In all the ways that really matter, this perfect combination, this perfect brainstorm is not at all surprising. With this collection of others in a place suspicious of yet dependent on them for survival, Merchant is the right play for us. Not only because it vibrates with national and global issues, but also because it speaks to this university's own embrace of diversity. It's a stroke of good luck that we should have all of this right here, right now. Reading and to some extent performing Shakespeare is an important part of what we do here. Like the university itself, Shakespeare, I'm sorry, our study has changed, grown and morphed along with us. Having been here longer than most of the buildings on campus, I have witnessed a lot of those changes. We have always talked about Shakespeare in Montclair State. We have had to. A major part of our mission has always been the preparation of teachers at secondary and middle schools where they are called upon to teach the touchstone plays. Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Maybe a Little Hamlet. Generations of area teachers have learned to do that here. As the schools have changed and the population of New Jersey has changed, so has what we ask of Shakespeare and how we hear him. I'd like to say a few words about how we got here. When I started teaching here in 1972, we had one English department course devoted to Shakespeare's work. It was called Shakespeare's Major Plays. One course for all that amazing material. Speed records were set, but no one was thinking very much about how and why. It was automatic and pedestrian and for me completely impossible. I proposed that we offer at least two courses. My colleagues humored me. We still have those two in multiple sections every semester, plus three more at the MA level. We have a fourth teaching Shakespeare in the works for our graduate students. Already tried out on several occasions as workshops sponsored by the Center of Pedagogy in a program called Teachers as Scholars. Designed not only to inform their pedagogy, but also to remind them of who they were when they were learning and how excited they were by their discoveries. That's exactly what they want for their students. There was one disturbing event in the 70s involving Merchant that I wanted to share with you. I can't remember exactly what year it was when our theater department mounted a fairly straightforward production of the play. I got phone calls from local residents demanding that I, newbie that I was, put a stop to this production. How could I allow the college as it was then called to stage this anti-Semitic play? Neither the time I have today nor professional protocol will allow me to tell you what I said in response to those calls. But it was all a fairly colorful and protracted version of, but that was New Jersey in the 70s and I knew then that we had a lot of work to do. Montclair State College, then, was mainly white across faculty and student populations and Shakespeare was pressed into the service of a very conservative social agenda. We never performed Merchant after that, as far as I know. I don't think we ever performed Othello at all. We did not wish to offend.  In 1991, the public theater in New York in the last season of Shakespeare in the park in Joe Papp's lifetime brought a troop of Brazilian actors to perform completely in Portuguese amid summer night stream. The souvenir t-shirts announced the production's mission. Shakespeare para todos. Shakespeare for everyone. It was a bit of a radical statement in 1991. Now, it's what we expect of ourselves and what our constituent students and faculty and public expect of us. Shakespeare para todos. It's not very far off from higher education para todos, which, while it isn't yet on any of our t-shirts, is a central claim of our mission. The Merchant of Venice is a play that looks closely at issues of inclusion, diversity, and the consequences to a community that scapegoats and bullies and would homogenize those that it allows to live in it. It's obviously a play for our time, and it is very much a play for our campus, for our students, and for our surrounding communities in the plural. In my teaching, and I have two witnesses, I ask my students to find something in the plays that they are studying, the characters and situations represented, that they can recognize in themselves. I want them to own what they read, to find their own way in, to see that apart from a few linguistic distractions, a few these thousand those, Hamlet, or Othello, or Shylock, or Antonio, are us, like toys are us. They really are. No one ever asks me, though I know the question is out there somewhere, why we still study Shakespeare, and why we study Shakespeare at Montclair State? Here's my answer, you don't have to ask. It's because he knows us. He knows who we are now. We don't just talk about Shakespeare as a dead carver of cultural relics, though there's some of that too. He also helps us to understand ourselves now, and our place in the world now. It's not like we've changed all that much. Shakespeare's still, and really, is patototos. It's now my great pleasure to turn this program over to the people who really came to hear. Thank you for your ears. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my honor, my privilege, and boy am I very excited to introduce James Shapiro, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Thank you. I think we're all thrilled to be here today, and I think Jim and I feel a bit like spear carriers. We know why you're here, and I feel very much the same way. So I have the honor of asking the first question to the justice, and it's sort of embarrassingly a softball in this Yogi Berra home too. There's some advantage to that. But I wanted to begin just by asking Justice Ginsburg that I had read that you have a distinguished acting career that hasn't been quite as fully revealed as it might be now. Would you like to talk a bit about the acting you've done, especially Shakespeare? The Shakespeare Theater in D.C. invited the justices to do bit parts for a lawyer's night at the Shakespeare Theater. So my first role was the epilogue in Henry V. If you turn me on, I can start small time, but in that small. The next one at the Shakespeare Theater was not a Shakespeare play, it was here again. And I was the troll Chamberlain. And then in Henry VI, I was Dick the Butcher, who has the famous line, first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Which I then have to explain that that was not meant to be a put down of lawyers. It takes place, it's in Jack Cade's Rebellion, so Jack Cade is an anarchist, and you need the law to save the society from chaos. One of the things that I'd be very interested in, as somebody who also grew up in Brooklyn and attended school there, is your earliest experience of reading or seeing Shakespeare on stage. My earliest experience was not on stage, and it involved the Merchant of Venice, which was banned in public schools in New York. So then I decided to read the play, and it had these two bursts, the phalloc's famous speech, that's not a Jew eyes. And then Porsche's speech, the quality of the verse, is not strained. It also came to me, these are two wonderful speeches, but neither character is likeable. Porsche isn't, and Shylock isn't. There isn't in the Merchant any hero or heroine, or fun people. I think I saw Henry V at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. When I was in school, there was the Lawrence Olivier film, which I must have seen at least three times. Do you remember in 1962, I think you were clerking in New York around then, that there was a production of the Merchant of Venice in the Delacorte Theater in Central Park? Joe Papp was staging it, and it was controversial because the rabbis, the rabbinical groups in New York were terrified that this was going to be televised on CBS. And they protested unsuccessfully. And I think it was the first time in post-war America. I didn't know the play had been banned from the public schools, but it raises the question for me that I'd be very curious about your views. Can you imagine circumstances in which Shakespeare should be banned from the classroom, from the stage, or from television? Or are there no circumstances in your mind where censorship should exist? I can't imagine any such thing. Through the ages, authors, composers were plagued by censors. The famous answer of Justice Brandeis' solution for bad speech, what we should do about that speech, is to have good speech. It was kind of a replay of that when the Metropolitan Opera decided to put on death of clean opera. And there were protests. It was even a disruption, an opening night. The issues, obviously this is a play that just encourages all sorts of anxieties and strong responses. The fear that it is anti-Semitic or it will provoke anti-Semitism in other people. It was a famous production of a merchant in May of 1943 in Vienna at the city theater, the Berg Theater, in which it clearly was designed as a kind of provocation and actually the one thing they had to do with that because the laws prevented marriages of Gentiles and Jews, so you had to rewrite the ending. And the way what they did was Jessica, it turned out, was a foster child. So with the strong statement you just made about being opposed to censorship, that the answer to bad speech is good speech, what would you say, do you find the play anti-Semitic? I was interested in your comment before that neither Portia nor Shylock is admirable or likable. She is less, I mean she's the least likable. I came to understand that not the first time I read the play, but you think of the quality of mercy is not strained. And then two pages later she's beating up on poor old Shylock showing him no mercy at all. There's a clue very early on when the various suitors are coming to whom, Portia. And the first one is Morocco, she talks about his burnish skin and people of that complexion not appealing to her. So you know that she's bigoted. And then she's a trickster, even the bit about the ring. So Portia I think is the less likable of the two. There's so much about Shylock, yes he's wetting his knife to cut his pound of flesh. But when he talks before that he's told that his daughter who has eloped with Lorenzo has sold the turquoise ring for a monkey. And he says it was the ring I had of Leia, his wife, she gave it to me before we were married. And that, you can say, you can interpret that as the turning point for Shylock. That he wasn't mentally competent when he's insisting on the pound of flesh, but his despair and his rage. I think when he exits he said his line is I am not well. You can understand that Shylock's insistence on the pound of flesh that way. That's great. Henry Irving said at one point who was really the first of the great Shakespeare actors that played Shylock as a man of great dignity, the dignified. But he says that Shylock is at least honest in his vices. And the Christians are hypocrites in their virtues, which is a very nice, elegant formulation. When you have done two, I don't know whether the technical term is moot courts or not, but the year before last in Venice, you presided in the squalo over a very distinguished group of lawyers pleading for Antonio, Shylock and Portia. And then this past year you did it again as brilliantly, but somewhat differently in your rulings at the Library of Congress. And at that second event, one of the things that struck me very powerfully were your insights about the status of the alien in the play. That when Portia, my memory is not as strong as yours, so I'll read the lines. It's not that I don't teach this every year, I'm just not Supreme Court justice material. Portia says to Shylock, Terry Jew, the law hath yet another hold on you. It is enacted in the laws of Venice. If it be proved against an alien that by direct or indirect attempts he seeks the life of any citizen, that party against the witchy death-con tribe shall seize one half his goods, the other half comes to the privy coffer of the state. And I'm very interested