 low radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Book Show. Oh, right, everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show. Hope everybody's doing fantastically well. It was, had a good weekend, looking forward to good week. I am traveling, starting tomorrow. I am off to the UK and to the Netherlands. So starting probably Wednesday, I'll probably be doing shows from London. I'm not sure if while I'm in Amsterdam, I'll have any time to do shows, but certainly I expect to do, I'm hoping to do a show on Wednesday and on Thursday. And then when I come back to London after the Netherlands the following week, so I do expect to do a number of shows from Europe. They will be a combination, I think, of news as I pick it up and attempt to do my research on the road and other topics that we can cover. So they will be shows, but they will be completely off schedule. So I will do them because it's the time difference and everything else, I will do them as, and because I'm doing events and all kinds of stuff. I'll do them as they become possible, as they become possible. So I'm hoping I will try to get you a schedule, but we'll see as we go along. Rob says London is scary right now. Yeah, I mean, you just gotta be alert. You just gotta be alert and know what you're doing and know where you're going and know who not to piss off right now. But yes, London is going through, I think, an existential crisis. And it is making it worse. Every day it becomes worse. Primarily it's making it worse because the police are just not doing their job. I mean, that is basically the main thing is that the police are not doing their job. Sylvanos, I see Sylvanos this year and it's two o'clock this is the time I would start the new schedule. All right, as I said, new schedule delayed until after my Latin America trip in April, so mid-April, mid-April, we do new schedule, new content, new thing. And yeah. All right, let's see, we've also got remote and so we've got people from all over the, we've got your PNs, we've got, this is great, thank you. Thank you, Sylvanos, for the stick and thank you, Jonathan. All right, let's jump in, Q-Star. Q-Star, this is not the Death Star. Well, let me take that back. Make me it is the Death Star. Q-Star might be the Death Star, at least if you believe it on Musk and many of the other AI pessimists, Q-Star might be the Death Star. Q-Star is supposedly rumored, not verified, not confirmed, but supposedly rumored, Q-Star is open AI secret breakthrough. And the argument is that the open AI's Q-Star has a strong claim to being the first, artificial general intelligence. Now, I don't think it is because I don't think artificial general intelligence, the way I understand it is possible, but this is the claim. And it turns out that part of the Elon Musk lawsuit against open AI, which we discussed last week, hinges on this idea that open AI has indeed developed this, what is now AGI, right? So the first time we ever heard about Q-Star, not with this name, was when a day before, this is where the conspiracies get really juicy, right? A day before, Sam Altman was fired from open AI, you remember that whole saga. The day before he was giving a talk, I guess, at a panel, this is November 2023, so he was giving a talk, and he basically said, quote, is this a tool we built or creature we have built? But this is the biggest update we'll have. That was kind of the setup for what Q-Star supposedly is. At the time of the speech, nobody had heard of this breakthrough. The day after, Sam Altman is fired, there's a whole weekend of drama, if you remember that happens, he is reinstated, and basically nobody's really talked about this thing that he talked about, have we created a creature or not, and where is this major update? The major update has not come yet. There's no indication yet of when that's gonna happen or what it's happening. All right, so if you look at some people have done, if you look at their lawn musk lawsuit that was filed, you know, last week, part of the issue there relates to the relationship with open AI and Microsoft, and supposedly the contract between open AI and Microsoft is such that artificial general intelligence, artificial general intelligence generally means very similar to human intelligence. So, you know, control, creativity, whatever people think of human intelligence is. I don't think they really know, and I'm not sure I'm in a position to find it right now, but it's this idea that it can do stuff that computers could never ever imagine doing, right? It could never happen. So it's close to the computer. At least being able to think like a human being. So supposedly in open AI's contract with Microsoft, open AI's relationship with Microsoft does not include any development that open AI makes in AGI. That's what the lawsuit claims. And the lawsuit is claiming, this is, I'm reading this from a page from the lawsuit, moreover, on information and belief, open AI is currently developing a model known as QSTOP that has an ever stronger claim to AGI. This is according to Elon Musk, and of course he wants open AI to stop running for profit. He wants to shift it all to a non-profit model, and he wants a lot of this stuff that open AI has developed maybe not QSTOP, but a lot of that stuff to be placed in the public domain. Again, from the lawsuit, from the complaint, Musk's lawyers write, it appears QSTOP may now or in the future be a part of an even clearer and more striking example of artificial general intelligence that has been developed by open AI. So supposedly this is it. This is the holy grail of artificial intelligence. It's coming. It's close. And of course everybody, not everybody, but the people involved are panicking. This is of course a threat to humanity. One's computers can think in quotations for themselves. They might turn against us. And of course if you then add QSTOP to the humanoid robots, that Tesla is putting out, now you've got a perfect recipe for dystopia where the smart, unbelievably smart, artificially general intelligence smart robots take over the world and kill their masters, i.e. humanity. So it's happening fast. Although it's probably not happening at all, but it is something that's changing, the technology is changing. It's interesting though that while they're touting QSTOP, the chat GPT and the Gemini and these, you know, they're impressive in some regards and they're unimpressive in other regards. And yet now they're saying, no, no, no, this is now human intelligence level. Allow me, and granted, I'm not in the business. I'm curious what some of you in the business think. I'm skeptical. I'm skeptical about this as a reality. I'm skeptical about this as a possibility any time in the next few decades before they, I think in order to get to where you want to get, you're going to have to turn computers into something that's more like biological or chemical