The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Book Show. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Book Show on this Wednesday, March 27. I hope everybody is doing fantastic. All right, we've got a, I think, a full show. And I do have a hard stop at 4 p.m. east coast time. I was just on a call, so literally went right off, on a call planning the Conference in Argentina to write to this, where the Conference in Argentina, where Millet will be visiting. And yeah, write to this. All right, so let's jump right in, because we don't have a lot of time. And we're going to just start with an update from the war in Gaza and, you know, so a few things, a few things, I think, worthwhile saying. Whatever negotiations were going on about a ceasefire, in spite of all the intense pressure from the United States and the UN and the Europeans and everybody else, basically those negotiations have fallen apart. Because Hamas here is, you know, we had twist the more principled party. And it's basically saying, you either give us everything we want, or we're not signing on, and we're not releasing hostages. And basically what they want is a Israeli retreat, and they want to win. And of course Israel's not going to give them that, so it's off. And it's just stunning to me, it's stunning to me that Israel doesn't enter, and the West doesn't enter negotiations like this. Saying, yeah, I mean, here's the negotiation. Hamas either surrenders and gives us the prisoners back, or, you know, we're going to Rafa tomorrow. You've got 24 hours to make a decision. And that should be the starting point, the end point. That should be the only thing, you know, the only option given to Hamas is complete and un-conditional surrender and release of the hostages. Nothing else will do. No negotiations will suffice. And yet Hamas is here coming across as, oh, no, we want, we have principles. Everybody else is a pragmatist. This is why the West loses. This is why the West is uninspiring. This is why the West is pathetic. So negotiations are off, Hamas basically said, yeah, we're not, and why would they basically, Hamas has come to the conclusion that Israel is being handcuffed by the United States, that Israel is not going to be as tough on them as Israel has promised. They are going to rely on the Biden administration to secure them victory and on Europeans and the UN and everybody else to secure them victory rather than on and negotiate something. So that is where we are. You know, the Israelis have been dithering and dithering and dithering and they continue to dither. Netanyahu originally said that Israel would enter Rafa at the beginning of Ramadan. The beginning of Ramadan was two weeks ago. Two weeks have gone by and nothing has happened vis-a-vis Rafa. Israel has been engaged in insignificant warfare at the Shifa hospital where they arrested hundreds of Hamas members and killed, I think the last number I saw was 180. Supposedly among those arrested are some pretty senior people within the Hamas organization, although no names are being provided. So Israel still says we're going to Rafa, Rafiq, whether, when they go, how they go, what they do about the civilians, it's not clear. They have been bombing Rafiq. Last night they were bombing Rafiq. But what was interesting is they were bombing, they were doing the call up the building saying, hey, we're going to bomb your building and so everybody could run away, so nobody would actually be killed. So not clear why they're bombing.  So they're flattening some buildings where they need visibility so they can enter Rafa safely. That would be my guess, but I don't know. I have no specialized information here. But they are taking their time. They are waiting on something, not clear exactly what. It was clear how this was going to end, and yet they're doing nothing. I hope that within a week or so they will enter Rafa and start putting an end to this. They're still facing opposition all over the Gaza Strip, even in areas they're supposedly cleared. So the war is ongoing and the battles are ongoing. They are still killing Hamas in vast numbers, arresting a lot of them. A lot of Hamas fighters are now entering a stage in the war where a lot of them are surrendering because it's just they're isolated and it's too tough. A lot of the communication channels within Hamas are being eliminated.  And hopefully they will do that within the next week or so, start doing it. It's going to take them a little time to actually do it. It also means evacuating the civilians and it's hard to tell how long and how complex that process will be. In addition to that, the big focus right now in terms of condemning Israel is, this is a story published today, is it turns out, shockingly, nobody could have predicted this, that Israel is using AI facial identification software to identify terrorists and then kill them. So it scans a group of people, maybe identifies one of them as a terrorist leader or Hamas leader, as that person leaves the grouping a drone fires a missile and kills him. And they've been using this AI technology, I think, inside the hospitals and other places to identify Hamas members who are pretending to be maybe doctors or pretending to be patients or whatever. So they're using AI facial identification and people are flipping out over this. I guess they're concerned about privacy in the middle of a war, I don't know. But you would think that people who worry about civilian casualties will be celebrating this. This means that Israel doesn't have to round up and arrest thousands of people and then interrogate them and then figure out who are the few that are Hamas members, given that they have a database of faces associated with Hamas, they can just run them through the software and filter people that way. You'd think people would say, oh yeah, another example of Israel's relatively humane approach to all of this, no Israel's gonna be condemned no matter what it does, no matter how much it tries to avoid civilian casualties. You can never appease the altruists. There's no level of appeasement of the altruists except one thing, there's only one thing that will silence and appease the altruists.  That is the only thing that will satisfy the altruists. So, okay, so talk about altruism, one last thing. We talked about in a previous show the fact that the United States is going to build this pier where they're gonna unload food. And now it turns out that the pier is like gonna be four or five miles off-coast and then they're gonna use boats to take the food from the pier to some kind of causeway that goes 1,500 feet into the sea and then trucks will be loaded from there and taking it out. I don't quite understand why this is the way it's done but I don't, maybe I don't know all the logistics or maybe it's gotta do with the depth of the sea there. I don't know. But anyway, this is the plan right now or the plan that is coming together because like everything else these days, the US is dithering. They said they would build this pier and I thought they'd already started building it and it turns out they haven't even decided on what it's gonna look like. They haven't decided where they're gonna build it, which part of Gaza, they haven't decided anything. So it's still, everything's still up in the air. But the one thing Israel supposedly is committed to is creating a security bubble, a security bubble around this. So Israel is gonna guarantee and devote resources to protecting the lives of the Americans and the others who are going to be building this pier and building all these facilities and ultimately the food delivery and everything else is gonna be the responsibility of the Israelis. So Israel is taking on the role of securing the Americans so that the Americans don't get stuck in some kind of quagmire where Americans start getting killed because they're building a pier as a altruistic self-sacrificial act in order to strengthen or at least feed the Palestinians. Anyway, you'll hear a lot about security bubbles that Israel is guaranteeing. And of course, all of this in the context of ongoing nonstop