 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rocks. This is The Iran Brook Show. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Brook Show on this Thursday, the 20th. Hope everybody's having a fantastic week and getting ready for the weekend. All right. Just some quick reminders. Tonight, we're going to have Amesh Aduljah join the show. We're going to talk about kind of lessons learned from COVID. We'll talk about vaccines. Vaccines. And then I will talk about, you know, other threats, other threats that are possible. We'll talk about potentially biological weapons, which he's an expert on. So we'll talk about all that. That should be a lot of, that should be really interesting, a lot of fun. Hopefully, you guys will join us and also join us with questions and super chats and support kind of Amesh, who is often received, I think, very unjust responses from, what can we call it, our community. All right. Let's see. What else? Remember, today we have a target $250. Michael has got us off to an amazing start with five questions, $10 each. We also got some sticker from Robert Niso and from anonymous user. So thank you guys all for getting us rolling. And yeah, let's just keep it going. Keep it going. All right. Let's see. We have a, yeah, we have a bunch of stuff to talk about. And I kind of added at the last minute, RFK, you know, just because he was in front of Congress. Let me see if I can find this. He was in front of Congress now, just a few minutes ago. And, you know, testifying in front of Congress, RFK said, he basically said, under oath, under oath, that he has never been an anti-vax and he's never told the public to avoid vaccination. Never told the public to avoid vaccination and never been an anti-vax. That's what he said, right? You know, he said, he selectively wants research, he wants people to evaluate, he wants people to think about it, all this stuff, but he never, he's not anti-vax and he never told people not to take vaccines, right? Here's a quote from him from a podcast a couple of years ago, 2021. He says, our job is to resist and to talk about it to everybody. If you're walking down the street and I do this myself, which is, you know, I don't want to do, I'm not a busy body. I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get him vaccinated. And he heard that from me if he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won't do it. You know, maybe he will save their child. And before we were all quiet because we wanted to get along with our families, we just take endless flak. If you talk about this issue, people are scared. You're going to get marginalized from your community. That people are going to call you crazy or whatever. But now is the time to come out of the closet. And there's probably thousands of quotes where he's clearly anti-vax and clearly telling people not to get vaccinated. Don't have your child vaccinated is anti-vax for children. So he's not against our vaccination. Ask him what vaccinations he's for. You'll probably get a blank stare. But you know, just again, the lying, the sheer, bold lying that now is just a part of what we expect of our politicians. They just look at the camera and they state bold lies. They do it with a certain, you know, panache. And nobody cares. And they're forgiven. And everybody moves on. It doesn't matter. So, yeah. I mean, the guys, the guys, as we've said in that case, I'm sure we'll talk about this a bit later tonight. All right. Really powerful piece today in the free press, which I've often recommended to you that is Barry Weiss's publication. It's a substack. Used to be Barry Weiss's substack. Now it's called the free press because it's really expanded well beyond Barry Weiss. And I think she's doing a pretty good job of getting a lot of different people writing and even some reporting. And really this whole alternative media that is really coming about on substack is a very, very positive development. News-wise and commentary-wise, you're getting a wider way of views. You're getting substantive articles. You're getting real content depth. I don't think journalism or commentary plus journalism has been in terms of diversity in a better situation than we have right now. We can complain all we want about the mainstream media, but the mainstream media is very non-dominant. You know, the alternatives to mainstream media, they've never been more. And good ones, not just garbage alternatives that they've always been, but good alternatives is pretty amazing. Anyway, a very powerful piece today in the free press about autism by a mother who has two autistic kids. And this kind of reminds me of RFK. And the piece really deals with the fact that the reality is, according to this, and I have no reason to doubt it, and from the little research I've done, this sounds true, the way to autism is skyrocketing. I mean really skyrocketing in scary, scary ways. It is a non-trivial chance now that a child of yours could have autism. It's something like 3% of all 8-year-olds are being diagnosed by autism. And you can say some of that's diagnosis, inflation, but probably not. Probably not. And, you know, so it really is scary in terms of parents. Now we talk about autism and often the examples that are brought up with people like Elon Musk, right? And yes, there's some high-performing autistic kids, but that's a minority. The majority of autistic kids, some of them have IQs of under 50. They can do anything. Even the ones who can are very, very, very difficult and cannot function completely independently in the