 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Brookshow. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Brookshow on this Sunday. Beautiful Sunday in Puerto Rico. Hope all of you are having a fantastic weekend. Things are great over here. World Cup results. I mean, the two teams that were supposed to win won today. Good games. I enjoyed. I didn't see. Well, I don't know. One, two games. There's only one game. What am I talking about? The second game is on right now. The second game I'm not going to be able to watch because of you guys. It's your fault. Anyway, France won today. That was to be expected. Yesterday, the two teams that were expected to win won the USA Lost, but they lost a very good Dutch team. And what was the other game? The other game was, I forget, but the team was supposed to win. Somebody played Australia. Argentina played Australia, and it was fun to watch. That was a fun one to watch because Messi had some, you know, Messi, the best player in the world over the last 15 or so years, had some just amazing plays, and it was just a fun, when Messi's really on top of it, Messi is super fun to watch. He makes soccer, football, however you want to call it. He makes it a great game and a fun game and super enjoyable. So yeah, hopefully you guys are enjoying the World Cup. It's the only football really I ever watch. It's too tight-consuming otherwise, sports generally, but the World Cup is fun. The French beat Poland today. The French beat Poland. Two beautiful goals from the French. I mean, they won 3-1. I saw two goals and both goals were pretty beautiful. So it was definitely fun. Roland is in the Swiss Alps, skiing, I assume, having a good time, good for you, Roland. He seems to be all over the place. I mean, he seems to be traveling constantly, not quite as much as I travel, but I think it's more vacation time than I do. I don't know. I hope you're having a blast in Switzerland, Roland. I'll be in Switzerland in, I'm speaking in Zurich in March, early March, like the first week in March, I'm giving a talk at Zurich. So for those of you in Switzerland, out there, I hope you can make my talk in Zurich. It should be fun. All right. What else did I want to say? World Cup, yes. Iran. So rumors have it, or that one source has it. The Attorney General in Iran has announced the dismantling of the morality police. Morality police. It's, it's every, you know, Catholic integralists' wet dream is to have a morality police in the United States. So morality police. And they're talking about dismantling it. I just want to, I wanted to read you some, let me see if I can find it. Oops, where did I put it? It's here somewhere. It's here somewhere. There it is. So headline was, Iran, the dismantling of morality police amid ongoing protests. So this is the response of the, of the regime. You know, and this is the response of at least one demonstrator, a few demonstrators to the potential dismantling of the morality police. This is the police force that was responsible for the killing of the Iranian woman, who wasn't wearing a hijab right. This is the, these are the people responsible for the strict dress codes and enforcing those dress codes. And they are going to dismantle. And there's even discussion, even discussion. They're going to debate whether they might loosen up the hijab wearing laws, the, the, the law that mandates that women in public wear the hijab. This is what some, some of the demonstrators were saying because demonstrators are continuing today. Good for them. She said, just because the government has decided dismantle morality police, it doesn't mean the protests are ending. Even the government saying the hijab is a personal choice is not enough. People know Iran has no future with the government, with this government in power. We will see more people from different factions of Iranian society, moderate and traditional coming out in support of women to get more of their rights back. Wow, people are talking about rights. Another woman said, we the protesters don't care about no hijab anymore. We've been going without hijab for the past 70 days. A revolution is what we have. Hijab was the start of it. And we don't want anything, anything less. But death for the dictator and a regime change. I mean, how cool is that? How cool is that? You've got to love these women. This is fantastic. I mean, these are real revolutionaries. They're not going to be any no compromising. You know, give me a little bit of my demands and that's fine. You know, if I just, this is just about clothes. This is just about, no, this is a revolution. We do not want to be ruled in the theocracy. We do not want a dictator. We do not want mullahs deciding our fate. We want this regime gone. That is the message of women in Iran, even as the Iranian regime seems to be compromising. And I think the compromises there, you can kind of imagine what's going on. I think there were instructions to increase the violence against the protesters. There were probably instructions to start shooting them and killing them. And two things held them back. One is the fact that everything would have been on iPhones. Everything would have been on video. Everything would have been blasted around the world and around Iran. And they were worried about making things worse. And second is, I think some of the soldiers, some of the members of the National Guard, balked. I think they said, we're not going to shoot. My daughter might be in that crowd. My wife, my mother might be in that crowd. We're not going to shoot. We're not going to shoot our own people. We're not going to shoot our own women. And I think that's when revolutions start succeeding is when the soldiers won't shoot their own. When the soldiers start defecting and we've seen some stories coming out of Iran over the last week or so of soldiers defecting. That's when you get a revolution. So, wow, this is fantastic. Good for the Iranians. Good to see the regime starting to compromise, starting to soften, starting to give in. But this woman says, he job was the start of it and we don't want anything, anything less but death for the dictator and a regime change. Got to love him. Got to love him. All right. That is in Iran. In the meantime, in the good old United States, a former president and leading candidate for the 2024 election has said that since Twitter suppressed the Hunter Biden story, clearly the election was stolen and as a consequence of the election be stolen, even the Constitution shouldn't prevent either being a new election or just installing him as president. So, yeah, Republicans today are not condemning him. A lot of silence from Republicans. It's just unbelievable about how the Republican Party, which never was big on ideas, but has become a personality cult and nothing else. A personality cult that will basically support or at least not question what the leader, what the personality at the head actually says. So, we have nothing from Republicans about Trump's horrible tweet on his truth network. Truth network. Talk about 1984. In 1984, for example, Trump's truth network is a good 1984 doublespeak. The truth network that only publishes untruths that's pretty good. All right. Put all that aside. We'll talk about new stuff next time. We've got a bunch of stuff to talk about today. I'm going to flip the order of things a little bit. But before that, let me just remind you, thank you, Liam, that you can use the super chat to ask questions. Not a lot of people watching live right now, which is kind of interesting. Maybe it's too early on a Sunday. I don't know. But, you know, so we do have super chat available. You can ask questions on the super chat. I will answer them at the end of the show. $20 or more get priority. They always get answered. And so, yeah, bring them on and ask questions. And we have a goal. The goal is $650. Thanks to Liam. We've already chipped like $60 off of that. Liam and Michael, we've already chipped about $60 off of that. It's a $590 left to go. But that's a lot of money. So think about it. Value for value. All right. Let's see. What else do we have? Yes. So if you want to support the show on a regular basis, please do so on your onbookshow.com. Support on Patreon, subscribe star. Monthly support is greatly valued. You can also become a member of the onbookshow. Click on the bottom. Then you can become a member. I will be doing a member's only show. I'll figure out when this week. I'll let you know in one of the next few shows when the member's only show will be. But there will be a member's only show sometime in December. All right. Let's see. What do we want to do? Yeah. Let's flip the order. I'm going to start with chatGPT. So I don't know how many of you know what chatGPT is. I don't know that much about chatGPT. I've kind of been reading a lot about it, reading people's experiences of it. But chatGPT is basically it's an AI driven query engine where you can go and you can have conversations with the AI. You can ask it questions. You can ask it to do things. And it is natural language. So you ask it in natural language. And it answers in natural language. So I've read some of the stuff. And we'll be doing, I think, more shows about this in the future because it truly is super interesting, super exciting, a little creepy, a little creepy, right? A little creepy, as you'll see. But it's truly amazing. It is about AI and the advances they have made, the ability of the AI to sound like a human being, the sentence structure, the understanding of the questions that it's being asked, the interesting responses. Somebody, for example, asked it to take the similar amount by Jesus, take the text from the New Testament, and rewrite it as if Ayn Rand was writing it. That's pretty cool that somebody thought of that. And the response, I don't have it in front of me, but the response was actually pretty good. It was something that I think that if you'd given it to a human being who knew about Ayn Rand, I think it is the kind of thing that it is very similar to the way a human being would have changed what Jesus said into kind of reflecting Ayn Rand values. Oh, yeah, I want to do this one second. So, yeah, for some reason I can't get the actual sermon on the Mount, the chat. Let me just, oh, I've got a typo. Let me just check one thing and then see if I can get it up for you. No, I can't, yeah, I can't find it. But I did, I read it yesterday. And it was, wow, it was pretty amazing. I've seen a lot of other people do things with it. It answer questions that are truly amazing. I think now we are getting very close to the ability to create, in a sense, a super app. A super app that basically you communicate verbally and you basically tell the super app, you know, I think I'm going vacation and March. Can you give me flight options, hotels? Check the weather and see if it's better to be in Barcelona. I'm a drid during that period of time. Give me options for both or you choose based on the weather and based on the kind of weather you know I like, which is the better place. Book me cars from the airport. Arrange the trip to happen. Give me options for all of those and be ready to book them all for me. Right? Or a personal assistant basically, AI personal assistant basically keeps your entire