about your insights into, at this moment historically, into what this play might be saying about the status of the alien. And the alien is... In this case, it's Shylock. But Portia, in a way, should have understood that status. Portia is a woman pretending to be a man, pretending to be a lawyer or judge at a time when she could not be or a judge. So, in a sense, she is an outsider too, and that's why it's so remarkable that she should do this to Shylock. She should have experienced otherness herself. What do you think she can't see that? Is it just her personality prevents her from that? Or her anxiety about seeing her husband in a room with another man attracted to him, perhaps? Yes, I think that is part of it. The Antonio-Basanio relationship. One of the things that always interests me about that court scene, I'm curious, your response to this, is she's assured Shylock that he can press the suit without the law having any hold over him. That's legitimate to go forth the suit. In the lines Jim just read, it's hold on the law hath yet another hold on you. And this is an aspect of the law that Shylock's unaware of, has never been told about. She has assured him he's not liable in any way from the law. And it wonders if Shylock had known that bit of law if he would have, first of all, entered into the bond in the first place or pressed the suit. In your trickster sense of, Portia seems to extend actually into the courtroom itself. It's an odd moment. That's the second time the first is the legalism of the law. You can't cut even a jot of blood. But then suddenly the law hath yet another hold on you. What do you think is happening there? Why suddenly does this hitherto unmentioned law suddenly show up? Certainly in odd terms Shylock was denied due process. The first thing that somebody who is suspected of criminal activity has a right to notice of what the charges are and an opportunity to defend against them. There was no notice. I wonder about that switch because Shakespeare knew a lot about the law. That's evident from his plays. And yet Shylock is bringing a civil case. He's suing on a contract for specific enforcement. And then it gets turned into a criminal case against him. Now that seems really interesting to me, that switch. And there's that moment when she asks for mercy, but she doesn't ask mercy from the court. She asks mercy from Shylock, which is an odd thing. So it's a criminal case and then suddenly it ends up with in this kind of equity world and then ultimately to the criminal case. So when you say that, obviously Shakespeare does know a lot about the law. He always thinks about it, words like equity appear regularly in the plays. In fact, mercy appears in every play, but Julia Caesar, which is always interesting to make of that fact. How do you account for how much he knew about the law, just as a practical man in London? Why does he seem to know so much about the law? Perhaps he was a lawyer. And that's what makes this change so interesting there is such a thing in the civil law world of a person bringing a civil claim on the tales of the prosecutor. The prosecutor is prosecuting somebody, let's say, for assault. And then the person who is assaulted joins in the prosecution to get damages. But this is a proceeding that starts out civil. And I think that that is unknown in the legal world, that you can transform a civil proceeding into criminal prosecution. I mean one of the things that does interest me of this way, it's a play obviously where this is so much embedded in this language of the law and I suggest that he might have been a lawyer, he might have been reasonable. There's missing seven years in Shakespeare's biography, maybe. And English law is so interesting because there are all these overlapping layers of jurisdiction. It's one of the, at Shakespeare's time, there are these different courts. The American system, where Justice Ginsburg is at the height of it obviously, of hierarchical, it's not the way the English legal system worked. And yet there was this principle of equity, that was the word that was usually used. And the Chancellery courts actually are sometimes instructed to say, well it doesn't matter what the legal issue is, that you have to proceed on the grounds of reasonableness and justice. There was a way in which you could sort of override the legalism, that's the basis of the claim that finally Portia uses to prevent what would really be a murder. The United States had inherited from England that division between law and equity. And the merger wasn't until the 20th, in the 20th century. Because it became the same court, but it was an equity side and a law side. So that's already been written in. And it is interesting in the English system that this sort of equity provision in the two revolutionary moments in Britain in the 1640s and in 1688, that's the one piece of the legal system that carries over. People recognize the humane, logical quality of this. The quality of mercy in these cases hasn't been constrained, but it certainly is here in this play. I would ask a version of that question in a slightly different way. Conceding that Shakespeare was interested in the law and that legal issues appear in many of the plays, what to your mind doesn't he understand at a deep level about the law? Shakespeare were your clerk. What would you have taught him? Well, I would have taught him first of all that this idea of turning a civil case into a criminal prosecution is. Do you think there are other things that at a deep level he doesn't grasp about law or is law one of those? I think that Henry, the Dick the Butcher scene, shows how much he does understand about the law and the law's importance as society needs a ruler of law. I want to go back to your initial point that no speech should be censored, but of course even in our country there is speech that's prohibited. There's probably never been a culture that has absolutely no prohibitions on speech. The famous you can't yell fire in a crowded room and we have both on college campuses and sometimes in other public spaces regulations about what gets often called hate speech. Is there any part of Merchant of Venice? If there's time for other speech, but in the case of fire in a theater or stirring the troops to go out and kill Jews, there's no time for a reasoned response. But if there is time, one of the most famous free speeches, Terminella, involved, and even a couple of the leading cases involved virulent anti-semitic speech. I like the temporal distinction though that if there's time for more speech, then it would be permissible and if it activates a whole set of responses. If there's an immediate danger, then there's no time. Do you think there is a difference? I'm fascinated in the way you were telling me before that there have been moot court discussions of various Shakespearean scenes, not just Merchant of Venice, but you told me, Justice was telling me about a moot court where they were deciding whether Hamlet had the mental capacity to be tried for the murder of Polonius, which I liked, and even the witches in Macbeth, the question was about the trial for those. I'm curious what the status is. I guess that would be the word of the Shakespearean play in these discussions. As a space for thinking through legal concerns, why is this useful rather than using actual cases for moot court? Isn't it fiction? It's sometimes quite extreme in its characterization. Is this a serious project in legal education? It's serious for the Lawyers Committee for the Shakespeare Theatre. They designed the moot court and as you mentioned, the most recent one was the trial of the witches for complicity in the murder of Duncan. Did they get off? Yes. Because they equivocated or because... They were just an excuse for what his ambition drove him to do. One thing that's interesting, may reading court decisions and all of becoming important parts of our lived experience, one of the principles that some of your colleagues invoke regularly is what gets called original intent. What do you think about that both as a legal principle and maybe Jim too could join in thinking as a principle of literary criticism? Are we bound to read Shakespeare in terms of what we can learn about what might have been his original intent? What do you think of it as a legal principle, if constitutionally? It's not it. You have 20 seconds. One thing, it's guesswork on the part of who knows what James Madison would have thought about, but we do know that there were certain values and one of them was free speech and other freedom of religion. No unreasonable searches and seizures. Those are values that have staying power. How they apply to today's situation is different from... Well, to take one example, libel law was certainly actions for libel at the time of the founders. And yet we had this case of times against Sullivan when it became clear that these libel suits could bankrupt the press. And so now we still have libel suits, but they're very hard. It's very hard to make out such a case. You have to prove actual malice. So that's for another thing, the framers of the Constitution, they gave the world something wonderful in the Constitution. They start out with the people of the United States of who were we, the people. I would not have been there. People were held in human bondage. Native Americans, they were excluded. So to me, the genius of the Constitution is that over the course of our history, that notion of who counts among we the people has expanded. Now that seems really important. One of the things I always tell my students is whenever you see the word people in an argument, the people think the people say we the people, it means something other than the people. I should take my favorite clause of the Constitution in the 14th Amendment. No state shall deny to any person the equal protection of the laws. 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. If you would ask the members of Congress at the time or the ratifiers in the states, well, women are people. So that must mean that women have the most basic right of citizenship, the right to vote. It took a long time until 1920. The same problem exists in the world in which David and I live and work, which is we're constantly asked by students or general public, well, was Shakespeare anti-Semitic or was he phylo-Semitic? Was Shakespeare sympathetic to Caliban at the end? Were his intentions in writing Hamlet this or that? And I think there are quite a few Shakespeareans, many who've taught for a very long time, who come to believe from the years of teaching and reading and studying these plays, that they can access Shakespeare's original intent. Although they might not use that vocabulary, I think that's true. And I think it's a great danger to how we read and teach and stage Shakespeare today. I think the other part of that is we also use Shakespeare somewhat instrumentally as both the voice and the guarantor of what we take to be our best instincts. And it's a lovely thought, but I'm not sure it's always true. And I think even in Merchant of Ennis, not that with the justice, I think I cannot think of any context in which I would want it censored, but there's a way in which it seems to be at this moment in our history we want this to be more inclusive, more cosmopolitan in some way than I think the play actually initially could have been understood. And as you say, we often don't know what either the framers were actually thinking or what Shakespeare is thinking, but in many ways it is a play that one could say by some definition is anti-Semitic. It assumes Judaism as a secondary, if not even inferior form of faith in a culture that believes there are two versions of what a Jew is in Christian Europe. One sort of super-sessional, it's kind of the beginning of, you find lots of people saying things like Jews are children that will eventually grow up to be proper Christians or Jews are first drafts, that's another version of a certain kind of ethical being. But at the end of the play, Shylock's gone. He's not there in the fifth act. Jessica