world out there. And that is the vast majority of autistic cases. And that's a big number. And it's a scary number. You know, I hate catastrophizing, but when I see a number like that, it is scary. And of course, you know, RFK has a simplistic, stupid explanation, which has been debunked by science over and over and over again. And debunked just somewhat by common sense. You can find other countries in the world which have equal levels of vaccination that have lower levels of autism, although autism is climbing everywhere. Now, autism is a spectrum, but the problem is that a big chunk of the people are at the lower end of the spectrum, at the dysfunctional end of the spectrum. And now it's true that they're redefining other kind of cognitive issues as autism. But even when taking all of that into account, even when you take into account all the redefining that's being done, autism is still rising significantly. It's not true that something like a few percent of people were born in the past with some kind of cognitive problems. So something's causing it. And the challenge, of course, is to figure out why and what. And the problem has been is that autism has become completely politicized. And you have various groups trying to dominate the discussion. And what happens as a consequence, and we'll get into the details, what happens as a consequence is that it's very difficult to do research. It's very difficult to actually have an adult conversation. It's very difficult to actually try to find cures and treatments and ways to deal with it. And the people who really suffer from all this are the parents and, of course, the kids. It's truly horrific. Now, on the left, you have the recent rise of something called neurodiversity. Talk about sick. It's a neurodiversity identity movement. And autism there is considered just a natural difference to be celebrated. We're all individuals. We should all be celebrated, even if we're in a cognitive position where we can't even take care of ourselves. We shouldn't investigate. We shouldn't prevent. We shouldn't treat. We should just accept. I mean, I guess we should accept disease and accept death. That is the logical conclusion. Even though rates rise, what's happening more and more is more and more people want us to just view this as just... This is just the way it is. These are just... These are as normal people as anybody else. There is no such thing as normal. Don't talk about normal. A lot of the research institutions that have a focus on autism have been corrupted by this. You know, they now, instead of doing intense research and funding intense research, they now fund and talk about celebrating neurodiversity. And it's hard for them to... So journals that are publishing articles on this have now said, maybe you shouldn't just have articles treating people with autism as if it's a disadvantage. We need to talk about how we can talk about this without putting these people down. We should avoid terms like disruptive behaviors or challenging behaviors or impairments. We're supposed to see children as disabled only by... Only because society is screwed up, because we don't understand them. They're not disabled, they're just them. It's only by our standard of society standard, by some arbitrary, random, artificial standard, do we view them as bad? Yeah, this is moral relativism gone nuts. The meeting of the Federal Autism Advisory Committee are now becoming social justice theater instead of actually dealing with the issues. And, you know, prevention, for example, is off the table. The worst kind of cases, nobody wants to talk about them. They label, you know, if you talk about your disabled child, oh, you're just ableist. Ableist is an evil term for you. So, you know, the left has completely corrupted this. And the social warriors, the social justice warriors, the moral relativists, just like they wanted us to embrace deafness. You know, I remember this from the 90s and 2000s, they wanted to embrace blindness. God forbid you have a cure for blindness or deafness. That's not good. This is how they're born. This is how they are. They want to defend unhealthy obesity. They want to defend anything, any choice, anything that anybody does, except if they don't like it. And this is just, you can see how this cripples the parent's ability to deal with this. It cripples the scientist's ability to do with it, and scientists are condemned. It's just, it's hard to believe that civilization has reached such a low point. And then, of course, on the flip side of this are the RFK and the variety of different conspiracy theories out there blaming vaccines. Vaccines have repeatedly been shown not to be the cause, but because there's this constant emphasis on the vaccines, harder to do research over the real causes, harder to discover what's really going on. And, you know, very few solutions. So I highly recommend subscribing to the free press. Generally, I recommend reading this post. It's very hard to read. It's heart wrenching. I mean, it's written by a mother of two kids with autism, and she tells the kind of problems, the kind of issues that they have to go through. I mean, the big issue regarding vaccines is it looks like the autism is something that happens during development of the fetus. Inside the womb, it looks like it's a problem of, you know, the funnel cortex not developing properly. Not in a way that structurally you can see, but in terms of the way the neurons are connected inside. And instead of focusing on that and focusing on things that can be done about