 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rocks. This is The Iran Brook Show. Alright everybody, welcome to Iran Brook Show on this Wednesday of the week already. Hope everybody's having a fantastic week and we're ready for another new roundup here at the Iran Brook Show. So yes, got a full list of issues to talk about reminding everybody. We fund these shows with, at least partially with the Super Chat. We have a target for the news roundup shows which is $250 so hopefully, hopefully value for value you guys can make that happen. Alright, so let's get started. So one of the challenges Republicans face in the world out there and in legislation and in getting their agenda passed is the fact that Americans, a majority of Americans does not agree with Republicans about abortion. The majority of Americans does not want to see abortion rights restricted and access to abortion dramatically restricted. And this is true across the entire country including in red states, it is a fact that since Dobs there hasn't been a single voter approved abortion restriction policy in any state. Every state where it's being brought up, it has been rejected, increased restrictions on abortion. That's true in Kentucky, in Montana, in Michigan, in Kansas, in Vermont, in California. And you know, several of those states are strongly Republican states and yet in spite of being strongly Republican states, when you give it, when you leave it up to their people to vote, they vote overwhelmingly to not to restrict abortion. Now this is going to happen in Ohio. Ohio, another solidly red state that Trump won in the last election by a pretty significant margin, used to be a state that could go either way, but now has become a solidly red state. In Ohio, it appeared that later this year there was going to be an attempt to, you know, significantly to amend the Constitution, right, to amend the Constitution, in order to make it, in order to restrict abortion significantly. But to do that, Ohio Republicans, oh so sorry, there was a proposal to amend the Constitution to secure abortion rights, to secure the ability of women to have an abortion in Ohio. Americans knew they would lose that. So instead of fighting that battle, they proposed something called issue number one, which was just voted on in Ohio, and that was to change the terms of the game, right? So up until now, in order to change the Ohio Constitution, all you needed was a 50% vote. That the pro-abortion side had more than 50% to be able to change the Ohio Constitution. So what they tried to do is make it so that the constitutional amendment in the future could only go into effect if it had a supermajority of 60%. Thinking or knowing that they could probably, they could probably get 41% of Ohioans to vote against abortion. They couldn't get 51, but they could probably get 41. And this was not hidden. This is not, oh, these are defenders of a real constitution. They want to make it hard to change, so they went for 60%. No, this is clearly about abortion. This is about changing the Constitution to make it more difficult for the pro-abortion side to actually get a change to the Ohio Constitution to allow abortion. And yesterday, they lost big time, a vote for 57 to 43, which is big in politics, particularly given that this is a Republican state, Republicans lost. And this opens it up to a fall ballot where the pro-abortion side will propose to have some kind of guarantee in the Ohio Constitution for abortion rights, therefore going around the legislature, around the courts in Ohio, and basically guaranteeing their right until the federal government or the federal courts do something to overturn that. So this is great news for those of us who believe in a right to abortion. This is just another example of how this is a losing issue for Republicans. And the more they make a big issue out of it, which they do all the time, the more they will lose. And it's the only issue where Republicans seem to have any kind of, call it, integrity in quotes, where they actually go to the mat over an issue. They'll fight tooth and nail. They'll lose. They'll be decimated. They'll lose the presidency. They'll lose the Senate. They'll lose all these things. They don't care. This is the issue they're willing to die on. No other issue do they have like that. But they seem to be dying on this issue. So good for Ohioans. Thumbs up to the Ohio people, as I've often said. A lot of Republican women vote pro-abortion. So just because a state is red, just because they might vote for Republican candidates in any other respect on the issue of abortion, many, many Republican women are pro and will not vote for an anti-abortion agenda. So another small victory in the fight for abortion rights in Ohio yesterday. By the way, according to polls, this issue of abortion is an issue that is across the board on a national level, hurting Republicans. This is an issue that a lot of people, a lot of U.S. voters are making this a litmus test, are choosing their candidates based on this. This is going to hurt Republicans. And again, the more they make a big deal out of it, as they seem to be doing