 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brook Show. All right everybody, welcome to The Iran Brook Show. As always, cue me in on the volume. Maybe that was too loud. I don't know, I can't tell. Cues here are not that useful. Yeah, I'm trying to figure this out. I think I'll increase the volume there. All right. So, let's see. Where were we? Yeah. No video. Thank you, Jennifer. For some reason, I forget to click that one button that puts me on the screen. Hey guys, thanks for joining me tonight. Thanks to everybody joining. Main topic of today's show, which is drugs prohibition, organized crime, and the police state that they engender. I wanted to just say, I told you so. You know, sometimes I'm right. It's unusual, but once in a while I get stuff right. And this evening we got news that Fox and Dominion have settled the case. That is, Fox has settled. It has issued basically an apology. You know, a formal apology, admitting that all the stories about Dominion were false and had no basis in reality. They also wrote Dominion a check for basically just short of $800 million. $800 million. God, by far the largest, as far as we know, because some defamation lawsuits settlement has kept private. But as far as we know, by far, nothing even comes even close. By far the largest defamation lawsuit settlement ever. $800 million. God, just 1% of that would be a nice payday. So there you go. As I told you, starting in late 2020 and January 2021, Fox lied. Fox lied to all of us. Fox continues to lie. But I think now it's doing so in ways that are not going to bring about a defamation lawsuit. In the Dominion case, they made the mistake of going after a particular company. And a particular company that was not willing to stay quiet and roll over. So good for Dominion. Yay for Dominion. I think this is the right outcome. I celebrate Dominion's, you know, standing up for themselves. Right? So many companies would roll over. Well, it's the media who wants to go after Fox. Fox is this massive entity. It's scary. It's Rupert Murdoch. It's the most watched, you know, show, Taka Carlson and all of these guys. And who wants to go up against that? And as a consequence of that, people don't go up against it. They don't challenge it. They don't call them for the lies. Not like we do on the Iran book show. They don't call them for the lies. And Dominion did that and it deserves our kudos and our thanks. I think this will improve the behavior on some of these networks. And, yeah, we'll see what happens from here. But I wish they hadn't settled. I wish it had gone to Kauatai. I would have loved to see Taka Carlson and Maria and some of the other Fox hosts actually on the witness stand and see what they had to say and how they defend themselves. It would have been quite entertaining, I think, and quite revealing, revealing in terms of what, yeah, anyway. All right, so let's see. What else do we want to, what are we talking about today? What really we're talking about today is the one drugs and the extent to which the one drugs and everything associated with the one drugs and prohibition of drugs is corrupting our society and destroying the world in which we live. I think this is a big issue. I don't think this is a minor issue. I think this is a big issue. It's an important issue. It's not, and I want to emphasize this and emphasize it throughout, this is not about the drug users. I don't really care that much about the drug users. It's vaguely about your right to do with your body as you see fit. You know, and if we allow for drugs, maybe they'll also allow for the FDA, you know, for the FDA to be privatized. Maybe they'll even allow for us to engage in life extension therapies and other therapies, stem cells, other stuff that involves your own body. But even if that's not the case, the great tragedy of the war on drugs is primarily what it does to our culture, what it does to the world around us, what it does to law enforcement and generally how it basically creates, reinforces, bolsters a police state mentality, a police state mentality. And I think to a large extent, in recent times, the growth of kind of a police state mentality has been justified in terms of the war on drugs. And this really came to me this morning when I was reading a couple of stories. One in one of them in, I think, New York Magazine or the New Yorker. Yeah, the New Yorker called Cook's Mistaken Betz Unencrypted Phones. Fascinating article. You should look it up online and read it, the whole thing. It's just an interesting article for a variety of reasons. Basically, the story it tells is the story of how the Feds basically broke the encryption of a couple of services, a couple of services that promised 100% encrypted calls, 100% encrypted communications on harded phones, phones that could only use this one app, phones that were just being used by criminals to communicate between them. Not just by criminals, and we'll get to that in a minute, but criminals were using these phones. And by a variety of different means, very creative means, partially by finding the data centers where the data traveled through and where the data was held, law enforcement has managed to get into these phones, managed to basically record everything that is being said between these criminals. So when drug shipments are coming, who they're assassinating, who they're knocking off. And they made arrests all over Europe and some in the United States and Canada as a consequence. There's been a number of these encrypted servers that have been broken into that the police have managed to get a hold of. And they got so bold, the police got so bold that they actually launched their own service called, I think, Anon, where they promised they set up a marketing firm, they sold phones, they promised that this was 100% anonymous. And basically, they had malware on the phones that provided the police with real time copies of everything, everything that was being communicated on these phones. And again, this allowed them to roll up a bunch of drug dealers. This allows them to roll up a bunch of motorists and a bunch of cartels and so on. And this is a crucial element in the war on drugs is the ability to get intelligence, and we'll get to this, to get intelligence about the drug cartel. There's no question in my mind that a lot of this kind of work could have only been achieved with the help of the NSA, the National Security Agency, the NSA is responsible for monitoring phone calls, monitoring electronic communication, doing exactly this kind of thing. But the NSA is supposed to be a national security organization. It's supposed to protect us from threats to the national security of the United States. It's supposed to be used on our enemies. We also know it's being used on our friends. We know that from a variety of different leaks from Snowden all the way down to the materials released last week. So the NSA was probably involved in breaking into these networks, breaking into these phones, and then providing, in a sense, police forces all over the world with real-life, real-time access to what some of the worst criminals in the world were communicating. And, you know, the story, it's a long article. The New York article is a very long article. It's fascinating. It gets into kind of the organized crime in Europe and in Montenegro and in the Balkans and their connections to organized crime in Central and South America, to organized crime in the United States, the connections between them, how they operate. It's really, really, actually fascinating article. And what it has shown is basically that all of these gangs are using different forms of encryption and that in this case, the encryption has, the NSA and the US, the FBI, basically, have been able to basically break all this encryption and monitor these phones and, in other words, don't feel safe. You know, there's an interesting history here. The idea of wiretaps, the idea of listening into crooks dates back to 1895 when a police officer in Manhattan who had once worked in a telephone company suggested adding a hidden socket to lines used by the criminals, in other words, a wiretap, first wiretap ever. Once they approved this technique, of course, it was used on all kinds of other things, including political rivals and all kinds of others. And that, of course, is the big problem. Let's say I bought an encrypted phone for whatever reason, do financial transactions or something, and it's one of these encrypted phones that the criminals also use. Well, as part of the government's attempt to break into these phones and to monitor these phones and to deliver the information from these phones, they would also break into my phone. So in an effort to catch the crooks, they would also be accumulating all this data on me. And yes, you could say, well, they delete that, but maybe they don't. How do I know as a citizen whether the police are using information that is truly only criminal? They're accumulating information about me as well as other people. The legality of this, I think, is quite questionable, although, as