it or things that can be focused on diagnosing it, everybody's obsessed with RFK and with all these other issues. Yeah, I hope they figure this out. All right, a reminder, Michael is alone on the board. Thank you, by the way, Stephen Hopper and David also know for their support. Michael is on the board alone in terms of questions. He has five questions, no other questions. So please consider asking questions in the super chat, $20 questions. In particular, we need $9, $20 questions to get our goal right now. All right, Wuhan lab. So today, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a letter announcing the suspension of Wuhan Institute of Urology's access to U.S. government federal funding, both in the short run and in the long term. Now, the Wuhan lab has not received any federal funding since July of 2020, but it is now suspending all funding. And the reason is that the Wuhan Institute of Urology has disregarded NIH's numerous requests to provide the required materials to back up the research in the grant progress reports. The NIH's conclusion that the WIV research likely violated protocols of the NIH regarding biosafety is undisputed, the memo states. It continues as such, there is risk that WIV, WIV is the one Institute of Urology, not only previously violated, but it's currently violating and will continue to violate protocols of the NIH on biosafety. The WIV, you might know, received NIH funding through its partnership with EcoHealth Alliance, which is a U.S.-based nonprofit, and it collaborated with WIV on coronavirus research, generally, coronaviruses. It hasn't received, as we said, it hasn't received any funding since July of 2020. They have 30 days to respond, although it's unlikely they will respond, but it does look like that relationship is toast, and it's more support, I think, for the idea that the COVID-19 was unleashed by pharma lab, accidentally from a lab, and that the Chinese authorities have engaged in three years now of cover-up of that fact. I think the Chinese authorities know whether it's an animal transmission or a lab leak, they know for a fact which one it is, and they're not disclosing everything that they know about this. So it really is concerning. It would be nice to know from the NIH all the labs that they fund, their locations, and whether they think that these labs are up to the kind of safety standards. The NIH is just another government bureaucracy, and I don't trust who they're giving money to, and I don't trust that they're managing to follow up and making sure that the money is being used the way it should be used and the safety is up to standards. And it's amazing to me it's taken three years for the NIH to cut off WIV given how much they've been stonewalled. Now just as a related story somewhat, another story that hit this week is the fact that it's very likely that official, in spite of what RFK says, that official government data about deaths from COVID in China is probably very, very, very underestimated. That is that the government has purposefully underestimated the number of people who have died from COVID in China in spite of the fact that RFK thinks the Chinese are genetically somehow immune from COVID. During this last week some data was published on a government website that suggested that the number of cremations in an eastern province of Zizhiang rose to 171,000 in the first quarter of this year of 2023. There was 72 more cremations, roughly 70% increase than had been reported in the same time period last year. And this is exactly the same period also that China went off of COVID-zero and opened everything up, right? But yet China's official death toll from the start of the pandemic till today is 83,150. So, you know, an unbelievably remarkable low number. And yet just this one province in one period of time, one quarter, had double the efficient rate for all of China. That these are people who've died from COVID. That tells you something about how much to trust numbers coming out of China and how much China's really been engaged in propaganda to try to hide from its own people. The true cost of COVID and the true cost of what's probably not guaranteed, but probably the leak from a Chinese facility. Rough estimates of the number of people who probably died from COVID in China is somewhere around a minimal of 1 to 1.5 million people. And that's just for when China announced the zero COVID policy, such just in the last six months. Really, in the first quarter of the year, they are estimating that about 1 to 1.5 million people died of COVID during that period. Remember, China did not have a vaccine or to the extent that they had a vaccine, it was a vaccine that was useless and did not work at all. All right, what else do we have? TSMC chip plant. Oh, we'll do this quickly because we don't have a lot of time. Okay, TSMC chip plant. We've been talking a lot about chips, microprocessors. We've been talking a lot about the factories built to build the microprocessors and the CHIP Act was supposed to bring all these factories to the United States. And that was a big push of the Biden administration. Of course, a bunch of Republicans supported it and everybody seems to be very proud of the success of the CHIP Act. Well, I've been saying over and over again that this is not going to go well, that even if they build these plants, they don't have the personnel, they don't have the personnel to run these plants, that there's a huge labor shortage. And somebody yesterday put up, he said, this is nonsense. Of course, we have well-trained people. There's no labor shortage in the United States for people to work in chip plants. As often happens this morning, this is the headline of a story in the newspaper. Apple supplier TSMC delay start of Arizona chip factory. Why, you might ask? Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company will delay production of its new Arizona-based chip plant to 2025 due to a shortage of skilled labor, the company's chairman said on its second quarter earnings call Thursday. Sometimes I think these people listen to my show and they say, oh, that's what we should say on the earnings call. TSMC chairman said the company is working to send trained technicians from Taiwan to train local workers to help accelerate equipment installation. Now, this is interesting because this is not about running the plant. This is not labor, trained labor who will actually work at the plant once it's open. We haven't even got there. Those problems are in our future because the plant will only open in 2025. But why is the plant being delayed? Because the equipment itself to install it, to literally, I don't know, bolt it into the ground, assemble it, do whatever is needed to actually put together some of this very sophisticated, and this is by the way not the most sophisticated, semiconductor manufacturing equipment. There's nobody in America who knows how to do that, how to put it together and install it. So the Taiwanese are going to have to send technicians from Taiwan to train people in the United States on how to do it and that's going to delay the opening. This is just the beginning. There is a massive shortage of labor, primarily skilled labor, across the board from people who can work in a semiconductor factory who can install equipment all the way to welders and construction workers. There is a massive shortage of labor in this country. And instead, of course, of focusing immigration policy on people who can get jobs here, right now there are 9.8 million open positions, but it's a lot more than that. Those are the 9.8 that are advertised where companies know that there's limited availability. Imagine what we happen once those were filled, companies become more profitable, jobs get done, work happens, and now all of that creates more jobs. There are millions and millions and millions and millions of unfilled jobs in this country, and instead of focusing our immigration policy on that, instead of really making the number one issue today education and how do we fix our educational systems so we have more high skilled laborers, instead of finding ways to incentivize and motivate all the people who don't work today, who are not working today, collecting welfare checks or just sitting in their mother's basement playing video games, how to get them to work. No, I mean, we're much more interested in all these other issues that have, these are the issues that the campaigns should be talking about. These are the issues that really have an impact. Instead, we want to build walls, we want to ban trans, we want to keep women at home if you're on the right. We want to shrink the labor market, not expand it. And no discussion of education, not a zero. All right, talk about innovation. The Fed is finally catching up to countries like China, India, UK, Sweden, and many other countries around the world. They have just launched today something called Fed Now. Do you know that when you send money to somebody, you notice how long it takes, unless you will need to pay a lot of money for a wire transfer, it can take three days. When you deposit a check, it takes days for that check to clear. When you transfer money to somebody using your bank, it can take days, three days usually. It takes three or four days for paywall to clear and actually show up in people's accounts. On the other hand, if I want to transfer one of you money, if you want to transfer me money, we can use Venmo and it just goes like that. Or even some banks, some banks that use Zell, you can use Zell and transfer money to other people. Instantaneously, it appears immediately in their accounts. The reason it takes so long is because the Fed serves as the clearinghouse for all banks. And as a clearinghouse for all banks, it is used old technology where in order to move the money and to credit and debit everybody's accounts and make sure everything's... Even in the world of instantaneous internet, even in the world of instantaneous communication, it's taken us until middle of 2023 to get a system where all of that, very simple stuff that the private sector has already easily done. It's saying that finally the Fed has launched a product that does it all instantaneously between banks. Now, this is not something that's consumer facing, it's something that only banks can use. They will create portals where you will be able to use it. But it does mean that in the future, who knows when, when the banks deploy this, you will now be able to pay payroll instantaneously. You will now be able to send somebody an ACH, money transfer instantaneously. This basically eliminates the need for wire transfers. Everything should be at zero cost, instantaneous, settling of accounts, instantaneous. We'll see how quickly banks roll this feature out, but this is a Fed product. It's completely unnecessary, by the way, because if they just allowed the private sector, the private sector would have had this product available for banks a long time ago. Some banks already have products like this, Zell being one example. But this is the Fed, Federal Reserve basically asserting its monopolistic