 The radical. Fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. All right, everybody. Welcome to the Iran Brookshow on this Tuesday afternoon. It's late, not typical hour for the show. Sorry. A bunch of calendar confusions and other meetings that got moved, cancelled. Jig it around. Here we are at 3 p.m. East Coast time. Again, hope everybody's having a great week for our news roundup. There will be a show tonight, 8 p.m. East Coast time. Won't move it, I promise. Well, I think I promise. Won't move it. I'm not sure all the topics will cover, but we're still going to talk about the movie I saw this weekend, Golda, which, so I've got a bunch of stuff to say about that. It's a movie review of the movie Golda that came out this last weekend about Golda Meir and the Yom Kippur war in Israel, but we'll cover, I'm sure we'll cover a bunch of other topics as well. So that'll be at 8 p.m. East Coast time tonight. All right, also reminder to all of you, you can ask questions. Super Chat is the way to do that. That way you get to ask whatever you want. You get to steer the conversation and direction you want. You get to highlight the news items if the question is related to news item that you would like. All right, let's get started. We're going to start with one of the worst things the Biden administration has done since, I think, since he got elected. So, and it's part of the inflation, so-called Inflation Reduction Act. It is the idea that the act gives Medicare, right, Medicare, which is basically health insurance for everybody over 65, so Socialized Medicine, government-run Socialized Medicine for everybody over 65 in the United States. For all Europeans out there who think the United States doesn't have Socialized Medicine, you're wrong. It just limits its Socialized Medicine to people over 65 and to the very poor. So we have Medicare and Medicaid, which are basically Socialized Medicine, the government pays for all of it. So, anyway, the idea was that Medicare is, you know, it spends a lot of money on healthcare, a lot of money on healthcare. Most of it, by the way, for the last six months of your life. So most of it is like to keep you alive when it's not clear. You should be kept alive, right? And if maybe it was your own money, you wouldn't spend it on keeping yourself alive. Maybe you'd rather leave it to your kids or something. But since it's a taxpayer's money, who cares? Why not? Another six months, I'll take it. So Medicare, of course, is bankrupting the country. It's, it's, it will be the, or maybe is already, but it's going to become the largest expenditure on the budget by far. It only going to increase from here on as the baby boomers retire, get older, get sick and approach death. And, you know, for every dollar you pay in taxes towards Medicaid, you spend over four. So it's a massive, massive redistribution plan scheme from the young to the old. And in that sense, it's much bigger than Social Security. It's, it's, they spend a lot more money because it's healthcare. It's super expensive and the government's buying it. So anyway, so the plan was how do we reduce the amount of money we spend on Medicare? How do we reduce the cost of healthcare? And how do we, how do we, a big part of this is Medicare's coverage of drugs. Now, Medicare originally didn't cover drugs. Medicare originally just covered treatment and didn't cover drugs at all. It was Republicans led by George Bush and by the House and Senate when Republicans had the White House, the House and the Senate, who expanded Medicare in one of the most costly additions to government spending ever, expanded Medicare to cover drugs. So you can thank Republicans for this. Original Medicare was passed by Democrats, the expansion, massive expansion. You can thank Republicans for. Anyway, Biden wants to curb expenses. And he also wants to satisfy the left wing and might I add right wing populists who generally hate the pharma industry. And he also wants to satisfy this idea that what do Europeans pay and Canadians pay a lot less for drugs than we do in the United States. So his solution to all of this is to have Medicare, just like governments in other countries do, negotiate directly with pharma to reduce the prices. Now, Medicare is such a huge buyer. It might be the biggest buyer in the world for many of these drugs that, you know, pharma is going to have to give a massive discount. Of course, not only that, but Medicare doesn't just buy the one drug. It buys a whole series of drugs and you don't want to piss up Medicare. You don't want them to stop approving your drugs. So there is a massive incentive for pharmaceutical companies to collaborate and to reduce the drugs dramatically. If a drug company does not enter into negotiations with Medicare, or I guess if those negotiations do not go well according to Medicare. Listen to this. Then the drug company basically faces an excise tax of up to 95%. I mean, you can't be serious, right? 