we know from Snowden, the Snowden revelation, this is what the government, the US government does. And as I can tell you from somebody who was at the NSA, the NSA views the war on drugs as a national security issue. So for the NSA to use its unbelievable capabilities, maybe the best capabilities in the world to snoop on the electronic information of people. The NSA has the capabilities, and once you say, well, the drug war is a national security issue, they have now the means, the authority, the legal sanction to go out and listen to cartels and listen to gangsters and mobsters, but also listen to anybody who happened to buy an encrypted app or encrypted phone and gets caught up in this broad net. And it struck me that here in the name of policing, in the name of these unbelievably sophisticated, wide internationally based, wide ranging criminal gangs that are basically funded by, motivated by, incentivized by the drug trade, none of these cartels exist on anything else illegal. Nothing else is as profitable, generates as much demand than drugs do. That one of the great costs of prohibiting drugs is that in the war against them, the state must attain greater and greater and greater power to fight them. So, you know, just look at the history of this over the last 50, 60 years, as drugs have become more lucrative and as cartels, and we'll get to why cartels have to use violence, but as cartels have used violence to achieve their goals, well, the police have had to get stronger and better equipped because the cartels in fighting each other and having lots of money at their disposal are getting bigger and bigger weapons. The fact that they have bigger and bigger weapons means that the police now have to get bigger and bigger weapons. So we have now a situation where there's an arms race between the cartels, among each other, and the police. And as the police get bigger and bigger weapons, guess what? We get what's been called the militarization of police. We get suddenly police who are more like, I don't know, special forces units or combat units rather than police units. We get police that have kind of weapon systems, armored vehicles that do not belong of the streets of a civilized city, but tools of war. And we've seen the American military get, sorry, the American police force get militarized. Why is it militarized? Because of the drug cartels, that militarization of the police gives the police tools, gives the government tools to subjugate us that it could never imagine before when police had simple weapons, maybe very similar weapons to the weapons citizens themselves had. So it's the drug war that facilitates this arm race, because it's the drug war that pays for this arm race. And it's the drug war because it's so violent between gangs that makes the arms race necessary, possible, and again, and provides the financing for it. In every respect, the war on drugs increases the power of government, the power of government to snoop on our phones, which these articles are about. And the articles are very praiseworthy of the police because look, we snooped on these phones and look how many people we arrested. And we took off the streets, murderers and criminals and drug dealers and, you know, we captured tons and tons of illegal drugs. And isn't this a great thing? Look, policing is working. Yeah. You know, the more tools to violate our privacy, the more tools to violate our rights, the more tools to provide for a robust police that can do whatever they want to whomever they want. Yeah, the more peaceful things might be, might be. The more cooks you will catch, not more peaceful, but the more cooks you will catch. But is that a virtue? Is that a good thing? Aren't these cooks, first and foremost, what they created by the very laws that the police is trying to defend? All right, so let's let's step back. I mean, the story again in New York. It's called cooks, mistaken bets on encrypted phones, drug syndicates and other criminal groups bought into the idea that a new kind of phone network couldn't be infiltrated by cops. They were wrong big time, but that also suggests, my friends, that the cops have access to your phone or, you know, at least to if you've done encryption. If you're using encryption, the police might view you as guilty, a suspect, because an innocent person doesn't need to hide. And therefore, rolling up your information with everybody else's. You know, the first real occurrence of large scale organized crime in the United States was a consequence of the prohibition. A prohibition in the early part of the 20th century, from what was in 1920 to 1933, I think, when Congress or basically the country passed a constitutional amendment, 18th amendment, to basically make the sale and the consumption of liquor illegal. This started out as as pretty, you know, one aspect of this, which I found interesting was it started out as, you know, is not a big deal. A lot of local people brewed a bunch of beer. They would, they would sell it, they would consume it. But, you know, transporting beer turned out to be quite expensive. A beer has a low, low alcohol content and therefore people consumed a lot of it. So you would need large quantities of beer. These enterprises got bigger. Transportation became more expensive and organized crime got involved in the transportation and distribution and sale of beer. And of course, to gain the monopoly profits necessary to run a illegal operation like running alcohol during the prohibition, you had to get rid of your competitors. And that's where violence and force entered the foray where, you know, different, different organized crime families, organized crime units would go out and try to destroy. And the, the, the competition, call it competition. Part of part of what characterizes organized crime is the need for loyalty, the willingness to use violence and defense of one's business. Organized crime is often oriented around a tribe. It's, it's a very tribal business. So it's, it's often a family affair. Almost always organized crime is centered around a particular ethnicity and people from particular ethnicity who share a particular code of honor, a code of values and, and who are committed to that particular group and who are unlikely to undermine it. But it is, it is by necessity. Once the state is not there, once you don't have a court system in the state to arbitrate contracts, once you don't have a state to basically help determine in a dispute who is right and who is wrong, who has this territory, who has that territory, who signed this contract, who signed that contract. Once contracts in the rule of law out, all that is left, and this is again a good example, an anti-anarchy example, all that is left is violence. And indeed, organized crime under the, under prohibition is a good example of what, what happens. It's not like organized crime developed its own court system that reduced the amount of violence between gangs. They had a semblance of that, but for most, most of the time, most disputes were settled by force. You can, you can see this fictional accounts of this in the Godfather movies. So organized crime started developing around beer, but soon became clear that transporting beer was dangerous. It was, it was, you had to transport a lot of it because people consumed a lot of it. And soon what happened is that the, the production of alcohol and the distribution of alcohol gravitated towards stronger and stronger drinks. Because as the drinks got stronger, they were easier to transport. People drank less of them and got more of a bang for the buck, more of a bang for the risk. You could sell them for more money. The profit was higher and again easier to transport because there were fewer of them. Notice how similar that is to what's happened with drugs. A lot of the drug, early illegal drug business was Moana business. Moana business never really got that exciting for organized crime because it's too easy to grow locally. It's, it's, it's too easy to transport. And it's too hard to transport over long distances. It's too mild of a drug. It doesn't have that big of an impact on people. And what you're seeing is, is then cares, it comes heroin and cocaine. But one of the reasons you get fentanyl today, one of the reasons fentanyl is so popular among drug smugglers in the United States. And one of the reasons it is so popular among those who use it is that it's so potent. It's unbelievably potent. And therefore smuggling in a small quantity results in a lot of hours of being high. And therefore it can be sold at a premium. So what you get is just like with alcohol, the alcohol got stronger and stronger and stronger over prohibition. The same is happening with drugs. The drugs are getting stronger and stronger and as a result more dangerous with prohibition. So, so you got, you got, you got the organized crime during the prohibition being set up. It was focused around Italians, Jews, Irish. So ethnic groups, family organizations, loyalty, violence. So that is certainly one aspect of organized crime. And, and of course, with prohibition