can be allowed in, but only by converting and marrying a Christian. Half of Shylock's money, maybe all, depending how you read this, he's either gone to the state or to a son-in-law he can't like very much. So I'm just curious not whether this is an argument for censoring the play, is there, do you feel there is something anti-Semitic about this play that at least should make us worry? Compared to what? Compared to the Jew of Malta? Excellent answer. Compared to the Jew of Malta, which is different than the Jew of Malta. Yes. I mean there's a way in which there's a recognition of humanity. Yes. Compared to what? The answer is an excellent one. And compared to the merchant of Venice in Vienna in 1943. I mean that plays also malleable in some way that you can kind of make them be many different things. No, I've written a book on Shakespeare and the Jews and I've thought long and hard about this. And one of the things that I found very exciting seeing the production that you're about to see today in Venice in the ghetto, which was under Shaul Basi's brilliant, brilliant leadership and David Castan and others helping to create the possibility of this production. Every time that play takes place, where it is staged, by whom it is staged, how it is imagined is different. And when Israel was not yet created in the 1930s, Jewish settlers in Israel, intellectuals, many of them from Europe, debated whether the play should be banned in Israel. And it was a long discussion in many of the leading Hebrew journals of the time. And in the end it was decided not to ban the play from Israel in a way that Wagner's music had been banned from Israel. And yet when the Royal Shakespeare Company came to Israel, I think Barry Kyle was directing it in 1988, the Jewish actors asked him to leave out the conversion of Shylock at the end. So what is it when in Germany you're leaving out the intermarriage, in Israel you're leaving out the conversion? We always call it the Merchant of Venice, but it is a very malleable thing as you say. I guess to turn it into a question for Justice Ginsburg, does this play give you pleasure or is it a disturbing experience when you sit in the theater and watch the Merchant of Venice? I wonder why it's labeled a comedy. Even the parts when Lorenzo and Jessica on such a night, all of the lovers came to a terrible end. I suppose if you just had the very last scene it would be kind of comedy then. But the rest of it is not very funny. It is interesting that actually what it's called generically shifts around a lot. I mean when the book is first registered in the stationers transcripts, which are sort of the version of copyright, which didn't belong to authors, belong to publishers, it's just called the Book of the Merchant of Venice, otherwise called the Jew of Venice. And that's the first time it ever is referred to. The Merchant is Antonio. But the Merchant is Antonio and that's the other issue. And even the play itself is sort of aware of that, which is the Merchant here and which is the Jew. Try explaining that to my students who come in assuming that Shylock is that merchant. And then when it is first published, that first publication of 1600, it's called the Most Excellent History of the Merchant of Venice. History and story are essentially the same word. Story is just an aphetic form of history. But then there's a subtitle with the extreme cruelty of Shylock the Jew toward the said merchant. So that title pageant makes it very clear which is the merchant and which is the Jew. But when the folio came into being in 1623 and they had to decide which pigeonhole to shove the play into, it turned out to be comedy. And it's just ninth in the plays, ninth in the list of comedies in the folio, precisely because, as the justice says, there's a marriage at the end, however bizarrely it's introduced with those classical images on such a night. You're a much better reader than any of my students, I have to say. One curious thing is what is the meaning of the conversion? Is that kind of a mercy because here's this Jew who will be damned, who will never go to heaven unless he becomes a Christian? I think that's really one of the crucial questions and I think that is the right answer. I mean there was a theological concept that had been circulating in Europe really since about the 6th century. And the way it was usually described was charitable hatred. And Luther writes about this a lot also. But charitable hatred was, and its best version is, hate the sin, love the sinner. In its worst version it was something like this that says the only way you can be saved is to convert. But then the problem is because what is a forced conversion? How does that even work as a principle? How do you force somebody to convert? And no one in all the source materials that Shakespeare drew on ever had a forced conversion of Shiloh. So what does it say about Shakespeare that he would add that dark twist to this so-called comedy? It's the only one. I mean no one, there are many sources for this play and he introduces the forced conversion that wasn't there before. I think it may have something to do with Shakespeare's just relentless need to pun on the word will. I mean both of us have written books with will in the title. But there is a way in which thou will turn Christian. And there's a way in which that's the issue. Do you will your conversion or is it a gift of grace or is it, if it's forced, isn't it just external? What could that possibly mean at a moment as you know well where various people are performing outwardly certain kinds of religion? Elizabeth once said, I think probably Francis Bacon wrote the words. But she's trying to keep Britain whole. Mainly the issues are mainly between Protestants and Catholics. And she says, we do not make windows into men's hearts. It's kind of a wonderful image. We do not make windows into men's hearts. And all she really wants anyone to do is just show up in church on Sunday and perform the things you are supposed to perform. You know you think what is it that Venice imagined Shylock would do to force a conversion. So the people of so-called of the spirit there you shall see the difference of our spirits as the do. So the people of the spirit, this Christian community in fact turn into literalists like everybody else and say well you will perform this conversion. But I like your reading that you know that once he says I am content. Then he says I am not well. Yes. I'll be thinking about that. Professor Castan, Justice Stevens. Justice Stevens was who we were talking about beforehand. I should say. Justice Stevens did not believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. And we were in the green room discussing my correspondence with him on the subject. And happily Justice Ginsburg not only believes that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare but can take to school two Shakespeareans. And we'll take back into our classrooms at Yale and Columbia your insights and your brilliance. I'm very grateful every time I hear you talk about this play. And one of the reasons that I was excited about being here was once more to ask you hard questions and to take away some wisdom. So I'm grateful for that. I'm very grateful you're still on the court. Good evening everyone. I'd just like to thank one more time Justice Ginsburg, Professors Castan and Shapiro. It's a privilege to have you here and to hear what I think was a very illuminating and quite lovely discussion just now. Looking over what's been written about this play recently, it occurs to me that we are these days in quite a bit of agreement about the play, surprisingly. And especially about its capacity to remind us to think critically about otherness and prejudice in our societies and to find ways to ameliorate the traumas great and small that so often attend racial, religious and ethnic difference. As Stephen Greenblatt has put it recently, what Shakespeare bequeathed to us offers possibilities of escape from the mental ghettos most of us inhabit. Most of us. I'm sure that Greenblatt is only giving his readers the benefit of the doubt. And yet the phrase does give us the dangerous opportunity to see ourselves as comfortably in the minority of those who have escaped these ghettos of the mind or are at least on our way to escaping. It's a strange thing to be in firm agreement about the limits of our understanding. To be certain about ambiguity, though that is of course a certainty, we scholars in particular prize and teach. But it is also important, I think, to allow a text like the Merchant of Venice to genuinely unsettle us in the words of one of my students just last week to freak us out. How sure are we that we know the nature of the human virtues that a play like Merchant kindles in us? How sure are we that the openness it asks of us is in fact what we owe to others? How sure are we even of ambiguity? More than anywhere else that I've taught, Montclair has taught me that this kind of unsettling comes most often from students. And we are lucky to have here tonight two of the best, whom Naomi and I have had the privilege of teaching in our Shakespeare classes here. Allison Gormley and Gustavo Vasquez. Their questions are about conversion and assimilation, which have already come up, and about the resistance to these conversion and assimilation. They are not easy issues by any standard, and that is exactly what we hope for most from our best students. So Gustavo, would you start? I was very excited to hear Justice Ginsburg bring up Morocco. Because when I read this play for this particular round table, I focused on the racial overtones, especially towards Morocco. And when he first meets Portia, he is super conscious about his complexion. He even goes on and tells her, I would not change this hue except to stay your thoughts. So with that being said, to me that immediately struck as a term acting way, that's usually used towards people of color. So do you see the play, especially in this relationship with Portia and Morocco, as the power of assimilation or the resistance to assimilation? No, Morocco doesn't get to assimilate because he picks the wrong casket that he goes back to Morocco. But I think that is a tip-off about Portia, her reaction to him. One of the many puzzling things about the merchant is why she is an amateur Bassanio, who is me. I guess he's a happy-go-lucky character, but doesn't seem to have much weight. And she is attractive to him, Portia is attractive to Bassanio, for one thing, because Portia is a very rich woman. I would only add to that, that I grew up in a world in which the conversation about this play was about, is it anti-Semitic or not? And in my own classroom and reading the work of David Castan and Stephen Greenblatt and others, nowadays we talk about this play in very different ways. It's a play about intolerance, intolerance to those who have a different religion. And Prince of Morocco is not only a dark-skinned or black man, but he's also a Muslim. And he's dismissed by Portia with the words, let all of his complexion win me so.  