calendar, you know, that runs all your travel, that answers all your kind of Google kind of questions, all instantaneously quickly understood, all in natural language without having to formulate, okay, how do I ask the question? You just ask it the way you would ask a human being. A lot of people are freaking out because it sounds so much like a human being and there's a whole view out there, there's a whole belief out there among people including Elon Musk that AI is a real threat, that AI can ultimately become conscious and have its own view of the world and this is expressed with singularity and the whole view of singularity so that AI will become conscious, will have its own values and therefore like in 2001, start running the planet and since it would be interconnected throughout, since it will have all the knowledge available on the internet, it'll be smarter, better, more effective than any human being and will control everything. Chat, I guess somebody ran a IQ test on chat, GPT. I think this tells you a little bit about the value of IQ tests anyway. But they ran an IQ test on chat, GPT and came out with IQ of about 85. So well below average of, I think average is about 105 or just over 100. So well below average but still pretty respectful, respectable but with no consciousness and no free will. So while I know that AI, artificial intelligence and oxymoron, you can't have intelligence that's artificial, intelligence is a feature of a biological entity, intelligence is a feature of a particular type of consciousness, intelligence cannot exist without free will, intelligence is an aspect of reason. There is such a thing as AI, not artificial intelligence, but let's just call it technology that is driven by AI, technology that is being built around computers being able to deal with massive quantities of data, be able to be absolutely phenomenal at patent recognition, absolutely amazing at being able to both understand you and communicate. And women, 2022, going on to 2023, one can only just imagine, this is the first chat AI that is impressive, that is actually has impressive features and comes across as human and does actually respond in an intelligent way to questions asked it, that is not just, and this is just unleashed on the world, if you will, it was made public and you can play around with it. It required me to have to submit some kind of email explaining why I wanted to play around with it. So I haven't had a chance to first-hand experience it, but I've had other people's interactions with it and they are amazing, they are truly amazing. I wonder if I can get the chat GPT to start doing Twitter posts for me. I'll just say, you know, here are my ideas, now generate Twitter posts based on the headline in the newspaper every day. See how that'll go. It is, so it is amazing and I think the most amazing thing about it, the most striking things about it is the potential that this now reveals and how spooky that potential is and how few inducing I think that is going to be. I think we're heading towards an AI and I'm calling it AI to avoid the issue of artificial intelligence, it's called an AI. We're heading towards an AI revolution. We're heading towards computer, we have so much computing power and we have partially because of the internet and because of social media and because we so freely give our information is out there. AI has, these algorithms now have so much information from which to quote, learn and we're going to have to figure out a new language to talk about what computers do because yes, I know computers don't learn in the sense of human beings learn but they do something, they discover patterns, they discover in a sense new information embedded in information. It wouldn't call it exactly induction but they can see connections and what's going to happen is going to be truly astounding. It depends on increasing computer power. We need ever more powerful computers but it looks like we're going to get them. Every time the world goes through a phase of it's the end of Moore's Law. There's a new technology that breaks through and Moore's Law continues. The doubling of computer power every two years, is that right? I think that's right. That seems to be continuing. The new technologies around chip mini-fracturing seems to be able to keep up with Moore's Law. At some point maybe there's a physical barrier to Moore's Law but we haven't found it yet and if you combine that with sheer computing power with massive amounts of information and then the ability to program algorithms that in a sense teach computers to be able to or program computers to be able to see recognition of patterns to see connections between things then it is truly astounding. It'll make it possible for us to have amazing progress in science. It's already true that a computer algorithm like this can identify breast cancer on an MRI sooner than a human doctor with years and years and years of experience. It is true today that because of this kind of computer power and because of this kind of algorithms which we call AI, computers can now scan pharmaceuticals and molecular combinations in order to make predictions about which drugs will work on what diseases, what combinations of molecules will work on what diseases, particularly as we become more specialized in terms of the drugs we use, in terms of genetics. We can now take your entire... It's not just speed, it's the ability to recognize patterns which computers could not do and it's ability to recognize patterns and then create a new pattern recognition based on the patterns you've recognized. So it's very similar to how human beings learn. Again, this is not about being conscious, it's not about live, it's not about replacing human beings, but it is about replacing human beings in terms of being able to do things faster, more accurately and with more data than human beings can. So this is going to enhance human life, it's going to make us more productive, it's going to advance science, it's going to take the data that we have, I don't know about physics, it'll take the data that we have certainly in biology and make it much, much easier for us to extract from that data real knowledge, it makes it easier for us to use our intelligence. Humans will always be in the loop, first of all because you have to program it, secondly because at the end of the day you have to act on it, you have to interpret it and you have to do something with it. So again, super exciting, super exciting. I think it's more than just a calculator for speech. I think it's more than a calculator for speech. Because we can get the computer to do more than just be a calculator for speech. Maybe it's a calculator for concept formation, maybe it's a calculator for pattern recognition, which concept formation to some extent is, emitting measurements, seeing similarities, emitting measurements, why can't you program that with enough and why can't you teach it to do that? So, I don't know, right? This is super interesting and now my area of expertise clearly, holograms already exist, holograms are already pretty amazing, holograms I don't think require AI, but holograms are really, really amazing. And yeah, I am super excited about this, not because again, I think that this replaces human beings, not because I think this is dangerous, I don't think it is, although in the wrong hands it always could be, but because I think that it has now the potential to make us more efficient, right? It makes, it could be massively forward in terms of production, in terms of productivity, in terms of efficiency, in terms of, again, science. So yeah, this is fantastic news, right? Fantastic news. By the way, holograms, I don't know, my wife went to see this concert where they created a hologram on stage of Maria Callas, it was a great opera singer, and she sang arias, and it was truly stunning. That is, the hologram was so good, it was difficult not to imagine it was Maria Callas, and remember Maria Callas died a long time ago, this is not some modern video, this is an old video that they took, created a hologram, managed to have her facial expressions matched up with the arias she was singing, her body expressions, her movement, and after a while, my wife said, it felt like there was Maria Callas. What an opportunity to see Maria Callas live, right? And that was due to hologramic technologies. These technologies are stunning, and they're getting unbelievably better, and, you know, we've only had computers, I mean, real computers with chips and stuff, right, with semiconductors, what, since the late 60s? So, for 60 years, so as long as I'm alive, I mean, now project 200 years into the future, or if things are going exponentially, take the last 60 years and project them into the next 60 years, and it's mind-boggling what is possible. It truly is mind-boggling what is possible, and so when I see these things like chat GPT, and I've already seen critics where you can ask it certain questions, and it trips up, and you can easily get into these logical loops where it can't find a way out because it doesn't know what to do with them, and there are lots of ways you can trip it up, but this is new technology. It's brand new, and the potential is unbelievable, and together with the increase in computing power, wow, sort of a nuclear war, sort of a complete civilization of collapse, civilization of collapse, which I do not see coming, this is stunning technology, and the world is going to get better in spite of the rotten philosophy just because technology keeps moving us forward, whether we like it or not for now. It doesn't have to be like that. We could destroy it all, right? Richard said, computer used to be a job description before computing machines, yes. If you remember, there was a movie about the computers for Apollo. There was these women who were phenomenal in doing calculations in their head, and they would compute stuff in real time for the Apollo program. Just from that to today, where our iPhone is many, many, many times more powerful than the actual computer that they used to send men to the moon, the advances are so stunning, just in the last 50 years, just imagine what the next 50 years are going to be. Yeah, the movie is called Hidden Figures, excellent movie, excellent movie, which also has an anti-racist bento. It's a heroic movie. It's an interesting movie on history that I didn't know, definitely worth watching, so I encourage you to see it called Hidden Figures. Yeah, slide rulers were very popular. Slide rulers were just on the way out when I was in high school. All right, let's see. We've got a couple of questions on this topic, I think, so Jennifer says, do you think they could be a danger of someone getting emotionally attached in AI and substituted for real human relationship? Yes, absolutely, I think so. I think probably even today, I think probably even this chat GPT could become something like that, I guess with the right programming or the right focus. It's got enough of a tone to it, a human tone to it, a responsiveness to it that, yes, psychologically, I mean, I talked about this earlier. I talked on a previous show about, like, how because of the industrial revolution we've equated men and women because now everything is about about the