came huge quantities of money. Organized crime chieftains became enormously wealthy. That money to a large extent, some of that money was used to corrupt the criminal justice system, to bribe policemen, to bribe judges. There was a lot of money. It was a victimless crime. There were no real victims, right? It was a voluntary transaction between seller and buyer. And suddenly in the days of prohibition, nobody really cared that much. Most Americans ultimately were liked alcohol and were consuming alcohol, less so with drugs. But still the money is much bigger with drugs. And therefore more available to corrupt the criminal justice system. So you get the corrupt, you get the corruption of the criminal justice system during prohibition. A big part, a big evil of prohibition, a big evil of prohibition created organized crime and the kind of wealth and money that is generated from it. Is the impact that has on police, on judges, in the fact that it corrupts them? And you can see that by the way, you know, probably the best show ever on the whole war on drugs is The Wire. I highly recommend the show. And you can see what it does to the police. You know, you can't win the war on drugs. So the police are constantly fighting a battle they know they cannot win. They cannot even make a dent in. They constantly see innocent people dying. They constantly see young kids being involved in the violence and dying. Drug addicts are going to continue to be drug addicts. People continue to consume drugs. Whatever the police do doesn't matter. The demand is always there. And then many police get corrupted and it's easy to get corrupted. But it's not just the police. It's judges. It's mayors. It's the entire system gets corrupted. It's a lot of money. And then beyond the corruption, beyond the importation, production, distribution, sale and possession of narcotics, which is criminalized through prohibition. There's the corruption of the justice system. But then if you answer that, that there is the corruption of legal commas. So one of the excuses that the government gives, maybe the main excuse that the government gives from monitoring your bank account, from requiring that every transaction over $10,000 be reported to the government, now in Venmo and other places, every transaction over $600 needs to be reported. One of the justifications is not just tax evasion, which is often an excuse, but a big part of it and a big part of massive financial regulation and anti-privacy regulation has to do with money laundering. But money laundering is primarily a phenomenon of the drug trade. Drug trade produces vast quantities of money that need to somehow turned into legit money. If you're wondering how this is done, check out the other TV show. What's the TV show where the guy makes methamphetamines? Breaking Bad, right? Breaking Bad. Breaking Bad, and you can see there the amount of effort and time and energy devoted to money laundering, but the money laundering schemes make banks engaged in illegal activity. And as a consequence, again, expand government control over our lives by now acquiring all kind of money laundering laws or kind of anti... what is it? If you're suspicious while you're depositing money in a bank, the bank needs to report you, and it's not about terrorism, it's about drugs, it's about organized crime. So again, what happens when you create a prohibition over a product that is in demand is you create... you don't just make the drug illegal. You make legitimate transactions, bank transactions. You make those suspect phone calls. You make those suspect. And you give the government the excuse now to listen into your phone. You give the government the excuse now to monitor your bank account. And again, this is the entryway into a police state. This is how in a free country you slowly get the encroachment of government in, all in the name of, well, we have to stop the drug trade, drugs are evil, we're fighting a war on drugs, it's an emergency. And I was told at the NSA that again, drugs are a national security issue. So you get the criminalization of the actual activity, the voluntary exchange of money for a particular product, alcohol or drugs. You get the corruption of the criminal justice system through bribes. You get the corruption of legal commerce, money laundering, and government intervention into the legal process, into a legal industry. And then finally you get violent crime connected to that commerce. And you get an explosion of violent crime. Violent crime went through the roof during prohibition in the 1920s. It declined dramatically once prohibition was ended. I mean organized crime had to pivot. It pivoted primarily to prostitution and gambling, but prostitution and gambling are nowhere near as profitable as selling alcohol. And then slowly organized crime discovered drugs, discovered the drug trade. We forget that early in American history, early in the 20th century even, drugs are sold by pharmacists. You bought heroin and cocaine from a pharmacist or a doctor. They were licensed to distribute drugs. So our war on drugs today not only kills thousands of people around the world, maybe tens of thousands of people around the world, many of them completely innocent. Not only is that it's give massive funds, wealth to criminals and criminal organizations. It corrupts a criminal justice system. It increases the power of government. It creates, I mean, how many government entities at the state level, at the federal level, at the local level are dedicated. A dedicated to the war on drugs. How much of a budget, a policing budget goes to war drugs. I mean, disproportionate, how much of the violence in American streets is related to the war on drugs. How much of the violence all over Latin America is related to a struggle between cartels, the dominance of the war on drugs. And you can go on and on and on. I mean, the consequence of the war drugs are basically destruction and mayhem and violence and death on the one hand, and the growth of the state. Growth of state power, growth of state force, growth of the police state in every single dimension. From listening into your phone calls and accumulating phone data on you, all the way to the militarization of our police, to the monitoring of your bank account, to the inefficiency of wire transfers and money transfers, because they all have to go through this loop of, ooh, maybe it's drug money. And to do what? To impose a people a particular view of how they should live. To impose a people a particular view on the kind of products they should and shouldn't consume. Now, I think drugs are harmful, although to varying degrees, right? Different drugs are harmful to very degrees. And that it is probably for most of these drugs immoral to use them because of their potential impact on your brain, which is pretty important, your brain, remember the brain? And that it takes you out of control. But some of these drugs have Moana, for example, has, you know, questionable impact, questionable whether its impact is greater than alcohol overall. And other drugs, you know, I don't know, LSD, mushrooms and others, might have all kind of pharmaceutical uses and might have other benefits. But the point is, all of this should be determined by people's independent decisions, people's independent judgment, and a marketplace. A legalization of drugs would cause drug prices to plummet, particularly if you allowed pharmacists to distribute drugs in CVS and Walgreens. Drug prices would plummet, cartels would be out of business, production of drugs would become much easier, farmers would benefit much more from it. The entire supply chain would be completely disrupted, it would be legalized. The amount of money dedicated to policing could shrink dramatically. The number of people in jail would shrink by, I don't know, 50, 60, 70 percent. The amount of violence in our society would shrink dramatically. The government would no longer have an excuse to listen into our phone calls, no longer have an excuse to monitor our bank accounts. I'm not sure they will back off of all of that, but they would no longer have the excuse. And no longer, and our police force would have no longer the excuse of driving armored vehicles and deploying, you know, massive automatic weapons. Are cops would become more honest? Are laws would be more objective? I mean, there literally is no downside, no downside. And a massive upside to legalizing drugs, and that's true of legalizing everything that is victimless. Victimless crimes, in quotes, are non-objective crimes. And as such, distort, pervert, and destroy the concept of the rule of law, and the ability of good policemen to do their jobs honestly and courageously and focused on protecting us from forced coercion, fraud, crooks, thieves, bad guys. Stuart mentions the fact that this is also connected to, that the whole drug prohibition is also connected to restrictions on immigration, and that is true. The smugglers who bring in immigrants, who bring in drugs, they're connected. And, you know, restrictions on immigration empower smugglers, empower