And odds are, the Shakespeare editor, probably somebody known to us, gentlemen who taught both of us, writes the word complexion doesn't really mean skin color, it means temperament. And then about two pages later, it so clearly means skin color. So there are ways in which we don't offer legal rulings, but we do offer editorial rulings that shape the lives and responses of students. And we have an obligation to search for the truth of that and to change the story we're telling. The only thing I would add to that is there is another play where, of course, Morocco does marry the white woman, and that's called A Fellow, and unfortunately it ends really badly. And they're the two plays which have Venice in the title. And I think that matters because Venice had a self-image of itself as the most cosmopolitan of European cities. And in fact, probably the only other city on the globe on the earth that had anything like that cosmopolitan fantasy was Aleppo, which has a very different history right now, which was a rather similar kind of city. But I think in part this is a play that exposes that fantasy of cosmopolitanism. It works as long as it works, as long as you don't marry a black man or you don't marry a Jew. I do think there's a way in which there's a kind of critique of the fantasy of cosmopolitanism and the comedy of Merchant of Venice is in a sense that white Christian communities in its own slightly self-satisfied version of what it thinks it is, and yet those two plays really raise the question you brilliantly posed. You mentioned that Venice was a cosmopolitan place. There were restrictions on Jews, but they let Jews live there and engage in certain occupations. In 1290, the Jews were expelled from England. So how many Jews would even have been known to Shakespeare? That is a very good question that took me about seven years of my life to answer, and the answer is not many. There was a converts house in Holborn where Shakespeare had he desired, could have walked up and spoken to a man who was born Yehuda Menda, who was converted by John Fox to Nathaniel Menda. But we might think of the usefulness of thinking of Jew as a complicated entity in Shakespeare. Are Jews a nation? Are Jews a people? Are Jews the member of a religious community? If they convert to Christianity and they are racially other, which many believed in the 16th century, would they retain their racial tape? Some Elizabethan dramatist, Thomas Decker, is one of them, talked, and Marla was another, who joke about the stink of the Jews. Well, if they convert, did they lose that stink or is that... So all the contradictions about the categories we use to define and describe other human beings coalesce uncomfortably in the Jews. It's not worth mentioning Justice Ginsburg's recollection of 1290 as the date when the Jews are expelled from England. It is the first European country to expel its Jewish population. It's just a random fact. Well, this is, the Spanish came late to it. That's right, came late, came late to intolerance. Allison, would you like to ask your question? Hi, it's an honor to hear you all speak, and I actually started answering my question. I was really interested in the trial scene, particularly in terms of Shylock's conversion to Christianity and even Jessica's conversion to a Christian. This play really reminded me of the scapegoat by Rene Girard, and one of his main arguments is that the scapegoated people, the minority, the other that Dr. Liebler was talking about before, they aren't persecuted in terms of their crimes against society because they're different, but because they are insisting that they are the same. And this is particularly notable in the half-not-a-Jew eyes speech that Shylock gives. So I'm wondering in terms of that, and you were talking about the ethnicity of Jews before, why would Antonio and the Christians in the play, with this idea in mind, still want to convert Shylock and convert Jessica if that was their initial crime that they were trying to be similar? That is a really, really good question. Good students are such a delight. I'm tempted to use that teacher's slate of hand. I'm so sorry our time will address that next semester. But I can offer a provisional response, and English colleagues up here can get the last word in today. Those are the questions that keep me not only up at night, but wrestling with Shakespeare for my career, for my life, for my entity, because there are no easy questions to that. I wrestle with the question of whether conversion is even a possibility. When you convert, do you lose something? Do you gain something? Do you retain something? And those are questions that are deeply embedded and left unanswered in the play. To put that another way, Shakespeare forces us to ask questions. His plays don't yield easy answers, and I'd be skeptical of any answer that a professor gave me to such a good question. And I'm not even going to try. Take it away, Justice. You get the last word. Jessica is very happy about, I mean, she's going to be saved because she married a Christian. Well, history teaches us that maybe she isn't going to be saved. We think of all the Jews who converted who were considered by Nazi Germany to remain Jews. So Mendelssohn, for example, his family converted before he was born, and yet he remained a Jew. That's right. There's something intractable about it in the way communities view this. In one way, it always seems to me Jessica can be welcomed into this Christian community more easily than Shylock, and it's simply because she's a woman. And so therefore, you know, one mark of Judaism, the circumcision, doesn't apply to her. It's just a sort of physically easier accommodation. But she's also silenced for the last three months. But she doesn't say anything. And then again, the question of the malleability of the production. I mean, you and I both have seen many where this is true, but one that Murray did, Murray Abraham, where the actor's playing Jessica, at the end, at one point Shylock throws off his yarmulke at the end of Act 4 and just at the edge of the stage. And then at the very end of the play in this production, there's nothing textual that indicates this, the director's insight. As the couples go off, coupled off, Narissa and Graschiano, Bassanio and Portia, Antonio always awkwardly by himself. But then Jessica goes off with Lorenzo and then runs back just to pick up the amica and the sense of loss, the sadness there. There's not a line in the play that makes that necessary. There's not a line in the play that even makes that reasonable. But there's, you know, it is an action that makes sense in all of our lived experience of the kinds of things you two both brilliantly spoke about. The questions confirm just what a great job Moncler is doing. And I'd like to thank Moncler. I'd like to thank the organizers of this event. But mostly I'd like to thank Justice Ginsburg for being here and sharing her wisdom with us. Thank you so much.  We'll stay for the reception. Thank you all very, very much. It is such an honor. Thank you very much. And please join us. We're having a little party in the lobby. You're all invited. And there's a play at eight o'clock. Rialto.


Out here today we're doing our Viper family day. So this is the second time we've had a chance to do this and really what we're trying to do is bring all the families out to the field to see where our soldiers do when we when we go train. It's wonderful to be at the celebration. Everybody is out here. So many people from the community that we know. Great food and it was a fantastic show with the aircraft. So it's been wonderful. So the preparation for the event you know takes the entire team down to the guys bringing the trucks, the coordination of the foods, the aircraft, the crews doing the crew briefs, the coordination with the ranges, the ammunition people down at the FARP refueling. Just really just takes the entire team.


The radical. Fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brook Show. Alright everybody, welcome to Iran Brook Show on this Tuesday, March 26, almost the end of the month, and I'm almost on my way to South America next week. Tuesday, a week from today, I'm on a flight to Sa Paolo, where I will be giving a talk, and then Buenos Aires, where we'll be doing three days of lecturing, conference talks, meeting with Mele, all of that, and then from there to Santiago, Chile, where we're doing two days of conference talks, and then back home. So yeah, busy, busy, busy schedule, but looking forward to it, it's great. Alright, let's see, anything I need to announce, let you know, there will be a show tonight, still working on the topic, so to be determined that there will be a show tonight, 8 p.m. East Coast time, stay tuned for that, and yeah, other than that, I think we're good. You know, we can rock and roll. Alright, you guys have probably seen the news about the Baltimore Bridge. If you haven't seen videos of the bridge collapsing, they're quite striking, it's worth seeing, it's interesting engineering in terms of how the whole bridge collapses, the central section of the bridge, it's a bridge that's made of section, and the whole center of the bridge just collapses. I mean, basically what happened is a ship on the waterway exiting, I think it was exiting, the Port of Baltimore, one of the busiest ports in the United States, lost its, basically lost control, and drifted. It let, I guess the authorities know that it was losing control, and it was likely, or there was a probability they would hit the bridge, they landed up hitting one of the columns of the bridge, and because it is a vertical force on a column, a vertical force, most of the force a bridge is designed to handle is obviously horizontal, it's from the top, it's down, and this is a vertical force on a column, it just, it buckled, and the whole bridge just came crashing down.  The bridge could have been a lot worse in a sense that because the ship had let the authorities know they had tried to close the road off, so you can actually see cars passing as it's drifting towards the column, and then there are very few or any cars driving along once the ship, once the ship hits, so that reduced the number of casualties, there were some workmen, the bridge was not a repair, so there's some workmen on the bridge who hit the water. Last I saw, I mean, originally the estimates were about 20 people, 20 people from the construction crew were missing in the water, one had been rescued, one or two have been rescued, last I saw there were only six missing in the water, but I think we'll know more as the day progresses. It is an interesting engineering feat today, a bridge like this would be, a number of different things would be done in order to prevent it from an accident like this, I mean this is not a crazy accident, right? You would think a bridge could withstand this force coming from the side, but remember this is a, I don't know, I saw some way, what's, you know, this is the ship that went 500 feet, of course, again that's pretty rare, but you could imagine that the bridge should have been designed to deal with it and why it would collapse, but let me just give you a quick update on this. So we're talking about, you know, we're talking about a large bridge, a span of, my internet is for some reason suddenly slow, I guess maybe because of, okay, let's start from the beginning, the bridge, the bridge, other bridges have collapsed from similar strikes in 1980, a Sunshine Skyway bridge collapsed when a vessel strikes again, one of the columns that's the weak point in a bridge like this, this bridge was hit by a container ship, a container ship that was fully loaded, we're talking about well over three million pounds, right? No bridge I think is designed of three million pounds of that's equivalent static force of hitting a column from the side, the bridge had three spans, but once you take out one they all collapse on top of the other, the other spans a whole because the centerpiece is hinged and once those collapse the rest of the bridge is fine, so this is designed to work like this, designed to collapse. What usually happens is that you, a modern bridge is built to prevent a ship from hitting the column, so what they do is around the column, they will put lots of rocks and other things sand and rocks and build it out, so the ship doesn't literally hit the column, it hits the sand barrier with the rocks and it, so the whole force is not hitting a thin column on which the bridge rests and you'll see that when they rebuild this they will build it quite differently, so it's going to be interesting, it's going to be interesting also you know modern bridges often have cables, the cables are there to take some of the stress off of this center column, so the column could get weakened but the cables would hold it up at least for a while until you came in and reinforced the column so a lot of modern bridges would not collapse the way this bridge did and you know it'll be interesting to see what the bridge looks like once they rebuild it and