even in the presidential election, the more they make a big deal out of it, the more votes they will lose. And poll after poll shows that Americans support, up to a point, they don't support abortion to the extent that I do, but they support abortion certainly in the first trimester and well into the second trimester. And they generally view like these really, really restrictive laws that many Republican states are passing as abhorrent and do not want to see that on a national level. All right, let's see, oh, X, X. Like I was going to write Twitter and then I realized Twitter, there are a lot of characters. I'm limited in the titles of my YouTube videos to how many characters I can put in. And Twitter has a lot of characters. I can just write X now and it doesn't have to be Twitter, but for all intents and purposes, this is Twitter. Anyway, Elon Musk tweeted or exed, posted, whatever, when was it in August 5th, so four days ago, this is the tweet he put out there. If you are unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill. No limit, please let us know. Wow. So first you go, okay, I mean, all right, that's nice of Elon and, you know, nobody wants to be treated unfairly by the employer. But wait a minute, wait a minute. Even one of the things that makes the United States unique, one of the things that makes the U.S. economy flexible and resilient, isn't it the fact that we have, or at least we nominally have, we pretend we have, employment at will? Isn't that kind of the generally the legal rule? Employment at will? Shouldn't an employer have every right to fire an employee over anything that the employer views as negative, apparent, unacceptable, or dislike? Are we now not going to allow employers to, quote, discriminate about anything, or is it just Twitter's unique? So first of all, from a perspective of free markets, from a perspective of freedom, on what basis would you sue an employer if they fired you because you tweeted something stupid? It's not stupid, it doesn't matter. They viewed as it's stupid. What is the rational basis for suing an employer for firing you for any cause if your employment is at will? So this is super anti-free markets, anti-freedom, anti-freedom of employer, anti the freedom to discriminate. I believe people have the right to discriminate. Now it is true that our laws have watered down significantly the idea of employment at will. They've created all kinds of categories by which employers are not allowed to discriminate. Okay? Then maybe in those limited circumstances you can sue, I don't like it that the law has done that. It doesn't matter whether your employer fired you for rational reasons or for completely irrational reasons, or because he got up that morning and decided, I don't like Joe, I'm going to fire him, or whatever. It's called employment at will. The will is gone, therefore your employment is gone. Your employer doesn't owe you an explanation for a fired you unless you have some kind of interesting contract, maybe a union contract or some other contract. I mean, either we believe in freedom or not. When you leave a firm, the employer doesn't ask you, is it rational for you to resign? Or is it irrational for you to resign? If it's irrational, I'm going to force you to stay. The rationality, irrationality has nothing to do with it. It's about freedom. So yes, we have all these legal constraints about discrimination, about race and gender and whatever. And those, I guess, you can sue for. I'm not an advocate for them. I think they're aberration. I think they reduce our freedom. I think they're wrong. But you certainly have a right to sue. But for everything else, including for expressing an opinion that your employer doesn't like, there's no basis for the lawsuit. There's no legal standard in the US on a basis for which you could sue. Elon Musk here is encouraging people to sue their employers. For what? These are going to be frivolous lawsuits that are going to, you know, thrown out a number of legal scholars have already commented on this. There's a good article on this by Walter Olson. There's also on the Volcker conspiracy. Eugene Volick of UCLA has commented on this. Well, by what theory are they going to sue? But imagine, imagine if you tweeted in a tweet and made fun of your CEO, made fun of your company or made fun of your product, who gets to decide what unfairly is, I guess, Twitter does with it. I'll cover your legal bills or not. So what if you tweeted anti-semitic stuff on your Twitter feed and your boss happens to be Jewish? Does he really want to work with you? What if you tweeted racist stuff and your boss happens to be black? Does he really want to work for you? So there are lots of reasons why you would want to fire somebody for a tweet. So here, Elon Musk is encouraging people to have a view of employment, which is completely un-American, is encouraging people to have a view of lawsuits that is completely counter to the American system. They used to be actually a idea in common law that was basically held you liable for encouraging people to sue frivolously. I guess that does not exist anymore in the law in