cartels to basically take money from people for a service that they should get for much cheaper. They should be able to get on a plane and fly into a country, get on a train right into a country, get in a car, drive into a country, but no, they have to walk through the desert and pay smugglers thousands of dollars in order to do that. All right, you know, the war on drugs is one of the most irrational things that the government today is doing, and the consequences are far-fetched. I mean, the nice thing about prohibition with alcohol is, because it was unpopular ultimately, because most people wanted to drink, it got rid of it very relatively quickly. It lasted 13 years and it was gone, and nobody's ever considered being back. The tragedy of the drug prohibition is that it started at about the same time as the alcohol prohibition. It started out in much milder form, and then it has only got, the prohibition has become more and more stringent. And with it, more and more resources have been devoted to it. It was Richard Nixon, the declarer of war on drugs in the late 1960s. It was Ronald Reagan that really, really, really accelerated that war on drugs and brought in a lot more money and a lot more resources and a lot more firepower. The war on drugs today has been internationalized. It is not only responsible for violence as far south as Argentina and Brazil and Chile, but as far north as Scandinavian countries and the gangs that are competing for the drug trade in Sweden and everywhere in the Mediterranean. It involves funding the Taliban by growing poppy seeds in Afghanistan and therefore funding global terrorism and funding the subjugation of women by the Taliban without the drug trade, without the drug trade being illegal because if it was legal, these profits would be much, much, much dramatically smaller and therefore would not be funding the terrorism and whole regimes like the Taliban with heroin. It's just inconceivable to me that this idea of legalizing drugs is basically off the table that the only people really advocating for it are a bunch of libertarians, some saints, some wacky, but really that there is no mainstream support for policy that would almost immediately enhance our life, enhance the quality of our life, enhance the quality of the policing and reduce the violence and the terror in our streets and all over the world, not just in the United States. Again, if you read the New Yorker piece and you see the extent to which very courageous policemen and law enforcement agencies all over the world have to do with this, the extent to which the amount of resources they put into it and violence against them as well, it's just unbelievable if all of that just went away, went away. And yeah, crime syndicates would still look for other things, but nothing is as profitable as drugs. Again, they would look at prostitution, but prostitution already exists and while you add it, why not legalize prostitution as well and then get rid of that problem? And while you add that, why not legalize gambling as well and then you really solve the problem and then what is organized crime going to do? Once all these things are legal, it's very difficult to imagine where organized crime gets the resources to manage gangs who can do the kind of things that they do. Yes, there's always going to be something, drug smuggling, there's always going to be something, but it's minute as compared to what we're seeing today. Again, benefits are stunning as compared to the cost. Now, will drug use go up maybe for a while? Ultimately today people would want to use drugs, use drugs, but maybe we'd have a more healthy attitude towards drug use. Maybe we'd focus more on rehabilitation, focus more on drugs and medications and psychological treatment to help people get over drug addiction. Maybe we'd start looking at the reasons why people are taking fentanyl and others, why there is so much drug and alcohol abuse in America among certain parts of American society. Now, there's no question. Most Americans today are opposed to drug legalization. That's a fact. The question is, shouldn't we be able to convince them? This should be a relatively easy one, given the odds, given the stakes. And given that this is a quick fix to a lot of what ails us, quick fix for big government, a quick fix for a police that is not, the counter-copener is distracted by the drug, by the one drugs instead of doing all the other things they should be doing. It's a quick fix for reorienting maybe inner city youth that are ambitious away from a quick buck on the drug trade and maybe back to education and hard work as a way of rising up out of the slums. It would be a complete cultural shift if people who made a lot of drugs weren't the focal of admiration because they were gone. It is interesting. The amount of, one of the things I read that I found really interesting was how rich the gangsters at the end of prohibition were and the fact that much of that money was funneled into legal activities. And really Las Vegas was built, was built on money made by gangsters during prohibition and Las Vegas was created by gangsters. And one wonders, if you take all that money that flows into the cartels today and you in a sense take away the source of that, where does that money go and what productive activities could that money actually serve versus today it just serves grinding back into the trade, buying bigger and bigger weapons, having to hire more and more people because your people could keep getting killed. But what would happen if these people did not die off and you weren't constantly investing in weapons, but you're investing in something positive in the culture? Again, very little, very little, very little downside. The other article I read was on The Guardian, The Guardian newspaper, cracking apps, a crime fighter is going too far to bring down the cartels and this is a real question, right? They're very good at what they did and it's really impressive to read about this but a lot of innocent people, I'm sure caught up in this. By the way, they've arrested people in Dubai and Spain and the Netherlands and Belgium and Canada all over the world. I mean, as part of this, the use of breaking into these encrypted phones, there's this company called Sky ECC which was a provider of these phones that they broke in. I thought the most original thing, the most interesting thing that the police did was create their own encrypted phone company. But again, what about all the innocent people that got caught up in that and now had bought these encrypted phones from the police, not knowing it was the police, thinking that these were really encrypted phones and the police basically having committed fraud against them because they sold them a product based on a false premise. This is a product that police could completely access. So there's fraud involved here, there's something wrong in terms of our privacy as individuals. There's something very wrong about the police's ability to do this kind of stuff but it's all again justified by the war on drugs, by prohibition. Prohibition is never right. People have every right to destroy their lives, every right to be suicidal, every right to consume products that you don't like. If they commit a crime in the process, try them for the crime. But the use of drugs and the trading of drugs should not be a crime. It is a voluntary exchange. It might not be win-win but it's a voluntary exchange. They indeed are situations where trade is not win-win. Well, everybody trusts the government on this issue. Conservatives trust the government, left trust the government. Everybody trusts the government on this issue. And the Conservatives love regulating our behavior, love regulating our behavior in every aspect of our life, maybe with exception of our business life but they love regulating that part of their life as well. All right, Hopper Campbell, thank you, $50, really appreciate that. We are way, way, way short of our goal but it's still early. And if everybody puts in five bucks right now, we can easily make the goal. So please consider that. Hopper Campbell asked, do you foresee the war on drugs ending before the welfare state? Look how slow it takes good things to manifest. Half the states have legalized weed, kind of, and tax the hell out of it. Everyone on YB show is 200 years ahead of the times. Yeah, I mean that's absolutely right. And the weed stuff reminds me, right, isn't it ridiculous that they tax weed so much that basically what you've got now is a black market in weed. So even though weed is legal, there is plenty of illegal weed being sold because you can sell illegal weed at a lower price than legal weed because of the taxes. So taxes are a way of creating a black market. If you tax a legal product so much and demand is still there, then people will find a way to sell it to you without collecting the taxes and they will sell it to you for a discount. And one of the things that really hit home with me is when I was reading about these organized crime gangs in Europe selling drugs, one of the