95%. Let's just have 100% taxation in the United States and finish with it. 95%. Or it will be forced to leave Medicare and Medicaid completely. In other words, the government is coming to these negotiations with the guns loaded and pointed and ready to course pharma companies to reduce those prices no matter what. This is unbelievably destructive. It's unbelievably harmful to the future of healthcare. I mean, it won't have any consequences in the short run, but it will massively reduce the amount of money available for pharma companies to invest in new drugs, in new treatments in the future. It will also reduce the appetite of investors to provide capital to biotechs and pharma companies in the future to come up with new blockbuster drugs. Because if it becomes a blockbuster, then the government's going to price control it, which is basically what this is, price controls. Now, look, the government wants to be reasonable about these things. They're bringing the guns, but they're not bringing the guns to everything. They have criteria, and what they've done is they've chosen 10 drugs to at least start this program on. And they've chosen 10 drugs, and these drugs have to meet certain criteria, and they were written into the bill, into the inflation reduction bill. And they have to be drugs that Medicare spends a lot of money on because they have to have an impact on reducing Medicare expenses. So how do they choose the drugs? Well, one, the drug has to have been on the market for a certain period of time. Look, the government's kind of reasonable, and they want the drug companies to be able to make some money, at least to pay back the development costs of the drug. So they want to allow them to make a profit for a while, just not too long, and how long is long enough, the government will decide. So if it's a small molecule drug, they get nine years before these price caps enter. And if it's a biologic drug, then they get 13 years before price controls are implemented. Price controls in America in the 21st century. The drug must not face competition. So it has to be like a drug that there's no competitors for, although that's not really true, because how do you define competitors? Like, in the first 10 that they chose today, there are several blood thinners. Maybe they don't compete directly in the sense that they don't work the same way, but they clearly substitute products. So of course the government is defining competition in a very vague, ambiguous kind of way. So they can't face competition for either generics or a biosimilar, or a drug that closely resembles a biologic, but is sold at a cheaper price. Because they figure competition would reduce the price anyway, so can't face competition. Again, that is meaningless and stupid, completely arbitrary. It can be an orphan drug. An orphan drug is an FDA designated drug for rare disease treatment that only treats one condition. That is not eligible for price reduction, price control, not price reduction, price control. And it has to be one of the highest annual expenditures as part of Medicaid, part D, part D is the drug part, right? So, you know, this is how it's all, this is how it's all going to come down. Of course what this means is those of us who might be taking drugs who have to buy drugs were under 65. And therefore, you know, but still need the drugs, my guess is prices for the rest of us are going to go up, right? So if Medicaid forces prices down, why wouldn't the drug company just raise prices on the rest of us? Who are not under Medicaid? The price control is only for what Medicare buys. I mean, the real problem here is Medicare. The real problem is Medicare's dominance over healthcare in the United States. The real problem is socialized medicine, no matter whether that socialized medicine applies to 65-year-old or to anybody. Socialized medicine is wrong. Socialized medicine distorts and perverts the marketplace. And that's the real issue. Once you have Medicare, once you have socialized medicine, well, you're going to have additional distortions. And this is one big one. And we can thank the George W. Bush administration, George Bush Jr. for this. Without the expansion of Medicare to drugs, this wouldn't have come about. We can thank our Republicans for this. And all those House members, including, you know, I don't know, the ones who believe in free markets, supposedly, and everything who voted for it. We can thank the senators. And I think this passed with a 60-vote majority. Well, I guess a lot of Democrats voted for it, too. We can thank all the senators and other Republicans for voting for this. They made this possible. Now we have price controls, because that's what the Democrats will do. I mean, this is disgusting. Although, you know, what's a candid someone will be very happy. Some others on the, you know, sometimes a free market might be very happy because hatred of pharma has become very, very popular. Almost like a virus that has infected people. So all the haters, all the people who hate pharmaceutical companies, all the people who hate drug companies are celebrating, I assume, right now because this will squeeze them. And I often wonder, because I hear this a lot, pharma is crony. They have their people at the FDA. They have their people in government. They control all these things. So much for cronyism. It doesn't help them much. They just had their profits cut dramatically. They just had their revenues cut dramatically. In spite of all the connections and