the United States, unfortunately. But this is just a form of encouraging people to sue for no reason. We have enough lawsuits in America. We try to resolve too many things through the legal system. Elon Musk should just stick to flying rockets into space and doing the other innovative things that he does whenever he gets involved in anything slightly philosophical or legal. Oh, God, it gets completely messed up. Here, he's advocating for something clearly that is anti-freedom, anti-freedom of contract, anti-freedom of employment, anti-freedom, period. Just another status. All right, natural resources. This is a big topic, we'll cover a little bit of it today, but it's I think it's an interesting topic, the whole topic of natural resources and how they control and who controls them. But the reality is that with the advent of new technologies, primarily new technologies that are now being subsidized by governments like clean tech, batteries and things like that, there is a whole new class of materials, natural resources that are now come to the forefront and in a sense that demand for them has gone through the roof. Things like natural, rare material, sorry, rare earth materials or copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, graphite. All of these, you know, are materials that are necessary for the new technologies and are going to be necessary even more in the future as everything becomes electronic tech related. But we're going to require more and more and more of these materials. As it happens, you know, China is it could controls minds and refines many of these materials. It has it has a big percentage of the world supply of rare earths somewhere close to 85 to 90 percent of those both in terms of mining and refining. And now we know that there are reserves in other countries when it comes to graphite, China has almost complete, almost 100 percent. Lithium, it's somewhere closer to 60 percent. So substantial. Cobalt close to 70 percent over 70 percent. Nickel, copper, not quite as much, but still a dominant position. And then, of course, again, that's that's that is China. But then if you look at the top three processes of any one of these materials, they dominate lithium graphite rare earth. It's basically 100 percent in three countries. A lot of countries are now recognizing this and stopping the exploitation of these materials. Not clear why. I mean, the whole point of this is to export them. But fundamentally, you know, China is going to start using this for geopolitical means. These natural resources are not owned and controlled by private companies in China that are governed by supply and demand, global economics, but they are controlled by the Chinese government. Sadly, much of these materials now are being discovered, mindful, extracted in countries that have very, very status governments, whether that is in Africa or Latin America. And even countries like Chile that used to have robust private mining private mining ventures are nationalizing some of the ventures because it's so crucial. We need to nationalize it. If it was so crucial, you need to privatize it. It works exactly the other way around. Latin America is becoming a powerhouse when it comes to natural resources. Chile has Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela. A lot of these companies have significant minerals that they need to exploit. And of course, the more government gets involved, the less ability they will have to exploit them. These exploitation of these minerals in these countries is one of the ways in which we reduce the dependence on Chinese and take away the leverage China is going to try to use over the West. Oh, you won't sell us sophisticated chips. Well, we won't sell you galenium that we control completely, right? But in order to facilitate this, we need a robust market. We need privatization. We need to allow the best, most innovative mining companies and equipment to get into Latin America to go to Africa. Africa is another area where there is a huge amount of minerals and mineral deposits, but where, unfortunately, either you have centralized governments that are trying to dominate this or you have gangs like the Wagner group, the Russian Wagner group, that control these mining operations and exploit people and devastate the human environment in which this mining is happening and don't really care and rather than professional mining operations. That can come in and allow everybody locally to benefit from these things. So the world is becoming more and more and more dependent, if you will, on natural resources that come from Africa, Latin America and China. Now, this is, of course, not new. This is reminiscent of the fact that we've been dependent or we're dependent for decades and decades on natural resources from Saudi Arabia and Iran and Iraq and Kuwait oil. You think we would have learned from that? One is to invest in our own capacity to produce natural resources at home. We'll get to that in a minute. But second, to encourage these countries to try to educate these countries, to try to convince these countries to privatize these markets, to allow for private