things, the way they get started in organized crime is not selling drugs. What do they sell? What do you think they sell? They sell cigarettes. And cigarettes have such a high tax in Europe that there is a massive business, organized crime business, of smuggling in cigarettes and selling them in the black market. And you can make a lot of money. A lot of money by selling cigarettes, a legal product, but by selling it for less than what it sells for in these countries because of taxes. So the amount of distortion and perversion because the government is playing, because our government plays paternalistic parent to us, telling us what we can consume and how much of it and what price we should pay and telling us what's good for us. By the way, the taxes on the cigarettes and the taxes on marijuana are not just to raise revenue, but to a large extent they are sin taxes. They are taxing your sinful behavior. You're smoking. You shouldn't smoke. Smoking is bad for you. So we're going to tax it in order to penalize you for engaging in bad behavior or discourage you, disincentivize you from engaging in bad behavior. And the same with marijuana now in a number of states. Marijuana is so much cheaper in the black market, the illegal market than it is in the formal authorized stores. But by the way, one of the reasons, one of the ways in which they got voters to agree to legalize marijuana is they told voters, we're going to tax it. And because we're going to tax marijuana, you will have to pay less taxes. We will fund government expenditures from the taxes on marijuana instead of taxing you. Now I wonder how well that's worked for people. I wonder if those taxes, I mean, that's a good empirical question. Maybe somebody's done a study on this. Have states that legalize marijuana actually lower taxes on everybody else? Have they indeed cut taxes or lower taxes on the rest of the population and rely more on taxes and weed? And of course, one of the reasons taxes on weed are disappointing is because the taxes create a black market, a lot of the weed is sold illegally, continues to be sold illegally and the government doesn't get the benefit and therefore they raise taxes anyway. I think I answered the question. Let's see. Dave says, $100. Thank you, Dave. Really, really appreciate it for stepping up. Dave says, I'm currently driving through public housing projects and everyone thinks their window is a garbage can. I see open drug deals taking place constantly. One positive about larger cities is they are harder to regulate. New York City may be the most unregulateable city in America. That's very possible. It would be nice if drug deals could happen in storefronts. It would be nice if drug deals did not have to happen in back alleys on street corners where there is definitely a risk of violence and gunshots and settling disputes. And a lot of innocents get killed in the process. But yeah, I mean, look, the reality is that the more laws you have, the more difficult it is to actually enforce them. The more complicated the laws, the more onerous the laws, the more victimless the laws are, the more onerous it is to enforce them. And that's what happens in big cities. The city's big. There's so much going on. The cops don't want to bother with small, you know, victimless crimes. They don't want to bother in some neighborhoods. They don't want to bother with drug deals. So they just leave it alone. They just leave it alone. They couldn't be bothered. And they're right to not be bothered. I don't blame them. And again, highly, highly recommend if you haven't watched the wire. Watch the wire and watch what the one drugs does to the policeman there and watch what it does to the incentives and the motivation. And watch what it does to the community. To the community which is involved in the drug trade. In this case, you know, the wire is set in Baltimore. What it does to the black community that is engaged in the black trade. What it does to the kids. What it does to the neighborhoods. It is just an every aspect. It is an unmitigated disaster. All right. Thank you, Dave. $100. Really, really appreciate that. Thank you. Jennifer says, is there actually, if there actually was a drug that even a little bit always turned anyone into a homicidal maniac? It could be illegal. No such thing, though. Yeah, I mean, if there was a causal relationship between it, that you take the drug and you do violence, then yeah, you would argue that the drug is part of the violence and you could easily, but there is no such thing. Indeed, most drugs are downers. Most drugs make you want to sulk in a corner. For a lot of people, alcohol is an upper. And alcohol makes a lot of crime is committed under the influence of alcohol. Alcohol, at least in a certain phase of getting drunk. Alcohol is an upper. It gets you motivated, excited. And I think some drugs work that way, but most drugs are downers and you just want to sit in a corner and float. I don't know why you would want that, but some people want that. Wonder Freeman's asking if I have any good news. That's not the topic today. We don't have good news topics today. Mike, I haven't seen Wonder Freeman in a while. Where's he been? Michael asks, all a cop has to say is he smells weed and he can search your car without your consent. And if he finds a sizable amount of cash, the state can seize it under civil asset forfeiture law. The ripple effects of the one drugs are almost incalculable. Yeah, I didn't even mention that. You're absolutely right, Michael. Just the suspicion you might be carrying drugs. Just some kind of inclination, white powder somewhere. A smell of weed or anything like that, and they can stop you. They can search you. They can take your stuff. They can impound your car if they suspect it was used in a drug trade. They can take your cash. Civil forfeitures laws are some of the most irrational and immoral laws that exist on the books. And all of these things, or most of these things are consequences of the war and drugs and the ripple effect of that war and drug. So incalculable is absolutely right, but we can't calculate one thing. It's huge. The amount of resources, the amount of money, the amount of lives that are wasted, that are wasted. Because we've decided to criminalize a particular product that we don't like. Used to be alcohol, now it's heroin and cocaine. But by doing so, we're destroying lives, just destroying lives. And one of the things that frustrates me and makes it difficult to be an intellectual sometimes is, God, you can see this so clearly. You see the impact of bad policies, bad ideas so clearly. And it doesn't matter. Nobody really cares. It's so true in so many different realms of the law, of our political lives, of the lives in which we live. There's so many areas in which the fix is so clear and obvious and straightforward and nobody's interested. Nobody's looking at it. Nobody wants to do it. You're constantly fighting against windmills. You're constantly Don Quixote fighting against the windmills. I think I told you this once. Somebody wants to ask me what the most frustrating part of my job is. And I said the most frustrating part is I know how to fix the world. I know how to make the world a significantly dramatically better place to live. Nobody cares. Nobody's interested. Nobody listens. As many lectures as I give, as many talks, as many shows as we have here on the Iran Book Show, the number of people who listen is a tiniest fraction of people interested in the world. And it doesn't go beyond that. My audience is small and not very influential. That's you guys. Small, not very influential. I didn't mean to insult you, but that's the reality. One of the few men said he's been working. Alright, so by implication, before that you weren't working? I'm just giving you a hard time. Just giving you a hard time. Alright, let's see more questions. We're about $390 short. That is $850 questions, $400 questions, $2020 questions, $2020 questions. Who knows? We might be able to do it. We'll see. Not a lot of questions left. So you haven't been asking a lot of questions. No one says greetings from Germany. Thanks. It's very late in Germany right now. Thanks for joining us. So not a lot of questions left. So if you're going to ask, then now's the time to do it. And if you can, do $20 or more so we can kind of make a dent in the goal. That would be nice. Alright, Katharine asks, do you speed read? It sounds like you have a lot of material, a lot of material in a relatively short amount of time. No, I don't. I'm actually a slow reader. I do not speed read. I wish I did. It's one skill that I wish I really had. I know people who speed read and it's amazing what they can do. And they retain it. It's not like they're just, it's the ability to read and retain. I'm a slow reader. I read a lot. I spend a lot of time reading. I can't skim a lot of stuff. So I'm very good at getting the gist of an article and moving on, not having to read every last detail and not having to read every little thing about it. The New Yorker article, I read most of it, but I