all the people they bought off, what's up with that? I mean, they need an upgrade. Maybe they need to take an extra class in cronyism, advanced cronyism, how to prevent price controls from affecting your industry. The point is about cronyism. Is that at the end of the day, all the power resides with those wielding the guns. All the power resides with the government. And you can play games with them and you can benefit for a little bit. You can benefit for a while. You can benefit here and there. But overall, you lose. And you always will. The people with the guns don't care about you. They don't care about the people. They care only about power. They care only about manipulating. They believe in manipulation. And they will continue to do it. And this is just horrible. This is just another example of the political class in America taking more and more control of our lives and of our future. This one I take personally because it's going to affect my future. It's going to affect my future. A lot less lower probability that I will be able to take that life extending drug that allowed me to live to be 120. All right. There's a lot of talk right now about China, about that Chinese economy slowing, about struggles in the Chinese economy. A lot of the discussion is at that kind of macro level. The Chinese government should stimulate more. The Chinese government should do this more, should do that more. But everybody's really, I think most of the people who are writing about this, are really missing the picture. And really missing what is actually going on. And there's a story that I read today, came out today in actually the New York Times. Which I think actually reveals what the real problem in China is. And suggests what the real solution ultimately has to be. And that all these bailouts, talk about bailouts. And it's funny because it's funny right now because it's American economists and Western politicians and Western economists that are urging the Chinese to take on more debt and to stimulate the economy, to encourage people to go out and borrow money and consume. And for the government to redistribute more wealth. The solution, by the way, to China's problems right now, we are told by many Western economists, is they don't have enough of a welfare state. They need more welfare. They don't have enough socialized medicine. They need more socialized medicine. The way to turn China into a consumer economy, which is what everybody claims is a solution for China, is by handing people money in one way or another so that they can go out and consume. That is such a perverse and upside down view of economics. And in this scenario, the rulers of China are evil and bad people because they're not Keynesian enough. And I'd say the rulers of China, probably for all the wrong reasons, actually acting fairly responsible. They're not stimulating the economy. They're not printing gazillions of yuan to bail everybody out. They're not taking huge amounts of debt. They're not creating inflation. They're actually being responsible, holding the line, letting the economy go into a recession because of all the excesses of debt that led to this point. Now we'll see if they actually let this happen. But what they should do is let the economy go into a recession, deregulate taxes in the meantime, particularly deregulate in China, and then allow for it to increase once all the garbage is being funneled out. But even there, there's a problem. So I want to illustrate this problem through this story that I read about in the New York Times. And it's a really fascinating story. It's about this woman who grew up in China, very poor. And she, from a very young age, left high school and started working. And she worked in all kinds of jobs just to make any kind of money and slowly accumulate some wealth and some credit. And basically used that wealth and credit to start businesses. And basically did very well and expanded those businesses. And when the economy shrunk a little bit at some point during the financial crisis, for example, she pivoted and invested in a different type of business that was more attractive to the clientele. And she built a little kind of restaurant empire and did very, very well for herself. And did it the way you do. You borrow money, you invest, you borrow money, you invest. You're wealthy in a sense, but you're always expanding and therefore you're always taking on more debt. But she was very responsible, did this very well and was very successful for a while. And then Xi Jinping came to power. And a number of things happened. Regulators start clamping down on small businesses. Regulators starting to make it a lot more difficult for small businesses to take on debt. In addition, China's never really developed proper or systematic bankruptcy laws. For many companies like small businesses, there is no such thing as bankruptcy. Anyway, because of COVID, her businesses got in real trouble. Suddenly she had debt. The banks wouldn't lend money and she couldn't pay the debt back. She borrowed money for family, sustained, kept it going. But then again, because of all the closures, the lockdowns that China engaged in during this period, she couldn't sustain the business. As a consequence, she