power and offering a technology solution that is its own, its own technological solution. All right, we are still way short, guys. Michael keeps coming in with more questions, but other than Michael, this is the first ever with all the questions I had from one person, every single one of them. We've got 77 people watching. We had over 80. There's just no excuse not to support the show at least with like a couple of bucks or something. You can use the sticker feature as some of you have already to support the show, but two bucks for everybody watching right now and we've made our numbers. All right, let's see. Last story is about unions. Biden is pushing a strong union focus. He's pushing more unionization. Unions getting involved more in the economy. But here's what happens with unions. I think unions raise costs. They would use productivity. They would use the generally inefficient and unproductive. And indeed one of the costs that they bear and it's a cost that's protected by government is the cost of striking. Right now we see that in Hollywood with both unions, the actors unions and the writers unions striking. But it is anticipated that soon you might see UPS employees strike, auto workers strike and possibly other unions striking as well. UPS in particular strike by UPS workers would really do havoc to all of us who depend on Amazon for everything, right, for everything we consume. So unions are a real challenge and at the Biden administration receives a lot of its votes from unions. 58% of unionized workers voted for Biden in the last election. And he is going to push unions. He's going to encourage them. By the way, again, sadly, people like JD Vance and Josh Hawley and even Trump are quite supportive of unions and have pushed unions as well. What we really need to do is get rid of the laws protecting unions. Get rid of the laws that allow the government to protect them and don't allow, for example, employers to fire them. I'm generally against unions to a large extent because all unions can do is establish a one size fit all solution. Now there's no question in my mind that, for example, in Hollywood there are real issues like with the use of AI instead of actors and how many royalties actors or writers should get from streaming shows and things like that. Absolutely there are real issues that need to be negotiated and settled. But it is also true that we don't know what kind of alternatives are possible because we have one size fit all solutions. If we had either smaller unions or if we had, I don't know what alternatives are, but smaller unions strikes me as a, or just individuals negotiating or different contracts for different studios, different contacts for different streaming services. Maybe we would discover, maybe through the market process of discovery, we would discover different ways to do things. The problem is you get one contract and that contract lasts for many, many years and it is kind of, it is not flexible. It does not adjust to new technologies and new realities, new changes in the world and very difficult to change. And it's a one size fit all. I love experimentation. I love competition. I love to see and why not have competition in contracts? Why not have competitions in royalty payments and different forms of royalty payments for workers, actors, writers in Hollywood, for example. I did make a mistake last time I talked about the strike in Hollywood. I said that these happen often. They don't, there hasn't been a strike of this magnitude where both writers and actors have gone on strikes since 1968. I think it is when Ronald Reagan was, maybe it's even earlier than 1968. I forget now. But when Ronald Reagan kind of was head of the union, there have been strikes of individual unions in Hollywood but not of the two big ones. I still think something is off. Something is off anytime. There is kind of one solution dictated in the whole industry and that it's, and you can't deviate from it. Yeah, so I, you know, if we didn't protect unions and if there wasn't a mentality of protection unions, one wonders what actually would evolve in a free market, how you would solve these problems in a more creative, innovative, competitive nature. All right. Thank you, Carolina. Thank you, Apollo. Thank you, Fendt Hopper. Michael. So we go into super chat questions, right? Even though intellectuals, Michael says, even though intellectuals perpetuate dangerous and destructive ideas, does the fact that the right is comprised of more unintellectual, uneducated people make them more prone to frustration and collective violence? Hmm. Well, I don't know. I mean, we saw BLM. We saw collective violence there. So we saw communism, of course, is extremely violent. You know, so I don't know. I don't think you can make that argument. I do think it's true. Generally, the right tends to be unintellectual and unsophisticated. It's, you know, it's intellectuals mainly hawken back to the past. That's the best they can do. They're not very creative. You know, Jordan Peterson is probably among the best on the right in terms of intellectuals who are thinking a little bit outside of the box. I don't agree with him, but at least he's thinking. Most of the others are just traditionalists. And that's the framework from which they see everything. And that's not particularly intellectual. It's not particularly smart. It's not particularly sophisticated. So yeah, the intellectuals on the right, and look, generally on the right, people are just not as smart as people on the left. Just sheer brainpower. It's