skim parts of it. I do recommend it. It is fascinating. But I read a lot today. I read this whole essay about prohibition and how it helped create organized crime in the old days and what was the nature of organized crime, how organized crime becomes more complex as the profit, as your ability to mark up the goods goes up and as having more territory and have more geographic reach has a greater payoff. These drug cartels become super complex, integrated. They look like businesses with the added negative feature of violence on top of it. So these are massive corporate entities that use extensive violence in order to get their way. But it was a really interesting article from 1992 that looked at the history of kind of organized crime and its relationship to prohibition. But really, there is no organized crime. Not in the scale that we know it today without prohibition on alcohol and then the prohibition on drugs. Daniel says, Iowa has low taxes, little crime. I have my big home, great job. I'm saving more. But I miss my home state. I miss all what Los Angeles offers. Would it be wise to move back to California currently? I make 65K. I'm 36, blue collar, no kids. I mean, that's a question I cannot answer, right? I mean, you have to answer that question. I get it. I get it completely. I mean, it's not just about low taxes, little crime and big home. It's about meeting people, doing stuff, culture, just the dynamism of the city. And there's an amazing dynamism that exists in a city in California. God, it has so much going for it. I miss California constantly. I mean, it's an amazing state. It's modern. It's clean. It's got everything. The infrastructure is the best in the world, you know, maybe with the exception of the electricity grid in Northern California. For the most part, you've got, you know, they screw up, but it's all government screw ups to the extent that the infrastructure is problematic. It's the government is constantly screwing it up. But it's so much good about California. And of course, the weather in Los Angeles, you can't compete, certainly not in Iowa with California weather. California summers, California winters, the weather is just perfect. So I completely understand that. And you have to ask a question of what values are more important to you. And I don't think there's a right answer to that. I don't think there's a... That is, there's no right answer from my perspective, looking at you. From your perspective, there's a right answer. You have to rank your values. You have to create a higher care values and you have to say, what are the most important things to you? And based on that, determine where you want to live. I mean, I always say, why the hell does anybody live in Chicago? I mean, that to me is completely mind boggling. It's violent. It used to be a pretty city, but the data is slowly fading. It's got some of the worst, most corrupt city officials in the country. It has a horrible school system. And it's unbelievably cold. Why would you want to live there? But some people have real values there, whether it's family, whether it's a history with Chicago or in a love for the city, whether it's, you know, they find a ways to manage. So what you need to do is really think about, there is no ideal place today because California with all its goodness has a horrific government and the government is screwing things up and it's only going to get a worse and it's going to make it more and more and more expensive in a 65,000 a year. It's very hard to live in Los Angeles. I mean, I don't know where you live in Los Angeles, 65,000 a year. I mean, that's my one thing about California is I think you have to make well into the six figures to make life in California make sense. I think that's a reality. So I don't know, Daniel, but I'm skeptical of California is the right place. But maybe you can find a place that has some of Iowa's benefits and some of California's benefits, maybe Dallas, maybe Houston, maybe Phoenix, maybe Denver City, dynamic cities, decent weather and low cost of living where you can live in 65,000. It doesn't have to be California, but my guess is you can improve in Iowa. It reminded me when I was up for a job at Santa Clara University in 1993 and they offered the job to somebody ahead of me and he had two job offers. He had a job offer from Iowa State and from Santa Clara University and I thought, well, of course he's going to take the Iowa State. I was so depressed because I thought, this is it. I'm not going to get the job at Santa Clara because he's going to take the job in Santa Clara. Nobody in Israel, not mine, would ever take a job in Iowa State over Santa Clara. And of course, he took the job in Iowa State and I got the job in Santa Clara. Anyway, the whole hiring process for me to get into Santa Clara was very bizarre and strange. Ian says that he makes less than $200,000 and lives very comfortably in California. Great, I mean, I don't know what very comfortably means, but I made more than $200,000 and I lived fine in California. But I was sending so much money to the government that it just was offensive. It just was just offensive. But now I live in Puerto Rico, I don't say there's much money to get to the government, but life is not as good as in California. There's no question about it. These are trade-offs and you have to figure out which trade-off makes sense for you at what point in your life. Let's see, I want some stuff on the topic of today. So we're still $270 short, so we made some real progress. Thank you guys, particularly Daniel with $50 and then we've got a bunch of $20 questions. So thank you guys, but we still have $270 to go. So another $13, $14, $20 questions would be good. All right, Andrew says, Tony Soprano denies his free will. This is in the show on the Sopranos that was on HBO. He denies his free will. There's a good line when the lover of his therapist tells her, one day you're going to get past psychotherapy and the cheesiness of moral relativism and get to the good and evil. He's evil. Tony Soprano gets therapy from this therapist who has to ignore the fact that he is evil. But he, of course, denies he's evil because he rejects the fact that he has free will. This is all happening to him. This is all stuff he has to do. He has no choice. And you find yourself in a lot of gangster movies. The gangsters are trying to present it as if, well, I have no choice. I have to kill all these people. What choice do they have? If I don't kill them, they'll kill me. You know, it's always position and then, you know, and it's rare when somebody says, no, you do have a choice and you will suffer the consequence of the choices that you actually do make. See, yes, a lot of gangsters, I believe, justify the wickedness, the evil by claiming that they never had any choice. Let's see. Not your average algorithm says they can't even keep drugs out of totalitarian controlled settings like prisons. When I was locked up, we would often make wine in the toilet during the evening. I don't even want to know how you make wine in a toilet. But anyway, God's never bothered us. Yeah, of course. I mean, and drugs is smuggled into prisons all the time. And, you know, mafia bosses, organized crime bosses who were in jail managed to somehow manage the organized crime networks from jail. So, yes, even in a controlled environment like prison, they can't control supply and demand. All right, let's see. Okay, so we got outside of this. Let's go with on the Leroy. How do we $250 left, by the way? How do we get through to the average person? People may not care, but if voters demand something, politicians will respond. The simplest fact is that most people seem to not want freedom. What can be done? I mean, there is no easy answer to that. Most people don't want freedom. That's the reality. That's always been the reality in all of human history. Freedom is rare. It's unusual. It's a unique phenomena. And it's a consequence of some really deep understanding about, you know, the state of man and what's required for human beings to survive and to thrive. Freedom is, you know, a lot of my talks I talk about this, freedom is really dependent on the recognition of reason as man's means of survival and reason as efficacious, because if reason is not efficacious, if it's not the way in which you survive, then anything goes. And we need guidance. We need somebody to tell us what to do and how to do it. And that's authoritarianism. Authoritarianism comes from a platonic view of the world where most of us cannot take care of ourselves. And therefore we need an authority to tell us what to do. This is how religious and flourishes. This is authoritarianism. Don't worry. I'll tell you what to do. I know it's hard. Life is hard. Don't worry. I'll take care of you. I'll help you. I'll guide you. I'll provide you with what to do, when to do it. Just listen to me and everything will be good. And the second, so that's one foundation of freedom is reason. And the second foundation of reason is the value of the individual. The value of individual life, the value of individual, the