was arrested because it turned out she owed her employees money. She hadn't been able to pay them. Even though she had now, by this point, transferred many of the restaurants to her minority owners. She became just an employee, but turns out she owed some money. She couldn't file for bankruptcy because there's no such thing, such code in China in order to restructure her debt. Instead, what happened is she was literally arrested. She was put in jail for 16 days while the authorities tried to figure out whether she was hiding any assets from which maybe she could have paid the employees, found out that she wasn't hiding anything, let her out. Anyway, here's a woman who throughout her career, she even pivoted when e-commerce became a big thing. She was, I guess, selling merchandise before and after e-commerce. She started selling food because food can't buy on the internet or you can't cook it. It has to be physical. So here's an entrepreneur who's not allowed to fail. Failure is devastating at stand. So this is the other element I wanted to add. She's been put on one of these lists in China because she owes money and because credit rating has dropped, her social rating has dropped as well. She can't fly. She can't take the fast train. She cannot leave her hometown. She cannot go to a bank and get credit. She's stuck. She cannot actually resume entrepreneurial activity. She's being penalized for failing. In the US, one of the great virtues that we have in the US is that we allow people to fail and we allow people to get back on their feet and start up again and succeed. We don't penalize the failure itself and failure is a penalty in and of itself. You don't need to add to that. We allow bankruptcy laws that allow you to restructure your debt that allow you to sometimes write off part of your debt so that you can start fresh. None of that exists. She's lost her home. She's lost her businesses. She's lost everything. And that's okay. That happens even in a market economy. But there's no way for her to get out of the hole. And that's because of the social scores and the regulatory regime and the controls and the general distrust and hatred that Xi and his regime have towards entrepreneurs. Eighty percent of all new jobs in China are created by the private sector and that the private sector is now despised by the regime, discouraged by the regime. And it would rather jail entrepreneurs. And she's not asking money from the government. She explicitly says, I don't want money from the government. What she's asking is for the government to get rid of the barriers that prevent her from going out and restarting her life, restarting her businesses, restarting as an entrepreneur. This is what's holding China back. The switch in the Xi administration over the last five, six, seven years to be explicitly hostile to the private sector, to guiding banks against the private sector, adding regulations, increased regulations, not having proper rule of law, not having a proper bankruptcy regime, not having the ability to actually sustain a true entrepreneurial culture. That's what China needs. It needs massive deregulations. It needs banks that are truly private banks and are not run by the government. It needs capitalism. It needs freedom. Not more government stimulus, more government control, more government printing of money, more government telling the banks what they can or cannot do, which is what almost every western economist is telling them. So what China needs is more economic freedom. Even if a turn to the way it was 10, 12 years ago would go a long way to helping the Chinese economy recover. All right. Interesting editorial in the Wall Street Journal by Walter Russell Mead, who I read quite a lot after 9-11, who had a lot of interesting things to say about foreign policy after 9-11. Anyway, Walter Russell Mead has an op-ed today or yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. The view from the Kremlin isn't all bad. Putin has problems in Ukraine, but he's gaining in the Middle East, Africa and China. I mean, I think it overplays that a lot, but there's one paragraph that was so good I wanted to read it to you here because I thought it was perfect in terms of illustrating the essence of why Ukraine is struggling, why Russia has any success at all on the global scene. Who Russia's biggest asset is? Who's Putin's biggest ally? So this is the paragraph. Mr. Putin's strongest asset, as ever, I think he's right, this has always been the case, remains the incoherence of the contemporary West. His Western opponents are Churchill's on the podium and Chamberlain's in real life. Now that's a good line. That's a good line. So his Western opponents are Churchill's on the podium and Chamberlain's in real life. They proclaim their underlying commitment to a rules-based international order that forbids territorial conquest while quietly pressing Ukraine to accept the laws of Crimea and Donbass. They solemnly commemorate Pride Month in Kabul while preparing the wholesome abandonment of Afghans to the Taliban. They oscillate between denouncing Saudi Arabia as a pariah state and begging it, begging it for help. They moralistically instruct the global south to sacrifice for the