talk about a famine and about Israel's responsibility for this famine and blaming Israel for the famine. There are all kinds of measures of when a population goes into famine state and starvation state that the UN or other aid organizations have developed over the years. And again, there are a bunch of news stories including a major story in The Economist about when does this happen and how does this happen? And yeah, and this is... Everything's being blamed on Israel and Israel, of course, is feeling guilty. So part of all this food and building piers and all of this has to do with that. All right, let's see. Yeah. So that's my update from Gaza. I lost to say that things are continuing on the northern front with Hezbollah. Israel bombs them, kills a bunch of them. They bomb Israel, Israel bombs them back, and they bomb Israel, and it's tit-for-tat. The tit-for-tat in the northern frontier is continuing. Hezbollah has not yet launched missiles deep into Israel. They focused just on the border area. They've still got well over 100,000 rockets that can reach deep into Israeli territory that they have not yet launched because they don't want to give Israel an excuse, in a sense, to invade Lebanon and really hurt them and really take out their entire infrastructure. But they're holding that back in reserve, and it's likely to happen at some point. So again, stuff in Gaza, stuff in Israel, generally still incredibly unstable, hot, and warfare continues, even though I think much of the media and many of you are probably already tired of this topic and have moved on to other things. Talk about moving on to other things. Robert F. Kennedy has chosen his VP candidate. Robert F. Kennedy is running for president. He's having a really hard time registering in all the different states, registering as an independent in all the states. A lot of states make it very, very difficult to register the Democratic Party, which is convinced RFK will draw more votes from the Democrats than he will from Republicans, is worried about him swaying the election to Trump and is making it very, very difficult for him to register as an independent in all these other states. Robert F. Kennedy is still trying to potentially be the libertarian candidate for president. It will be really funny if he succeeds in doing that. It will completely empty the concept of libertarian from any meaning, particularly given his VP choice, but he is still trying because the advantage of being a libertarian is the libertarian party is already registered in all the states and therefore he will be on the ballot in every single state. I doubt it'll happen, but it's part, I doubt it'll happen because he supports Israel and the libertarians flip out against anybody who supports Israel. That's the one litmus test. You can be a socialist and run as a libertarian, but you can't be pro-Israel and run as a libertarian. That is the ultimate test for that wacky, crazy, insane political party. Anyway, Afge chose as his running mate, as his vice presidential candidate, Nicole Shanahan. Nicole Shanahan is a patent lawyer. She grew up in a low-income household. She has been very, very successful. She, among other things, married one of the founders of Google. And when she got divorced, I think she got a lot of money, a lot of money. So since then, she has been a philanthropist. She has been a venture capitalist. She has invested in a lot of companies, but she's also been willing to open up a checkbook for RFK's campaign. And as a consequence of that, RFK, I think, has made a VP candidate to a large extent because he wants to, he needs her money in order to try to register in these states. Registering in the states costs a lot of money, and RFK has no money, so he has brought in a deep pocket to run with him. I hard for me to say on how many issues she actually agrees with RFK, hard to tell. I suppose that she's pro-vaccine, but she's also says some anti-vaccine things as well, so it's hard to tell. But what we do know is that she is, and here it is consistent with RFK. She's a rabid environmentalist. She is a real progressive, a real leftist, and consistent, I think, with RFK's true nature, he's on the far left in spite of his support for Israel and in spite of some issues in which he might not appear to be very far left. I don't think RFK might take a few votes from Donald Trump, some of the conspiracy theory stuff, but I think he mainly appeals to the far left because of his environmentalist record. And his, generally, his socialist views on so many things. He is far from being a libertarian on anything.  Just to give you a sense of his VP pick, you know, she has mentioned when it was announced that she was gonna be the VP pick, how important it was for her without thankful she was that RFK took her up on her niche political interests. Those include toxic chemicals in the soil. She's produced two films around toxic chemicals in the soil. This is a quote from her. Healthy soil is the foundation of healthy food. It is the foundation of a healthy ecosystem, and it is our answer to climate crisis. It is the foundation of a healthy economy. But what politician beside Bobby Kennedy do you ever hear talking about soil? None. So I'm glad they finally have discovered the real source of economic and cultural angst in the United States. It turns out it's not creeping statism. It turns out it's not anything else except that it's literally dirt, it's soil, it's the quality of soil. That is the real thing that is preventing this country from achieving its potential. That is what is destroying wealth in this country, and RFK and his campaign will deal with the issue of dirt and soil, and we can all breathe, well, not breathe, maybe eat a sigh of relief, eat something of relief so that, because the world will be fixed once we fix of soil.  All right, RFK can't vote for him. I mean, there's just no way.  No, can't vote for him, can't vote for Biden, can't vote for Trump, I don't know, Cornell West maybe?  I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I know the headlines are gonna be striking. All right, minimum wage, you know, there's always this debate about minimum wage is raising the minimum wage gonna actually decrease, decrease employment is the relationship between minimum wage and unemployment. It's pretty clear that there is, it's pretty much economics 101, it's not that hard to see it, but in a world in which we live, we need to, you know, when it happens, we need to emphasize, emphasize the fact that it is happening because so many people do not wanna believe it, although I'm not sure pointing out any particular phenomena will convince anybody of anything. It turns out that fast food workers are losing their jobs in California as restaurant chains are prepared to meet the $20 minimum wage, right? Minimum wage that goes into effect really next week, we're ready at $20, right? Restaurants making the cuts are pizzerias, mostly pizzerias, but also other fast food, other fast food places as well, hundreds of jobs. They're cutting back on hours, not just on the jobs themselves, but also cutting back on hours and they are freezing, hiring. There's only so much they can raise the price of pizza to cover the increase in the minimum wage increase. They ultimately have to make a living, right? So Pizza Hut has announced that it is cutting 1,200 delivery jobs in December and all of this is really a consequence of the minimum wage. What they're doing is they're transferring their delivery service to a third party. And hopefully the third party can handle this better than they can. And you're seeing the same thing. So they're probably using services like Dodash and things like that. Roundtable Pizza is gonna lay off 1,280 delivery drivers this year and Excalibur Pizza is, as plans to cut 73 drivers, as well as 21% of its workforce in April. In a state filing. The Newsom has basically not allowed for any real exemptions for the increase in minimum wage for fast food industries. And as a consequence, we're seeing significant cuts. Chipotle, on the other hand, is increasing prices to