pursuit of happiness, the value of an individual life in pursuit of the individual's well-being. That means egoism. Again, so the two foundations for freedom are some form of egoism. You get that in the Declaration of Independence with the right to pursue a happiness and a deep respect for reason. And you can see that all over the founding fathers. And without those two, you don't get freedom. And those are rare. And we don't have them today. Modern philosophers, modern thinkers, modern intellectuals, right and left don't believe in reason. Jordan Peterson doesn't believe in reason. Norm Chomsky doesn't believe in reason. Paul Krugman doesn't believe in reason. As guiding all men, as efficacious as... No, most people are stupid and need to be taken care of. And... Or they need religion to dictate to them what they can and cannot do because you can't count on them what as a Dennis Prager says, without God there is no morality. You are just rape and pillage left and right. That's the view of man. That's the view of humanity. You can't have freedom under conditions like that. And then, of course, egoism is out in the entire culture. So, no, the battle is a philosophical battle. There's no quick solutions. There's no one argument I can make. And yes, the whole rally to my cause. I mean, if you want to legalize drugs, what about the drug addicts? Well, why should I care? Let them die. I don't care. Do you care about drug addicts? I don't. So, but altruism demand that we care. And what about all the new people that will take drugs? What if you're going to take drugs? Why should I care? It's your problem. Not mine. But everybody will take drugs because nobody can take. Nobody can control themselves. We don't have control of ourselves. Well, that's the problem. See that right there, that inability to control yourself. That is the issue. And as long as you believe human beings are like that, not capable of self-control, not capable of governing their own emotions, not capable of governing their own lives, then yeah, what you'll get are laws like prohibition on drugs. Hey, we can't even convince people that a clump of cells just after conception is not a human being. Can't even convince them of that. And you can see that through own eyes. How are we going to convince them of more sophisticated stuff? It's going to take a long time. Philosophy, philosophy, philosophy. And we have to. I mean, this is the sad thing. You're not going to get a better world until we crush religion. Just the reality. Religion is a massive obstacle. A massive obstacle. James says, Objectivists always worry about getting through to people. How do we reach the average person? But I think the YB show is and has gotten through to a ton of new people. Yes, when I bring up, when I bring you up in debates, people know who you are. This wasn't the case a few years ago. Well, that's amazing that people know who I am. I really appreciate you telling me that. And yeah, we're slowly making progress, but it's slow. And look how many people subscribe to my channel. You can tell it's slow. It's not a lot of people. It's not massive numbers. Not a lot of people watch the show. You know, we're in the thousands. We should be in the tens, hundreds of thousands. But we're reaching thousands of people. And at this pace, it's going to take hundreds of years to get to where we need to be. This is why there need to be a lot of you on books. There need to be a lot of people doing what I'm doing. And I need somehow to figure out how to leverage this into a larger audience. Maybe the larger audience doesn't exist, but James is suggesting it does out there that they at least know who I am. And I do it. Did I tell you a story in Medellin? I mean, Medellin, talk about drugs, right? I mean, Medellin, Columbia. I think I told you this, but anyway, I'm in Medellin, Columbia. I'm checking in my hotel, the Marriott Hotel in Medellin, Columbia. It's 10 p.m. at night. And there's a guy next to me who's checking in with the other agent, checking into his hotel. Into the hotel. And he raises his head and looks at me and kind of gets this whimsical look on his face and looks at me and he says, you're your own book, right? And I go, yes. He's a Colombian from Bogota who once in a while watches my videos. He's not a... I don't know if he's a subscriber, I don't know if he's a... I don't think he's a regular listener, but he knew who I was. Like, in the middle of the night, in Medellin, Columbia. Like, it's my first time ever in Medellin. And he's from Bogota. Anyway, it's those kind of situations where people recognize me, people do that, that, yeah, there is some reach. If you look at some of my videos, if you look at some of my videos, they reach hundreds of thousands of people. I mean, some of my longer videos, like the debate on inequality from Yale University that I did a few years ago, I mean, that's been watched by, I think, close to half a million people on the Federalist Society website. It's actually the most watched video the Federalist Society have ever put out, which is pretty amazing. This is the Federalist Society, right? This is Clarence Thomas. This is Scalia. This is the biggest names in law ever. And the number one video on the Federalist Society's YouTube channel is me debating a law professor at Yale University on inequality. And by the way, two of my other videos, short videos, like in the top five. So I have three of the top five, I think, last time I looked. On the Federalist Society website. That's nutty. It truly is nutty. And then that same video has like 100,000 views on my YouTube channel. So it's 600,000 and it's a long video. That's like an hour and a half, two hour video. It's not some short snippet. Now some of my short snippets have reached millions of people on Facebook and others, sometimes without my name associated with it. I think students for Liberty once put out one of my videos without attributing it to me. And it was watched by millions of people. So yeah, I'm known. Are we having an impact? I don't know. I think so. On some people, yes. As we said, a mind at the time. We're having that. But are we having a culture-wide impact? Not yet. It's going to take time. All right, Jennifer says you know the Greek myth of Cassandra. She was cursed to always tell the truth, but have no one ever believe her. You're saying I'm cursed like that. Some people believe me. But yes, I'm now Cassandra. That's good. I like that. Thanks, Jennifer. All right, we're only $128 short. This is very doable, guys. You guys are really chipping away. $250 and $120 will get us there. But ask some questions at $20. This is good. We can do $620 questions. That's very doable. Richard says how can we make the world a better place when so many people are unwilling or unable to take care of themselves and want the government to take care of them? We just have to argue against it. Look, same question over and over again. How can we? Only one way. We need to make the argument for liberty. We need to make the argument for egoism. We need to make the argument for reason. We need to make the argument that people take care of themselves are not taking care of themselves. They're living miserable, pathetic lives. And if people choose not to take care of themselves, it's not my responsibility. Not my responsibility to take care of them. How is this a burden on me? The fact that they chose not to take care of themselves. And you could go on and on and on. But we've got to just make the arguments and keep making them. And the main thing is not allow ourselves to sanction our enemies. Not allow ourselves to give in to their demands. Not allow ourselves to give them the moral high ground. I think that's the most important thing. One of the few minutes says I have to work in Africa. I'd love to work in Africa. I do worry that it's a little dangerous. But maybe not all of Africa. Maybe that place is a little less dangerous. I'd like to find ways to deal to address African audiences. I really would. And there is supposedly a big like objectivist movement there. I don't know how objectivist it is. But they're using Ayn Rand's name. They're using objectivism. There's a big movement in India. Maybe I can do advice zoom or something. We'll see. All right. No one asks. No one. Literally no one. Objectivism work with a gnostic religion. While a lot of gnostics believe in some subjective reality. They do pretty consistently believe every human is a creative being in his own right with his own moral guidance. At the center of objectivism is the idea of reason and to bring everything before reason. Reason to be the guide to your life. The guide to your decisions. The guide to your reality. And in that sense any religion or any ideology that rejects religion is just not integrated. So while they might be I don't think it doesn't matter who you bring up. It's just not going to integrate with objectivism as long as it doesn't have a deep profound respect for reason. This is why maybe religious and objectivist. And yes, maybe the gnostics are less offensive than other