common good and climate change even as they embrace protectionist policies that threaten the south's economic future. Now I think that's a great paragraph and it's a paragraph that exactly captures the complete and utter decay, the complete and utter dishonesty. Lack of integrity, lack of strategic thinking, lack of foreign policy that, you know, the Trump administration, the Biden administration, the European Union, the entire West has at its disposal. I mean, Putin would now have clearly have lost on the ground in Ukraine if the administration had actually approved the weapons that the Ukrainians had sought, which it ultimately did, but it took it a year to approve tanks, a year and a half to approve F-16s. That could have been done a year and a half ago. Ukraine would be a lot further along if they had done that. And of course the examples he gives, I love the one in Kabul, you know, a celebrating Pride Month in Kabul and then a month later, oops, we're out of there and handing it over to Taliban. Guess what they do to Pride Month? We have no foreign policy. We have no strategy. We have no long-term thinking. We have no, no principles. And that allows autocrats, the Toletarians, barbarians, mafia regimes like Putin's to survive and not to thrive. He's not thriving, but to survive. In a rational world, Putin wouldn't survive. Wouldn't survive. He continues in the next paragraph from Putin's point of view, this mix of aggressive rhetoric and cautious policymaking is the best of all possible American approaches. The administration's chest thumping about American values often sounds like bullying to other countries, while the unmissable contrast between bold words and timid deeds invites contempt. And that's perfect, right? And of course, it undermines it at home as well. Nobody in America understands what the hell Biden administration's doing. You know, this increases the sympathy for Vivek or Trump or whoever who wants to stop supporting Ukraine. It increases all that because there's no coherency. There's no strategy. There's no somebody coming out and explaining to the American people why this is in America's self-interest. There's none of that. The American people are too stupid, I guess, to understand. So the administration is silent. Or maybe the administration doesn't ever clue what they're doing. All right, finally, we all know that there's a real housing shortage in the Bay Area in California. We know the situation San Francisco is in, but yet in spite of how bad things are in San Francisco, certainly in spite of everything, the Bay Area is one of the most expensive places in the world to buy real estate, to own a home, to move to. Well, there is now a new solution to this. Over the last, maybe a couple of years, I think, a mysterious group called Flannery has been buying up huge swaths of land just northeast of San Francisco across the Bay, not far from Travis Air Force Base. Rumors have been swirling. And I've read stories about this, that this land is being bought up by the Chinese and it's a national security threat and a lot of the rhetoric around not allowing Chinese to buy land, which is a law that now passed in Florida, bizarre, wanted to be applied to California because hey, it was the Chinese buying land and it's next to Travis Air Force Base. This is a national security threat. Turns out, not the Chinese. It turns out that this land has been bought by an American company called Flannery that is run by a young 36 year old entrepreneur. It turns out that the backers of this entrepreneur, the money to buy all of this money has come from big shots in Silicon Valley. We're talking about some of the biggest names in the valley from Steve Jobs' wife to people like Andreessen and Moritz and a bunch of the top names in the venture capital community, the guy who started LinkedIn, I forget his name now. Anyway, the Flannery group has spent a billion dollars, one billion dollars, buying all this land in Solana County. Solana County is a county southeast of Marin County, which is the county north of San Francisco, and do northeast a little bit from San Francisco. It's a county that doesn't have a lot of inhabitants. And the plan is to build a new city then. The plan is to build what's called a mixed-use city, a city that would have both work, shopping, and residential in a place that can be walked that will not rely on cars. The entire city supposedly will be, the energy will be provided through solar energy. So the idea is to have good paying jobs, affordable housing, clean energy, sustainable infrastructure, open spaces in a healthy environment. And they're going to be building this. They are now letting the county know they're in the process of trying to rezone it so that they can build this. And this is, let me just say, put the details aside, this is fantastic. This is the kind of optimistic pro-growth, pro-building, let's make something new attitude to solving problems. Let's build, let's create, let's solve by adding, not by subtracting. And the list includes people who've changed the world already. And again, Michael Moritz from Sequoia, Mark Andreessen, Chris Dixon, the Collinsen brothers who, the founders of Stripe, as I said, Lauren Jobs, Steve Jobs, White