comply with the minimum wage increase. Starbucks is evaluating what it's going to do, but it will probably see a combination of both increasing prices and some layoffs. So minimum wages have a cost. And the ultimate cost is that the people who are least able to deal with it will lose their jobs. The people who are the least productive, the people who create the least value, the people who just don't live up to $20 an hour. And therefore the people who are least likely to be able to find jobs elsewhere. I'm sure you will see more and more in California innovations like ordering off of iPad-type devices. You're already seeing that in a lot of places. McDonald's is already implementing this where you just go up to a screen, you order what you want to order. And therefore there doesn't have to be somebody behind a cashier. Taking your order, you just swipe a credit card and it's done. So you're going to see more and more of that. Machines replacing employees and other cost-saving devices to reduce the amount of labor necessary in order to produce the fast food. I mean, the only attraction of fast food ultimately is price. And therefore there's only so much that they can raise their costs before they go out of business. So they have to lay people off, they have to place them with robots and they have to find ways, maybe they do dashes of the world and so on don't have to pay $20 an hour because these are independent contractors and stuff. Those are the kind of options that are going to be changed. But it's the most marginal groups in society that suffer because of these economic policies. They also are the groups that have this least voice that anybody really cares about, that anybody wants to listen to. And they're the ones of course that are burdened with the feel-good policies of raising the minimum wage and supposedly helping people. All right, as you probably know, Truth Social, Donald Trump's social media company has gone public. It's gone public through a SPAC. It is now a meme stock. In other words, it is trading at valuations that have literally zero to do with its underlying financials, underlying essential financial characteristics. It is trading based on just the, if you will, the media of the people who wanna own Truth Social because they support Donald Trump, how long they can sustain that, how long they can keep the stock price up is hard to tell. But the reality is that Truth Social earned $3.4 million in revenue in the first nine months of 2023 and it lost about $49 million. So it lost $49 million on revenue of 3.4 million. No, that's not how all stocks trade. I mean, with all due respect, most stocks trade on fundamentals, at least on some semblance of fundamentals. And there are periods in which stocks trade completely divorced the fundamentals, the meme stock phenomena in January 2021 that still lasted this day in various areas of the stock market and this is one of them. Truth Social has a $6 billion valuation, market cap Pinterest has a $10 billion, just a little bit more, but Pinterest has $250 million of revenue and Truth Social has $2.4 million of revenue. Twitter, which has actually less revenue than Pinterest, has a $24 billion market cap. If you look at other companies that have gone public, when Facebook went public, it had $3.71 billion in revenue, billions, billions. So Truth Social is being hyped up by MAGA. It'll be interesting to see if they can keep it going for six months so that Donald Trump can sell. He can't sell for the first six months. So while his wealth on paper has skyrocketed into the gazillions, until he actually sells it doesn't count, and whether MAGA can keep that price up for him to be able to sell to them, they take the loss, and for six months it's not clear, but it's just, it's stupidity on steroids, it's what happens. Truth Social is a complete and utter business disaster that gains valuation because of hype. Nothing but hype. Hype because it's Donald Trump, but that's Trump, that's Trump's whole brand is hype. Okay, abortion pill, so the abortion pill discussion happened at the Supreme Court yesterday. Generally it seemed like the court's judges were skeptical about a ban on the abortion pill. Even some of the most conservative judges like Gorsuch and I forget Barrett seemed skeptical, to a logic stand, they seemed skeptical about the standing of the doctors who are suing. That is, it is doctors who are suing saying that this is creating complications for them and creating emergency room procedures for them and therefore they have standing. It doesn't look like even the conservatives in the court were accepting any of that. So it does look like the abortion pill will survive at least this round with the Supreme Court. But no worries, the anti-abortion or as I like to call them, the anti-life movement is ready for a defeat here.  One of their big pushes is gonna be to get a Republican Congress, House Senate and a Republican President, Trump to ban the abortion pill through legislation. I don't think the courts can do anything about that if it's banned at the federal level. One of the reasons I want one of the branches of government, House Senate or White House to be democratic, at least until the Republicans if as long as Republicans are this irrational one of them at least should be democratic is to prevent them from passing laws like this to prevent them from passing a law like this but they are gonna keep fighting. I mean, it took them 40 years, 40 years or 50 years to get rid of Urobas's Wade. They have patience, they will continue fighting, they're incredibly passionate. This is a crucial issue for them and they will continue to fight it. Hopefully this is the kind of thing that will galvanize people who are pro-women's right to have an abortion to vote against a Republican majority in some of these places and to prevent at the state and at the federal level from banning these, I think, life-saving abortion pills. Life-saving pills. The lifesavers for the mothers. Okay, finally, you know, there's this thing going on in Twitter right now, I guess the response to a New York magazine hit piece on Andrew Huberman. I don't know how many of you know Andrew Huberman. He is an influencer. He is a neuroscientist at Stanford University who started up a YouTube channel, has millions of followers, and talks about health, both psychological health and physical health and biological health. So, well, that is physical health. So he talks about exercise, he talks about nutrition, he talks about, I don't know, he does all these episodes on I don't know how to deal with baldness and how to deal with all these very specific going over the literature, covering a whole gamut of things. And, you know, I don't always agree with him, but I like what he does. Basically, Andrew Huberman represents, I think, he represents a pro-taking-your-life-seriously attitude to life. It's like I'm going to approach living well, at least in these dimensions that he engages in. I'm going to approach it scientifically. I'm going to look at the research. I'm going to see what's available, and that will determine I'm going to try to organize my life and my routines around living the healthiest, most productive psychologically and physically life that I can live. And he does it in a very calm, I think, rational way. He interviews a lot of experts, but he also just presents his own findings and his own research that he has done. He's unbelievably popular. He's one of the biggest guys on YouTube in the space. And I think, overall, while, again, I don't necessarily agree with everything he says, I'm not always in a position to agree or disagree. I'm often in a position of ignorance when it comes to material he covers. But there's no question that he, I think, is doing good in the sense that he is elevating the idea that you need to think about how to live well. And, again, he's not just talking about nutrition and exercise and health and the way everybody else does. He also talks about psychological health and things like that. All good stuff, all good, at least, in terms of let's have a discussion about this without necessarily having agreed with everything he says. So there was a piece on him in New York magazine, and it was like really 8,000 words, a long piece, really going after him for his sex life. So it turns out that Huberman likes to date multiple women at the same time, and he lies to them. He doesn't tell them about the other. He tries to juggle this, and I guess there was a situation where he was dating five women at once and trying to juggle all those relationships all at once, and ultimately they all found out about it, and they've all created, like, all these women, the five women have created, like, they've all bonded, and they became friends. I think there was a movie like this, and they've gone public with this, and they're accusing Huberman of deceits and all this stuff. Not legally, but just in a public eye, and this New York magazine story is based on this. And it's like, oh, right.  