you know what the cost is and everything, talk about costs, this bridge, the bridges collapse was built in 1977 and it cost $61 million which is about $343 million in 2024, I'm gonna make a guess that the new bridge that replaces it will cost anywhere between I don't know five to ten times that amount, so probably looking one and a half to three billion dollars, not because it has to cost that much but because and not because of inflation, we're taking into account inflation from 61 to 343, that's inflation, no but because of regulation and all the constraints on building today and the environmental concerns and the million things that you have to do today when you construct anything that you didn't have to do in the column the old days, so yes this bridge is gonna cost a fortune to fix the other thing that I don't think people are taking into account, this is gonna take quite a while to build, again everything takes a lot longer than it used to take and this is not a section of a highway that collapses like in Philadelphia, this is a bridge of a waterway, in the meantime this is gonna have a pretty negative consequence to the Port of Baltimore, again one of the busiest ports in the United States, I'll also note that you know they're gonna have to dredge this area, they're gonna have to take out the bridge and take out the stuff that collapsed into there, there is a foreign dredge act of 1906, which you're probably not familiar with, but the foreign dredge act of 1906 says that dredging operations in the United States waters, in US waters, must be the dredging equipment, must be built in the United States, be owned and chartered by a US citizen, that's the Jones Act for dredging, so one can anticipate that there are fewer dredging capabilities than would otherwise be available, that these dredging capabilities are far more expensive than they should be because they have to be American built and American owned and American flagged and American personnel and American this and American that, so we have kind of a Jones Act for dredging, that's kind of interesting, let's see what else, yeah there was a great post by you know, so this bridge collapse tragic and unfortunate and sad, but it highlights a bunch of issues in our economy, like the foreign dredging act, which is absurd and ridiculous, but so this is gonna cost a fortune to fix, it's gonna cost a fortune to dredge, it's gonna cost a fortune to reopen the Port of Baltimore, these are real costs on the economy, these are real costs to all of us, these are real costs to progress, it's sad and yeah, you know, I think Mark says the ship was dealing with power issues, yeah basically they lost power and it drifted into the column and they kind of had a sense that that was happening and it's one of these big container ships, so God, I mean that hits a column, it doesn't have to be at very high speeds because of the mass involved, that is the force, but here is Thomas Massey, Thomas Massey for those of you who do not know is a representative, I think from Ohio, maybe not from Ohio anyway from the Midwest and he is considered the most libertarian, I mean seriously the most libertarian member of Congress, member of Congress, yes Kentucky, I think you're right, he's from Kentucky, so the most libertarian member of Congress, this is what he writes, my district has 250 miles of the Ohio River with three dams, city water intakes and a dozen bridges, the Jones Act requires shipping on inland waterways to be conducted with vessels built, registered and crewed in the United States, I support the Jones Act, even if it is protectionist, I have no idea what he's talking about, so he doesn't want foreign vessels traveling in the inland waterways of the Ohio River because in Kentucky because of what, you know American ships that are built flagged the safer, I mean is there evidence of this, is this just xenophobia, I mean this is the most libertarian member of Congress, now he's really really bad on foreign policy, but I thought he'd be good on this, but no, he's supporter of the Jones Act, the number one stupidest act that we have in the books, well they're probably stupid, but certainly one of the most stupidest acts that we have in the book, Massey's, I mean this is it, the Republican Party is finished, it's history, it's junk, it should be trashed in the junk keep of history if this is the most free market person, now it turns out that in spite of what Thomas Massey is saying, foreign vessels can and do operate on US inland waterways, so in spite of the Jones Acts, foreign vessels can navigate through these inlands, they just can't go between two American ports and if you think the Jones Act vessels don't collide with bridges and other infrastructure, then you're delusional and it's a completely arbitrary assertion, but there's a number of examples, one at least of a Jones Act vessel hitting a bridge in Kentucky right on in January 26, 2012, so this idea that Jones Act ships don't hit bridges, bizarre, silly, ignorant and very non, I don't know what you'd think traditionally of libertarian, but here is a libertarian, member of Congress, Republican, coming out for the Jones Act because somehow it protects the bridges in Kentucky, which it doesn't, it's just stupid and this is politics today, stupid, squared, you know, what else can you say, what I mean, I don't know what else you can say about this stuff, anyway right now ever this moment, I guess the websites where you can find who is operating on the waterways, as we speak right now, they are foreign vessels on US inland waterways, not just American vessels, so I guess you should be very, very, very worried, I mean it might even be the case that some of those vessels operating in the inland waters of the United States, maybe some of them I even, God forbid, maybe some of them are even owned by the Chinese, you know, and that of course would be the end of times. Alright, I don't know, where do we go from here? Yes, there is a rumor all over Twitter, which is of course the standard of all truth and all knowledge and we, unfortunately most people get their news or get information about the world, there is a meme and or maybe it's not a meme but there is a conspiracy theory out there that's saying, oh my God, the reason housing is in such crisis in America today is because Wall Street, people like BlackRock, big Wall Street firms are buying 44% of all homes this year, 44%, 44%, that's a big number, almost half of all the homes being bought by Wall Street firms, firms that own at least 1,000 homes together. Now, those of you who are worried about that, let me first say, I'm not sure why that's a worry, I don't know, but let's just factually say that's not happening, it's just not happening, not even close. Large corporate buyers share of the purchase market, right, that is institutional investors, people who buy homes for institutions like BlackRock as investments and then rent them out. We're not talking about the mom and pop who buy one to 10 properties and then lease them out, we're talking about big institutional investors that buy hundreds of these. That is peaked with those about 100 plus homes, this is 100 plus in a 12-month period, right, institutional home buyers that buy 100 plus homes in a 12-month period, that's peaked to 2.5% of the housing markets, 2.5, not 44%, 2.5, a blimp, not a real impact on housing. Now, it's true that if you take the entire market share of investors, including mom and pops, that buy a few homes and rent them out. I know people who do this, lots of people who do this, it's not a bad way to diversify your wealth and get rental income and get steady income, and hopefully if home prices go up, you make some capital gains as well. If you include all of them, every buyer who buys homes as an investment, that total is 30%. And that is what creates a robust rental market in homes. And as I've said in the past, there is no great necessary advantage to buying over renting. Renting is perfect in certain circumstances, at certain points in your life. Early on in my life, I spent most of the years early on in rental properties when I was an adult, right?  I even rented when I first had a family. And it took me years before I owned something and usually rented apartments. It took me years before I owned a house. And it's not clear. It's not clear, depending again on your values, depending on what you want to do and everything. It's not clear. Anybody should own a house. You know, it's not clear. You should own a house necessarily. It depends on your values. It depends where you are in your life and what you want to achieve. So there's just no basis for this, zero. If you look at the market share, total market share, not just what they, you know, in 12 months of landlords, total landlords with a thousand plus properties that peaked in 2021, I think at 2.4%. 2.4% versus 44%. You can see how these things go online. Very few people question them and they just become this panic about nothing. Now again, it's not even clear why it's bad, even if it happens, right? It's not clear. But yeah, let's see. All right. So I've talked often about sugar, about the fact that sugar in the United States, there's a reason why you, in your Coca-Cola, you have corn syrup and not sugar. And the primary reason for that is because of the sugar lobby. And the sugar lobby is not just sugar farmers, primarily in Florida, that are supported by people like Rubio, that basically have forced very, very large, basically limits on how much sugar we can import. It's not even tariffs. It's literally quotas of how much sugar can be imported in order to drive prices of sugar up so that American farmers who have high costs to produce their sugar can compete. And of course, American farmers, this is a national security issue. If, for some reason, there's a war and we become completely dependent on sugar from an enemy state like Mexico, what will we do without any sugar? Oh, wait a minute. It's sugar. So there's no national security issue. All right. So that's not why. So we could use Brie's sugar, which is her honey, right? She produces honey. Brie is a honey producer. So we could use honey. But because sugar prices are so high, we import very little. And because they're quotas, and because the United States is not exactly ideal for production of sugar, so we don't, and it's expensive. We don't produce much sugar. Because of that, the biggest pro restrictions on sugar lobby that the United States has is the corn lobby, the corn farmers in the Midwest. They're the ones who really advocate for sugar quotas. And the reason for that is because then they get to sell their corn as a sugar substitute through corn syrup. And that's why drinks have corn syrup.  