he was fine with what the Hamilton staff or what the Hamilton, you know, accrued it. Right. But the idea, the idea that Trump would criticize any of that. Trump should stop it. He needs to stop it. And then he had this, I guess he had this meeting with the press where he lambasted them on being liars and frauds. That's intimidation when it comes to the president. That's again, an attack on free speech. And he has to stop it. He's the president now as much as I hate it. He is the president. And I'm hopeful that somebody can get to him so that he behaves like a president. All right, we got a couple of calls. And I don't know if this is still Debbie from Silicon Valley. Hi, is this Debbie or is this somebody else? Hey, okay, it's not Debbie. It's another four and five caller. Go ahead. No, you haven't. Go ahead, Dave. Yep. Absolute. Ronald Reagan was a genius as compared to these guys. Yep. But you had a good post. You had a good post on my Facebook page. Let me see if I can find it. Facebook is slow down because it's doing the live feed. So my Facebook is I'm just trying to do too many things at the same time on the internet. All right, come on Facebook. But you had a good, what was the thing about somebody criticized like New York and California and you wrote back? Where was it? What was it? What post was it? Oh, here it is. Okay, so this is a good, this is good because this is a good, so I posted this thing. I posted on my Facebook page this story. There was published on 538 and we can talk about 538 as well. This is Nate Silver's website where he talks about education on income as being predicting who would vote for Donald Trump. That is the more education you had, the more likely it was that you voted for Hillary, the lower the education you had, the more likely it is to vote for Trump. That is just the statistical fact, guys, statistical fact. Anyway, so somebody wrote on my Facebook page, my progressive leftist friends always point out that undereducated idiots voted for Trump. But if you look at that electoral map, another interesting thing emerges. The states that produce goods, food, machinery voted for Trump. The Lee 12th state voted for Hillary. So Dave, who's on the phone right now, wrote back, I wouldn't categorize all of New York and California as Lee 12th states. You're being too nice, Dave. I mean, okay, let's look at actually what is going on here. You know, this is again, this is the stupid way in which the right presents ideas. So if we look at a list of the states, Dave, I'm going to hang up on you, but thanks for calling and I'm going to go on this tangent and then I'm going to get somebody else's call. This is, this is the stupid right. Okay. If you look at the number of states and the amount of money they get from the federal government, either as welfare for individuals or as grants to the states, where is California? Right on the list of the getting the most money. California is number 46. California is one of the few states in which the citizens pay more federal income taxes than they get from the federal government. What are the number one state Mississippi? New Mexico, number two, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, Montana, South Dakota, Kentucky, West Virginia, Missouri, Georgia, the top 11 states except for New Mexico, every single one of the states are red states. And they're the ones on the federal door. They're the ones getting money in, right? They don't pay enough taxes. So I in California are subsidizing welfare from Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, Missouri. Now, so, you know, in California, why do people pay a lot of taxes? Because they produce a lot. They build a lot. They create a lot. Where's New York here on the list? New York is number 41. So he gets more money per capita than California, but less than 40 other states, right? Why? Because New York produce, they create, they've got, you know, California, New York, both their wine countries, they have huge agricultural businesses. They have upstate New York is very producer in it. Manhattan is the financial capital of the world. There's a massive amount of production, wealth creation, real wealth creation in New York and California. So this idea that, you know, democratic states where the liberal, where the left lives, they're just leeches. And Republicans is where hardworking Americans live is to put it nicely, bullshit. It's actually California is like, I can't remember what, the eighth largest economy in the world, just California by itself, in spite of all the socialist policies we're in California, if we didn't have them, we'd be the largest economy in the world, second only to the United States of America, right? Granted. But really. So this attitude of, you know, California, New York leeches, they voted for, for, for Clinton, because we want to be on the dole. No, it's all the states that voted Republican, they get the door from Washington. Now, yeah, this. So, again, let's be objective, right? Objective truth. We're about the truth. We're not about politically filtered. And it's an interesting question. Why is it that California, in spite of having so many socialist policies, why is Denmark and Sweden, in spite of having socialist policies, why are they relatively rich? California is much richer than Denmark or Sweden. Why are they so rich? And that's an important thing to question. And