It sounds like a moral and wrong for him to be doing this. It sounds like not something good, and probably goes against the advice he would give himself if he was on his own show, if he asked that question in his own show. My guess is he would give advice against that kind of behavior. And he got caught, which is what happens when you do stuff like that, right? You get caught. So it's kind of silly and wrong, and if you lie to them, immoral, right? But, okay, I mean, he's suffering the consequences, right? I mean, these women are ganging up on him, and it's going to hard for him to establish trust and relationship with a woman in the future because of this, I'm sure there are a lot of women going after, Huberman is incredibly successful. He's healthy. He's a strong and healthy and successful man, and I'm sure that he has a lot of women chasing him, but he obviously is not, you know, has past issues, which he needs to work on. Huberman, go work on them.  And assuming this is all true, he's suffering the consequences of his actions. Yeah, you probably want to know about this so you don't have to, you don't take dating advice from Huberman, but beyond that, this piece is not really, you know, emboldening, it's not really adding anything to anybody's life. It's not really any good. You know, I don't want to compare it to Andrew Tate because I don't think he's, I mean, I think he has real value. Andrew Tate has no value, zero, zilch, nada, whereas I think Huberman does. All right. Yeah, let's see. All right, that is all I had. Remind you that we are sponsored by the Iron Rain Institute. They are now accepting scholarship applications from students and from young objectivists who are interested in studying objectivism. For the conference in Anaheim, for Ocon in Anaheim, you should apply. This is true of international students, local students.  So please apply. You can go to einran.org slash start here and apply. I'll be there. Lots of the Iron Rain Institute intellectuals are going to be there. It's a great event. It's a lot of fun. It's exciting and stimulating, and I hope to meet a lot of you there and hope a lot of you go to the website and apply, apply, apply now. All right. All right, let's see.  Don't forget, you can use the Super Chat to, oops, let me just see what's going on here. You can use the Super Chat to ask questions regarding anything. You can shape the show that way, and that way you can also support the show. Remember that ultimately the show is supported, is member supported, listener supported, listener supported. And pointing that out, it doesn't offend any of you guys. It's just a fact. Can't survive without you guys. The show can't exist without you guys supporting it. All right. Let's see. All right. Let's start with John who asked this question way, you know, way before the show even started. John says, isn't loyalty at the end of the day a loyalty to one's own values? If that's correct, does that make loyalty and integrity the same thing? Or is loyalty geared towards standing beside others when they reflect one's own values? If we acknowledge, all right, that's a different question. Okay, so loyalty. I mean, I think loyalty is a virtue under integrity. And I do think that loyalty primarily relates to one's relationship with others, you know, loyalty to oneself. You know, you're loyal to one's own values. I think in one's dealing with others, that's what loyalty means. So it definitely implies integrity. It definitely is similar. And there's a lot of overlap with integrity. It maybe is emphasizing a particular aspect of integrity. And that is, you know, loyalty to a friend. What does that mean? It means that, you know, friendship is important to you. This person is important to you. The reason they're important to you is because of those values. But you might, I don't know, in a situation where he said, she said you are going to be loyal to the friend because he is your friend unless you have significant evidence to suggest otherwise. Now, that's an application of integrity, but an application of integrity to a particular aspect to it.  It is a good country from a political perspective. And, you know, if you talk about not betraying that country and you're going to be loyal to that country in the context of the potential betrayal or conflict that arises, loyalty just emphasized that aspect of integrity. So it is, it is integrity as it applies to these. I don't have a formal definition of loyalty off the top of my head, but that is kind of how I would think about loyalty. It's an application. It's a, it's, it's subsumed under integrity, but it's, it's relates to others. It relates to your relationship with other people. All right. Thank you, John. I'll just, I just want to mention some of the people who've given stickers. Steven, thank you. Silvanos, $20 really appreciate that. Maryalene, thank you. And Alex, thank you. And John, thank you. You too can do a sticker. Some of these were $199, some of them were $5, some of them were $20 or anything in between. If you click on the dollar sign down there, you can, you can create a sticker and without asking a question, help support you on Brookshire. All right, Michael, do parents really teach their kids that their focus should be on other people and to sacrifice for them? I never saw that. Most parents are self-centered narcissists who just want to brag about how smart their kids are. No, they constantly do this. I mean, parents who tell their kids, think of others first. You really should help this kid who's mean to you. I mean, parents do this all the time. Guests are more important, are the most important. We keep the good stuff for the guests. We don't bring out the good stuff for ourselves. And they exhibit it in their own behavior. They drag the kids to the food kitchen and they drag the kids to this or that service activity because that's what you're supposed to do. They constantly teach their kids about other people. Think of yourself last. Think of other people first. I was taught, I was told that. And that was exhibited in a variety of different ways, in a variety of different places again and how you treat other people.  All right, Druski. Druski. Let's see. Trump wants more tariffs on China. Thomas Massey defends the Jones Act. DeSantis banned social media for minors. Meanwhile, Millet plans on firing 70,000 government workers. Why can't we have nice things? I don't completely understand the connection between nice things, but Millet is doing the right thing and all these other people are doing the wrong thing, right? Millet is shrinking government, reducing government's intervention and economy, reducing government role in our life and he's doing, you know, if Congress will let him, if his Congress will let him, he's doing all the right things to put the country on the right path, but in our people are doing the exact opposite. Our people are growing the state, growing government, reducing our ability to have nice things, reducing our ability to move forward, reducing our freedom, fundamentally reducing our freedom because Millet is doing this in the name of being the most libertarian congressman. It's just unbelievable and, yeah, I talk about this all the time.  