computers or something biological. But anyway, that is, we will see, but it is an interesting news story. It's in the fringes, but I think in the tech world right now, this is a really big deal. And again, there's a lot of panic. I think the panic is ridiculous. I think that the overwhelming effects of AI and the better it gets, the better the effects will be, they're going to be positive. They're going to be to enhance our lives and make our lives easier and smoother and just make life better and just like every other technology. But this could be a big leap forward. It really could be a big leap forward. And in that sense, super exciting. Super exciting as I've told you from the beginning, I am super excited by it. All right. Oh, so Supreme Court came down today and ruled unsurprising to anybody by a majority of nine to zero. So a unanimous decision that Donald Trump indeed is eligible to be in the ballot. Well, that's not what they ruled. They didn't rule that Donald Trump is eligible to be in the ballot. What they actually ruled was that the states are not in a position to rule that Trump is not legitimately on the ballot. That is that the only entity according to the Supreme Court to determine that Trump has violated the Constitution, that a president, and this is broader than Trump, that a president, or it seems like a federal official has violated the Constitution by participating in an insurgency and therefore is not liable to be on a ballot is Congress. And that the states are usurping a federal function by doing it themselves. So Colorado, Maine, and there was one other state, Illinois, I think maybe, they're considering taking Trump off the ballot for the November election. That is ruled that they cannot do it. It's unconstitutional. And it actually makes the point forever, right, at least as long as this ruling stands, that states just, this is not their responsibility. They are not responsible for national elections. They're not responsible for determining who can and cannot be on the ballot. They're not responsible for upholding the national Constitution that it is up to Congress to do so. This is, it's interesting. I'm not a legal expert, so I'm not gonna, I don't have an opinion about it. It is nine to zero. I really, really, really hope. This is just a hope because I don't think it's gonna be a reality. But I really, really, really hope that all the rulings related to, you know, to the elections, to Trump, to immunity, to whatever else comes to, you know, ultimately the Supreme Court might decide the election. I wouldn't be surprised if the election is challenged and it goes to the Supreme Court. It was, if you remember, some of the issues went to the Supreme Court after 2020 and they refused to hear many of the petitions from the Trump side. But I really hope that the decisions the Supreme Court makes around the election are all gonna be nine to zero. It would be really good if this country wasn't ripped to shreds, ripped to shreds over a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court that determines an election. Of course that happened with Bush versus Gore. But the country wasn't as divided back then as it is today. Today that would, I don't know what that would do, particularly if it went against Trump. I don't know what that would do. So I'm hoping that these are big majorities, that every one of these cases is nine to zero, eight, one, seven, two, even six, three is dicey. Even six, three is dicey. So I'm hoping for these kind of majorities. Anyway, what this means is Colorado has to put Trump back on the ballot. He will be on the ballot in the primary in a few days, maybe tomorrow, and he will be on the general election and the states are not gonna be able to take him off the ballot. This is where it is. This is where it is. So, yeah, that was big news. Trump is celebrating. The big case really is the immunity case. But who knows how they'll rule on that and it's delayed and it's gonna take a while. We won't really know. They're only gonna hear the case in April and we won't know the result until May or June. Alright, interesting story out of California. So California, as you know, California as a massive homeless crisis, they are more homeless in California really than any place else in the country. The homeless crisis is primarily a West Coast crisis. It's Oregon and California, predominantly. Anyway, a lot of cities in California are basically cracking down on homeless people. So San Diego, the city of San Diego, which has basically, I think, a 100% Democratic city council. The city of San Diego has climbed down on homeless encampments. They've made it illegal for them to be on the sidewalks in downtown. The police are now emboldened to go in there and, you know, scare them away, I guess. And indeed, the number of homeless in downtown San Diego has dropped significantly. And this is something that many other cities around California and in Oregon would like to do and are talking about doing. There is a court case, though. In the court case, it was a result from a case in Oregon where a city in Oregon has tried to do this, Grant's Pass, I think, in southern Oregon. Grant's Pass passed a law that said you can't camp on sidewalks, streets, parks and other public spaces. And they outlawed this and they affected this and they were sued by some homeless advocacy groups saying it was unconstitutional. It was a violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibiting against, quote, coolant and usual punishment. That's an interesting one, right? A court ruled in favor of the city, but then the appellate court, I think it was the Ninth District, is that right? The Ninth District Court overturned that and ruled for the homeless advocacy group. And the case is now going to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court will rule where the cities have the power to enforce laws that prohibit homeless people from living on the sidewalks. Now, I think the way to solve this problem is to privatize the sidewalks, you know, and that would do it because then it's clearly constitutional for me to keep people off trespassing on my private property. The challenge, of course, is, and the reason this is even an issue and the reason why it has to go to courts and the reason why, you know, there's even a question mark on this is the fact that streets, sidewalks, parks are public, quote, property. And they feel not clear who they belong to. Now, in spite of that, I think the courts should uphold the city's right to kick people off. It would be absurd and ridiculous if they didn't and then they couldn't. We should treat it as if it was private property with the city owning it, even though we know that's bogus. But ideally, and ultimately, wouldn't it be cool if some town, let's say Supreme Court rules, no, no, you can't kick homeless people out of your streets. Wouldn't it be cool