companies to come in and extract these resources and exploit what's out there, whether again, it's lithium, copper, silver, which is dominant in Latin America. I mean, what we need is not chilly to nationalize these things, but quite the opposite to privatize and privatize and privatize. And that's how we'll get more and more deposits. And we need to encourage Western companies to go out there and find these minerals in the West. I think Sweden, Greenland, other places have vast resources of, for example, rare earth materials. We need to be able to exploit those. Now, what is the biggest barrier for the West to exploit its own natural resources to be able to bring to market some of these some of these resources that are buried deep in the ground? Well, the big part of that is, of course, environmental regulations, environmental controls and so-called environmental sensitivity. This is primarily true in, in the West, in Europe, in the United States. But these kind of concerns have also been exported elsewhere to Latin America and Africa. Environmentalism stands in opposition to bringing to market of new resources, to bringing to market of additional resources. And it makes us more and more dependent on those countries that don't give a damn about environmentalists like China. Mongolia, for example, has vast resources of both rare earth materials and many of these other natural resources. And the United States is trying to build relationships with Mongolia. Mongolia, of course, sits right smack between China and Russia. It is very, very, very vulnerable, both on its Chinese border and its Russian border. It is a vast country, the size of Europe with a population of three million people. Yet it has huge quantities of natural resources, natural resources that Chinese would love to control, the Russians would love to control. The US needs to invest in Mongolia and relationships with Mongolia and invest in bringing US companies over there to mine these resources and get them out. So there's a lot to be done. Again, you need a strategy, a foreign policy strategy, and to the extent that some of these are required for national security, you need a security strategy you need to build up, inventories of some of these materials so that you don't become dependent on the Chinese. You need a strategy of how to deploy technology, how to build technology, and how to create relationships with those countries that can provide you with those natural resources without selling out to them like we did to the Saudis. Now, the United States, so there's a lot of stories right now about the different superpowers that are rising, not real superpowers, but in terms of natural resources. Indonesia, for example, in Cobalt and in Nicaragua, Chile and Argentina have Lithium and so on, so these countries. And again, the importance of bringing market forces, market technology, marketability to these countries and to these industries so that we can get them cheaply and effectively. The United States is doing its part to increase the availability of natural resources in the world. Biden has just created a new national monument near the Grand Canyon. He's taken about a million acres, one million acres, and basically permanently banned new uranium mining in the area and who knows what else could have been mined in the area. And giving it over to, I don't know, the Hopi tribe, the Hopi tribe, which I'm sure this is, remember this is like desert, there's nothing there, can do many productive things with it instead of like, if you want to give it to the Hopi tribe, great, give it to the Hopi tribe and give them the mining rights so that don't give it to the Hopi tribe, give it to individual Hopis so that they can exploit the land, make money, become rich and get uranium out of the ground. So unbelievable, right? Uranium, an essential material if we're going to move to nuclear power. We have tons of it in the desert. God forbid we go mining for it. Instead we're going to make it into a national monument. This is the, yeah, let's, we face a crisis where we become more and more dependent on other countries, even hostile countries. So instead of building our own ability to mine these things, let's just lock it up, let's just deny ourselves the natural resources. We do it in Alaska, we do it in Arizona, we do it in Wyoming, we do it in Montana, we do it all over the country. We could be far more economically, I'm not even talking about government subsidizing, government doing anything. Just privatize the land, sell it off. But even here, if you're going to do anything with the Hopi people, give it to individual Hopis, not to the tribe. I don't think they've given it to the tribe. They haven't really given it to the tribe. They're just making it into a national monument. So basically we're turning more and more of the country into nature untouched by man. Not a good move if you care about the human environment. All right, the Biden administration is clearly suffering from, you know, Trump administration envy. And, you know, one of the things that Trump administration, one of its, I think, few real successes in the Trump