Savanos, thank you, $50, really, really appreciate it. I assume that the case of Huberman, it was that the women didn't know, thought they had exclusivity with him. I think that's right. However, as long as you are upfront with an individual, that you're not exclusive, why shouldn't you juggle as many as you are able? I mean, I think there are a number of reasons why you shouldn't, but if you're upfront with them, then at least you're not being dishonest, right? So, in that case, you're telling the truth and it's not a moral violation. I think the main reason you don't want to be dating five women at the same time and not be exclusive with any of them is that it's a drain in your own life. It's just not possible to do. I just don't think there are enough hours in a day and it means that you're not giving any one of those women the attention that a proper relationship deserves. You're not giving yourself enough time to develop a real relationship with them. So, I think it's not a good strategy for dating. It's not a good strategy for living because it's my main objection to any kind of attempt to have a relationship with more than one woman at a time is you're not doing yourself justice and you're not doing them justice because there's just not enough time in the day and there's just not enough energy, mental focus and emotional focus to be able to juggle more than one relationship. Never mind five. So, yeah, there could be a period in your life where there are two and you're not lying to anybody and there are two because partially you're trying to figure out which one of them you are going to sustain. But, you know, that's a period in your life and to make that as a strategy would be a very bad, I don't think is doable. Again, in Huberman's case he was lying so that adds a sin to, you know, adds the sin of dishonesty beyond just I don't think it's rational to have a relationship with five women. It's just too much, too much. So, I have no problem with trying. I have no problem with, you know, doing, you know, seeing for yourself but as long as you're honest, but I think it realistically, if you think about what it takes really to have a relationship, a proper, full relationship with one person, it's just too much to do it with several. All right, Alex, talking about Huberman, have you been able to keep up Peter Atia's desired volume of workouts looking strong? You know, I'm deviating for Peter Atia. I've discovered that zone two exercise does not fit me well. I do not respond well to it and it consumes huge amounts of time but I really don't physically don't respond well to it. So, I actually do as many hours or maybe less hours than Peter would suggest but I do a lot more high intensity than he is recommending and less of the low intensity. So, I'm much more focused on doing high intensity intervals than I am focused on doing zone two. Zone two, I did it for months and it really wasn't good for me. I really, you know, by objective measures of like, hate heart rate variability, I was not getting better, I was getting worse and since I stopped doing a lot of zone two I mean, I feel better and I'm in much better shape, I feel like and my heart rate variability is much better. So, I'm experimenting, right? I'm still trying to figure it out but I'm certainly trying to do, I still do an hour and a half of basic strength training every week. So, three sessions of half an hour each, one legs, one core, one upper body, each one half an hour a week. I don't know that my body really can handle a lot more than that so I think that's probably the right level for me given how old I am. All right, I have to rush through some of these. John says, if we acknowledge ethnicity for the anti-concept that it is what is the valid concept that's being replaced? Is it free will? Well, it's free will or it's just the individual, the value of the individual. I think that's what's being ignored, being replaced because ethnicity wipes out the individual. The ethnicity is there for you to focus on the group, not a focus on the human being, on the individual that is there. So, yes, I think that ethnicity is, you know, as an anti-concept, it's trying to wipe out the individual. That's what it's trying to do. John, or is loyalty purely a faith-based concept? No, I don't think loyalty is faith-based at all. It's completely rational and again, it's integrity just looked at from a slightly different perspective. Stav, is it nihilistic to want to accelerate the demise? I mean, probably because part of the big problem with accelerating the demise is that you don't know how deep the demise will be and you don't know if you'll survive it. So there's a certain, you know, death wish involved in accelerating the demise. I mean, this idea that the demise leads to a rise, yeah, maybe a thousand years later, you don't know. And you don't know how quickly you'll become a victim of that demise. So there is a sense of nihilism and desperation and negation of one's own ability to live a good life and a happy life in this world, which I think you can. And don't give that up. Don't give up your ability to live well in the world as it exists today. Tom says, the attacks on human men are classicating the good for being the good.  That's right. I basically agree with that. Mary-Elaine, I understand Alito and Thomas brought up the Comstock Act at the MIFIP, whatever. I can't pronounce this drug's name. The Voice of Pass Harrow. Yes, I don't know in context. I didn't follow the discussion enough. But Alito and Thomas are the most religious conservative of the judges, unfortunately. I thought Thomas used to be much better than he's turned out to be. So Thomas, I think, has declined over the last seven years. I thought he was much better in the pre-Trump era. He has become much more religiously explicit in the post-Trump era and much more authoritarian in the post-Trump era. That is, government should impose certain things. He used to be much better on things like individual rights and the idea of rights. The Comstock Act, what acts, just to remind everybody, a suppression of trade in terms of circulation, of obscene literature and articles of immoral use, bringing back all the anti-pornography laws that used to exist. It was passed, I think, in when was this? 1873. 1873. Just in case you thought the pornography was new and only exists today. Thank you, Marilyn. Apollo Zeus, are you to travel around Argentina on your visit? No. I've got three days of lectures in Argentina, then two days of lectures in Chile, and one lecture in Brazil. So it's going to be pretty tight. I hope to have eaten at some good restaurants in Brazil and in Buenos Aires and maybe even in Chile. Chile has some phenomenal restaurants. I went to one of them last time I was there. So I'm pulling out my best 50 restaurants at Latin America list, and I'm going to try to see how many of those restaurants I can hit while I'm there. Apollo Zeus, I consider human being a lightweight in terms of numbers. I don't know what numbers you're talking about. So numbers in terms of the number of women he dated. So he only did five simultaneously. Apollo Zeus can do seven. All right. Thanks, guys. Thank you, everybody. Yes, I will leave Latin America on Tuesday. I'll be giving a talk on Wednesday in Brazil, then Friday, Saturday, Sunday in Argentina, and then Tuesday, Wednesday in Chile. I think overall I'm doing a debate on, again, on anarchism with a philosopher in Argentina. So basically it's all, you know, I'm going to doing, I don't know, seven, eight, nine different talks and events on the thing, and somebody on this channel, somebody in the chat is really begging to be banned from the show. And maybe at some point I will do that. All right. Thanks, everybody. I will see you all tomorrow for another News Roundup. Bye, everybody.