So when you think about the corn lobby, you remember Bob Dole was called the ethanol president, the ethanol senator, because he was, corn is also used for ethanol. Corn is a very, very, very big lobby. They control them at West and therefore they have ethanol and then they have corn syrup. But they also could be called the sugar lobby because they basically help the sugar farmers make vast profits. Now, I found this graph and I thought I'd share the graph with you because the graph kind of illustrates just the point about sugar. And again, people wonder about sugar in the United States. Here's the answer for you. This is sugar. Wait a minute. Yeah, that's sugar. And you can see, I don't know why it's not centered. It's supposed to be, let me just move that. There we go. That's better. All right. This sugar is not a few years, but this pattern has been consistent forever. Right? Basically, what you see in this graph is the red is the price of sugar, the price of sugar worldwide. This is the average world price of sugar. Right? And the blue is the price of sugar in the United States. And basically what you can see is that the price of sugar in the United States is almost always, whether the price of sugar is low or whether the price of sugar is high, always double, double. So price of sugar in the United States is literally double what it is everywhere else in the world. And it's amazing how this tracks. It's, wow. Only government could make a track this beautifully. This is why government limitations and the importation of sugar create. And when you buy a thing of sugar in the supermarket, know that you're paying double the average world price that you would pay in any other country. By the way, the largest import of sugar to the United States is Mexico. And sugar farmers in the United States right now are very upset at the Mexicans. And see if you can follow this. The NAFTA agreement allows Mexico to sell sugar into the United States on one condition. On the condition that all the sugar it sells into the United States at these at high prices is produced in Mexico. So Mexico can't import sugar from somewhere else, I don't know the Caribbean, and then resell it to the United States. They can only sell Mexican sugar into the United States. However, this is a problem, right? Because what happens if, how do we know it's Mexican sugar? Sugar, sugar. Well, you know, so for example, over the last two years, the production of sugar, the growth in sugar in Mexico has declined significantly. And yet the exports to the United States have stayed the same. And that has made sugar farmers in the United States suspicious that Mexico is actually, what they're doing is they, yeah, they're shipping all all the sugar that's being shipped to the United States is indeed Mexican sugar. But for domestic consumption in Mexico, they're using imported sugar, which goes against the NAFTA agreement. I don't know if you followed that, but hopefully you do. And therefore, sugar farmers right now are lobbying the government with the help of people like Marco Rubio, and I'm sure I'm sure the great governor of Florida is also involved in this in order to restrict the amount of sugar being imported from Mexico even further. Because, I mean, farmers in the United States, if they can get even higher prices in sugar, why not? It'll just mean greater profits for them. And they'll have more money to contribute to the re-election campaign of Marco Rubio and more money to contribute to the presidential campaign of our wonderful free market governor of Florida. So the US Department of Commerce is planning to look into whether the supply deals that Mexico has with the United States right now, skirt the trade rules preventing Mexico from bringing in sugar from other countries to meet domestic demand while exporting its own supply to the United States.  NAFTA is managed trade. It is a nutty, insane system. And you know, why we have tariffs on sugar at all? I mean, think of, just think of, the economic advantages to all of our lives, the cost of living decline that would happen if we just eliminated tariffs, just eliminated tariffs on everything. You don't view national security, well, no, just eliminated tariffs on everything. Just imagine what would happen. I mean, life in America would become suddenly so much cheaper to live. Our stand of living would suddenly become so much higher. We would have so much more money to save, to invest, to grow. Economy would grow so much more dramatically. Yes, there'd be a realignment of jobs. Sugar farmers would all go out of business. Good riddance. Who needs sugar farmers in the United States? But just imagine how much distortion and convo- I mean, corn farmers would go out of business. Maybe we'd grow something on those fields that Americans actually wanted to consume rather than corn syrup and ethanol. Just imagine if you just did get rid of all the tariffs, the distortions, the perversions, the craziness, the insanity that they create in all the stuff in the economy. And they got rid of the dredging act and the Jones act and subsidies and just simple stuff like that. Forget the welfare states. Forget even for a minute deregulations. Just get rid of all the subsidies, all the tariffs, all the little tax breaks could give everybody a flat tax at the corporate level. Just get out of the government trying to manage the minutia, a particular economic phenomenon.  What a boon to the U.S. economy, to U.S. quality of life, to our standard of living, to our welfare generally as individuals. It's just hard to imagine a world like that. And yet it's easy. And indeed, getting rid of tariffs is something a president could probably do unilaterally. At least many of those tariffs. Maybe not the sugar tariffs. Maybe that's a different law. Or maybe you would have to scrap NAFTA. So we're scrapping NAFTA. We're just going to have a free trade zone. We're going to allow Mexico to export anything they want to the United States. And the same with Canada. Oh, my God. Isn't, you know, whoa, cognitive dissonance and people going into cardiac arrest. This is so easy. So easy. And just like that, you make every single American, or almost every single American, not every single American. You make most Americans richer. And over the long run, every American you make richer. And instead, we're going to get a president who is going to promise to increase tariffs by 10 percent across the board on every good coming into the country. And then selectively on stuff he doesn't like, like 100 percent tariffs on electric cars from Mexico, 60 percent tariffs on everything coming in from China, maybe a few tariffs over here, over there, over elsewhere, depending on who lobbies him, and depending on who begs him, and depending on who funds this campaign or pays for his bond or whatever. We live in a crazy, crazy world where even the most libertarian member of the House of Representatives wants to maintain the Jones Act. God. Hopeless. All right, let's see. All right, a few other, you know, I'm on an economic fallacy thing, and then we'll get to a couple of other issues. Immigration, a number of different studies coming out or being reported on, they've been out for a little while. Being reported on in the media is a story in Forbes today that basically the headline says it all. Research shows immigrants benefit U.S. taxpayers. A number of different studies, one by a group here in the United States and one by a, this is from Wharton, from Penn, and one by a professor from George Mason. Both of these studies basically show the huge advantage we get from immigration and that if we allowed more immigration, the impact on things like, for example, federal deficit would be substantial. Federal deficit would be dramatically lower than without immigration. And another study by Michael Clemens that takes into account the capital investors, capital investment employers make when they hire an immigrant, when they hire for another job, which then if you take into account all the effects the immigrant has on the economy, there's a massive net positive benefit tax-wise. That is, the immigrant pays dramatically more taxes over his lifetime than anything he consumes, even if you take into account all the different stuff that in terms of taxpayer stuff that he consumes, all the different stuff that he is consuming. So I encourage you to go look at it. I mean, there's a lot of data coming out now that basically says that maybe one of the reasons we didn't go into recession while interest rates were going up, I've said this on a previous show, is because of all those illegal immigrants coming in and getting a job in spite of the fact that we don't want them to work, finding jobs anyway, all those asylum seekers finding black market jobs, or ultimately getting a job, a work permit, and going to work, all of that actually raises GDP, raises economic activity, improves the economy, and prevented us from going into recession. So maybe the crisis in the border is not a net negative, maybe it's actually a net positive. Maybe. At least the number of economic studies that seem to suggest exactly that. All right, let's see. Three-body problem. I don't know how many of you are familiar with the three-body problem. And the three-body problem is a science fiction novel.  It is considered kind of a modern classic in the genre. It's one of the, I think he won the, I forget the name of the big science fiction award for best novel, first Chinese author to ever win it. And the novels are supposedly really good. Unfortunately, I haven't read them. But Netflix has just come out with a series called American Production. There was a Chinese series of the three-body problem. And now it's just come out with the Netflix version. Same people who made Game of Thrones. So massive, high quality production values, great acting really well. The Hugo Award. Thank you, the Hugo Award.  It's really well done. You know, I don't know exactly where it's going. Don't tell me. I want to read it. No spoilers coming. But I highly recommend watching the first episode. And as I said, I don't know where it's going, but it's very well done. But the first episode opens with the scene, which is creating a lot of angst in China. And indeed, the scene comes out of the book. And it's hard to believe that the scene was allowed in the book originally, but it was in the book itself. It's somewhere in the middle of the book. Here it's right at the beginning. A lot of Chinese have been watching this using a VPN. But the scene at the beginning is very powerful, worth watching. It's violent, but it's worth watching because of what it says and because of what it tells us about a real history. It shows, I think it's 1966, in the midst of the China's cultural revolution, a revolution that was spurned by Mao Tse-tung that basically encouraged young people to purge Chinese institutions from bourgeois values and get rid of anything that was supposedly counter or anti-revolutionary. And that meant getting rid of a lot of the scientists at the universities. And in the scene, a scientist is accused of teaching Einstein's theory of relativity and other modern scientific ideas that are viewed as anti-Mao, anti-communist, anti-revolutionary. And you see the kind of mindlessness of the crowd. Scary because it looks so familiar. But you see the kind of mindless of the crowd. You see the almost orgasmic passion that they exude and then how this devolves into horrific violence. This is the Mao's cultural revolution in which two million people were killed. Two million people killed. And many, many more millions, tens of millions, were sentenced to labor camps or resettled in villages. Deng Cha-peng, Mao's number two, was actually a victim of the cultural revolution, was sent to work in a small farming community somewhere. And then when he returned, I think one of the reasons that when Mao died and Deng took over that he was more open to other ideas was because of his experiences during the cultural revolution. But Mao needed him. So he brought him back. But he did live in a small village for several years. And his son was actually thrown off of a third-story building and became a paraplegic and was crippled for the rest of his life. That is Deng, Deng Cha-peng. Anyway, this is a scene from history. It's worth watching just for this scene out of history. I think the series is probably going to be worth watching. I intend to watch the whole thing. And it looks interesting. I'll review it later. But I think this is, you know, there are not a lot of movies. I've talked about this in the past. Not a lot of movies that depict the evils of communism. Here's one short scene that does so and is causing a real stir in China. And maybe in some, one of the things that the crowd is doing is waving Mao's red book as part of this kind of craziness. They're waving Mao's red book. And that is probably stirring up some negative feelings among some in the American left who are pro Mao Tse-tung. There are people like that. Believe me, there are people like that. So I definitely worth watching. Three-body problem. And finally, because I did a show, is Andrew here? Yeah, Andrew's here. Because I did a show about fear and bravery. Well, about fear. Put aside the bravery. The bravery doesn't come into this. I thought I'd read you this post because a lot of people on Twitter are commenting on this. It's getting a lot of