we can do a whole show on that. And I will, right? But you can't dismiss that they're rich. You can't say, oh, now they've got a bunch of leftist living this, they must be poor, mooching leeches. No, the tragedy is that they are rich and that they vote to make themselves poor. One day, California will be poor if it doesn't change its ways. And it keeps voting to be poor. So, but no, but what upsets me is that people, including people who objectivists, who call themselves objectivists, are filtering the news not based on reality, but based on politics. And I talked about this when I talked about Silicon Valley last time. Politics is not the fundamental. Politics is not the fundamental. If you have people who are thinking, who use science, who are highly motivated, who work hard are incredibly productive, even if you chain them with socialist chains, they are going to be richer than people who are mystical. Don't use reason. And for whatever reason, are not motivated to work hard. You know, because some things are primary. All right. So let me talk a little bit about Nate Silver, because this again refers to media. I read a lot of Nate Silver stuff. I like Nate Silver. Nate Silver approaches a lot of these issues from the perspective of a statistician, from the perspective of a scientist. And people say, but he was completely wrong in the election. No, he actually wasn't wrong in the election. He gave Donald Trump a probability of 30 to 35% to win the election, based on the facts, the days before the election, based on the polling numbers, based on everything we knew about elections and so on. That was a reasonable probability. The thing about probabilities is if something has a 35% chance of happening, it has a 35% chance of happening. And once in a while, it will happen. About a third of the time, it will actually happen. Right? Now, he gave Donald Trump a higher probability of winning than anybody else, looking at exactly the same data. You have to give him incredible credit for that. And if you actually read what Nate Silver wrote in the days leading up to the election, he actually wrote, he actually wrote that he thought that there was a good chance that Trump would win, that was not reflected in the data because of all these other effects going on. So he actually recognized what was going on in a way that almost nobody else did. But he looked at it. He examined it. He reflected on it as a statistician, not as a commentator, not as a pundit, not as just somebody who has opinions, but as somebody who actually looks at the data, tries to figure it out, and gives you his best estimate for it. Now, yeah, the guy from Billboard was calling it from the get go. Other people, other pundits, were calling it from the get go, but they didn't use science to do it. They didn't use data to do it. They talked to some people. They made an evaluation. They were pundits. Good for them, and good for them to getting it right. Many of them, by the way, got Romney wrong. Right? Many of those same people, predict that Romney would win. I don't know if Scott Adams got it right or wrong, but it wasn't based on polling data. It was based on his own assessment of, yeah, that's fine. That's as a pundit. But if you actually looked at the data, it was hard to predict that Trump would win. And Nate Silva, I think, did the best job of all these people in figuring this out. Now, for example, this study about his analysis of the data, education on income predicted who would vote for Trump. Now, granted, his proxy for education is whether you got a degree or not. That's a decent proxy. It's not a crazy proxy to use. Now, he's not saying why we could argue, although I think it's much more complicated than this, we could argue that, yeah, people who are educated, got lots of degrees, are brainwashed in the system to be collectivists and socialists. So they all voted for Hillary Clinton. That can be an explanation, and he actually presents that as one of the alternative explanations for why education is predicted of who voted against Trump, right, of the people with an education voted against Trump. So I have a huge amount of respect for Nate Silva. And if you read his stuff, you can adjust for the fact that he's a lefty. He is a lefty. He has, you know, leans to the left, but you can adjust for it. But to ignore him, you ignore real data. You ignore real analysis, which you're not going to see anywhere else, certainly not for more. Ann Coulter. Here's another, you know, Ann Coulter reminds me, somebody on the, on the, I hate, I hate Ann Coulter just full disclosure. Can't stand a woman. Cannot stand her. So here's, here's a good, here's a good illustration of the media approach. So here's, so I'm on a, I'm going to, one of our guys at the Institute got me on this video, what do you call it, vlog thing, right, blog. Once in, I need, I need to put power into my Facebook live. Oops, that was good that I caught it because my iPad was gonna, was gonna fail in a minute. All right. So I'm on this video program with this guy who's, I guess, a huge Trump supporter and he's interviewing me and we start talking about, I guess, a free market perspective on Donald Trump. And I said something about immigration, which is a trigger, which is fascinating to me that immigration, you can't have a conversation with people about immigration. You can't talk about it. Not in