if one of these towns just said, all right, then we're privatizing all the streets? Hey, shopkeepers, we're going to, for $1, we're going to give you a deed to the pavement in front of your store. And to the road. And boom, you make it private property and the private owners decide and it's trespassing and they could send them to jail and you've done, you've done it. So that is my solution. But it is interesting, isn't it, that, and this is true of so many of these left-wing cases, Democratic governments, local Democratic governments in a overwhelmingly Democratic state like California are moving against the homeless and against this idea of homelessness and they are insisting that, you know, that homeless be evacuated from the streets and you're seeing this even in San Francisco where the city wants to do this and where, by the way, there are a number of ballot initiatives on the ballot in San Francisco to dramatically increase police, police enforcement, going after criminals, going after crime and going after the homeless where the mayor of San Francisco, the Democratic mayor of San Francisco is supportive of these voter initiatives. So it looks like on issues of homelessness and on issue of crime, the leftists of California are moving towards a more rational perspective, a more pro-human life perspective, a private property perspective, even in a state like California, and this is why I've told you many times that I believe at least, I believe, that many of these leftist ideas will never take roots, deep roots at least, in America, even in the most, even in the bluest part of it, parts of it. They won't accept rampant crime. They won't accept all their stores closing on them because of shoplifting. They won't accept. No, it might take them homelessness everywhere. It might take them decades to figure this out as it has, but ultimately, people will rebel against this. They don't want lawlessness and they don't want anarchy. They don't want anarchy. They don't want the disintegration of society, which is what the crazy left is explicitly advocating for, and therefore, they're already clamping down on it and good for them, interestingly as well. The governor of California, another real leftist, the governor of California, has submitted a statement to the Supreme Court supporting the city's rights to get, to move the homeless out of the streets. Even though it's a case in Oregon, the state of California is siting with the city, not with the homeless people. So, again, and this is Gavin Newsom, so this is not some centrist Democrat. This is a pretty left-wing Democrat. He's asked the conservative majority Supreme Court to take up the Oregon case. And in a brief, he said, the ruling by San Francisco, by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals against the measure in Grand Pass and Boise, Idaho, have paralyzed efforts to address unsafe and unsanitary encampments. So, a real effort in California to get rid of, to at least minimize the homeless issue that was from Reuters. I was reading from Reuters news release about Gavin Newsom. All right, let's see. Okay, yes, a couple of things about Apple, other than the fact that they released their new MacBook Air today, the M3 MacBook Air, so I will be buying a new computer. My M1 is just a little slow for me to do the show on the road. I'll be doing it, and I'll be doing it from London, but I think that having a more powerful computer will make the shows a lot easier and make technical problems a lot rarer. Other than that, like Apple finds itself in problems left and right with regard to antitrust. They're just, they're too big, they're too powerful, they're too, you know, the EU passed a law that basically says, I'm trying to get this cable was illegal and that this is a cable only Apple uses and that they had to convert to this cable, which the EU deems as the appropriate standardized cable for all phones. That was just one thing that they did last year, so now the new iPhones have the new cable attached, good or bad, it's attached. That is it. Whether this thwarts future innovations with regard to cables, probably, because now you have to have one standard that everybody abides by and that's always standardization like that, forced down by the government, is always going to, in one way or another, throttle innovation. Well, the EU is not finished, so EU is just to find Apple, 1.84 billion euro, basically 2 billion, 2 billion dollars, 2 billion dollars. I mean, they basically view Apple as a cash cow. Why not? Apple has a lot of cash, let's just milk it. They claim that Apple has breached antitrust rules in the market for music streaming services on its mobile platform. The penalty is focused on Apple's application of anti-steering provisions, which put restrictions on music streaming apps' ability to tell customers about cheaper offers outside Apple's app store. The iPhone make as its own music streaming service and rivals such as Spotify have argued the restrictions put on them put them at a disadvantage compared to iOS and Apple Store operator. So, you know, here's Apple. Apple created the music streaming for a fee business. You could argue that Steve Jobs with the iPod, the original iPod and Apple Music saved the music industry. But, you know, but even though Apple owns the phone, owns the app store, owns the app, it can't favor its own app. That's anti-antitrust. Who are we protecting here except Spotify, which is huge, just paid Joe Morgan $250 million. They must be raking it in. Yet they need protection from the government against Apple. It's just ridiculous. I mean, really, what this is, is there's a whole, there's a whole cash flow now. There's a whole source of revenue that the EU has discovered, and that is called anti-trust. And they can keep, they can keep putting in, putting in fines against Apple and Google and Facebook and all these other guys, and a billion here and a couple of billion there and a few billion there. And it adds up. And if you add up, if you add all that up, right, if you add all that up, then what you get is a lot of money. And this is how, yeah, I mean, Paul Azuz says, Apple killed vinyl. I know Apple did kill vinyl. Well, the vinyl made a comeback. It might be dying again. It definitely killed CDs. It killed, you know what Apple really killed? And I don't know how this was never a lawsuit. You remember the Walkman? Anybody have a Walkman? I had a Walkman. I had many Walkmans over the years. It killed a Walkman. And it killed Sony. Sony used to dominate the music space. Music delivery was Sony's business, right? They invented the Walkman and dominated it. And that was it. And I'm surprised Apple wasn't fine for killing the Walkman. And you'd think Apple has killed live music because who wants to go live music when you can get your music on your phone for free, basically. And it turns out, no, it turns out live concerts