views. And it's something that Mark Andreessen posted. He says, this captures the mood of the times perfectly. And this relates to my show. I don't think we're going to have to comment on this very much, but I do encourage anybody interested in watching the show I did on Saturday about fear and what it's going to take for us to reestablish bravery or just reestablish normalcy and the ability to face the future. So this is this is this post. He goes, I am 57. Not only does it feel like something wicked this way comes, but there is also this feeling that the whole world is holding its breath. Almost as though we are waiting for some catalyst or sign or event that puts an end to this feeling of being put on hold, this vague unexplained unease we feel, something terrible looking just out of our field of vision, but we all feel it closing in. I cannot count the number of people who have told me they wish that whatever is going to happen would just get on with it. That this waiting for the thing in the darkness is unbearable. I think that actually does capture a lot of the mood. You know, whether it's economic collapse is going to happen or whether it's World War three is going to happen, something out there is going to happen that's really, really, really bad or AI taking over the world and all of us losing our jobs and starving, something really, really, really bad is going to happen. We don't know what it is, but we know it's going to happen. And it's coupling us. It's coupling us. And I think I talk about in a sense this and maybe some of the causes for this on the Saturday show, but yeah, and the intellectuals are feeding on this. I think much of our culture is feeding on this. Certainly social media is feeling on this. This is fear for the sake of fear. It is white people go with conspiracy theories. It is this millennium, do moreism on steroids and the steroid here is social media. And it's fueled by a lack of philosophical clarity, a lack of clarity about what not only what do we believe or what should we believe, what should we believe, what does anybody believe. And it's, this is debilitating and a big cause I think of economic and cultural and scientific and everything else stagnation. It really, really, really is a sad phenomena. I think people used to know what they wanted in life. I think people used to have a certain clarity about, I don't know, the goodness of America, about the positive value of the West. The people used to be positive about science and technology. People used to be positive about their life and the progress they're making. And I think all of that has been lost. And I think it's been lost because our intellectuals have been feeding us this constant stream of uncertainty, of skepticism, of cynicism, and of mysticism in various forms. I think post Enlightenment, the world is generally being positive, and at least the West that we positive, and pro-science and pro-industry and pro-progress. And that over the last 40 years that is tilted, we've tilted away from that, first by the cynicism, skepticism of the left, and then by the mysticism and conspiracy theories of the right. And that combination has now brought all of us this kind of dread, this kind of dread. And there was this positive attitude after World War II, we won. And yeah, it's pretty sad. And anyway, go watch the Saturday episode. I'm not going to resurrect it here. All right, we've got a bunch of questions. We're going to go to the super chat. I do want to remind everybody that you can support the show on a monthly basis on you on Brookshow, on you on bookshow.com slash membership, you're on bookshow.com slash membership. I don't know what this is doing. All right. So please consider doing that. You can also support the show on Patreon. Remember, this is a listener-supported show. It couldn't survive without support from you guys. So please consider your support. Those of you who are listening live, of course, can use the super chat to support the show. That's a fun way to do it. It's also a way to kind of get you engaged and to help shape the show itself. All right, again, it's not working. All right. It will get there. All right, let's see. We have some questions. Oh, one more reminder. Iron Man Institute is a sponsor of the show. Soon we're going to have a new sponsor, but we haven't finished the exact sponsorship. Soon we'll have a new sponsor. But for now, Iron Man Institute is a sponsor of the show. And you can, they're looking for people to sign up for the Ocon conference, for annual conference, which is pretty cool and pretty exciting and a lot of fun. And you can get a full scholarship to attend the conference. So please consider doing that. Please consider coming to the conference. I'll be there. A lot of the intellectuals associated with objectivism would be very quick. So Mary would be there, Tara Smith, Uncle Garte.  So whether you attend and pay or whether you apply for a scholarship, you can go to ironman.com slash start here and apply for a scholarship or just register to attend the conference. And I look forward to seeing you all at the conference. It's a blast. You know, socially, you're in an environment with 400, 500 people who basically share your values. It's being like in a kind of golf, golf for six days. It's just fabulous. It's exciting. It's fun. I hope to meet many of you there. All right. Andrew. He says infrastructure would be unimaginably better under capitalism. Responses to the claim that big, ambitious infrastructure projects need the government. Otherwise, private interests would conflict and be unable to organize. Purely incorrect, right? The first canals in the United States in the 19th century built by private enterprise. It's only later that the government took over those canals and started building them themselves. But imagine many of the first roads are built by private enterprise. A lot of the roads built in order to feed developments, whether it's a business development or whether it's residential development is built by individual companies for the profit motive. So absolutely not. Infrastructure projects can and should be built by private enterprise, by people who have a selfish interest in seeing these projects being put up and then maintained. They would be a lot better. A lot of these bridges should be told so that people actually pay for their use and that at least payment would pay for the maintenance of the bridges if they were private. And there are a lot of interests here. Trucking companies who need to truck the containers out of the port in Baltimore and take them across the country would have a strong incentive to do so. There are a variety of different organizations, entities who would have an interest in building roads and building bridges and facilitating easier and quicker and more effective transportation. That is true of what's called public transportation. That's true of roads. That's true of bridges. That's true of desalination plants and electric power plants. All of this should be privatized. All of it can embody competition and again can create opportunities for profit motive and whether that profit is directly in payment for the particular use of the infrastructure, whether that profit is just from the fact that, hey, I need to get to the factory and if I can't get to the factory, I can't make any money and therefore I need to build the road in order to get to the factory and other people will use the road. That's fine. Who cares as long as I can get to there? There's a lot of positive externalities in a private economy. A lot. Already there's a huge amount of positive externalities. If we privatized infrastructure, there'd be a lot more positive externalities in such an economy. Thank you, Andrew. Michael, when are you doing a show on RANDs? I say the missing link. I'm really curious to hear your breakdown. I'm not sure when exactly, but maybe soon we'll see. Maybe this week, I've got two shows in the evening this week. Maybe one of those shows will be on that. I do want to do it soon, but I need some significant prep time for it. Thanks, Michael. Let's see. Not another account. All right. Not another account. Just a previous account. I've never heard you mention national security aspects of letting anonymous millions walk across a river to enter the US instead of going through official entry points. Do you not perceive a security problem in that? Yeah, I do. But the reality is that this is caused by the fact that we have restrictive immigration. I don't support the current system. Never have supported the current system. I also don't think there's a panic to be involved in the national security threat, because the national security threat so far has been hypothetical, but it's not to say that there won't be a terrorist attack from somebody coming in. The current immigration system sucks. It is destructive. It's destructive for everybody, and yes, it increases a national security risk. It would be much better if all those people came in through design checkpoints, but they would if they were told, yeah, you come to checkpoint, we run a background check on you. We make sure you're not coming from a country dominated by terrorism. We make sure you're not in contact with ISIS or Al Qaeda, and if you're not, you can come in. And if that were the case, then the national security risk would disappear. Would disappear. So I'm not for the current system. I just don't think there's this hysterical fanatical crisis happening on the border. And is there a national security threat? Sure. But how big is it? Hard to tell. And will there be a terrorist attack done by illegal immigrants from some Muslim country who cross the southern border illegally and do a terrorist attack in the United States? Probably at some point. So the immigration system needs to be changed. It needs to be improved. It needs to enhance legal migration. I mean, my proposal is, and I've said this many times, right, set up employment agencies all over the world and let those employment agencies issues work visas for people to come into the United States to work and let them be connected to the FBI database and they will be able to run background checks on anybody who applies for a visa. And if they clear the background check, they'll be allowed in. And if they don't clear the background check, they won't be allowed in. And of course, they have to have a job. So they will have to, you know, the employment agency will have to confirm that there is actually a job waiting for them in the United States. And if so, let them in. That's my proposal. I'm not for the current system. But I'm also not panicking over the current system. There are plenty of terrorist attacks by domestic mass shooting events that happen from people born in the United States. You don't violate rights in mass in order to prevent crime. You know that the current rate went down dramatically during COVID because when you lock people down, you get less cases of rape, probably more cases of incest, but less cases of rape. You know, if we locked all the male population down from 7 p.m. every evening until 7 a.m. in the morning, we said you couldn't go outside. Rape and murder would go down in the United States. But that doesn't justify the violation of rights. So yes, there is the potential for terrorists to cross the southern border. But that doesn't mean you lock down the border. That means you come up with a better system. And nobody, nobody, zero, zilch people out there are proposing a better system. I am. I am proposing a better system. A system that would better protect the United States. By the way, defeating the enemy would be also step number one in making the system better, right? But I'm proposing a much better system, but people reject it because I don't think the national security issue is what is constraining, is what is causing people to object to immigrants. But the reality is the immigration improves the economy. Immigration, if done right, you know, reduces national security threat. Immigration, if done right, reinvigures the American spirit. In every aspect, immigration is good. And yet, many of you oppose it. And you use, come up with all kinds of excuses, national security threat being one of them, to want to build a wall instead of massively expanding legal migration, massively expanding legal migration, which is the real solution. Sylvanos, thank you for making sure these shows, these news roundup shows, we always make our target. Really appreciate it. I have a relative that is described, that is described by that mood of fear perfectly. They've been certain, the end of times, have been just around the corner since Y2K. I remember Y2K. Sad to see what has become of their mind. Yes, I mean, fear is a crippling emotion, particularly when it's an irrational fear, when it's not based on anything legit. And it truly is sad what that kind of irrational fear, what any kind of irrationality, but when it's matched with that kind of emotion, the extent to which it'll cripple your mind and it'll cripple your ambition and it'll basically destroy your life. And the only remedy to that is ideas, better ideas, a better philosophy. A philosophy that actually explains the world and shows how so many of these things that we're so afraid of. There's so much that can be done that could easily, dramatically improve life in the United States and even improve security in the United States, but people will not do it because they're crippled by fear.  