mind, jobs about the mind, and therefore the differences between men and women in terms of work performance have been eviscerated and that men in a sense, women have adopted because to them it's liberation, to them it's amazing, to them it's now we can do, we can use our mind. And this is amazing. For men, it's been difficult to adjust because they always had a particular role in the world and their role was clear and everything was clear and they, you know, in these intermediate generations where it's somewhere in the middle where women quite haven't got to that point but they're moving in that direction and men don't know how to handle it. And I said that one of the issues was how do people adjust and how do men adjust, and men need to adjust. And in their relationships with women to the fact that from a work perspective, from a productivity perspective, there is no difference. There is no difference. A woman can be making a lot more money and you can be more productive than you. You know, you can't base a relationship on their need for you. On the other hand, similar to that I think that as we introduce these new kind of technologies, particularly a technology like this which I think can be truly revolutionary, it's going to take people a time to catch up and people will do all kinds of stupid things with this. As it is introduced and as it appears in the culture, a lot of dumb stuff will happen. Khmetija, thank you, really appreciate the support. So yes, I can think people will substitute AI for relationships, but already at least two movies, I haven't seen them, but I know that they exist. These two movies where a human being falls in love with his AI, with his computer. And it's kind of sad. I think the reason I didn't see it is because it's kind of sad. Ian says, chat GPT is super impressive, but don't read too much into it. Read Gary Marcus's substack on this topic. Yeah, I mean, look, I'm not reading too much into it, but it is just the beginning. That's the thing. We're just starting. And it will be able to do a lot more in five years and it'll be able to do even more than that, particularly if it grows exponentially, five years from that. And this can be used for evil. AI can just deal with quantities of information and kind of information that human beings can't in a way that can support an oppressive police state. China is investing heavily in AI as a tool to monitor everything its people do. Obviously, our own companies, Twitter, Facebook, and in China, WeChat and Tencent are investing heavily in AI to be able to improve the algorithms so that they can feed you in terms of the feed better contact that better actually matches your interest. So there is... My point is not that this is... I mean, first of all, this does seem like a breakthrough and it does seem like it's pretty impressive and cool, but this kind of technology can be a game-changer technologically in the future. This is just giving us a hint of what is actually possible. And people have been talking about the potential of AI for a long time, and I think AI has done some amazing thing in the background. Self-driving cars requires the integration of massive quantities of information. You know, and we've never had a machine do that kind of stuff and it's happening again in medicine and other places. But to have that now in kind of natural language query is very, very cool. And I think, again, will ultimately result in the availability of super apps, and I think super apps are super cool. I mean, I want a super app. I don't want to have to go to Google and Twitter and what is it, Travelocity and Tripit and American Airlines' website, and I want the computer to do it all for me. I literally want to be able to tell the computer what in general I want, and for it to make three proposals and for me to say pick number one, just in a sense like my human assistant does, but imagine if a computer could just do it. All right, let's see. That was chat GPT. All right, let's talk about this topic. Let's talk about Zionism. I wasn't going to be satisfied yesterday with the discussion of anti-Semitism and a lot of people, well, not a lot of people. Some people in the question, in the comment section raised the issue of Zionism and I guess it was also raised in the chat, but I didn't respond because it wasn't a super chat question. But I figured we might as well address Zionism given that we just did anti-Semitism and we talk about it and talk about it in the context of anti-Semitism. Generally, I think the point of the show yesterday was we're individualists. We value individuals. We don't treat people as tribes. People out there are tribal. One of the tribal groups is Jews. They view themselves as a tribe. But it's one thing to view yourself as belonging to a tribe and it's not, you know, this is kind of a very diverse tribe. It's a very kind of strange tribe. It's a tribe unified by some affiliation. It's a kind of religion that none of them agree about. It's a kind of a tribe that is affiliated around a culture. But the culture is very diverse, particularly once you bring in Jews from other parts of the world, from Northern Africa, from Asia, from, you know, all over the world. It becomes a very diverse culture but it has certain similarities and it has a certain sense of religion. And so it becomes like an identifier, but like I'm French, I'm, you know, it's kind of a nation. You could view it as a nation. So what's really horrific is when we start evaluating individuals within a tribe, based on our racist conceptions of the tribe as a whole. So we don't treat individuals as individuals anymore. We treat individuals as members of tribes and then we demean those tribes. We come up with all kind of nasty things to say about those tribes. And then we prosecute them. So it's one thing just to say nasty things about them. It's next is persecution. And anti-Semitism is the persecution of individual Jews, individual members of this group based on a hatred of the group, based on a completely irrational, out of nowhere, hatred of the group. And anti-Semitism is unique in the sense that this particular group of people has been hated since, well, not quite since the beginning of Christianity, but since very, for 2,000 years. For 2,000 years, this particular group of people, this particular grouping of people, this particular nation, tribe, this particular culture, this particular religion has been constantly, constantly being... there's been violence against it. And this is important to understand in the context of Zionism. So Zionism, oh, wait a minute, I had a thing on Zionism here. One second, let me just find it. It's good to have, no, just have something, right? So Zionism is basically Jewish nationalism. Zionism is an idea that the Jews should have their own separate country, that they should have a state, that they are a people, that they are people and therefore deserve a state. Now, I'm against Zionism, sorry, I'm against nationalism, and as a consequence, I'm against Zionism as anism. I'm against Zionism. I don't think Zionism is appropriate. I'll explain why I'm pro-Israel and against Zionism, and even pro-Israel's right of return law and against Zionism in a minute. But this is a nationalistic movement, a nationalistic movement to establish a state, to establish a nation for the Jewish people to the extent that they are a people. What makes the French French? It can't be just geography. What makes the Germans, Germans, the Italians, the Italians? So Zionism is this national movement that came about during the 19th century, during the rise in nationalism in Europe and the establishment of many of the countries that we know today, the establishment of the kind of national entities that we know today that resulted from this rise in nationalism. But the problem was that the Jews were everywhere. They didn't occupy a particular geographic area, whereas the different nationalistic movements that rose in Europe during the 19th century were not just culture or ethnic-based. They were based on geography. They were based on a particular geographic situation, and they said, okay, you know, we are, I don't know, we are Czechs, we all live in this area, we want our own country, and we will need to fight for our own country. Now, I think nationalism is a bad idea. I think having as many nations states as we do is a bad idea. I think Europe would be much better for the fewer nations. I think the world would be better if we had fewer nations. But here the Jewish people come about, and they say we want a nation, but we have no, we're not in any particular place. Now, forever the Jews have been religious Jews and secular Jews, but primarily religious Jews have been have been hockening to, you know, the idea of recreating biblical Israel in what was then called Palestine, or what became known as Palestine under the British. They wanted to return to the ancient homeland and establish a nation there. Why? So any rational human being would have to look at them and say, you guys are crazy. Palestine is a dump. It's a mosquito-infested swamp. There is nothing there, and there are already hundreds of thousands or a couple of hundred thousand of Arabs there living there. They won't like the fact that you're coming. Why go there? What would be the purpose? And I would have to say, we'll get to why I think it's legitimate, but I'd have to say from the perspective of a 19th century Jewish person in Europe who was, you know, of any kind of intellectual means, the answer would be, yeah, why go there? It's insane. Life in Europe is great. Why would we want to go there? We're in the midst of civilization. We're in the most civilized place on the planet. We've got massive advances. We're free to do all these amazing things. Why would we want to go to a land and start from scratch? Why would we have to fight for every inch? Who cares that my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents lived there? What difference does that make to me as an individual? It makes zero difference. And most Jews in the middle of the 19th century rejected the idea that they were a nation. Most Jews in Germany considered themselves Germans. Jews in Poland considered themselves Poles. Jews in Morocco considered themselves Moroccans. Yes, they said next year in Jerusalem, but nobody went, nobody wanted really to go. They were quite comfortable with their lives that they had. So what changed their minds? What brought about the movement, the Zionism that drove them to leave Europe, to leave the comfort of their homes, to leave the comfort of their societies and go to this Godforsaken place in the Middle East? But the rational individual sitting in the mid-19th century would say, no, if I'm going to go anywhere, I'm going to go to America. As most Jews did. I mean, millions of Jews, well, maybe not millions, but maybe it was millions, I don't know what the exact number is, left Europe and went to America. That was the place to go. Why would you want to go to the Middle East? What connection is there between you and this place? Nothing, zero zilchers, nada. Now, if you're religious, sure, but that's mysticism. I can't defend that. There was no basis for that link, that mystical link between the Jewish people and this so-called holy