Widow, and Nate Friedman who is the former chief executive of GitHub and others. The project is spearheaded by a 36-year-old former trader at Goldman Sachs. And they're going to build a new town. Now, I don't know if this will be successful. I mean, there's a lot of hurdles. There are a lot of challenges. I find it exciting. I find this, this is the kind of way, this is the way you solve problems. And these are problems solving like people. One of the best essays published in the last few years was the essay by Mark Andreessen on build. Let's build stuff. We used to build stuff in this country and we need to build stuff again in this country. And this is him putting his money where his mouth is and actually doing it. So good for them. I'm excited, a story to follow, to keep track of. I'll update you as things transpire. All right. Thought I'd end there on a positive note. All right. Let's now move to Super Chat is about halfway to a goal. We didn't make a goal yesterday. Didn't bug you about it. Not going to bug you today. Just mentioning it as please. Let's try to make our goals so that these news briefings, news roundups, which many of you seem to like. We've got over 100 people listening right now are sustainable. So a lot of people, since there are a lot of people here, assuming there are a lot of people who don't usually do Super Chat or stickers, use the Super Chat to ask a question. Use the sticker just to support the show. Think of it as a trade. I'm providing this value. Value in return is your financial support. All right. Let me just say, Mike, thank you. Silvanos, thank you. $50. That's amazing. Thank you. FDF, thank you. And Steven, thank you. And Antonio, thank you. Really appreciated. John Bales, thank you for the $20. Really appreciate that. All right. Jeffrey says, I hope you're excited for college football. I hate to admit it, Jeffrey. And I know you'll be really disappointed, but I really do not watch college football. And I have a problem with football more broadly that we can talk about over dinner in New York soon. Fender Harper says, have you had art of the argument by Steven Molineau? Seems pro-liberty, and I was curious if you know of the author. It's not often I hear someone characterize freedom as the absence of coercion outside of objectivity. Yes, I know Steven Molineau. Steven Molineau used to be a really, really big shot on social media, on YouTube. He had a huge channel before I think he was a band from many of his social media platforms. He is a very, very mixed bag. He liked Dyn Rand, but was also an anarchist, was an anarchist. He then went from being an anarchist to being more of a kind of a racist, you know, white nationalist type conservative or maybe that's just paleo-libertarian or whatever you want to call it. But a very, very, very mixed bag. Said a lot of positive things about Dyn Rand, but of course was an orcho-capitalist or an anarchist at the same time. But very mixed bag. You can find his videos, they're all over the place. He's a big celebrity. He made a lot of money off of his public appearance and had a huge following, much bigger unfortunately than mine. But yeah, I mean, because those more fringe views have a lot more people interested than what I have to offer you obviously. That's the reality that we have to live with until we change the world. All right, we're still about $95 short. So just for your consideration, we've got 100 people watching $94 short. You'd think that would be an easy and easy make. Thank you, Darlene. Thank you, Dave. And we've only got two questions, so this is going to be over very quickly. All right, Scott asks, glad you're going to JP's event, but are you acknowledging the right may not be as bad as you thought or are you just trying to flip his followers? The event is not going to be of his followers. The event is invitation-only. It is an event supposedly of influencers, a bunch of influencers. I'm going to see who's going to be there. I'm going to there because I want to have my hand on the pulse of what's going on. I want to be there to have a voice in the debate. So I was invited. Alex Epstein, for example, would be one of the speakers. But am I there to flip his followers? No. I'm not going to be given a stage to flip his followers. It's more to be there. Now, look, if what do you call it, certain leftist organizations invited me to come to an event, an invitation-only with a lot of influencers on what I'd call on the left, I would go with the hope of meeting people like Steven Pinker and meeting others who I think are interesting and, again, like to have the hand on the pulse of what's going on in the world. I'm hoping there are better people than Jordan Peterson there. I'm hoping some of the more rational elements of the right are there. If it turns out that everybody's just a Jordan Peterson religionists, God, I was watching some video of Knowles, which I might talk about tonight, but a video of Knowles where he talks about Ayn Rand, he talks about other stuff this morning, and oh my God, those people are hopeless and disgusting and horrible and worse than the left, right? If it's a bunch of those people, then it'll be a waste of my time. If there are people there, and