any kind of sane way. They, it completely triggers them completely. I mean, they go nuts. They freak out. So anyway, I said something about immigration, they got freaked out. And he started talking about 30 million illegal immigrants, 30 million illegal immigrants, there are no 30 million illegal immigrants. So I, you know, so I did what I do. I go research. And where does he get the 30 million illegal immigrants for? He gets it from Ann Coulter. Ann Coulter in a book declared that there are 30 million illegal immigrants in the United States. And where did Ann Coulter get it? She extrapolates from a based on study from 2005, which said that it estimated 20 million illegal immigrants at the time. By the way, a study that has been critiqued and has a lot of problems, a lot of flaws in it. And then what you do is you take that 20 million and you extrapolate forward about how many people come in every year and then they have children and you get to 30 million as a conservative estimate. She says it's probably even higher than that. All right, that's one approach. But it turns out that many other approaches and the estimates of illegal immigrants in the United States range from about, from about six, seven million to Ann Coulter's 30 plus million. And she declared it. And now everybody on the right, everybody on the right is using the 30 million number. Nobody's done the research. Nobody's looked into it. And the answer, of course, is the real answer is we don't know, but it's much more likely to be where most people align on and where the research seems to be strongest and where even some anti-immigration groups quote this number is somewhere between 11 to 12 million. But then people like Ann Coulter said, but wait a minute, it was 11 to 12 million. Actually, according to these numbers, it peaked at 12 million in 2007. What do you mean? It's flat for the last nine years. And the answer to that is, yeah, because a lot of people, a lot of illegals left the country, left the country during the financial crisis. Why did they leave the country? Because of the financial crisis, because the construction jobs that they were working on disappeared and they left. They couldn't get welfare because welfare, you can't get if you're illegal. It's difficult and welfare is not very attractive. So they went back to Mexico. The Mexican economy is done actually not bad. So there are actually jobs over there. So people are being leaving. And if you look at the net, net illegal migration into the United States, it's basically been zero for the last nine years. Everybody's freaking out. That can't be right. Donald Trump told us that this is a big, big problem. That's what the number show. That's what the most respectable number show. You can ignore them. You can, you can just mild off what Ann Coulter tells you. Or you can actually go do some research and at best, what you can say from the research is, we don't know. We don't know. Yeah, I mean, there's a, there was actually, I heard a story about if you want to increase illegal immigration, what you would do is you would invest a lot in infrastructure. So Donald Trump gets his way and invests a billion, a trillion dollars over the next X number of years in infrastructure or whatever the number is. A lot of illegals are going to come into the country because suddenly they'll have jobs. And when the jobs are here, people come in because Americans won't do the jobs. And in some cases, the skilled, the skilled manual labor jobs like welders, like welders, we just don't have Americans to do it. Now, we don't know how many illegals are here is the right answer. But you can also say, we don't know certainly what the number of illegals you can say the most reasonable estimate out there is somewhere between 11 to 12 million. It's increasing right now, because as the US economy recovers, as more jobs are created over the last few months, years, the last couple of years, more people have come into the country. The flow of migrants into the United States is very responsive to the state of the economy. And indeed, with Donald Trump's election, more people are going to come into the country because A, they want to get in before he gets sworn in, because they fear the wall, although I wouldn't if I were them, there'll be plenty of ways to get around the wall. But I guess they don't fear deportation that much. But also because they expect the economy to recover, the economy to be better, if you really deregulate, if you really lose taxes, the economy would do well. And then there'll be more jobs. So my point is just read our culture if you want, certainly read her, but just know that she is biased, that she is often, often, often wrong, that she is great at attacking the left, and has no defense for her actual positions that doesn't ultimately rely on some form of collectivism and emotionalism. So read her with caution. Read her with caution. And when she gives you a fact, go research it, go study it. This is the same thing you see with trade. If you read a lot of stuff on trade, people attack trade, people claim that trade causes jobs to be lost, people claim, oh, my favorite one, okay, here's my favorite one. Because I also posted a story on this on Facebook. Currency manipulation, currency manipulation. And by the way, I agree that New York Times is wrong as well as Angkolter being wrong. They're both wrong. You