land. So the only thing that would drive you to wanting to go to Israel, with one exception in a minute, is mysticism, superstition, and racism. The attribution of characteristics to you, the attribution of values to you, based on your DNA. But something changed. Something changed in Europe. That changed many Jews' life. Maybe a good example of this is a man by the name of Theodor Herzl. Theodor Herzl was a Viennese Austrian journalist. He was Jewish, but if you'd asked him in the mid-19th century what it meant for him to be Jewish, he wouldn't know. He would say he's probably not Jewish. He was completely assimilated. He was a member of the intelligentsia of Austria. He moved in all the right circles. He was relatively wealthy. He had done well for himself. He was a writer. He was a journalist. He had done well and he was completely assimilated. He considered himself a western, civilized, rational individual. Judaism meant nothing to him. Certainly the religion meant nothing to him. He was an atheist and he believed in a completely western, secular culture. He believed in individualism and believed in reason. I mean, he was a really smart guy. And there was an entire movement among Jews of the late 18th century, going into the 19th century called the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment, which urged Jews to stop being Jewish. Urged Jews to assimilate into western culture, western civilization. What point was there to be Jewish? There was no upside. Why identify yourself based on characteristics that you have no control over? So Jews in the 19th century assimilated, many of them assimilated, and you could not tell the difference. They didn't convert to Christianity because they were atheists. They rejected religion completely and they adopted western habits, western values. They lived successful western lives. But something changed. Something changed to change their mind about their ability to assimilate. Oops, what am I doing? I'm screwing up. And what was that? Well, the big event in the late 19th century that really changed the way people, the way Jews viewed Europe was the Dreyfus trial. Now, Zalmi says the opposition to the Ascalar was just as strong in the East. Yes, I know a lot of Jews that were objected to the Ascalar because a lot of Jews that wanted to be Jewish and they were religious, or they were committed to this nation, they were committed to what it means to be Jewish. They were committed to their religion. Many of them were religious. And I'd say both in the East and in the West of Europe, there was significant both embrace but the embrace of the Ascalar, the embrace of assimilation was primarily among the intellectuals called them the liberals of their time. The secular intellectuals and the rejection of the Ascalar, the rejection of assimilation was particularly among the masses and among the religionists. But the Dreyfus trial really changed things. I don't know how much you know about the Dreyfus trial but the Dreyfus was basically a very senior officer in the French military. And there had been a scandal in the French military where secrets had been revealed to an enemy country. I think it was Germany. And they were looking for somebody to blame and the blame fell on Dreyfus. And there was a famous trial. Theador Herzl, who was the Viennese journalist I mentioned was at that trial covering the trial for his Viennese newspaper. And what became evident in the trial was the Dreyfus was being persecuted not because he was a spy, not because he had done anything wrong but because he was a Jew. And this was a shock to Herzl and a shock to this simulated Jews. How could it be? How could it be? That in the most modern, in the most liberal of all European countries, France, anti-Semitism was still alive and well, alive and well to the extent that they were willing to kill, to execute a Jew based on a conspiracy theory. Had anything changed from the old conspiracy theories about the Jews drinking the blood of babies? Maybe not. Maybe Europe was still fundamentally hostile to Jews. Maybe this was indication that with the rise of nationalism, with the rise of collectivism in Europe, World War I being not that far off in the future, with the rise of that collectivism, the rise of nationalism, anti-Semitism would be back as well. Jews would be hated. Violence against Jews would accelerate. Jews would be run out of town. Would be persecuted. Would be murdered. Life would become impossible. And this is the conclusion Herzl came to. He said basically, in an ideal world, I am not a Jew. I am an Austrian-European. I am completely assimilated. But the world is not ideal. By the way, let me just, an important point to add. Dreyfus. Dreyfus considered himself completely assimilated. He was a Jew who did not consider himself Jewish. He was a Frenchman. He was a French military officer. He was committed to France. He wasn't committed to Judaism. He was committed to Jewish religion, or Jewish state, or Jewish people, or Jewish anything. He was a completely assimilated Jew. And what this taught Herzl and the others was, it doesn't matter what you think of yourself. What you think of yourself is not what is essential. What is essential is what others think of me. Because whether I think I'm an individual and unrelated to all of this collectivism around me, they think I'm a member of a collective. And if they kill me because I'm a member of a collective, I'm still dead. So a third of what Herzl said is, I wish I didn't have to do this. But what we need is we need the Jews to bond together. We need the Jews to come together to defend themselves. Because whether we like it or not, whether we as individuals identify as Jews or not, we will be hunted down. We will be murdered. We will be slaughtered. Indeed, Herzl actually predicted the Holocaust. He saw it coming. Because once he saw the Dreyfus trial, he looked around and he saw lots of other examples. And of course, this is an era where the pogroms in the east are starting, where the Russians are starting to kill Jews willy-nilly, I guess, the Ukrainians, the Poles, the Athenians. This is why this is an era of mass Jewish migration out of Eastern Europe. But before this, Herzl would say, ah, that's Eastern Europe. They're barbarians. It could never happen in the West. And what the Dreyfus trial and other things he's observing around him suggests to him is maybe it can. Maybe it can happen in the West. Maybe it will. Indeed, I predict it will. And as a consequence, he said the Jews have to get together and they have to have their own state. And Herzl, funnily enough, didn't really care where that state was. He just wanted a state. There was this idea, there was this idea that, you know, Jews should go back to their original state, right? Israel, what's called Palestine. And he went along with that because that seemed as reasonable as any other place. It was a relatively uninhabited area. It was under the Ottoman Empire in those days. And they lobbied the Ottoman Empire to give them autonomy over this piece of land and then encouraged Jews to move there. And they established a Zionist organization. The first Zionist conference was held in 1897 in Basel in Switzerland. This is clearly a Western European, at least as long as Herzl was involved, a Western European endeavor. It was funded by people like the Rothschilds. And they made it a real attempt to get the Ottomans to change it, but they failed. The Ottomans said no. The Ottomans said we're not interested. So they went to the British and they said, look, we know you don't occupy Palestine, but maybe you once will, one day will. There was already this view that a war was coming between the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire. We really want autonomy. We really want this. And the British kind of thought, okay, the Jews should have their own state. It makes sense. It makes sense. Everybody else seems to be getting their own state. Why shouldn't the Jews get their own state? And the British government in 1903, the British government said, look, we've got 6,000 square miles. 6,000 square miles. I'm not sure how big that is. Maybe somebody can look at the size of Rhode Island or something. 6,000 square miles of uninhabited land in Uganda. Uganda. You can look it up on a map in the middle of Africa. And you can settle there if you want. This is a time where Uganda was part of the British Empire. And they figured they could give it away. The Jews, particularly these Western Jews were productive. Intellectuals, maybe this would actually enhance Uganda and make it into a more prosperous British colony. So the Jews were actually offered. Zionists were offered. 6,000 square miles in Uganda. You can just imagine what would have happened if they'd gone there. Idi Amin would be the us or alpha or whatever. You can just imagine how that would have played out. Maybe better. Maybe better. Who knows? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe better. Hutzel supported this proposal. Hutzel advocated for the Jews taking the British up on it and going to Uganda. I'm not kidding you. This is actual history. Hutzel said, let's go. We get our land. We don't need to be in Palestine. Who the hell cares about Palestine? What differences would make? Maybe the Jews would be better off without Jerusalem. He was in the minority. And when it came to a vote in the Zionist Congress, it was voted down. Hutzel died in 1904. The leadership moved from Vienna to Cologne. Russian Jews and German Jews came to dominate. It's, as the programs increased in Russia and in Eastern Europe, the Zionist movement became more and more and more Eastern European. Of course, as a consequence, Jews started emigrating. In spite of the Ottomans not wanting to give them autonomy, Jews started emigrating. By 1914, there were about 90,000 Jews in Palestine. And again, a lot of agricultural communities they were supported by rich Jews like Rothschild. And the rest of the history, I'm sure you don't know the rest of the history, but the rest of the history ultimately leads to the establishment of the state of Israel. All under the disguise of Jews need a homeland. And I'm sympathetic to that. So while I reject Zionism as an ideology, I don't think it really is an ideology, I reject nationalism, per se. I think given the history of the Jews and given the present of the Jews, given the sustainable sustainability of anti-Semitism for 2,000 years and the fact that it does not seem to go away even in the most civilized places like the United States or like Western Europe. Look at France today. Given that anti-Semitism seems to be with us until the rise of real individualism and reason, Jews need to protect themselves. As such, Zionism is primarily a self-defense pact. We'll stick together until we no longer need to stick together. We'll stick together as long as Jews are persecuted. As long as there's anti-Semitism. As long as the possibility of another Holocaust is there, we will stick together. And we will allow anybody who self-identifies as Jewish, and that's been much of the trend in Muammar in times, even here, to protect themselves. To protect themselves against the potential anti-Semitism out there in the world. So I am, in that sense, sympathetic to Judaism