particularly given that it's not in the U.S., it's in Europe, and at least in the U.K., I think the right, the right in the U.K. is much more rational than the right in the U.S. because the right in the U.K. is much more secular than the right in the U.S. So I'm just hoping to meet interesting people there, and I got invited at a pretty big discount to attend, so I'm going. I'll let you know how it is afterwards. Don't read too much into it. Zachary asks, how long should copyrights last? The current policy seems to prioritize writing from 100 years ago as opposed to active writers. Well, the current policy is a policy kind of dictated by or passed for Disney. When the copyright on Mickey Mouse was about to expire, the extended copyright law is to, I think, author's life plus 75 years. I think that's too long. That doesn't really make sense to me, although one has to think about things like corporate logos and given the corporations last much longer than the founders. But I don't know what the right number is. That's a question to ask Adam Arsoff when he's on the show. But it needs to be at least the author's lifetime and maybe some beyond that to allow the authors to benefit from it. But 75 years, which was what it is today, certainly seems, you know, too long. But, you know, on the other hand, I mean, I don't know why anybody cares that much, right? So, you know, do we really want Atlas Shrugged to go into the public domain? And when it goes into public domain to anybody to print it, change words in it, do all kinds of stuff to it, use it for all kinds of purposes, there's a value in having control of these things and who's losing exactly from not having Atlas Shrugged in the public domain. If you want a free copy, by the way, the Ironman Institute will provide you with one. So it's not like that's the problem. So, it's, you know, I don't know who loses from not being able to use Mickey Mouse because Disney has a copy right over it. So I'm open to arguments about what the time should be, but probably 75 is too much, I don't know. But it needs to be figured out by, this is what you have, experts in law and philosophers of law and economists who can get together and really figure out what makes the most sense. And it's not going to be like an intrinsic number. And this is why, maybe in different countries, it lasts differently and we can have a little bit of competition across jurisdictions. But there has to be some number agreed upon. Tessa says, what did you think about John Stasso? I mean, generally, I like John Stasso. I have a lot of admiration for him. It's taking him a lot of courage to go on the journey that he's gone. He started as kind of a leftist, a consumer advocate and discovered the truth. So you have to give Stasso a gazillion amount of credit for being a truth seeker. He's one of the good guys. He doesn't go very deep. He's not interested in deep. His mind doesn't go deep. It just doesn't. But so what? I respect him for what he actually does and for what he is able to do. So huge respect and admiration for Stasso. I've enjoyed working for him over the years. I don't agree with everything he does and everything he says. But, you know, I like much of what he did. Remember, Stasso got his break on Network TV and started to do his radical kind of free market stuff while he was on Network TV. Had a whole show dedicated to it for a while. Then went to Fox and today is doing his own thing with his own production company. He did not fit Fox's mold anymore. That new city across the bay you mentioned, what will they do for electricity at night or will they be using candles? My assumption is that they will be using some kind of battery technology to at night. So solar only makes sense when teamed with batteries. The problem is the expense. So my guess is they'll be hooked to the grid and they'll be using natural gas like the rest of us. At least until batteries get so cheap as that you can run a city. Look, solar energy is not crazy for a state like, at least for a portion of it, for a state like California. Once it gets cheap enough, it's crazy for Germany. But the state of California with 300 days of sunshine a year, not insane. You need backup. You can't only rely on solar. That's insane. Jeff says thanks for the great analysis. Thank you, Jeff. Really appreciate the support. We've made our goal so really appreciate you guys coming through. Paul says, have you read Gideon's decline? Gideon's decline of fall of the role of an empire? Gideon. That's not Gideon's decline of the fall of their own empire is, what's his name for that? I forget. The names don't come to me as you know. Written around the same time as the American Revolution, yes, seems like it was influenced by the age of reason. Yes, it was. I mean, some of it's wrong, but it was certainly Gibbons, not Gideons. Gibbons, thank you. It was certainly influenced by the age of reason, certainly a good book, very, very influential, and even the errors in it are relatively easy. Correct, because a lot of it is so good. It lays a very, very good foundation and a proper approach to history. Wolf, what do you say to people who argue that drug prices are inelastic? Pharmaceutical companies can simply raise prices