have to adjust. Read them both if you want, but adjust. And by the way, if I had to choose between the two, I would rather read the New York Times, not that I would trust the New York Times, any day I'd rather they're more intellectual, they're more intelligent, you know, they're more readable than a lot of stuff on the right ever is. But let me take this one, currency manipulation, right? If you listen to Donald Trump and he listened to the Democrats and he listened to many Republicans, the Chinese have been involved in a massive conspiracy over many years to cause their currency value to decline. So what is the advantage? The cheaper the yuan is, their currency is, the stronger the dollar is, the more we import from China, the cheaper their goods are in the United States in dollar terms. So the more we buy from them, this is how they steal our jobs. It's by driving their currency downwards is how they steal our jobs. And for a long time, Congress and pundits and Trump have been urging the Chinese to let their currency float. So it would reflect the true value, the true value of its relationship with the dollar. And they believe that that would cause the yuan to go up dramatically. And when it would up, it would make Chinese products more expensive. And they would say that would reflect reality. And therefore imports into the United States would go down. And we were so called save American jobs. Now that's, now that's nuts. Because it's just factually wrong. It's factually wrong. Since the global financial crisis, or at least since 2009, 10, the Chinese government has been propping its currency up. Because they, unlike many people in the United States realize that a strong currency is actually good. Because it allows you to import things cheaply. And it reflects, should reflect a strong economy. But the economy in China has been weak. And they've been stimulating it with printing massive amounts of money. That printing massive amounts of money should devalue the currency. So they've been propping it up. And there was a story this week that as they allow it to float, what's happening is that the currency is collapsing. It's going down. So it's doing the exact opposite of what Trump and the Democrats, and I say that on purpose because the Democrats and Trump are being arguing the same thing, just like the whole fair trade, for those of you who believe in fair trade. That is a leftist term, an anti-trade term that was invented by the left in order to impose labor and environmental regulations on third world countries to cripple them. So the whole country manipulation, the Washington had a story. China struggles to steady Yuan's decline, decline. The opposite of everything people have been saying. You want to trust the news? You want to trust the news that Donald Trump reads? This is the kind of stuff you get. You get blatant falsehood about something simple like which direction would the currency go if you let it float. And here it's night of day. It's exact opposite of what they've been arguing. So you've got to be careful, guys. You've got to be careful. All right, so let's talk quickly because I thought I wouldn't have enough to say today, and I'm not going to even cover. All right, so this is the deal. We're going to have to push out globalism to next time. Next time I'll talk about globalism. I mean, in some way it's a continuation of this topic, but I really keep pushing out this discussion of God and Iran, and I really need to discuss this. I really need to talk about it. So, okay, so I'm going to take a short break, just to clear my mind and switch topics. And we're going to talk about an op-ed that was published in the Wall Street Journal called Iran Freedom. No, no, that's the latest. The op-ed was called Can You Love God and Iran? So we're going to devote the last 20 minutes discussing this op-ed and I'll be right back after this break. And those of you who are Facebook live, go get a drink, go browse Facebook. We'll be back in basically in three minutes. Talk to you then. All right, so we're going to talk about an op-ed that was published in the Wall Street Journal called Can You Love God and Iran? Oh, more commercials. We'll be right back then in a few seconds. All right, now we're on. Cool. Okay, we're talking about this op-ed that was published on November 10th. You can find it on the Wall Street Journal website. Although, you need to have a subscription to read the Wall Street Journal, so I'm not sure if you can get it for free. It was published on November 10th. Can You Love God and Iran? The subtitle, which I think is kind of a friend claims the atheist philosopher at one point saw their appeal of spirituality. I'll talk about that in a minute. All right, so the op-ed starts off by saying, look, and I'm going to I'm going to go over the op-ed and kind of analyze it a little bit and then and then give a few other responses and stuff. But you know, I think, I think, okay, you'll you'll figure it out. So the op-ed asks, you know, Ayn Rand said the contradictions don't exist. And it seems to be a contradiction between her philosophy and religion, between reason and faith. And yet it goes on to say her followers, you know, there are many people who think that, you know, you can love Alashrugged in the Bible. Now, let me just say, and this goes to the point made earlier, people can hold contradictions. People