as a self-defense mechanism. Sorry, sympathetic to Zionism as a self-defense mechanism. Even though in an ideal world, I don't think there would be such a thing. I don't think there would be such a thing. Alright, let's see. Alright, I don't know if there are any questions about Zionism. For those of you interested, there are about 15 million Jews in the world today. And remember that 6 million of them died in the Holocaust. Scott, you can have a liberty alliance with your own Khazani. I don't know how you can have a liberty alliance with somebody who doesn't believe really fundamentally in liberty. Certainly not any form of liberty that I'm familiar with. Yeah, anyway. The scots of the world just infuriate me. I'm not sure why exactly. Because I guess I know why. Because I expect so much more of people who've read Ein Rand and present themselves as objective. I expect a modicum of rationality that just drives me crazy to see the insanity of some of their views. Alright, I think I'm going to leave the globalization out. We'll do that another time, given that we've already gone an hour. And I will shift to Super Chat. I'll just remind you, again, we have a $650 target. Ein Rand never wrote about this. She supported Israel. She viewed, but she did view Israel as, you know, Israel's Jewishness as a negative as I do. But she did support Israel as a civilized country in the midst of lack of civilization. She, I think, actually sent financial support to Israel as part of that when it was under threat. But no, she never actually wrote about, as far as I know, about Zionism. I don't think she, she didn't care enough about it. She was an American and she dedicated herself to issues related to America. She viewed Israel from the perspective of an American as a bastion of civilization, as a bastion of pro-Americanism and a western satellite, if you will, in an unwestern part of the world. So she viewed it from that perspective and she didn't really get into an analysis of how Israel was created, what brought about its creation, the movement that was involved. But again, the movement has a good reason to have existed, self-defense. Zionism is about people getting together around a particular common value, a particular common, you know, pseudo-identity you could call it in order to defend themselves. An identity that others are placed on you whether you like it or not. It doesn't matter whether I consider myself a Jew or not, the world considers myself a Jew, me a Jew. All right, let's see. So yeah, I encourage Super Chat questions, I encourage Super Chat support. I'm not sure what's going on in the last couple of days. It seems that Super Chat seems to be mellow. Maybe it's late coming, maybe it's the weekend. Maybe you guys did so much Super Chat in November that you're kind of taking a breath and getting ready for December. We will see, but hopefully we can do a little bit better than we're doing right now because we're still short like 550 bucks. And that's a little ridiculous of a $650 goal and the fact that we make the goal almost every single time. And there are very few questions, too. So jump in with questions, let's take $20 or more questions about anything you want. Gail says, thanks a million for once again making a stunning rational case for individualism. I appreciate the support. Gail, thank you. Apollo Zeus just wants to express his love to Catherine Mendes. Thank you, Apollo. I appreciate the support. All right, let's see, is there one more anti-Semitism? Oh yeah, there's an anti-Semitism here from Michael. Anti-Semitism always seems to be right beneath the surface, any discomfort or disruption in people lives and it comes out. I think that's right. I think anti-Semitism is the collectivists go to, prosecute the Jews. Let's go after the Jews. It must be the fault of the Jews. The Jews did it. That is instinctual whenever there are problems, whenever there are disasters, whenever there are struggles in the world out there. Sadly for people. Let's see, Lea. The exponential growth of objectivism will come when most people view it as an item on the menu. It's a legitimate option. For the next 50 years or so, objectivism won't hold the status as a legitimate role of view to intellectually minded people. I think it will. I think we've got less than 50 years until it's an intellectually legitimate point of view when it's an option on the menu. I think that is going to happen much sooner than 50 years. I think in the next 20 to 30 years, objectivism will be clearly one of the options intellectually out there. I think within my lifetime that it will be coming. It won't be dominant. It won't be the majority. It won't be a big. But it will be a recognizable option that people will consider. That is what I am fighting for. That's what I think Eorae is trying to achieve, much of what Eorae is trying to achieve. To do that, we need a lot more intellectuals. We need to be a lot more people talking about it. We need a lot more people advocating for it in a variety of different forms all over the world. And I think we're getting there. I think the next 10 years are going to be very, very exciting. It's already the case that they have said this many, many times that there's so much more content today from objectivists that you can't consume at all. You can't come even close to consuming at all. And that's only going to increase significantly in the next few years. And part of helping making that, I'm going to make a pitch here, part of making that happen is to show people that you can be successful at doing it. And part of showing people that you can be successful at doing it, so we get more people doing it, is by showing them they can make a living from doing it. So in a sense, by you supporting my show, not only are you supporting my show, which is a value in and of itself, but you're also showing the future potential objectivist intellectual that, hey, there is a way to actually make a living being an objectivist intellectual, being somebody who speaks out on objectivist issues. There is an audience. There are people. This is why I think it's so important to grow the subscriber list. It's so important to increase our audience. It's so important for you to share the content because the more successful I am, that's good because then I'm successful. But also, the more inspiring that will be to the generations that follow that will have to do their own shows, their own books, their own articles, their own substacks, their own stuff. So I need your help, not just because it's helping me. I mean, that's a good enough reason. I'm an egoist after all. But because it'll help change the world. It really will. Through me and through all those future generations. Whatever. I can't pronounce some of your name. Sorry. It says, it was nice talking to you in Oslo. I'm sure it was nice talking to you too, but with that name, there's no way I can remember who you are. Anyway, I probably, well, anyway. Yes, I enjoy talking to a lot of people in Oslo. Also, it was a good event. We had a really good event in Oslo, I thought. I don't know. Yeah. It was a really good event. All right. Mike says 50 bucks. This is good. We need more 50 bucks. We need like 950 buck questions. 950 buck questions would be really nice. Oh, one $400 question would be good too. That's only eight. So 150 and $400. Let's see. Does it make sense for Kurds to want their own state because they are persecuting Iran, Iraq, Syria, or should they just try to assimilate? No, I think it does make sense for them to have their own country. This is why I think a Kurdish state makes sense, but a Catalonian state doesn't. The Catalonians in Barcelona are not persecuted by the Spanish, by the rest of Spain. They're not hounded down. They're not killed. And the Catalonian state in Catalonia is likely to be a lot more socialist than Spain is. So it's likely to be less free, not more free. Kurds have two things going for them for the claim for nationhood. One, persecution. They want to be killed. The Iranians are trying to kill them. The Iraqis have been trying for a long time. And the Turks and the Syrians, all four, are trying to kill the Kurds. But in addition to that, Kurdistan, which is this autonomous region within Iraq, is one of the most freest areas in the Middle East. The Kurds would establish a free, relatively free country as compared to Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran. So I've said this before. I am for establishing new countries or spinning off, or what do you call it when you leave another country? Succeeding. I'm all for secession. If the purpose of the secession is objectively more freedom. More freedom. So, yes, freedom justifies establishing a state. And, yeah, all right. Hoppe Campbell says, when is it appropriate for the government to commit someone to an institution? Is Kanye West at that point? So I don't know exactly what the point is. I think it's the point where you become a danger to yourself or to other people. I think as long as you're not a danger to yourself or other people, as long as you can survive somehow out there, that your mental illness is not preventing you from surviving materially. You're not going to die. Then I don't think you can be institutionalized. And in that sense, no, Kanye West should not be institutionalized. He's a bigot. He's a lot of things. He's crazy in a lot of different dimensions. But he's clearly functioning. He is not a danger to himself or to other people as far as I can tell. And he has enough money that he can live. So there is an argument about homeless people. Some of them, should they be institutionalized? Probably given how bad their mental health is and the fact that they cannot take care of themselves. So, you know, it's probably cheaper to institutionalize them to give them all the kind of assistance and welfare that they get right now. So, but when is that? And so I don't know. I don't know when exactly the red line is that you would have to cross. Somebody would have to really think about it. But I think a danger to yourself or to others is a good starting point. And then in the context of a welfare state, I think not being able to take care of yourself, not even able to work, not being able to, because of mental illness, not being able to have a home, not being able to do any of these things might also justify institutionalization. But all right, Richard asks, will I reduce the need for people in service jobs? If so, could we see a population decline in a more capital intensive world with reduced infant mortality? I mean, we're definitely going to see population decline. I mean, the population has hit 8 billion. A few weeks ago, somebody's counting, I guess, but the estimate is 8 billion. The population of the world at some point is going to peak and start declining primarily because both rates are just very, very low. I don't think that is forever. I think at some point we will hit some kind of equilibrium. I do think service jobs are going to be replaced. I think a lot of jobs are going to be replaced. I think jobs in medicine are going to be replaced. I think a lot of, I think some programming jobs will be replaced. I think those jobs that require, you know, simple analysis or simple identification will be replaced. And more jobs will be created. AI will create huge swaths of jobs that we can't even imagine today. We also might work less. We already work a lot less than we did 300 years ago. And we certainly will work a lot less manual labor. So one of the things AI, the kind of algorithms and the kind of technology that's being developed is going to make, it's going to make robots move more smoothly so that a lot of that is software. It's analyzing visual, quote, visual information or radar information and also guiding movement and subtle small movements. It's going to be a while before robots can do that, but that will happen over time. So a lot of jobs are going to go away, but they will be replaced with even better jobs, better paying jobs because the productivity of jobs is going to go through the roof. AI will make us richer. And there will come a day where even the most simplest job will make you rich. Will make you rich. Not relatively speaking. There will always be people who are richer than you, but make you rich from the perspective of absolute perspective, from the perspective of what you need in order to survive and to thrive as a human being. Colleen, thank you. Really, really appreciate that. $50 from Colleen. Thank you. Thank you for all the support of the show. Colleen is a major, major supporter of the show. Colleen and her husband. All right, let's see. Dr. Pie asks, we're doing better with the super chat, but we're still way behind our usual numbers, way behind. We're less than halfway to 650. 