without any correlated shift in demand. I'd say even if that's true and it's only true because Medicare has an infinite budget and therefore puts no price pressure, but in a private market, that's obviously not true. There are always substitute products and there's always the opportunity of not to take the drug if you can't afford it. And if you have insurance companies who would properly negotiate drug prices, you see we live in a world where there's no real private market so it's just not true that prices are inelastic. I mean, they might be less elastic but not inelastic and you have to be willing to say some insurance companies won't offer some drugs, some people won't be able to afford some drugs, and that'll just happen. But that's the market. And there'll be a lot of competition to create substitute products and replace them. So I just... the market has to be allowed to work. You can't take an American system and say look, it doesn't work in America. Yeah, because there is no market system in America. Insurance companies are constrained by regulations and by controls. Everybody's expected to get everything in terms of treatment because Medicare and Medicaid cover everything at Infinitum. So you have no real supply and demand functioning. You don't really have a proper demand function. Anyway, thank you Wolf and that was Wolf's first super chat. So I don't believe drug prices are inelastic. In a real marketplace, they wouldn't be. And what we need is to create a real marketplace. And even if they are, so be it, the prices would keep going up and people would have to dedicate as much money as they can to it if it was that big of a value. And you don't have... just because you don't like the elasticity of a price of demand doesn't give you the right to control it. It's not the job of government. It's not the job of government. Even if some people die because they can't get the drug, it's not the job of government to provide them with that drug. It's not the job of government to set the prices of the drug or to cater to every need of every person in a particular country. The job of government is to protect individual rights and by setting price controls. No matter what the elasticity of demand is, they're violating individual rights. They're violating the rights of producers and consumers to set prices based on whatever the supply and demand happens to be. All right, Apollo Zeus, to what degree do you think the Chinese government is involved in Chinese tech-computer companies? I think the most strategic ones like Huawei, Huawei, Huawei, Huawei, Huawei, Huawei are very, I think it's very involved. Others might be less involved. I think the Chinese government is, I think like the social media companies and so on, they weren't very involved in the past and they're becoming more involved. And in particular about the ones that have expanded to the West and have strategic value to the government. Again, like Huawei and its competitor, I forget the name of the competitor, the cellular equipment manufacturer. Huawei is also now supposedly investing under a different name, heavily in semiconductors, and clearly the government is very involved in the semiconductor industry in China. Friend Harper, does ARU use logical leap induction in physics as a sort of textbook? Like I hear they do with OPA. The opening says ARUI helped fund it and it seems valuable for teaching induction in science. No, I think partially because we're currently at least not teaching not teaching what do you call it? Advanced science. Keith Lockidge is teaching kind of an intro to science and to scientific thinking. And I don't think we will be using Dave Harman's book, I suspect. I mean, given how nasty and horrible he has become towards the institute, why would the institute use his book? I mean, the knowledge in the book will use. The important knowledge in the book was indeed, you know, comes from Leonard, Leonard Picoff, and so the knowledge, but I don't think we would ever be buying the book and providing Dave Harman with royalties to provide it to our students. I think we would rather just have somebody like Keith teach some of the content based on those ideas. Shai Levy says we've had readings from it in the Francis Bacon course. So it's being used somewhat, right? It's being used somewhat. The day will come where I'll say my piece about Dave Harman, but it's not, the day has not come yet. The day will come, don't worry. You'll have to wait a while, but it will come. All right, thank you guys. We really appreciate that. We really appreciate the support. Thanks for getting to where we are. And let's see, tonight we have a show at 8 p.m. East Coast time. One of the things, I'm not sure what the rest of the topics are going to be, but certainly one topic will be the movie Golda, which just came out with Helen Mirren that features, it's about Golda Meir and the Yom Kippur War. Hopefully some of you have seen it. If not, you should go see it. It's worth seeing. I'll talk about that tonight, but we'll also talk about other topics as well. All right, everybody, have a great rest of your day. I will see you tonight. Or otherwise, I'll see you for another news roundup tomorrow morning or tomorrow sometime.