are as big as ever. So it didn't kill live music. Otherwise, the EU, I'm sure, would go after it. Not to be undone, the United States, Apple might be facing class action lawsuit, or is facing a class action lawsuit, that is alleging the company holds an illegal monopoly over digital storage for its customers, right? So if you own an Apple product, you can easily back up your phone, your iPad, your computer, and many computers onto the iCloud. Well, that is a monopoly because they don't offer you an easy way to back up your computer to other cloud services. I don't know if you can even back up your phone to other cloud services. You only can back up to iCloud. Now, I mean, what do you say about this? Apple's company is Apple's product. It wants to control how you back stuff up. You know, the integration with the operating system, the integration between the computer and the phone and the iPad. It wants to be able to control all that because that's good customer service. And it wants to offer its customers a great product so they can back everything up. And now we hold this view that at the point of the gun, they must offer the same possibility to every other backup company. Now, note that I, on my computer, not on my phones, but on my computer, I have Dropbox. I back up a lot of my files on Dropbox as well as on iCloud. I even have the Microsoft thing. I don't even know what it's called because I barely ever use it. I only have one drive or something. And I back up some files, some business files, to that. So there are plenty of other backup options and that people use, people who have Macs use. It's not a seamless, particularly not on your phone or your iPhone, one drive, thank you, on your phone or your iPhone. It's not as seamless as that, but it does exist. So Apple must make the competitors as good of a product as they own as much priority as they own. I mean, this is truly insane. But this is what it means. This is the crazy economic model of perfect competition that is completely, completely, completely, you know, it's a platonic mythology. It's a useless concept. An idea is that in every segment in which you compete, there should be perfect competition and that is, there should be an indefinite number of competitors, profit margins for everybody should be basically zero and all the products should be exactly the same. And that is the only way to guarantee that you, the customer, will not be exploited by some monopolistic tendency in one country. What is a monopolistic tendency? Innovation, you know, higher productivity. Those are fundamentally monopolistic because they entail you doing something that you compare it as enough and therefore, by definition, monopolistic, therefore by definition, should be regulated by the government. You should be stopped. I mean, this is insane. This is the, what is the term here? This is basically all a consequence of the antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft. In the 1990s, they were accused of quote, bundling including a free web browser with the operating system and that was deemed somehow illegal. That was deemed somehow a violation of antitrust and therefore, and maybe it was because antitrust is such an ambiguous concept. Anything is probably a violation of antitrust. And so it was, that opened up this whole field. It was what unleashed this craziness in antitrust was that lawsuit and of course that lawsuit, that lawsuit is what brought the regulators into tech. Yeah, Paul says egalitarianism gone wild. Yeah, egalitarianism and the divorce which egalitarian by definition is completely divorced from reality, completely divorced from facts and how the world actually works. All right, finally, just something to watch and economically, very, very important and I think going to be massive. I have many, many times argued and a lot of economists have but I've argued that China contributed dramatically to the quality of life and standard of living of Americans during the 1990s and 2000s. The cheap Chinese imports dramatically lowered the cost of living for Americans. It allowed Americans basically to buy things cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, freeing up capital to be invested in many other ways and even though people constantly deny that American life has gotten better, it's gotten dramatically better and a big part of that is the fact that we could buy significantly cheaper things from China during the 90s and 2000s, early 2000s at least. This is a huge boom to the American economy. It might explain why in spite of significant increases in money supply and significant and lower than rational interest rates, we never had inflation during that period because prices were kept down by a growing supply of products from China that lowered costs, increased quality and standard of living in America and shifted the kind of jobs that Americans do away, for example, manufacturing to other areas all, I believe, significantly for the better. Anyway, right now, and by the way, people call that period the China shock because it was unexpected and suddenly these products were... We didn't expect it, we didn't plan for it, we didn't see it coming. It caused a shock in the sense of it caused a realignment of labor but there's no question and economists have looked at this over and over and over again, there's no question that this raised the standard of living of Americans primarily of low income and lower middle class Americans. Low income and lower middle class Americans benefited enormously from the Chinese shock. This is what made Walmart really blow up and it didn't lower sense of value, which is absurd. It basically increased our sense of value because now we could get more for our dollar and we could then enhance our lives in other ways by taking those dollars and using them elsewhere, the dollars that we saved. Anyway, get ready for shock number two, part two of China's shock. China's economy is struggling as we've talked about many, many times. It's a state crisis, financial crisis. Stocks are going down. Same things for cheaper, not cheap things. Same things for cheaper and that's reality. You guys can argue but quality has gone up and prices have gone down and I know you hate to think that because it's not made in America, it's not good for us but you know, you can go listen to Tech of Carlson if you want to confirm your and you can still list nonsensical ideas about economics. Caused by, you know, Chinese goods today by every measure better. I mean this is made in China. Everything better than they were before China entered the thing. You can pretend all you want. You can pretend all you want but so be it. Anyway, the reality is we're heading towards shock number two because the fact is that China right now, its economy is slowing, it's struggling, it's going to see some of the slowest economic growth we've seen in China since it opened