hold contradictions all the time. People are compartmentalized. So there's a difference between asking the question, can you, in reason, philosophically, have objectivism and faith together? Have objectivism and religion together? And the answer to that is unequivocally no. To ask you the question, can you love Ayn Rand and God? That's emotion. Sure, emotions can hold contradictions. It's not good for you. It's not good for you to hold a contradiction. It's not pro-life to have a contradiction, but you can hold it. Right? You can, you know, if you're asking, so the op-ed kind of, what is it asking? Is, can I hold the contradiction? Yes. Can you love Ayn Rand and God? Sure. I know a lot of Christians and religious Jews and my guess is some Muslims who are both religious and love Ayn Rand. Are they objectivist? Did they get Ayn Rand's philosophy? No, because objectivism rejects faith. It rejects faith. It doesn't say faith is not important. It's marginalized. No, we reject faith. We view before everything should be brought before reason. You should be able to prove in reason everything. And since God can only be, you know, you can only believe in God based on faith. There is no evidence for God. There is no reason case for God. Then religion is out. God is out. So, but that doesn't stop. Again, many religionists from Ayn Rand and Ayn Rand, and I'm all for that. I think that's great. So, I get people who tell me I'm a Christian objectivist. Now, that's a contradiction of terms. You cannot be a Christian objectivist. But I would rather you be a Christian who's been influenced by objectivist ideas than a Christian who hasn't. I like to say, I'd rather you be a Christian objectivist than a Christian Christian. But really, there's no such thing as a Christian objectivist. It's just an objectivist and a Christian. And then there are all kinds of Christians. The Christians who take their religious more seriously and Christians who take their religion less seriously. The Christians who follow biblical interpretation all the way. And the Christians who, you know, take what's convenient and what's nice and what's consistent, and then they take some stuff from Ayn Rand. But there is no, there's no Christian objectivist. But you can love both. You can be influenced by Ayn Rand. Okay, later in the op-ed, the author writes, it's a shame that Rand's secularism promotes some to reject the rest of objectivism. So it's a shame that Rand's secularism, the fact that she's an atheist, prompts some to reject the rest of objectivism. There is no rest of objectivism. Objectivism is not this, I don't know, mishmash of stuff in there. And you get to choose, I'll take that one. And I'll take that one. I don't like the epistemology. Nah, I won't have the epistemology. The metaphysics, well, it's not consistent with our religion. So am I going to have that? I'll take, I'll take three of the virtues but not the other four. Right? That doesn't work that way. Objectivism is a philosophy. It's a whole. It's a systematic philosophy. It's integrated completely. You can't pick and choose and be an objectivist. Her position on political freedom does not stand alone. You cannot say I accept objectivist position on political freedom but I reject her ethics. Without her ethics, her position on political liberty, political freedom, is floating. It's unattached. It's not logically sustainable. And this is a critique of libertarianism. This is my critique of libertarianism. Without a philosophical foundation, there is no case for liberty. Without a philosophical foundation, there is no case for freedom. If you're religious, if you're epistemology and morality are religious base, you cannot be consistently pro-freedom. Not intellectually, not logically. There are people who are. Because ultimately, they're compartmentalized. But they cannot make a logical case for freedom based on these religious fundamentals. In logic, it doesn't hold. So if you take philosophy seriously, if you take objectivism seriously, then there is no reject the rest of objectivism. I mean, the op-ed continues. There's a teenager in Soviet Russia, Rand, decided that the concept of God is decreting to man. I mean, that sounds like, well, she just decided one day. I mean, that might be true when she was a child. But then, I ran, went on to develop an entire philosophy based on the idea of reason, efficacy of reason. She defined reason, she articulated reason, she explained how epistemology, epistemologically human consciousness works to discover concept. She has a whole theory of concept formation based on the idea of reason. She rejects faith philosophically, logically. It's not that she's just decided one day there's no God entail with that. And maybe, even if she did as a child, that's not her mature understanding of it. And to give that no credence. And then it continues going on. Right? Here's the paragraph. Though her atheism never wavered. Well, of course it didn't waver. Of course it didn't waver. How could it waver? When? If philosophy was so integrated. It was all the whole. That would be like, though her belief in capitalism never wavered, or her belief in rational egoism never wavered. Atheism is not just something tagged on to objectivism. It is an essential part of their epistemology because of the rejection of faith. And then there's the story by Steve Mariotti, who I know that