MS-13. I'll take my job though.  And so you're crippled. You can't think, oh, how do we solve this? I'll just note that so far, and I'm not saying this will hold forever, but so far, no illegal immigrants has committed a terrorist attack. So far, it'll probably happen. It'll probably happen. But given the millions and millions and millions of people who come illegally, they were 11 million, maybe they're now 15 million illegal immigrants in the United States. That's a pretty cool number, zero. And even if there's one, that's a one.  And you're probably of dying from a terrorist attack. I mean, we shouldn't, we should stop them at all. You know, we should stop them whenever we can. But you're probably of dying from a terrorist attack is about as close to zero. You're much more likely to die of a traffic accident than have a terrorist attack. So, you know, we should stop people from driving. That'll save lives. So it's just, it's just, we need to really rethink our priorities and what we're focused on and what we're fearful of. And I've always said building walls is a sure sign of crippling fear and, you know, a decline in civilization. Building walls, not good. Silvanos, is the success of three body problem a sign that the old communist idealists of Mao's generation are gone? Yeah, I think that's right. I think very few communist idealists remain, even in China. The communists running China today are more fascist than they are communist. And they're more interested in making money and yeah, than in any kind of communist ideal. I just don't think they have any communist ideals. There's communist ideals out. All right, John says, will Biden's betrayal at the UN give Israel the incentive to go ahead and do what they need to do without worrying about what the U.S. thinks? I doubt it. I mean, maybe, but I doubt it because I have acquired Israel to have a strong perspective on this, on what they need to do. And it's not clear that they do. You know, I think that, I think that, you know, Nintendo's angry right now. But what's really going to spur Israel on is the fact that Hamas won't agree to ceasefire. So it doesn't really matter what America does at this point, unless it demands that the Israel do a unilateral ceasefire, and it hasn't so far demanded even that, although it did abstain at the UN as just a stick it to Israel. I think Israel's going to have to go into a fight. What choice does it have? And the Biden administration will pretend to see them and to be really, really upset. But in the end, everybody realizes that Israel has to do this. They'll secretly be happy that they're doing it, because doing it helps America. But they will pretend that Israel is being awful and terrible and non-cooperative and betrays whatever. But so yes and no, I think Israel is going to go to Iraq no matter what. The U.S. did, I don't think, dispose them on faster. But it does close off more options. And it does give Israel the sense that they are alone. And I think they should have had that sense in the beginning, because they've always been alone. Nobody really supports Israel. They do it out of a sense of electoral politics. And it's not clear where those electoral politics will ultimately fall. Mary Lee says that Jones Act is evil. I agree completely.  Scott says, if the court rules Biden can jawbone social media into suppressing content he doesn't like, will you still think free speech is the best it's ever been? No, because it was better before. And it wasn't just the Biden administration. I know Scott is unbelievably biased. But it's also the Trump administration did the same thing and Trump himself jaw-boned social media and regular media on several occasions. It was free before that. But you know, there were periods in American history where even newspapers didn't have a complete freedom of speech. So you know, we'll be less free than we were today right now. We're free here because right now the Biden administration is banned from jaw-boning social media.  I list all the dates in American history and rank them based on the extent to which we had free speech.  There was a period just before maybe Trump came into office that we had more free speech. But it will be terrible if they allow social media to be jaw-boned by the administration. And if they do allow it, I hope they allow it only with really stringent restraints. But I think those restraints can be easily overcome. So it'll be sad for the Supreme Court to sanction the government basically using implicit force to dictate what is said. And this is a conservative court. This is the most conservative court we've ever seen. And it will just prove counter to what Scott implies in every single one of these sessions that conservatives are more pro-free speech than the left is, I think. Unfortunately, nobody in America is intellectually pro-free speech. And it's just now a battle between whose speech they want to regulate and control. Daniel, isn't it interesting that Republicans want parents to have a say in education? But when it comes to social media, government must step in. Florida is banning social media for kids. Yes. And that is pretty typical. And even in parents having a say in education, in Florida, it's still true that the government was dictating what classes can or cannot be taught at schools. It wasn't up to the parents. It was the government deciding these things. And no, there's nobody there. Even, you know, there's some Republicans who support school choice and really allowing for private schools to teach whatever they want and for the slow decline of public schools or government schools phasing them out. But that's still a minority. Most Republicans want government schools. And many Republicans want conservatives to control what is taught in those government schools. So this idea that one side is more pro-freedom than the other is almost daily being refuted. And it's not, you know, they're both awful. It's not the one is good. It's not the left is good. The left is awful, horrible, maybe worse than the right. But the right is awful, horrible. There's no good guys in this battle. Most Republicans support choice with all these constraints and all these limitations. Just look at the bills that pass Congress and look at all the education bills that not pass Congress, pass the state houses and look at all the constraints and limitations that all these red states are passing on what can be taught in the classroom. They want control. They want control over your children. Have no, no doubt about it. Roland, nice to know there's a most libertarian member of Congress. Hope he isn't planning to protect America. Super chatters from foreign competitions too much. I hope not. You know, I hope not. Yeah, that would be, that would be, I'd lose a bunch of revenue if he prevented foreign super chatters from contributing. I guess they're okay with money flowing into the United States. They don't like money going out because when money goes out, we lose. That's using Trump's terminology. Mike, in the 1960s, there was a popular song called The Eve of Destruction. Google it. It didn't age well. Here we are still muddling through. Yeah. Yes. I mean, this millennial cult thing has always been around. There's always been people who thought the world, the end of the world is around. It just seems like it's worse today. Maybe it isn't, but it just seems that way. Savano says, reminds us all to like the show. Please like the show before you leave. It really helps the algorithm. So really, really appreciate it. Thank you, Sylvanus, for reminding us. Shazvat, why are some people who are against free speech offended when they are accused of being against free speech? Because a lot of these people on the left who want Biden administration or any administration, and of course, if the Supreme Court allows the Biden administration to do this, that means any Republican administration will be allowed to do this. They believe that it's the government's job, yes, to allow free speech, but also to correct misinformation and to prevent people from getting hurt from misinformation and so on. So they want the government involved in truth seeking, which is bizarre, right? So they think they're for free speech. So they're offended when you attack them. So it's kind of a, and this is the problem. Here's the problem. People don't understand what free speech is, where it comes from, what it implies, why it's important. They don't understand any of these things. They don't understand what it has to do with government, why you shouldn't be able to force, I mean, so many people here in the chat and among my so-called objectives friends, think that the government should pass a law that says that social media cannot limit who says what on their channels. That is that they force them to give equal time to conservatives. Ted Cruz believes that, a lot of conservatives believe that, and sort of some people in the chat. So there is a massive lack of understanding of the concept of free speech, how and to whom it applies, the right to free speech, how and to whom it applies. Frank, in million dollar baby, the mom of the girl boxer gets mad at her for buying her a house. She worries about losing her welfare. Was Matt defending this? Yes. I mean, anybody who defends welfare defends this kind of stuff. But he would claim that that doesn't happen. There is no mentality like this. There are no people permanently poor. There are no people in a sense addicted to welfare. That's just a blimp. That's insignificant in comparison to the benefits welfare provides so many people. And he'll say, that doesn't happen in Norway. It doesn't happen in Sweden. So if it's happened in America, it's unique to America. So we need to adapt the welfare system of Sweden and Denmark and so on. Andrew, Andreessen's post reminds me of your point on Saturday show about free will. People feel there is something imminently bad that is going to happen and that we have no ability to alter that. Yeah, I think that's right. They feel out of control. They feel out of control. That is a big part of the fear. If you don't have a sense that you can control your life, whether it's because you don't have free will or whether it's because forces greater than yourself, forces outside of your control are imposing their will on you and you have nowhere out of this, then yeah. And that is exactly what happens. That is the kind of doom, fear that they get. All right, everybody. Thank you. Show tonight, 8 p.m. East Coast time, topic to be determined, and I will see you guys then. And then, of course, there'll be a news round up tomorrow. Thanks, everybody. Have a great week or great day. See you tonight. Bye.