up in the late 1970s and while China wanted to develop a new economic model, it wanted to develop a new economic model, it has not been able to primarily because the Chinese central government has tried to control the economy too rigorously into a controlling way and it's not allowed the Chinese market to evolve in a kind of natural way. So the Chinese government instead is not pouring money into subsidizing, giving all kinds of tax breaks and everything else into Chinese manufacturing going back to an export model which are, you know, which are built for export. So China is ramping up its manufacturing capabilities and we're going to see a flood of Chinese goods into the United States and one of the interesting things this time around the Chinese actually are going to be competing in spite of what some people think are going to be competing at the high end of manufactured goods that is Chinese companies now can produce some of the really high tolerance or low tolerance, low tolerance products really, really high quality engineered products that the Germans used to dominate. One of the reasons, one of the reasons that Germany is seeing significant economic slowdown is because it is losing its competitive advantage in high end manufactured goods. It's losing its competitive advantage on sophisticated engineered goods. And what you're going to see is a flood of those Chinese goods. Now the difference between this time and last time is that this time the Chinese are going to find resistance. I think stupidly, but they're going to find resistance. The Europeans are looking at different ways in which to place tariffs and to put import controls over Chinese goods. Trump, as basically said, while he's going to have a 10% tariff on all imported goods, talk about stupidity and barbarity, he is going to have tariffs of 60% on Chinese goods, talk about stupidity and barbarity, look at the list nonsense, 60%. Now China's ready for this in a sense, a lot of Chinese companies are building manufacturing plants in Mexico, in Latin America, in other countries in Asia, and even some of them are building manufacturing plants in the United States, so that they can continue supplying the American market without and not suffering the 60% tariffs because the products will not be arriving from China. They'll be arriving from these other countries or they'll be arriving from a state next door to you. But what you can expect, no matter what, China today has basically the best manufacturing processes in the world. It is better at making stuff than anybody else in the world. They have huge numbers of engineers and their engineers are smart. I don't think the Chinese can innovate and I don't think the engineers will be able to innovate because they lack the freedom, the political freedom to do so. And they will be dependent on innovation from outside and ultimately this manufacturing boom will peter out and self-destruct, even without all the obstacles that mercantilist Americans and Europeans will place on it. So this is heading our way. It's going to be really interesting. Now if you add to this the fact that the Chinese are basically now dominating the electric vehicle market. Chinese manufacturers now can design and deliver a car in about 25 to 33% less time than manufacturers in Europe and the United States because as technologically advanced there's anything that Americans or the Europeans they have copied a lot of the innovations introduced by Tesla but now they're doing it just as well if not better and certainly faster. You can see Tesla rushing to bring out their roadster because BYD just bought out a $250,000 roadster and they are going to just dominate just like the Japanese did in the 1970s. They're going to dominate the auto industry and the people who are suffering the most I think ultimately are going to be the American auto builders and the European auto builders who are stuck in an old model who cannot innovate, cannot move fast, have unions up the kazoo, don't necessarily have access to batteries and are just behind in manufacturing techniques and engineering. So I would expect, you know, it looks like, again, there are going to be barriers placed on this but I expect that the Chinese are going to dominate cars, particularly electric cars over the next 20 years. American, you know, I'm not sure the auto industry, traditional auto industry will ever recover from what's about to hit them over the next 20 years and believe me they will all run for Washington and of course they'll receive a welcome reception there to try to stop the Chinese from dominating but the fact is that China right now has an incredibly competitive, they have multiple players, start-ups, they are doing things like a lot of the car design is done on simulators, on the computer, on 3D simulation rather than actually building prototypes. They are far more advanced in terms of technology, in terms of modeling, in terms of implementation, in terms of embodying the cars with advanced chips than anything that the West can compete with and this is going to be part of this new shock. The new shock is going to be really, really difficult for automakers in the US and maybe more so even in Europe because Europe is mandating transition to EVs in a way we're not seeing it quite as much as here. They're mandating it, so here it is. All right. Let's see, that is what I have today for the roundup so we will move now to Super Chat. I will remind you guys you can ask questions on the Super Chat, supports the show as well. You can also do stickers to support the show. We've got a bunch of those. We've got Maria Lean, we've got Stephen Hopper. I think I saw Jonathan Honing and Maria Lean again and Sylvanus, yeah, we got everybody. All right, so thank you guys for the stickers. You can do that. You can also become a member. Hailey just became a member. Thank you, Hailey. Really appreciate the support. Thank you for being a member. I'll do a member show. I haven't done one in a while. We did Westerns, not that long ago actually but I will do another one and I'll do another one later in the month so once I get back from Europe. What else did I want to tell you? Yes, I want to remind you all that the deadline for getting a scholarship for the Austin Conference, the Austin Conference, Einrand Conference in Austin with Greg Salamieri, Ben Baer, Jason Rines, Tara Smith and Gina Golan. The deadline for the scholarships is March 15th. You can apply. Please do so to apply. Go to Einrand.org slash start here, Einrand.org slash start here and click on the link to the ARC. The ARC Europe is going to be this weekend in Amsterdam. I'll be there. I'm looking forward to meeting some of you there but go to the Austin one. The Austin one is fantastic and I think you'll really, really enjoy it and of course, you should also sign up for Ocon and the ability to sign up for Ocon, again, that's