Okay, so first of all I would like to thank the organizers for inviting me to give a talk in this fantastic forum. I'm sure we will see along the next days very interesting examples on how the scattering techniques are excellent tools to understand the structure of food. And in my case, I would like to show you some examples of the work that we have been doing on the investigation of the structure of polysaccharide gels. So first of all, a little bit of my background. I'm currently working for the Spanish Council for Scientific Research, the CSIC. It has several institutes along Spain, and I was previously working on Valencia on the extraction of polysaccharides from Mara in biomass and the development of gel-like structures. But I'm currently based on Madrid, on a different institute. But it was several years ago when I was working in Australia with Elliot Gilbert and Mike Gidley, that I had the opportunity of learning how excellent tools are the scattering techniques to understand the structure of food. So first of all, why are we interested in understanding the structure of food? Well, for scientific and for technological reasons. Because, you know, nowadays the consumers are looking for new types of foods like functional foods or dietetic foods. So we need to develop new production processes. But also the consumers are more and more concerned about the relationship between diet and health. So we want to understand also how the foods that we are consuming are affecting our health. So as you know, food has, many foods have a very complex structure. The polysaccharides proteins are, in fact, are the main macronutrients. And today I will talk to you about polysaccharides. So one example of polysaccharides I'm sure you know is cellulose we can find in the cell walls from vegetables and fruits. In general, polysaccharides are the major components in fruits and vegetables. They can account up to 90% of the right weight. And they are also used in the food industry as ingredients because they have thickening, jelly and properties. They can also be used as encapsulants and some other functionalities. And there are some examples here from the most widely known polysaccharides which can be extracted from plants, seaweed and can also be produced from microorganisms. And some particularities from polysaccharides in foods is that they are typically found in nature as highly hydrated systems. And this is an issue because typically microscopy techniques have been used to investigate the structure of these polysaccharides. But since we need to subject the samples to drying processes we are surely affecting the structure of these native materials. And then on the other hand, we can find polysaccharides having an amorphous structure such as some phycocoloids which are water soluble, but they can also be showing a crystalline structure such as cellulose. And also another important particularity of polysaccharides is that most of them or some of them are able to form gels when they are subjected to different temperature conditions. So many of you I'm sure you are familiar with these gel-like structures in gelatin, some products like that. And here I'm showing an example of based on the work that I did in Australia to investigate the structure of cellulose. And as you can see, we can find cellulose in the plant cell walls forming a hierarchical structure with different structure levels. So we need to combine different characterization techniques to get the whole picture. And in this sense, scattering techniques are very powerful because not only they allow us to cover almost the whole size range of interest, but we can also analyze the structure of these materials in their native hydrated state. So that's a very great advantage. And I would also like to mention, because you will see in my presentation that we used x-rays and neutrons. And that's because in the case of polysaccharides, x-rays are going to highlight differences between crystalline and amorphous domains, whereas when using neutrons, we can generate contrast between different components in our samples. So we need to be careful of selecting the source of radiation that we need for each type of experiment. And you will see in the results that I will show you today, some experiments that we did in Australia using the SANS and USAN instrument, but we have also done a lot of work in the sax and wax line in the Spanish synchrotron. The first example consists on agar-based hydrogels. So agar is a polysaccharide which is found on the cell walls from red seaweeds. I'm sure you are familiar with agar agar because nowadays it's commercialized and it's used in the food industry to produce gel-like products. In this case, what we wanted to explore was how to simplify the production process of the agar because it's a relatively complex process industrially, it has several steps. The main ones are an alkali per treatment where we are removing some other polysaccharides which are present in the seaweeds and other components. And then the main extraction step is a hot with water treatment. So we wanted to investigate the possibility of removing the first alkali extraction step and then also evaluate the possibility of using alternative methods such as ultrasounds to extract agar. So first thing we observe is that the sonication extraction allowed us to reduce the extraction time significantly while the extraction yields were preserved. And then, as you can see in this picture, we produced less purified agar by skipping this first alkali treatment, which of course contains some other components such as proteins and minerals. So the alkali per treatment is good when we want to produce a pure agar, but on the other hand is producing a lower molecular weight agars. And then the non-purified extracts contain agar, but some other components such as proteins, minerals and polyphenols, which gave them some bioactive properties. And therefore we wanted to study what was the gelation process in the pure agars and in the less purified agars. So the hypothesis was that when in solution agar chains are forming a random coil structure and then as we cool down, they first form the elix aggregates, which then associate to form bundles. And these bundles are responsible for the hydrogel structure. So we first started doing some rheological measurements, and here you can see the results from more purified agar versus less purified agar. Essentially, you see that the gelation temperature was very similar for both of them. So that means even if we have some impurities, they are not affecting the gel structure, the final gel structure, but they are forming softer gels. And on the other hand, when when heating down the samples back to the initial temperature, there was no real melting. So the structures that were being formed were not completely disrupted. And there was a large synergistic meaning that there was a large difference between the initial status and the final structure of the material. So now we wanted to understand what was going on on these agars and for that, the first thing we did with it was to perform sacks and stands experiments on the gels as they were formed. And in the case of using neutrons we took advantage of contrast variation so that you can see there the type of cells that we used. We put a piece of the of the gel sample and then it was soaked on different mixtures of H2O and D2O so that to generate different contrasts. So as you can see here in the scattering patterns from the sacks and stands experiments, we can differentiate three regions. A low Q region where most of the samples show the power low behavior, then an intermediate region where most of the samples showed shoulder like feature and then in current scattering. So using advantage of taking advantage of the of the contrast variation experiments and what we did was to plot the intensity values calculated at a certain Q value versus the amount of D2O in our solvent to determine the contrast match point of the samples and if you are familiar with with some techniques, you will know that if the samples are not deviating from the theoretical behavior those points would fit to a parabolic function and then we will have a minimum points, which theoretically would give us an intensity of zero and that's the contrast match point that means that the