3-0 England and I'm missing it, but I'm glad England's winning. It's going to be, I think, I think, you know, all the teams you'd expect are moving on and it's the quarterfinals are going to be games between really good teams. Really good teams and really exciting. All right, Dr. Pie, thoughts on transhumanism. Do you believe we'd be able to advance biologically as creatures at an advanced rate as AI? Finally, do you believe AI will help persuade more people of objectivism? The last thing, no, because maybe AI will improve our ability to communicate, but at the end of the day, people need to make the choice. People need to think. People need to engage with reality. People need to accept objectivism and that requires will and that requires a human being to do the work. AI will not, cannot shortcut the work that individual human beings have to do. What do I think of transhumanism? I am sympathetic to transhumanism. At the end of the day, I think that what will evolve is the integration of man and machine and I know this sounds weird, but it kind of makes sense. I mean, you know, we already have computers on our phones we're already talking about having computers in our glasses. A friend of mine just had his, I think, retina replaced or something replaced with basically a little computer that is generating with lenses that adjust. But basically, I think there's a microchip there, so basically lenses that adjust that give him 20-20 eyesight. Both near, far, doesn't need reading glasses. I mean, it's amazing technology, stunning. Done in outpatient, simple outpatient surgery. We have prosthetics. The prosthetics are just going to get better. They're going to be connected to our nervous system. We're going to be able to control them and the motions are going to get more and more refined, more and more accurate as like they do with robots. Elon Musk is launching Newellink, which is going to be computer-mined interface. Primarily at this point, the computer stimulating certain areas of the brain to deal with certain things like, I think, alcoholism or other things where we know that if you stimulate the brain you can change behavior. But that could get bigger and more and everything like that. Again, why not maintain the free will that a human being has, maintain the pleasure pain mechanism a human being has, which is so crucial to values while making us smarter, stronger, more capable. Imagine if I could implant a web interface into my eye or into my brain and just have to think about, how do I move the cursor just by thinking inside my head? Privacy of consciousness, you start. So I don't know exactly where it's going to go, but I would be shocked if from a thousand years the human beings over here and the robots over here, it's kind of funny to see Star Wars and to look at human beings and so little has changed and they don't live any longer, they don't see them, they seem to be about the same, they don't have any real prosthetics. I just think we become better, stronger, faster. So I don't know about the transhumanist movement and it worries me that people are trying to do it today because I don't think the technology is there, but we want to maintain what is human, which is certain capacities that our brain has, starting with free will, but certain capacities that we have, consciousness and free will, with certain abilities that our brain has and augmented with computer power, which is what we do today, but imagine you could do it even more and imagine you could do it with minimal real estate. That is without occupying a whole desk. Again, I don't know how to evolve, but I think that's kind of where we're heading in hundreds of years. Frank asks, is it wrong to say Henry Ford and Richard Wagner had good in them? When I know they went to semites but did great things for industry music? Well, absolutely you can say that. Most people, people like Henry Ford and Richard Wagner, are mixed. They might have some evil and they might have quite a bit of good. The challenge becomes is when you take somebody like Hitler and say, well, he had some good in him. There's no evidence of that. Zero. And he is a true monster. In spite of their anti-Semitism, Henry Ford and Richard Wagner were not monsters. They held really bad ideas and they probably did some bad things, but they weren't monsters. They went evil through and through. Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-Dung, Tse-Dung, they're evil through and through. Popat, the Khmer Rouge, evil through and through. There's no industry that they created or music that they wrote. I mean, I love Wagner's music. He was an anti-Semitism. That's unfortunate for him and for people who interacted with him. It doesn't really affect me. All right. Last question. Catherine is going home depressed. All right. Hannah asks, should objectives stay in fight to change the culture in their home country or pursue a life in a freer country? Is spending your own life trying to make political change not a sacrifice? Yeah, it is. I don't think you should stay in your home country to try to make your home country better. I think that's fake nationalism. I think it's fake. Go to where it's for you. I mean, assuming that's not in the middle of the desert somewhere on a desert island with nothing. Go to where you can live the best life that you can live. Go to where you can live the best life that you can live. And that has to do with politics. It has to do with culture. It has to do with weather. It has to do with a lot of things. But don't, you owe nothing to the culture or the country in which you were born into. You only have one life. Live it. Live it to the best of your ability. And that means go to the place where you can achieve the most for you. For you. I apologize. You know, Jennifer said don't quite Catherine. It's too late. Catherine is going to quite tonight. Nothing much we can do about it. Frank, I mean, you guys can do something about it. Nothing I can do about it. Frank says, do you think AI will ever be able to distinguish between a conversation and an argument? The horizontal and the vertical? I think so. I think you can probably come up with rules in a sense to embody into the program that can differentiate between an argument. I mean, I have to think about it between an argument and a conversation. Yeah. I mean, she don't mean an argument as in shouting at one another. You mean an argument as a laying out of a rational, you know, logical structure. I think I don't see why not. I don't see why not. If the two are differentiated, if you can differentiate them or you can find the rules to differentiate them and I think you can, then now it'll probably make mistakes between the two on occasion because sometimes arguments are more like conversations, sometimes conversations are more like arguments, so that maybe there'd be always borderline cases. But fundamentally, yes, I don't see why not. Roosevelt, thank you, really appreciate the support. All right, we're short $350, but you'll make it up during the rest of the month. I'm not too worried about it. All right, so starting tomorrow, we will have news updates regularly every morning. I'm not committing to a particular time, and there might be mornings where I can't because other things come about like I'm giving a talk on Thursday morning, but we will have your unbook news updates every morning. I will announce early in the morning what time it's going to be. It'll vary a little bit, but generally, I'll try to do it 11 o'clock East Coast time. Red Hawk just gave $100, and so let me just finish the start. So it'll probably be an 11 o'clock Eastern time, but it'll vary a little bit among them starting tomorrow. So starting tomorrow, we will start doing this. So I hope you join us. It'll be right here, right? Red Hawk 2030, I saw an old story, show story about you almost getting murdered. I knew, can you tell that story? I don't think it was ever nearly murdered. I'm trying to think of a story where I almost... I've almost been killed a few times. I can think of one story about me almost dying, or thinking I was going to die. I wasn't literally almost going to die. I have a story about, you know, a wartime story about driving through Lebanon at night as a maniac. And I have a story about almost being raped, hitchhiking. So I don't know which one of those you're referring to and which one of those you'd like me to tell. I'm happy to tell any one of those stories. If you're in the chat, you could just say on the chat which one of those you want to tell. The hitchhiking story, the Lebanon story, or the landmine story, those are the three stories I have. I'm not doing Mr. Muffin. I'm doing Red Hawk. Red Hawk 2030 is the one who put up the $100. Red Hawk gets to decide. Tell the hitchhiking one, that sounds interesting. It's not really. I don't know why it's interesting. But anyway, in 1979, I was 18 years old. I was about to go into the Army, and I came to the United States, and I spent, I think, two months driving from Washington, D.C. to California, zigzagging the country. I think we did 20,000 miles during that period. And while we did that, I hitchhiked in a couple of places, like in the Grand Canyon I hitchhiked, maybe one other place I can't remember. Anyway, when we got to Los Angeles, I was with a friend. I was with a friend of mine, and he decided when we got to Los Angeles that he was going to go back to Israel. And I did not want to go back to Israel. I was like, you know, I've still got some adventure in me, and there's still some of America I'd like to see. And there'd been one place that I'd never been to. I'd seen a lot of America. I'd been to a lot of places in America, both on this trip and on a previous trip with my parents. But I'd never been to