administration was what I call the Abraham Accords. These are chords between Israel and a number of Muslim countries, both in the Gulf and in Northern Africa, that established peaceful relationships between Israel and these countries in exchange of technology, even for weapons and tourism and other things. And, you know, Biden feels like, wait a minute. I want some of that. I want some of that cred that comes from the Abraham Accords. I want to do my own Abraham Accords. As a result, the Biden administration is working frantically to try to wrap up before the 2024 election, try to wrap up a blockbuster deal whereby Israel and the Saudi Arabia normalize relationships. This could involve actual recognition, a peace deal where there would actually be formal ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, embassies and all of that stuff. As a consequence of this, we would secure U.S. defense support. We would sell them even more weapons than we're selling them right now. I remember this is after the Biden administration came into office saying, we're going to get tough on those Saudis. Their human rights record sucks. We're going to be really tough on them. But it looks like now, in order to get them to do this, we're going to send them more weapons. We're going to provide them assistance with their own civil nuclear program. One of the things the Saudis want to do is they're building all these cities, all this new modern infrastructure. They need to power it. They want to be able to power it without far self-heals. But they're smart enough not to be investing too heavily in solar. So they want to build nuclear power. In exchange, I guess Israel will have to make some concessions to the Palestinians. Then Saudi Arabia and Israel will have some kind of bilateral security cooperation in the face of threats of Iran. Although Saudi Arabia has got much closer to Iran and it's also got much closer to Syria, it's not clear exactly who Saudi Arabia needs Israel's help against and why it needs all those weapons, but what the hell, why not get some F-35s to the Saudis? Anyway, this would be huge for the Middle East. This would change the Middle East in a significant way. Saudi Arabia is the leader of the Sunni world. The only other leader would be Egypt. It already has a peace deal with Israel. Saudi Arabia has the two Islam's holiest sites. Having a peace deal with Israel would be incredibly symbolic. Now, Islam allows for, you know, to have a peace deal that can then be revoked, you know, so lying, you know, to achieve a short-term goal is okay according to Islam. So I mean, put aside believing any of this is long-term actually favorable. If you think, and I, you know, I'm not sure, but you know, you could go either way here. If you think Saudi Arabia is honestly trying to reform, to modernize, to change its both its economy and its culture internally, to westernize in important ways, peace with Israel would be a great step for Saudi Arabia in that direction. Israel would benefit from taking one kind of player off. You know, the Saudis have Saudi Intelligence Corporation with Israel would help with Iran. It would also help with dealing with the Islamists, the terrorists, the various terrorist elements. And it would just take a significant player in the Middle East off as obviously hostile to Israel. And it would be, I guess, a step towards securing Israel, at least in the short run. Again, I don't trust any of these deals. I didn't trust Abraham Accord. I don't really trust this either. But it is interesting that, you know, Biden is really, really pushing for this. He wants this before 2024. And of course, you know, Netanyahu was interviewed over the weekend and he is very excited about establishing a relationship with Saudi Arabia. This would be a huge coup for him as well. He needs some positive news, given all the negativity that's going on with the judicial reform. So he is likely to be willing to even compromise in order to get this done. So this could get done. We could see Saudi Arabia and Israel getting significantly closer. From all my sources in Israel, it seems like Israel and Saudi Arabia pretty close already. There's a lot of intelligence cooperation. There's a lot of military cooperation between the two countries already. So this would be a further step, which is positive, but much of this is already happening. So, you know, yeah, let me just say this. This whole phenomena of these countries establishing peace with Israel and so on, the Trump administration, of course, took full credit of the Bahamik Accords. Biden will take credit for the Saudi Arabia if it happens. The reality is, the US doesn't deserve much credit for this, other than it's bribing the different parties with cash and weapons. This is happening because it's in the self-interest of the, or at least the perceived self-interest, the short-term self-interest of both parties. Would this be happening if Hillary had won in 2016? Absolutely. There's nothing about Trump that made this more likely or less likely. This has much more to do with the dynamics in the Middle East than the politics in the United States. It doesn't