scattering density of the sample equals that of the solvent. But as you can see, in this plot, most of the samples deviated from from that behavior and that was something that was not unexpected to us, because we knew that this polysaccharide, well, it's not something particular from agar from agar we also saw that something similar in the case of cellulose, because because they have so many labile hydroxyl groups, they are exchanged when we soak the pellicles in different solvent mixtures so there will be a deviation from from the theoretical behavior and in fact, as you can see the theoretical scattering intensity of agarose was 2.16 while for most of our samples we obtain higher values. And this was especially visible in the case of the less purified samples, this could be due to a different structure for the AR but also due to the presence of other components such as the proteins. And then on the other hand, when fitting our scattering data using an empirical model, we observed that the radius of gyration, which is related to the thickness of the agar double elixus was greater in the case of the more purified agar that that made us think that probably if we have a higher concentration of agarose in those samples they were forming thicker bundles. And finally, to also understand the gelation process, we took advantage of the synchrotron beam line and perform a temperature resolved success experiments. So we use the similar program to that we previously used for for rheological measurements and the samples were heated to 95 degrees to melt the gels and then they were kept at that temperature for 30 minutes and cooled down back to 25 degrees. So we observed that there was no melting transition in the samples, but there was a disruption in the structure of the aggregates because the shoulder disappeared when we were heating the samples. That was true in the case of the less purified samples. But as you can see here for a more purified agar, even when we increase the temperature there was little change on the on the scattering intensity so that made us think that in that case the elix aggregates were much more stable. And then on the other hand when cooling down the sample back to the initial temperature we will we were not able to recover the initial structure so this process was not completely reversible. So based on this on all of these results we proposed a gelation mechanism for the purified agars and for the less purified agars. As you can see, in the case of the purified agars we have a two step gelation process. First, the agar chains combine to form double elixes and then these elixes further aggregate to form the bundles with a size around seven to 10 nanometers. And these bundles, as I said before, they are responsible for the hydro gel structure. And in the case of the less purified agars, we have proteins and other components which are not impeding the formation of the agar double elixes, which then further aggregate into bundles but the size of these bundles is smaller. So that's the reason why we observe a lower strength for the for the less purified agar hydrogels. In the case we saw that the presence of the proteins did not impair the interconnectivity of the gel network. So now another example, a different polysaccharide which is carrageenan. This polysaccharide is also found in the cell walls from red seaweed. And in this case, we have different types of carrageenan depending on the amount and the position of sulfate groups. Here you can see that we work with kappa carrageenan which has only one sulfate group per the saccharide unit, while Yota carrageenan contains two sulfate groups. So this position and amount of sulfate groups has a strong impact on the type of gels that are formed. In the case of kappa carrageenan, we typically come from very strong gels. In the case of Yota carrageenan, they are softer gels, more like a paste consistency. So in this case, we started doing a design of experiments where we were modifying the type and concentration of carrageenan. And then we also studied the incorporation of two different salts. The valent salts containing calcium are monovalent salt containing potassium. So to investigate the influence of these two salts in the type of hydrogel that was being formed. So what we saw is that the carrageenan and cell concentration had a very strong impact on the hydrogel strength. And as you can see, those were the optimal conditions for each type of carrageenan. Even with the addition of salt, in the case of the Yota carrageenan, you see that the hydrogel strength was much lower. That's because the sulfate content was much higher in this type of carrageenan. And then another interesting fact is that while potassium had a higher impact in the case of kappa carrageenan, calcium worked better for Yota carrageenan. So again, we started doing rheological measurements to see what was going on when the samples were going through the gelation process. In this case, we see only the cooling ramps and for the pure carrageenan and with the different salts. And as you can see in general, the incorporation of the salts had a positive effect in increasing the gelation temperature of the carrageenan and also in producing gels with higher strength. As I said before, while potassium worked better for the kappa carrageenan, calcium worked better for the Yota carrageenan. So the next step, we wanted to understand why and what type of structures were being formed in each case. So those are the results from SUCKS experiments and by fitting the data, we were able to determine the Gaussian parameter which is related to the mesh size in the hydrogels. And then the correlation length related to the size of the double helices. So first thing that we noticed is that more compacts and order structures were formed in the kappa carrageenan and especially with the addition of the potassium. I don't know if you can see properly but in the in the first plots, we also see two small peaks, which are appearing in the case of the kappa carrageenan, indicating the formation of very well ordered structures with the presence of the salt. In the case of the Yota carrageenan, we were able to observe a more packed structures with the addition of the calcium. And in general, the idea is that the nature of the bridges holding together the bundles was different depending on the carrageenan type and on the balance of the salt. So based on on our rheological and scattering results we proposed a model for the gelation mechanism. And so in the case of the kappa carrageenan we only have one sulfate group so the addition of the of the salts, especially the potassium is able to neutralize this sulfate groups and therefore is promoting the formation of hydrogen bonding between the polysaccharide chains. On the other hand, in the case of the Yota carrageenan we have a higher amount of sulfate groups so that the addition of salts is not able to to neutralize of these charges from the sulfate groups, but instead what what they are doing is creating cross bridges between the between the sulfate groups so that we in this case we have an ionic cross linking. So that's the main reason why the strength of these hydrogels is so different because in the case of the kappa carrageenan we have strong hydrogen bonding, whereas in the case of the Yota carrageenan, we have ionic interactions. I will show you something a little bit different. These polysaccharides are not able only to form hydrogels but they can also form a different type of structures which are emulsion gels. And in this case, what we do is that we mix a liquid oil in this case sunflower oil with a solution of the polysaccharide, which could be carrageenan or agar or any other gel in polysaccharide. We can also emulsify the material we can also incorporate surfactants and as we have this emulsion and this emulsion is cooling down the polysaccharide is gelling. So, as they form this gel structure the oil droplets are entrapped within this structure and we have something like you see in this confocal microscopy image which has gel consistency. And the polysaccharide