heard the story from. And I kind of, you know, questioned how he remembered the story about he telling Ayn Rand after she had, he knew Ayn Rand and he spent some time with her. And when her husband, Frank O'Connor, died, he told her that, you know, that she would see Frank again, because Steve is religious, right? Steve is Christian. And she would see Frank again, you know, in a spiritual sense. And he told me that Rand replied, I hope you're right. Maybe you are. I will find out soon enough. Now she was kidding. And he knows that and that's how he described it, right? But that didn't make it into the article. No, it just made it into, oh, she had a moment of doubt. Really? And then the whole, the whole, you know, positioning of objectivism versus spirituality. There's nothing against spirituality and objectivism. What you mean by spirituality is that of consciousness. I'm a spiritual person. You know, I, when I listen to, oops, when I listen to, hopefully there's still power in my opinion, when I listen to Rahmani enough, that's a spiritual experience. When I listen to Beethoven, it's a spiritual experience. And then towards the end of the article, more important, militant atheism doesn't spring from the pages of Rand's fiction. Really? All right, here we go. This is from Uncle Garte's letter to the editor, which he can read, published on November 17th. In Alashrug, those responsible for the destruction of capitalism and civilization are the mystics of spirit and of muscle, which includes religionists of all type, of all stripes. The hero argues against their doctrine of original sin and of self-sacrifice for the sake of one's neighbor with alleged higher power, challenging the very intelligibility of the concept of God itself. He argues the better people of the world to discard faith and embrace a new philosophy of life and happiness devoid of appeal to the supernatural. In other words, yeah, if you read Alashrug and you skip Galt's speech, then maybe the atheism doesn't come across. In We The Living, this is from, this is again from Ankar, but not from the letter because it didn't make it into the letter. In Now In We The Living, a favorite question the hero in Kira asks people is whether they believe in God and quote, if they say they do then I know they don't believe in life. Her sister Lydia retreats into religion, never having tried to embrace this world or life. Ah, so the fact that Iron Man was an atheist is not hidden in the pages of Alashrug. It's not hidden in the pages of We The Living. It's not hidden in her nonfiction. She didn't make a big deal out of it. Now why didn't she make a big deal out of it? Right? Why didn't she make a big deal out of it? She didn't make a big deal out of it because it wasn't a big deal. In the 40s and 50s religion was in decline. In the 40s and 50s the at least the perception was that religion was not a threat to freedom and indeed secularism, reason, science were on the ascent. But once that changed in the 1970s and Iron Man realized that religion was a political force, a significant political force. She reversed and she made a big deal out of religion. Indeed in 1980 Iron Man did not vote for Ronald Reagan because not only because he held religious beliefs particularly about abortion, which which he found horrific, the abortion part. But more importantly than that, she feared, a fear that completely came true and I think I think has manifested in the election of Donald Trump, that the moral majority would take over the Republican Party and bring religion into that party, establish religion as a primary in that political party. And she was of course right. So because she feared religion, particularly in politics so much and she saw it's a scent, she didn't vote for Ronald Reagan. Now, those of you who think she would have voted for Donald Trump, you guys are completely and utterly delusional with all due respect. Now again, you can love Iron Man and and I know a lot of people listening to the show are religious. Many of you believe in God and we can agree on a lot of stuff and I have a huge amount of respect for many of you because you see much of the truth but you cannot diminish the fact that you're not fully objectivist. That's the reality. To be fully objectivist one has to accept that. Reason is one's guide in life. One has to accept both the epistemology and the ethics. It goes on to say, Iron Man's rejection of our ancestors' Judaism in favor of secularism. Again, she didn't reject her ancestors' Judaism in favor of secularism as if Iron Man was a secular risk of just a conventional type. She rejected Judaism and Christianity and Contianism and Hegelianism and existentialism for a philosophy called objectivism which is systematically defined from metaphysics to aesthetics and it's all beautifully integrated as if you read Opa, Objectivism of the Philosophy of Iron Man by Lena Peacock. You could see the beauty and the integration of course it's all in Atlas Shrug. It's not just, she wasn't just a secularist. Her views were not secular views in a sense of secular people in the world around us. She was a philosopher presented a new philosophy and that philosophy rejects religion. It's incompatible with religion. Her secular view has likely been overstated. Really? Anyway, her fiction was for many an activator to learn about economic and political liberty. Absolutely. Absolutely. So