available in the Einrand.org slash start here. You should be signing up for that. You should be registering. It's going to be a fun conference. All right. Patreon, you're on bookshow.com slash membership. That's the way you can support the show on a monthly basis. Also by becoming a member here on YouTube. So those are the three ways to do it. Please consider supporting me on a monthly basis. It makes everything predictable and easy, particularly if you can afford to do a significant amount on a monthly basis. $100 or more is really, really, really appreciated and you get more books. All right. Let's go with the $50 question. Shazbot, Dune takes place 20,000 years from now. The desert dwelling people, Fremont, on another world had a huge underground pool of water which they forbade themselves from ever using due to it being sacred to them. Could mysticism survive that long? I mean, it could in a sense that they could be an isolated people somewhere and they settled it thousands of years ago and the knowledge is being lost and they on this planet have gone into a dark ages and they have reintroduced mysticism. Mysticism is the default when one has forgotten given up on reason. So I very much think that it is possible as something that maybe went away so that the expansion to the universe probably is free of mysticism but at some point, some isolated civilization could or non-civilization, isolated peoples could revert backwards. There's no guarantee that we don't go backwards particularly if you're isolated. By the way, I have seen Dune the TV show on Apple or movie, not TV show, the movie and it was very well made. It was very well made. It was very interesting, exciting, dramatic and I understand part two has come out. I don't know if it's streaming yet but when it streams, I plan to watch it. Shahzabat also says another $50. Thank you, Shahzabat. Really appreciate the support. Conservatives seem to like Dune because one of the characters has a magic unborn child which communicates with his mother telepathically. They see this as supporting their session that an unborn child is a person. I mean, that makes complete sense to me because everything that happens in science fiction is true in reality and can happen and will happen and is happening and yeah, it's true. I mean, all kinds of things that happen in science fiction that are not true. They also probably like the sacred water thing and not using the sacred water thing as well. So yeah, I mean, there's nothing you can do about people who are so desperate to find an excuse as their conservatives are to conserve their primitive beliefs but that's what it is, it's conservative primitive, conserving primitive beliefs. I'm sure the environmentalists love Dune too because they're trying to conserve the sacred waters so it's the nice thing about the show is everybody can find something to love in it and we objectivists like it because there's some heroes in it and they're fighting the bad guys so we can love it. Alright, Remo, I just finished reading Theory of the Phone by Michael Jensen. I really enjoyed it. Has he been a big influence on you regarding finance and have you ever met him? He has been a big influence on me regarding finance. I've got the book on my bookshelf at least I think I've brought it with me from California but he is, you know, I read when I was a PhD student I read a seminal article, I think it's 1978 on agency theory and agency cost and I think it wasn't just an influence on me it was an influence on the whole field of finance. It completely changed the way we thought we think about managers and shareholders and boards of directors and I think the markets solved the problems that he identified, well, identified earlier in the 1930s, the problems were identified but he had solutions to them and the market adopted those solutions and then government has outlawed many of the adopted solutions that the market adopted to solve these problems so the problems are back to a large extent. Hostile takeovers, options as compensation were all solutions to the agency problems that Michael Jensen, I don't think I ever actually well maybe I did meet him. God, I have this sense, I have a terrible memory that I shook his hand at a American management association meeting like maybe eight years ago or something like that when I was there presenting. Yeah, but yeah, huge influence unfortunately I think later in life he turned more statist or more collectivist but I really like his theory of the firm and I like his solutions and I think their capitalist and individualist he was very, very, very capitalist in those days. David Tomsu, hi Iran, really appreciate your work. Suggestion, do a talk with your neighbor from Puerto Rico, Peter Schiff. Oh, this is David's first Super Chat, thank you David, I appreciate it. Topics to discuss, iron-rand objectives in the current economic situation, gold, Bitcoin, regards from London. Well, I'll be in London. Yes, I should. I'll have to get in touch with Peter. I mean he had me on a show years ago so we've discussed a lot of these things when I was on a show, I think he had a show twice maybe, years ago but I need to reconnect with Peter. We've been kind of strange for some reason, nothing, no issue but he's probably mad at me because when I came to Puerto Rico I didn't make the effort to go see him so I don't know, I'll see if he responds if I send him a text, we'll see. Friend Hopup, an advantage to stream overlay is that you can get goals and passively promote it. Great for fundraising, for equipment or pushing subscription goals, streams use these methods to great success. Audiences love seeing goals be achieved. I have to learn how to do that on OBS. If somebody has a tutorial, if there's a tutorial on YouTube or something where they show you how to do it on OBS, the software I use to stream, then I would love to do it. Yes, that would be great. Friend Hopup, if you know how I can access that or what's the easiest way to do it or maybe I can just, if I look at, what do I look for, stream overlay? Maybe stream overlay is, I just need to do a Google search or stream overlay OBS and I'll get the videos I need to teach me how to do it. Everything, I plan to implement a lot of these things once we move into the April schedule. Now, I'm just juggling so many different things and actually, April, I've got a really exciting announcement to make about something I'm going to be doing in April and May, but I'm going to wait because I don't have the contract signed yet, so once I have the contract signed and it's a done deal and I'm really doing it, I think everybody will be excited, even Scott will be excited by this. So there you go. I am trying to create as big of a coalition as possible in doing this. Anyway, so I'm going to be busy in there, but anyway, I'm trying, everything takes at the Iran Book Show longer than I would like