matter who's president of the United States with regard to the fact that many of these Arab countries want the technology that Israel has. They want the expertise that Israel has. They want somebody who can help defend them from Iran. Hillary, Trump was tight with Bibi, so could Hillary have been tight with Bibi. She would have condemned certain things that he'd done, Biden's not tight with Bibi, but it doesn't matter. He still wants a Saudi deal. None of this matters. Kushner puts this together. He gave the Saudis all kinds of goodies and got $2 billion in exchange, just like Hunter Biden. There's no difference. I don't think it matters. All these families, American politicians, as I said, have crooks. They would have all cut deals for themselves and they cut deals for the region. At the end of the day, this happened because people locally wanted it to happen. You don't think of the peace with Egypt as resulting from Jimi Carter. You don't think of peace with Jordan as a consequence of, I can't remember, George Boussino or no, maybe it was Bill Clinton. You don't think of it because it wasn't. It had to do with the dynamics locally of the people locally. You don't think of the good relationships between Israel and Morocco as resulting from some American politician. It has nothing to do with any of that. It has everything to do with the fact that the parties locally want this to happen. There's a huge incentive for this to happen. So no, I give Trump almost no credit for this and I don't think if Hillary would have won with regard to the Middle East it would have made exactly zero difference. In other things, it would have made maybe, but in terms of this zero, zero. All right, let's see. By the way, what you say about the State Department is just blatantly untrue. Oh, quickly. Superconductors, God, I've gone over. Superconductors, you know, given that I talked about this yesterday, I had to let you know because the news book this morning basically, right, I mean, basically this LK99 Superconductor claim is most likely completely bogus. That is, it looks like a hoax. It looks like completely made up. Now, the Korean authorities are going to look at it, but a number of labs in the U.S. and in China and in Japan, I think, and a number of different places have looked at this and, you know, forget about it. It looks like you can forget about it, the Maryland's Condensed Matter Theory Center. They've all recreated LK99, this material, and it's not superconductive at all, so forget about it. I don't think Kushner did anything. I think Kushner exploited a circumstances that was already in play and he was very good at doing that. Good for him. I have no problem. And then, of course, he bribed, you know, he cut a deal. He got all these weapons deals for the Saudis and the Saudis gave him $2 billion to invest for them. He got, you know, let's say, he cut them a fee deal, 1% of $2 billion. What's 1% of $2 billion? $20 million? Not a bad deal. Not a bad deal. $20 million a year is what Kushner gets from the $2 billion, at least, of the $2 billion that the Saudis invested with him and then he gets a percentage of the profits. Kushner basically will make hundreds of millions of dollars. He makes Hunter Biden look like a pop-up in comparison to how much Kushner is going to make off of the sums that the Saudis completely irrationally from an investment perspective put into his fund. You know, what was it last year or the year before that? All right, let's see. We're way behind on the fundraising. I just want to remind everybody, $3 of sticker, $3 of everybody listening right now gets us there, but I'm just going to remind everybody once. I'm going to try not to bug you too often about this, but we do need to make our $250, try to make it every day, so please consider doing it. $3 sticker, $5 sticker, $10 sticker, $20 sticker from the 60 people watching right now gets us the way we need it. All right, Andrew, a lesson to be learned from Rand's atom bomb script experience is to not allow failure to overwhelm oneself. I must have been massively disappointed. She must have been massively disappointed that script shelved, but she always met failure with more writing. Yeah, I mean, she handled it brilliantly. She basically quit. She didn't want to work with Wallace again. She basically told him, if you've done that, I want my contract. I want you to basically void my contract, which she did. She then went on. She went back home and basically moved to New York and started to write Atlas Shrugged. So, you know, absolutely, you know, she was, life needs to be kind of a focused on the constant pursuit of values. And if you're constantly in pursuit of the next value, if you're constantly moving forward, then once in a while, not achieving your goal, once in a while, not getting your way is not going to hurt you because you know there's other things you could be doing. There are other great amounts to be climbing and great achievements to be had. So, yeah, I'm Mirkat. Don't forget that by fighting for fetuses, the GOP won't be able to own the Libs, which is the most important thing in the universe. Yeah, I