religions. But it doesn't make them I don't know what it means objectivism work with them. You know, one of the few men said David Deutsch is 100% pro-reason. I mean he is. And I have a huge amount of respect for David Deutsch. But he's wrong on very fundamental epistemological points that make it very difficult when it comes to applying the philosophy. But yeah, I mean he's one of the good guys. He's definitely an ally in the fight even if we disagree about particularly applications and even if we disagree about particular points his attitude and people like Steven Pinker even if Steven Pinkers are leftist on some economic issues I consider him an ally because the defense of reason and even if he gets the idea of reason wrong which I think David Deutsch does too the fact that they're generally in the direction of the human mind the mind and reality is a huge leg up on the subjectivists and the religionists and all the rest of them that reject reality and reject reason and reject as a consequence reject humanity, reject life. Alright, $103 we're getting close guys $520 questions and we're there. Christopher Hidgens with all his flaws was a devoted atheist who conceded that humanity will never give up religion. Perhaps the objective should be to create a religion based on reason and freedom don't laugh. You can't have a religion based on freedom on reason and freedom because that's the exact point is that religion is the negation of reason you can't have if the religion is a religion of reason it's not a religion and Christopher Hidgens was wrong on a lot of things a lot of things and I don't think to say humanity will never give up on religion never, never is a long time long time I don't think Christopher Hidgens or anybody else can say what will happen over such a long span of time so no as much as I admire Christopher Hidgens particularly in his opposition to religion and you don't need all of humanity you need the intellectuals intellectuals shape the world and the reason people are religious is because that's where they get the intellectual guidance from and we need to create intellectual guides who are non-religious who are pro-reason and I think we can, I think we win if we do and that's all we're working on God that's all we're working on that's what I do okay Andrew if you were willing to commit to a party a political faction and then spend every show lying facadeing and framing everything to lionize your side and demonize the enemy faction your show could be magnitudes bigger yes true I'd have no integrity I'd I'd hate myself I'd have a horrible life but I'd have a big following and maybe have more money than I do today yeah maybe we could come up with a party, a political faction that I can do with without losing my integrity isn't that what I actually do it's called the party of truth the political party of reality facts, reality and reason that's who we represent and we never we never commit treason against reality and truth at least we try not to I'm not saying everything I say is always true but I think it is I do make mistakes all the time Michael asks what is the best way to turn pain into purpose well I mean the number one purpose you should have when facing pain is to get rid of the pain so I think the way to turn pain into purpose is to recognize the pain identify its source and commit yourself to getting rid of it whether that's through exercise, health or if it's psychological playing through better psychological practices and better ideas and so on right so pain you turn it into purpose by recognizing that the standard is not pain the standard is the opposite it's pleasure, it's life and to do that you have to overcome the pain and you have to get rid of the pain and to get rid of the pain you have to take action whatever that action happens to be do it Michael asks yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel where the entire country stood still for one minute what did Yom HaShua mean to you growing up in Israel well I mean it was part of life it was music on the radio was a particular type of music sad and very sad music it's in all the stories you're taught the documentaries and the films that you watched that day it's not just a minute of silence it's the whole day is enveloped in this at least was when I was growing up enveloped in this idea of remembering an idea of recognizing the evil and committing oneself to never again so it's a profoundly emotional day you know and really committed to a positive value it's committed to life they overdo it and one of the reasons I won't go to Auschwitz and I I don't watch Holocaust movies anymore and I'm not interested in Holocaust documentaries that's so much of that growing up so much of that in Israel that I you know done that being there I understand it I get it Holocaust evil I understand why it happened who did it I understand it should never happen again don't need experience it over and over and over again all the time but for Israel this is a the the sense is you need a constant reminder of this you need the constant reminder of of this existential threat that the people of Israel live under and Jews all over the world live under Michael says should plain closed police officers and unmarked police vehicles be illegal this isn't this isn't this is a form of entrapment I don't think it's technically a form of entrapment it's a question of what function do they serve and to the extent that they're necessary in order to deceive criminals in order to catch criminals in order to be able to move around neighborhoods without being identified I don't see a problem there it's how they're being used if they're being used in a way to entrap you that's bad but if they're being used in order to spy in in order to be integrated into communities they can identify criminals I don't see any problem with it okay we've got two questions they're going to be quick and we're short $83 that's very it's a very doable $83 so let's see maybe somebody can step in and get us over over the top so that we can end today we met the target at the last minute in our morning show it would be great if we could meet the target today as well so feel free to ask a question or to just make a contribution through one of the stickers but it would be nice if we got the $80 Steven says my daughter is a criminal lawyer she fastaciously is in favor of the war on drugs because if it ends she would lose about 7% of her business that's a very cynical view to take yeah I mean if you're a criminal if we simplify the tax code a lot of accountants will lose their job so if jobs were the standard we need a bigger state a more complex state we need more government intervention we need more and the more the more convoluted and difficult and complex the laws are the more lawyers we need I mean there's no end to that line of reasoning lawyers never want simplicity lawyers never want legalization alright last question guys Daniel says thanks for the answer you on I missed the restaurant's beaches mountains family sometimes I don't care about the taxes traffic in California yeah I get that I completely get it I understand it you just have to figure out what's most important to you it's also about the big house you couldn't have a big house in California you have a big house in Iowa on $65,000 so it's a combination of a lot of things alright guys thank you I appreciate all the support thank you for everybody who stepped in with the super chat today a lot of good questions I appreciate this I hope you enjoyed the topic and enjoyed the show if somebody still wants to jump in with $83 that would be great but if not that is okay if you want to support the show kind of on a more regular basis you can do so by um signing up for monthly contributions and patreon and subscribe star patreon in particular is popular these days subscribe star dot com slash your own book show and or your own book show dot com slash support which uses paypal you can also send money through venmo and other sources so up to you it'd be great to get more supporters it'd be great to get more of the subscribers to support more of the listeners to support many many many more people listen to these shows or watch these shows or listen to them as podcasts then actually contribute it would be nice to get value for value I'm providing these shows as a value it'd be great if you provided a value in return by supporting these shows financially this is how I make a living a big chunk of my living comes from these shows this is the money I spend on groceries so um on groceries and mortgage Andrew has a another question I'm over my limit but we'll add a tip and quote powerful integration by Rand that zinged me she said atlas introduced them a reality of reason yes and that's what Rand's morality is about it's the morality of reason it's the morality for a rational man and the whole point of her morality is to emphasis rationality it's think think think use your mind alright guys have a great rest of your night have a great week I will see you all tomorrow morning for another news briefing I'll see you