New Orleans. And I really wanted to go see New Orleans. I'd never been to New Orleans. And I had no money. I had no money. So I decided that, and by the way, when we drove the 20,000 miles in the U.S., we had bought in Washington, D.C. a Ford Pinto. A Ford Pinto. Some of you are old enough to remember Ford Pintos. Ford Pintos were famous for, if you hit them hard enough from the back, they exploded. We only, Ford was sued for this. It was a major lawsuit and paid a lot of money. Anyway, so we drove this Pinto, which was fun and interesting. Anyway, we only realized that these cars blow up after we'd bought it. So every time we'd stop at a traffic light or a stop sign or anything, both of us would look back, petrified that somebody was going to hit us from the back and blow us up. Anyway, so that's part of the fun of the story. Anyway, so I decided I was going to hitchhike to New Orleans. And I needed to, and then from there to the east coast, so I could fly back to Israel. I needed to get to Washington, D.C. I think it was. I had a flight out of there. So I went out to Route 10 outside of, inside Los Angeles and stuck my thumb up. Like maybe you see once in a while, very rarely, but once in a while, somebody hitchhiking on American highways. And I basically hitchhiked from California to New Orleans. I've got a lot of really interesting hitchhiking stories. I've got several, a lot, I've got several really interesting hitchhiking stories. The anti-Semitism I encountered while hitchhiking the drunk Indians, Indians as in Indian Americans that I encountered hitchhiking Indians as Native Americans. The incredibly nice people I encountered while hitchhiking. The people who offered me a lot of money for, I don't know, a blow job or sex. So who wanted me to prostitute myself with them while I was hitchhiking. So it was quite an adventure, not a particularly pleasant one at that. Anyway, I was in, just north of Jacksonville, Florida, last leg of the trip, about to get, come up the East Coast and get to Washington D.C. and finish with the hitchhiking. And, you know, and I'd been dropped off in Jacksonville, I'd stuck my hand out. We were driving north of Jacksonville on the I, what is it, the I-95, right, the I-95. And the guy who's driving starts, how could I say it nicely, starts playing with himself and suggesting what he's going to do with me to me once we get to where it is that he's going and that he's got friends there and whatever. So, right, so he's indicating what he's going to do. So now at this point, by this point I had figured it out, I'd figured out that I should always have my backpack with me in the front seat, that I should not put the backpack in the back seat and get into the front seat because a number of times when I got out and went to the back seat to get my backpack go to the back of the pickup, the guy started driving. So I had figured out that I always had the backpack with me in the front seat, which was a little weird, but anyway. Anyway, when this started happening with this guy, I basically, this is an I-95, I slowed down at a section and I was petrified. I was convinced, who knows what they were going to do to me. I basically, as we were driving, he was on the right lane and he had slowed down a little bit. I opened the door and rolled out of the car as it was moving onto the side. Luckily the side was soft and I survived it. He drove off, he was petrified to something horrible that happened to me, I think, and was afraid, but I was scared beyond what you could imagine. I was sure that they were going to come back and hunt me down. I was on the highway, if you've ever been in an I-95, it's pitch black, pitch dark, pitch dark. From both sides of the highway, all you can hear is all these swamp animals, real swamp animals, not the kind in Washington, D.C., but the real ones. I rolled onto my backpack, that's why I survived the rolls. I rolled out of the car onto my backpack. It was not the last time I hitchhiked, no. I rolled onto my backpack and out of the car and walked. It was petrified that he was going to come back, but walked until I got to the border of the alligators there and all kinds of swamp animals and got to the border with Georgia. There was a, what do you call it, a rest station there. I basically went there and rolled up on a bench and went to sleep, didn't sleep much that night. Anyway, I got up in the morning and I said, okay, I've never hitchhiked again. This is nuts, this is crazy. I don't want ever to happen to me again. The only weapon I had on me was I had tucked a knife into my sock, but I didn't want to get into it. What's the knife going to help me if the three of them or whatever? I don't know. So, I'm not a knife fighter exactly. Guns, I mean, I was a tourist. There's no way I could get a gun. I decided to put a knife in my sock because of other things that had happened previously on this trip. Anyway, so I get up and I'm like, okay, I'll take a bus. No bus stops, can't get a bus. You're on the highway at a rest stop. So I said, okay, one last ride and that's it, never again. So I went out on I-95 and I stuck the finger out and the car stopped and the guy said, all right, I'll let you in, but on one condition. I said, what is that? He said, okay, you have to talk to me the whole time. Oh, and I said, just take me to the nearest town, I'll take a bus. And he said, no, I'm going to New York, I want you to ride with me. I said, okay, if you drop me off in Washington DC, I'll do it. So one ride to Washington DC and he said, the only condition is you can't fall asleep. You have to talk to me the whole time because I'm on speed or something and I have to make this drive and I can't fall asleep myself. So I want you to talk to me so I stay awake. Now I had slept the night before so I kept nodding off and he kept, you know, elbowing me to wake me up so I would talk to him to keep him awake. But anyway, we made it to Washington DC and in one piece. The only place I've hitchhiked since then is in Israel where pretty much at least in those days everybody hitchhiked, everybody hitchhiked. All right, that is a story. I've got lots of stories, but at $100 each, Red Hawk, we could do a lot of stories. So I don't know what you guys have learned from that other than a little bit of crazy. All right, Red Hawk wants the landmine story as well. Okay, wow, I mean, he could keep us here for a while. Given the number of stories I have and the amount of money he might have, we could be here for a while. All right, so I am probably 17 years old and I'm hiking as I did often. I was a big hiker in high school. I used to go up on the weekends and hike in the Golan Heights. The Golan Heights is a territory that the Israel captured from the Syrians during the Six-Day War and then fought a war with the Syrians on the Golan Heights during 1973, the Yom Kippur War. And the Golan Heights has still had in those days, this is 1970, I don't know, probably 1978, 77, 78, somewhere around that. After I read Atlas Shrugged, I read Atlas Shrugged in 1977. So it's probably 78. And I'm with a friend, my best friend at the time, and we're hiking, we're hiking. And usually there was this canyon that we came down. It was called Wasp Canyon. I can also tell you the story of why it's called Wasp Canyon and how I discovered the name Wasp Canyon, which is an interesting, which is a fun story too. But anyway, that's a different story. This time we decided we're going to go up the canyon. So we started out like in the valley and went up onto the Golan Heights, into the mountains. And we're walking along, and this is the direction we've never been before and it's a route we've never taken before. We're walking along on this pretty narrow path. There's nobody there, it's just us. And suddenly we both stop and freeze. What we see now far to our right is a fence, a wide fence. And we see one of those Beware landmine signs that we're familiar with because we've hiked in the Golan Heights quite a bit and we were familiar with these signs and these fences and these signs. But what we're seeing is, we're seeing it from the back. So we're looking at this sign, Beware landmines, but we're seeing it from the back. And we don't know what to think because we have no idea how we could have walked into a landmine area. But it's clearly a landmine sign, it's clearly from the back, it's clearly an issue here. So we decide that we're going to take turns, and there's nobody around, there's nothing, I mean we're in the middle of nowhere. We're going to take turns being first. And then the person from the back is going to keep it a little bit of a distance but going to try to step in exactly the same footprints as the person in the front. So at least only one of us is taking a risk at any given point in time. And I don't know, we must have walked like this, convinced we were going to die for, I don't know, half an hour, something like that. I wonder if he remembers the story, I mean I haven't been in touch with him in decades, but I wonder if he remembers the story. Anyway, at some point, at some point, luckily for us, we realize we've made a mistake, we've just lived half an hour of fear for no reason. What had happened was that there were two fences, and in between the fences were the landmines and it was narrow. And what we had seen was the outer fence, and we'd seen the landmine on the back, but we were over here. What we didn't see is the fence in between us and this other fence. And of course, once we discovered that, when you heard it happen, we kept going. And that is my landmine story. It was the half an hour, 15 minutes or however long it was, I have no idea, where I was sure I was going to die. There'd been other circumstances where I thought I was going to make it, climbing cliffs and stuff like that, but this was one of them. Almost all of these were from my youth. All my near-death experience stories are from my youth. I've lived a relatively calm life since then. All right. In the meantime, we've got a few other... Thank you. Thank you, Ed Hawk. Really, really appreciate that. You got us really close to our goal. So we're only $100, really, $112 short of the goal. So if somebody wants to do $100 and somebody wants to do $12, we'll make it and we can call it a day. Let's have Colt. Colt asks, I don't exactly... I don't have a lot of places where I can voice my mind. My church and my college, I've brought up anti-Semitism and what's going on in Iran. I've said I'm deeply concerned about growing anti-Semitism. I appreciate that, Colt. I mean, I appreciate the fact that you are willing to go out there and speak your mind and I know it's not easy and I know there are not a lot of places where you can do that, but I really, really, really, really appreciate that. And I know it's hard. I know it's hard. We live in a culture that is not particularly open to alternative views and is not always open to being challenged and being questioned. Red Hawk, you are amazing. Thank you. This is great. I'm glad I guess you're enjoying the stories. So thank you for enjoying the stories. This is great. Okay, so this is... I've told this story. I can't remember when. I've told it on a show before, but this is a story from 1982. Probably, God, you know, I think it's September. Maybe