because of Iron Man, many within the libertarian and other parts of the world out there have become more free markets. I mean, there's a question in my mind. She changed people's attitudes towards the word capitalism. She changed people's attitudes towards free markets. In my view, and I can't prove this, but I suspect Donald Reagan wouldn't have been elected in 1980 if not for Iron Man. She created her and Milton Friedman, created the atmosphere, the vocabulary, the attitude towards capitalism that made it possible for Ronald Reagan to win the election in 1980, right? But there's a difference. And this is why I say, go out there if you're religious, read Iron Man. Challenge yourself. Challenge yourself. Get your ideas pushed a little bit. She'll push them. She'll challenge your religiosity. And at the end of the day, if you want to stay religious, you stay religious. I certainly don't believe in forcing people to accept a philosophy. But I think you'll be a better person for having read Iron Man, even if you stay religious. So again, I'm not against people loving Iron Man and God. But don't pretend that there isn't a philosophy here. Now, I think the real sad thing about this is that this is written by the CEO of the Atlas Society. So it's an organization that presents itself as objectivist, as philosophical, as understanding the philosophy of objectivism. And this article completely undercuts Iron Man, completely undercuts who and what she was, completely undercuts the role of philosophy in life. I mean, basically the theme of this article is who cares about philosophy? Really, who cares about epistemology? Certainly. Don't, let's not make too big of a deal of reason. We don't want to emphasize reason too much. I mean, that's the reality of this article. And yet, what is the theme of Atlas Shrugged? This book that so many religious people love. What is the theme of the book? It's not political liberty. It's not economic freedom. It's not what happens when the state over regulates. It's the role of the mind in human life, of the mind, of reason, of man's capacity to think and whether he uses that capacity or not. The role of the mind. That's the theme of Atlas Shrugged. Now, some people don't get it and they read Atlas Shrugged and they don't get that that's the theme and they never will. But we as objectivists or those people who call themselves objectivists, we can't undercut the very theme of the novel by telling people, no, no, it's just about politics and liberty. And as long as you accept politics and liberty, you're cool. No, it's not cool. Well, I mean, you are cool, I guess, but there's no philosophy here. You're giving up on a whole philosophy. That's what we should be pitching. Hey, you think a liberty and freedom are good. Rational egoism and reason, that's the fundamental basis for liberty and freedom. And this is why I think partially why, you know, the Atlas Society has historically had a very different attitude towards libertarians. They don't take ideas and philosophy seriously. They don't. Because if they did, they wouldn't publish this article. But that's what it's reflective of. All right. So on that note, have a great week. I don't know when I'm broadcasting next, because I'm on a long trip. And by the way, if you're in Europe, I'm going to be in eight countries in 10 days, giving out, I don't know, 10 talks, I'm going to be. So just for the Europeans, I'm going to be in, where am I starting in London, in Zurich, in Prague, in Waterdam, in Sofia, Stockholm, Berlin and Copenhagen. Right? So I'll be in all those places. And I'm not sure what exactly I'm going to broadcast, how I'm going to broadcast whether it's going to be a taped show, whether it's going to be live show, where it's going to be from, how I'm going to do the Facebook live, all of that. But I'm going to try to get all that done and do it live from somewhere. So wish me luck on this trip. It's pretty intense. I'm also going to South Florida and some other places. But hopefully, those of you from Europe, I will get to see you then. And globalism, I want to talk about globalism and I want to talk about democracy. I think there's a lot of confusion about both. All right. Talk to you next week. And don't forget, don't forget to do two things before we finish. Two things I want you to do. One, is I want you to share the show. And I want you to help market the show. And I want you to tell people about the show. And I want you to get your friends and your enemies and people who you're associated with and your people on Facebook and Twitter to listen to the show, this show and all the shows before it. And second is I want you to help fund the show. This show depends on contributions from you. You can go to the ai-rand.org slash support and make a contribution. You can make a weekly contribution, a monthly contribution, a one-time contribution. You can put in in the field there, say it's for the radio show. But help keep this show going. Help keep me in airplanes. So I keep advocating for a fully systematic integrated philosophy for living on earth. You know why she said it was philosophy for living on earth? Why she added on earth to differentiate it from religion? Not for living in the afterlife, but we're living now, right now, here on this planet. All right. See y'all talk to y'all sometime next week. Bye from the Iran Brook show.