it to, but yeah, I don't know, it's about layering the scene that OBS has, I just need to figure out how to do it. How to do it. Anyway, some exciting announcements coming, hopefully, if they don't we buff me on my contract demands, coming soon to all of you and I think you'll all be excited by it because maybe it'll piss off some people, but I think mostly it'll be exciting. Anyway, so these kind of improvements to the show and the technology are coming, definitely coming. The other thing I need is I probably need to upgrade my computer. The more features like this stuff, the more this thing, you know, is challenged and the more I think we need to, I need to upgrade everything. So we might be upgrading cameras, we might be upgrading, I don't know, we're definitely upgrading the background, not upgrading it so much as just changing the lighting and just making it look more professional and all of that. Dave Rubin did not hire me. Nobody hired me. No, somebody else hired me for a short period of time, but you'll find out about that another time, but just to do something. I need to keep my mouth shut, shut. All right. Enric says, I think Atheist Republic would be good to bring on your show or interview them. They apply a reason, secular perspective and have a diverse audience. The last live show was TikTok Shocking Antisemitism Revealed. I'll look them up and see if they'd be willing to come on my show. Come on my show. All right. Yeah, I'm looking to expand the people we have on the show and hopefully that'll start happening as well soon, but everything, as I said, takes forever. Yeah. I like numbers. Bitcoin a year ago, but it's tripled since. It has. No. I never said it wouldn't. I still don't think it's money. It's a speculative asset. Right now, people are buying it. So it's going up. At some point, people will sell it. It'll go down. I don't know how far it'll go up. I don't know how far it'll go down. I'm not one of those like Peter Schiff who thinks it's going to go to zero tomorrow. I never thought that. I just don't get it, but people are buying it because of the assets and people accepting it as an asset class. Fine. It's why and what purpose it serves. We will still have to wait and see, but my point in dissing it is it's not money. It's not money and I don't own any because I don't know stuff. I don't understand and there's a lot I don't understand. I just don't buy it and I'm sure I'm going to not take advantage of a lot of opportunities because I don't understand them. But I don't think you should buy stuff that you don't understand. J.J.Jigbiz, are you going to do a show about Lex Friedman's interview with Taka Carlson? I think there were some interesting psychological interest into Carlson's way of thinking worth analyzing. I mean, the problem with that is it's three frigging hours. Who has three hours time to listen to the whole thing? I've listened to segments. They're interesting. The one on Navalny but God, it's three hours. I get it. I've done the Lex Friedman thing but I don't have the time to both listen to three hour show and then comment on a three hour show but I agree with you. Taka is an interesting phenomena. Ryan reminds us to like the show. Hit the button. Like it. Press that thumbs up. I mean, excuse me, you like it. Ryan says, if the police stop doing their job and say, is it not moral for an individual to use force and self-defense and therefore even preemptively scary stuff? Yes, it is. And that's very scary stuff because you lose any sense of objectivity. And you don't know when you're going to be prosecuted and who's going to be prosecute you and under what circumstances that prosecution has. That becomes anarchy and I am very, very, very opposed to anarchy. I think it's a disaster. It's worse than socialism. James G., when will you announce the speaking seminar dates? I have the date. I think I announced the date. The date is the date after Okon. So I think it is June 19. That's the date. I don't have a location yet and I don't have a price yet. I will announce those once I get back from Europe. But it is June. It's the day after Okon. Okon ends, I think, on the 18th and it's the 19th. And then I fly out back to Puerto Rico on the 20th. So the 19th, June 19th if you want to participate in a public speaking workshop June 19th in Anaheim or Anaheim, California area. Not sure it would be Anaheim itself. Ryan, we don't need general AI to create our own dystopia. Humanity is very good at doing it. Yeah, but imagine if humanity now has help. Have you seen minus one yet? I missed some shows. No, I haven't. I'm still waiting to stream. It's not streaming. I don't have access to theater where it's playing. I recommend you watch Shogun. Great show. It is a great show. I'm enjoying it. I watched the original Shogun TV series in the 1980s. My wife read the book. I don't think I've ever read the book. I read some of his other books, which I really like, Clevel. And she really, my wife really enjoyed the book. We'll see how, to what extent the show follows the book. The book gets pretty explicitly sexy. We'll see if the show does that as well. It's an interesting period in history. I like the show. It's very well made, and I'm looking forward to watching it. I think we've seen, what, two episodes? They haven't released the other ones. There's another episode being released tomorrow. James, you mentioned you know many people in Austin with a business mindset and objectivism. Do you know a lot of people in Dallas and London? I don't know a lot of people in Dallas. I know more people in London than Dallas, but I don't know that I know a lot of people in London with a business mindset or with a finance mindset. I don't think so. I'd have to look over a list of names, but probably not. James says, in what order do you rank these cars for driving and being driven as a passenger? Porsche World's Royce Bentley. Oh God. Did you ever consider buying one? So by far Porsche is the best car to drive in that list. It's the most fun. It's the fastest. It's just unbelievable. You know, if you get a really good Porsche, not the cheap, because you want the really good one. They are unbelievable to drive. There's so much fun. They're amazing. So to drive, I would go with the Porsche, not the World's Royce or the Bentley. Really, I find them ostentatious and stupid and bulky and heavy and unattractive. Although I will say the Bentley's and World's Royce are much better now than they were 20, 30 years ago when they were also ugly and really heavy and barely moved. They've really improved, particularly the Bentley's. The Bentley's are beautiful. Now, to be driven as a passenger, I'd say the Bentley, because the Bentley today has both power and grace. It drives unbelievably well. It's so freaking smooth when you drive it. I mean, not when you drive it or when you're driven in it. So I would not want to be a