it's October 1982. It's during the war in Lebanon. We won't get into the whole why we're in Lebanon, why there was a war. That's a whole show of itself. But we're in Lebanon. I'm in Israeli military intelligence. I'm based in Tel Aviv. During the war, I was in Lebanon once, but this is a separate story. And we're still ongoing, as well as in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, the largest city in Lebanon, on the coast, on the Mediterranean, a city that has been ravaged by war, by civil war, since the early 1970s. So it is a horrible... It's a place that's completely destroyed. But in Beirut at the time, and west side of Beirut, which is occupied at this point in time by the Palestinians that Israel has been chasing, Yasir al-Fahd and his troops, they are in West Beirut and they are primarily in the tunnels underneath West Beirut. They have dug tunnels just exactly for this occurrence. And Israel is contemplating... Israel is contemplating going into Beirut and getting them and killing them and destroying them, destroying their infrastructure and killing as many of them as possible. In catching or killing, preferably killing, I think, Yasir al-Fahd. And they are hunkered down in these tunnels in West Beirut. This is true history. And Israel is prepping for that mission. And part of my job was intelligence for that particular mission, for that mission of capturing West Beirut. So we were drawing up maps. We were trying to figure out where the tunnels were. We had a lot of aerial photography of the place, but it's hard to figure out where the tunnels were and exactly from the aerial photography. We had some intelligence, but not very good intelligence. Not enough. Anyway, we get a call that in Beirut there is a... a spy, if you will, somebody who is a Palestinian who has deep knowledge of all the tunnels in West Beirut. And they want us to come up and interrogate him because we have the context. We know a lot about the tunnels and we can help him fill in the blanks for us in terms of the tunnels in West Beirut. Now Beirut is kind of occupied territory and it's a significant drive from Tel Aviv to the border. That's a drive and then from the border up to Beirut is a significant drive and that drive from the border up to Beirut is through hostile territory. I mean, it's occupied by the Israeli army, but the Israeli army can be everywhere and you're driving through cities, Tzidon and Tso, which are major cities on the coast of the Mediterranean, and you're driving through those cities. And so we basically, my commanding officer and myself, we got into a jeep. We threw a couple of AK-47s in the back. I'm not even sure we knew they worked necessarily, but I think they did. They were well-preserved. But we threw the AK-47s in the back, put on our uniforms and brought with us civilian clothes because we were expecting to interrogate this person in civilian clothes, not in military. And we started driving up to Lebanon, which is just crazy. And it's a jeep. The two of us by ourselves just driving into Lebanon. We get to the checkpoint in Oshunikau, which is the border with Lebanon and we show our papers and we've been cleared to make the drive because they're waiting for us in Beirut and it's an important mission. We had to leave first thing in the morning. And so I drive through Seoul. And there were traffic jams and I drove on pavements. It was an insane drive because we're rushing. The state of the war depends on this. I'm driving on pavements because I'm in a military jeep car making way for me. I'm honking like crazy. I'm driving like a maniac. I drove like a maniac anyway, but in this drive I particularly drove like a maniac. I get to Beirut. I've never been in Beirut in my life. There's all GPS's. We pull out a map. I'm pretty sure most of you have never been in Beirut. Lots of little narrow alleyways streets. We're driving into these little narrow alleyways up the mountains because Beirut is on the slope of a mountain. Into the hills. I don't know how we got to where we were supposed to go, but we did. We had maps. We were very good at reading maps in those days. But all through Lebanon, Beirut, a country in a sense of war. We could have killed a thousand times easily at any point in time. Anyway, I go up there. We get to Beirut. They welcome us. Okay, the guy's here. We get dressed. We get into civilian clothes. On our way, we go to interview and interrogate. Interrogate really this guy. I think he was a friendly. I don't think we were interrogating him in a sense of anything nasty, but who knows. Anyway, in our civilian clothes, we were walking towards this thing and suddenly this entourage with Arik Sharon, who later became Prime Minister, was at the time Defense Minister. He shows up. And he says to us, I'm interrogating him, not you. This is important. Arik Sharon was a former general. He knew what he was doing. But he said, you can go. I'm doing it. So we driven there for nothing. So we're thinking, okay, we'll spend the night here. We'll drive back tomorrow. Never been to Beirut before. We're not going to drive anywhere, but we'll look around where the base was in this big state, like a villa up in the mountains overlooking Beirut. He had this magnificent view of all of Beirut. It was in ruins, right? It was horrible to see, but it was amazing. This is Arik Sharon. This is what I'm talking about, Arik Sharon. So, you know, amazing view of all of Beirut from this villa where the Israeli headquarters were and where we were supposed to interrogate this guy. So we're thinking, okay, we'll spend the night. And we had a phone call. And the phone call is from our commanding officer back in Tel Aviv. And he says, I heard you're not doing the interrogation. I need you back now. We are going to spend the night preparing the invasion of Beirut. We're going to get the intelligence that they're going to get us from the interrogation. We're going to immediately put it into maps and stuff. And we have to present it to the senior military command tomorrow morning. And this is it. Don't be here. We can't do this without you. I was a pretty important guy in those days in this military unit. And so we kind of jumped into the jeep and because it said, you have to come now and you have to come quickly. And the sun is starting to set and it's getting dark and we want to get out of there before it gets dark, which we didn't. But so I remember I took my shirt, civilian shirt, put it on my uniform, didn't change my jeans into civilian trousers because it didn't have time. Although that was clearly a violation of military law and I could have gotten in trouble, serious trouble because of it. Anyway, we jump into the jeep and we start driving the same route. We start driving back. But now it's dusk and then it's night. And supposedly you're not allowed, you're not supposed to, Israeli military, you're not supposed to drive alone at night in Lebanon. Pretty simple request. But we went out, so we just drove. I looked back on it and I think we were just crazy. I was crazy. And suicidal, I don't know. To enthralled with our own importance in some sense of an war and the adrenaline of a war. I think it's the adrenaline. Anyway, we drove back at any point in time. Again, we could have been killed. But on top of that also every time we'd come to a military check post, an Israeli military check post, they would stop. Why you by yourself? And we would say, oh no, there's a convoy behind us. I mean, literally we lied to them. There's a convoy behind us. They're going to catch up any time. We're just scouting ahead. They'd let us go. And we drove. We got it. We got to Israel. We got to Tel Aviv. We went straight to work, drove up the plans, presented it the next morning. Ultimately, there was no invasion of West Beirut because Ronald Reagan cut a deal with Yasser Al-Fat and saved him and escorted, allowed the Marines to escort him out of there. And Yasser Al-Fat went to Tunisia with all his troops. And the Marines that were sent there ultimately were all killed. 244 of them were killed in their barracks. A few months later in Beirut by Hezbollah, by the Iranians, really, by the Iranian intelligence services. So that is the story. Hope you guys entertained. But we made the goal. Thank you, Red Hog 2030. This is amazing. All right. In the meantime, we got three additional Super Chat questions. We'll do them quickly. A show that I thought would be really short has turned into a three-hour show, a two-hour show. Colt says, sorry, in my first chat was clumsy when I was trying to say is my church and my colleague is one of the few places where I can voice my opinion. Good. I mean, that's good. I'm glad that there are people who will listen that they're not so closed off on certain issues that they won't listen to you. So thanks for the clarification, Colt. I appreciate it. I appreciate you speaking out. Even though I know we don't agree on everything, I appreciate that on the things we do agree you're speaking out. You're trying to have an impact on the world around you. Audra says, I love the broad range of topics you cover on your show. Thank you for the historical background, especially. I had heard of the Dreyfus trial, but didn't know what it was about. My pleasure, Audra. Thanks. Thanks for the support. And then the last question, Ed says, how did your parents end up in Israel? My parents were big-time Zionists. They'd been born in South Africa. They hated South Africa because of pot hide. And they hated a pot hide. And they were Zionists. They wanted to go and live in Israel. They were very patriotic. They were Jewish culturally. They weren't religious, but they were definitely culturally Jewish. And they were nationalists. And they wanted to go to Israel and make Israel a Jewish homeland. So they were motivated by that. So they got married. And for the honeymoon, they basically got on a boat and went to Israel with nothing, with no money in their pocket. And I was born about a year later in Israel. All right. Thank you, everybody. Really appreciate it. Thanks for the support. Thank you, particularly Red Hawk 2030, who's also now become a member of the Iran Book Show. You can become a member, too. It's very easy. It's a button just under there. And the variety of different membership levels you can become a member of at. We reached our goal. Catherine is ecstatic. I mean, she was in tears before. And now she's just going to go and get a glass of wine just to handle the emotional rollercoaster she's been through. But she has survived and she is thrilled. England beats Senegal by 3-0. So another really good team is going to the quarterfinals. I'm excited about these quarterfinals. And I'm home now. I'm not traveling. So I can get to watch these games. England is going to play France, really. Wow. That's going to be a great game. England, France. Wow. I know who I'm rooting for. Although, yeah, it's hard to tell who won that one. Either team could win that one. I'm rooting for England, but I think the French have a really good team. All right. I will see you all tomorrow morning. Thanks, everybody. Don't forget to like the show before you leave. We should have more than 100 likes there. Don't forget to like the show before you leave. I will see you soon.