mean, by every measure, the GOP, by fighting for fetuses, is just, it's preventing it from achieving its political goals, it appears, and it also intellectually just makes them look kind of like the backward, the backward, backward orientation that they really are, right? The left has environmentalism, which puts us in the caves, and the right has abortion and social conservatism which puts us back in 1220. Fendt Hopper, really listening to Iron Man answers, valuable insight, I figured I would bump it here to spread awareness of the collection. Can you comment on its value? I don't have enough characters in the $20 to do so myself. Have a great day. Yeah, it would be great to get some more $20 questions. I only have one more question, and then we're done for today. You know, we're still, I'm still looking for those $5 stickers or $10 stickers. Doron, thank you. Colin, thank you. I really appreciate the support from you guys. Yes, Iron Man answers is a fantastic collection. It's basically a collection of Iron Man's Q&A's edited by Robin Mayhew, so basically it's all of her Q&A's and she covers, of course, a wide array of topics because you can imagine, how can people ask her lots of different things on a radio show? People ask her lots of different things. It's amazing. It's great to see Iron Man kind of on her feet, just answering questions quickly. You can get the book. I've got the book behind me. It is really amazing the scope and the extent of the topic she covers and how brilliant she is, whether it's an essay she's writing, a speech she's giving, she's just answering Q&A's. Her answers were always original, somewhat unexpected and fascinating. Interesting, always interesting. All right, last question. Wesley says, thoughts on the index of economic freedom. Also, if you had to pick a place to move, would you prefer Georgia the state or Georgia the country? So, I like the index of economic freedom. It's good. I think it's good that we have it. I think we actually have two. We have one produced by Heritage and one more produced by Cato. But they're very similar. There's some changes in rankings. You could quibble with the weighting, the different indexes, give to different aspects of the economy. You could quibble with the different focus that each one of them has in terms of, you know, you could quibble about what's more important to liberty, what's more important to freedom and how you would aggregate this and how you would calculate it. And this is why we have two indexes. There's a slightly different one another. I don't think it's that meaningful in terms of place number 10 or place number seven. I think it's valuable in seeing a direction of a country. For example, under Trump and Obama, under Bush, Obama and Trump and Biden, the United States mostly has lost from the perspective of economic freedom. It used to be number three. It's now depending on exactly what year and it's somewhere in the teens. And there's an absolute number, like an 80% of 100% absolute economic freedom. It has deteriorated over the last 20 years. Sadly. So it's interesting in looking at directions. It's also interesting in comparing like the top 20 with the middle 20 with the low 20, rather than comparing position by position because again, the weighting and everything. But you can clearly see that rich countries at the top and poor countries at the bottom. So it's good to show that. So generally I think it's very good. Would I rather live in Georgia the state or Georgia the country? Georgia the state, there's no question. I mean, look, living in America is fantastic. I mean, it's not just about economic freedom. It's about political freedom. It's about freedom of speech. It's about freedom from a lot of respect. It's also about scale and it's about possibilities and about opportunities. And you still can't compare the United States to any other country when you take everything into account, all the different things into account. All right, let's see. So, yeah, definitely Georgia the state. All right, everybody. We are way off from our target today. So I'm wagging a finger at you guys. You can still do something about it if you want to put in a sticker. And of course those of you who watched later on YouTube can do an applause. There's a button under there where you can contribute after the fact through the same through YouTube. You can also of course become members. You can press that joint button underneath there. And to really support the show and to keep it going kind of and stable over the long run. What is best is to become a monthly supporter of the show. You can do that on Patreon or patreon.com or on PayPal through the Iran book show.com. All right, everybody, I'll be back tomorrow morning. We will also have a show tomorrow night. I don't think I have anybody to interview tomorrow. So it'll just be me. I am looking for topics. If you have any ideas, email me. If you're willing to put $1,000 behind those ideas, even better. And I will see you guys all tomorrow. Have a great rest of your week. And don't forget to support the Iran book show one way or the other. Value for Value. Bye, everybody.