passenger in a Porsche. Being a passenger in a Porsche sucks. Generally, Porsches are not human-friendly. So here's my story with the Porsche. I had once for a few weeks, I had the pleasure of driving a really, really expensive Porsche. It was like a $200,000 Porsche and I had it for a few weeks and it was amazing to drive. But the first day I got into it, I typically would drive to work and I would have a cup of coffee with me and I had my coffee with me and I got into it and I realized within just a few minutes that the Porsche did not have a cup holder. Not in the driver's seat. Not in the passenger's seat. No cup holder. I don't know is it GT, something, something. I don't know what Porsche it was. I'm not a, you know, recently I drove a Maserati and I loved the Maserati because the Maserati had, it just isn't a sight. I don't know why we're talking about this. The Maserati just perfect because it had this really beautiful combination of anytime you put, you really pushed it it just went shooting and you could put it in sports mode and it would really shoot. But if you just wanted to if you just wanted to drive it in traffic or casually or you weren't rushing or you had passengers it behaved like a Maserati's Benz or it behaved like a Bentley. So if I really wanted to buy a car I think today right now I mean I think at the top of my list would be a Maserati although it would be, you know, it would go up against like an Audi RS RS you know 5, 6 because the Audi has that ability too so those would be the cars but the Maserati I was really impressed by it. It was a lot of fun a lot of fun to drive. And then I drove a really nice Mercedes the other time and that was great but it was very civilized where as the Maserati had this you got this real sense of something it doesn't take much to put a cup holder in a car it doesn't take much. You need to care about the driver and you need to care about his use on a day-to-day basis and it's not sacrificing designs it's a beautiful cup holders and I'm sure I have a feeling that Porsche has included a cup holder in its cars now. This is maybe 10, 12, 13 years ago I will check there's a Porsche downstairs of one of my neighbors I can check but anyway for what it's with I wouldn't wanted Porsche the two they're built for racing they're built for going fast and they're not built for anything else they're not comfortable for anything else they're not comfortable for long drives they're not comfortable for so I want something you can do both and that's why I loved my Audi S5 that was a great car I always wished I could get the RS5 that would have been even a greater car because it had both capacities it could be a real, a real, real amazing fast car and it could be a car for driving and commuting on a daily basis All right Dean says did you watch Marvelous Miss Maisel? I have a feeling it could be a show you would like it tells the story of a young woman comedian in 1960s and I saw it as a very individualistic and pro-life show yes I agree I loved that show I think I talked about it on the show I highly recommended it to a lot of people the Marvelous Miss Maisel show on Amazon Prime is a wonderful show for me it's delightful it's individualistic it's about taking risks it's about embracing change it's about doing all the things that you know we talk about in terms of living a good life there's certain elements about the final season I didn't like it embraces the duality between success and happiness which is unfortunate and success and loneliness or whatever the combination of success and that's unfortunate but all right Oivind thank you I've been watching the objectives principles by Brandon and I think he is fantastic there why is Brandon so disliked except breaking up with Rand he's obviously very smart and his stuff can be applied to objectivism he's disliked for a number of reasons one is he lied and deceived on Rand he later did all kinds of lectures about how objectivism was bad and destructive and hurtful and the damage to you which were all horrible he became a bit of a mystic in the 1970s early 80s he was doing seances he was participating in seances he also then joined different men's group drum beating BS mystical nonsense so he did a lot of stupid things and he did a lot of immoral things and that's why he's disliked a lot of his psychology stuff is pretty good and can be integrated with objectivism but not all of it but he fundamentally was immoral and you don't have to believe anybody except him just read his biography I read his biography and I was stunned his autobiography autobiography he wrote about himself the first version before he edited it to make himself look better and it was stunning how he described how horrible he was how immoral he was and he had no shame about it I guess because he described it well he did have a shame about it because then he rewrote it in a second edition and took out a lot of more embarrassing parts of it Paul Cohen what's your opinion about Harris's demand for a ceasefire oh I didn't know oh the vice president she's an idiot I mean she contradicted herself in that statement right if you actually you know don't read the headlines read what she actually said and what she actually said is that the main barrier to a ceasefire is Hamas and then she demanded a ceasefire but she has no sway over Hamas but she blamed Hamas for not having a ceasefire because that's true that Israel is compromising compromising compromising and willing to compromise and Hamas is saying no no no I mean Hamas does not want a ceasefire Israel does for some suicidal crazy reason and yet she blames Hamas for it but then kind of mutes that because she wants to appeal to the left and just demands a ceasefire and demands that kind of from Israel Israel keeps compromising keeps giving more and more now they're talking about what is it a six week ceasefire that Israel is willing to do and Hamas is still saying no so it's absurd this is exactly I'm all inversion but it's the whole world it's not just her it's the whole world that's gone insane and everybody I mean so many people out there anti-Israel it's stunning it really really really is stunning how anti-Israel the world has become and America has become America used to be its friend and left right it's just everywhere you turn fundamentally there's this huge block of anti-Israelis that want Israel to lose I guess alright everybody thank you thank you to all the supporters we appreciate it I'm hoping to see you tomorrow morning I'm not guaranteeing it but I'm going to try to do a show tomorrow before I leave for the airport we'll see if I can squeeze it in with everything else going on I will also oh god I forgot I'll see you tonight there is a show tonight 7pm east coast time tonight 7pm east coast time tonight topic to be determined maybe something on capitalism topic to be determined show tonight bye everybody