that we use as the gelling matrix we may obtain different types of structures. Here you can see some examples from agar and from kappa carrageenan. The amount of oil that we can incorporate is also different, while in the case of agar we can go up to 50% of oil. In the case of carrageenan we can only incorporate up to 40% of oil, but this can be a little bit increased when we incorporate surfactants into the formulations. So these images are confocal microscopy images from the emulsion gels and as you see they have a more or less homogeneous distribution of the oil droplets. In the case of the agar because it has high emulsifying properties, these droplets are much smaller and homogeneous. Whereas in the case of kappa carrageenan, because this polysaccharide starts gelling at a very high temperature, it was more difficult to disperse the oil droplets so that we had a larger oil droplets and a more heterogeneous distribution. And then also interestingly the presence of surfactants was not very positive in the case of agar and we felt that this may be due to a competition between the agar and the surfactant to cover the oil droplets surface so that in that case there was some coalescence. While in the case of the kappa carrageenan, since there was a decrease in the viscosity of the emulsions, it was easier to disperse the oil and the presence of the surfactant had a positive effect. So again, we wanted to investigate the structures of these materials by small angle scattering and here you can see some examples of sacks patterns. In the case of the agar, we basically observed that we had a very similar structure to that we had previously observed in the hydrogels. So the agar double helices had more or less the same size and we had a branch network structure which is typical from hydrogels. And so the oil did not have a very strong impact at this size range. On the other hand, in the case of the kappa carrageenan, we had the formation of less compact network structures as compared to the agar. And then the incorporation of the oil gave rise to the formation of less packed bundles, although the double helices had a similar size as those observed in the hydrogels. And then when we increase the amount of oil in the formulations, we observed some particular structures which could be related to the formation of inverse emulsions. So as we have done with all the polysaccharide based samples, we also performed rheological experiments because we think they can add a lot when combined with scattering. And as you can see here in the case of agar, we had a two step gelation process, a first step, which we thought was related to the gelation of the agar present in the accuse phase and a second step which may be related to the gelation of the domains located at the surface of the oil droplets. And this was not the case for the kappa carrageenan, in that case there was only one gelation step, but then interestingly with the addition of the surfactant, we have one step gelation process in the case of agar. So that supports the hypothesis that in that case the surfactant is located at the interface of the oil droplets so that it's disrupting the emulsifying capacity of the agar. And then we also observed here with marked with the arrows the formation of metastable structures in all the samples when cooling down. We couldn't find any reference on the literature to explain these structures and we perform several variations on the rheological measurements to see if this was an artifact or something due to the type of probes that we were using, but it always appeared in our samples. So then we decided to perform some temperature result experiments on the Spanish synchrotron and in fact we observed the formation of some metastable structures in the temperature range close to the same that we observed in the rheological experiments. So we think this is due to some kind of chain reorganization, but we have to do more experiments to try to understand what what is going on on on this process but we thought it was very interesting. You have three minutes. Okay, I will be very fast. So this this last slides are to show you the final application of this type of structures in the food industry. So we have also done some some experiments on evaluating how these hydrogels are being affected when subjected to some simulated digestion conditions. So that means changing the pH and also putting the samples in contact with different bile salts and other components. And in this case, these results are from alginates, but essentially what we saw that was very interesting is that depending on the structure of the alginate on the manuronic and guluronic ratio, these structures were more resistant to the in vitro digestion conditions, or in the case of the manuronic rich alginate, they lost their structural integrity when subjected to pH values higher than two. So what is next? Well, we are currently working on the encapsulation of protein in this type of polysaccharide hydrogel structures. So what we would like to do now is to do some that in situ digestion experiments to see how the structure of the polysaccharides is being affected, and also how the structure of the encapsulated protein is being affected during the the vitro digestion So that's the next step in this type of studies. And yeah, well, these were some conclusions, but basically, I would say that as you can see from these examples, both x-ray and neutron scattering techniques are very powerful tools to understand the structure of these polysaccharide materials And they offer us the possibility of doing some very interesting work such as in situ digestion experiments. So with that, I would like to thank my colleagues from the CSIC, Salmers, Ansto and the Spanish Synchrotron. Thank you so much Marta. There is one question if you can give a quick answer to that. And that's on Krasimir, he asked what applications to consider for the emulsion yield? What kind of applications? Well, in the food industry, we were thinking of fat replacement. So, for instance, for meat products where, you know, they are looking to replace all the animal fats for alternative type of fats. But also, we have also investigated the application of these materials for biomedical applications for fat phantoms in particular. So, yeah, they could have several applications. Oh, thank you so much. Thank you for a fascinating talk.


Construction work on DCU's new Student Centre is still under way. The 14 million year project began in June 2016 and was originally aimed to be finished in February. With delays due to recent snow and crane drivers going on strike, the construction will not be finished by the end of this academic year. While the reality of a new hub is welcomed by students, the transformation of Glass Neven Campus into a construction site has significantly impacted club and society life. For some certain societies like dance have lost their dance and spaces and the sober sock found it harder to hold their events. The Mental Health Society couldn't hold the tea and coffee mugs and they used smaller classrooms in Henry Gratt and other buildings which kind of took it away from the students and I suppose they didn't get as many students partaking in it and we also couldn't have our refreshers there.  For final year students who hope to get a glimpse of the new hub before leaving DCU, a soft opening of the ground floor may go ahead before the end of the semester. Socks were soft opening at the end of the month. Obviously you can look outside, it doesn't look like they're near soft opening. We're still hoping that there will be something and it will be something just for final years to be able to go in and say look, I was part of this because realistically every student at DCU has contributed towards it with the hub fee and I think that it's really important that everyone feels like it's their space. The summer ball which traditionally marks the end of the academic year was planned to be held in the new student hub. However, it will now be held in an external venue for a second year. Shauna Cone, DCU TV News.