just, you can, you can look at study after study after study. It's just, that's a reality. Education is just one proxy, but there are many proxies for that. And so, but so you'd expect that intellectual and educated people to be violent. And but there's enough of them on the left as well to be violent. So I'm not sure one side is going to be more violent than the other. I do think that the, the, the whole formulation of the problem on the right is much cruder than it is on the left. Maybe they come to the same conclusions and then maybe they're both racist in the end. But the left has these convoluted, you know, explanation, critical theory for why race is important. The right just says, yeah, because I'm white and I don't give a damn, right? It's a cruder form. So I don't know if that leads to more violence. I mean, it leads to both sides, ultimately to violence. John says, Canada is began recruiting USH1B foreigners and so far has about 10,000 applicants, according to Guardian. Yeah, I mean, good for Canada. Canada, Canada is embracing the idea that people are a net asset. They are value added that, you know, people, particularly smart people contribute enormously to your own economy. And they are, they are increasing immigration at rates that are just unprecedented. And I'd say good for Canada. I mean, Justin Trudeau is a monster in pretty much everything except this one area of immigration where this is amazing what they're doing. And one of the ways they can in a sense free ride off of the screening process that the US has already done is by going after American people who've received H1B visa in the United States. Who fear that they won't be able to convert the H1B visa into a green card. Fear that they won't be able to attain permanent residency in the United States and will be denied renewal for the H1B. And Canada is saying, come over here, we'll guarantee you you'll be renewed. Don't, no problem. We're right here ready to take you. I think it's brilliant. I think it's genius. You know, Canada also opened up to Hong Kong. Canada has taken in a lot of Ukrainians. You know, it's taking on some Ukrainians. We'll talk about US immigration policy, which is actually saying under Biden than it is under Trump. And it is interesting. I'll just mention this. And we'll talk about it more that the crisis at the border has been diffused dramatically. The numbers are way down suddenly. What happened? They increased legal migration. They gave people more legal options. And guess what happened? People who would have tried to sneak in are using legal methodologies, are staying in their countries, going to the embassy or consulates, and coming in legally rather than having to sneak across the border. So the crisis at the border has gone. There's no open borders. That's a joke. It is particularly for skilled workers. It is still unbelievably hard to get into this country. It's just that skilled workers, because they have options, don't tend to try to come here illegally. Or if they do come in illegally, they use other methods other than sneaking across the border. But this country is the opposite of open borders. Canada is far closer to open borders than the United States. If you look at the number of migrants into the United States per capita, and you look at the number of migrants coming into Canada per capita, Canada is way ahead of the United States. And it's doing it in a healthy, productive way, and good for them. And this is something that's going to benefit Canada over the long run. Particularly if, and this is important, if they work on assimilation, and if they work on law enforcement. Edward, you're ignorant. You have no idea what I've been given a stance for, or what he does or what he represents. What you just wrote is an ignorant statement, right? I mean, Itamar bin Gviro is as close to fascist as a country like Israel will allow, but he's close. The last thing you want anywhere is a little monster like him. David Arsenal, and by the way, crime in Israel, the crime that he complained about has not gone down since Itamar bin Gviro is responsible for internal security in Israel. He's done nothing to achieve that. David says, striking actors and writers have a legitimate grievance about Hollywood accounting. It books losses and unrelated projects and eats into legitimate residuals. How is it still around? I don't know. But I'm not sure that the right way, maybe because the whole industry functions by one methodology, maybe because there's no competition in terms of royalties, maybe because it's a one-size-fit-all solution rather than studios actually have to compete among each other in the way they compensate the people they work for them. They all compensate in kind of a standardized way. Maybe you wouldn't have survived an actual competitive hiring process in the way that other markets in other markets, these kind of things don't exist. So I am very, very skeptical, not an expert, don't know a lot about it, but I'm very, very skeptical that the solution to these things is another strike where they get to another agreement. And then because, again, it's a one-size-fit-all, maybe the studios find a different way to manipulate the numbers that wasn't projected by the thing and there's no competitive pressure and there's no way to get rid of that because the unions agreed to it. So everybody has to agree with it. So there's no competition is really, really good at these things. Having different alternatives, competing with one another, seeing what works and what doesn't in labor relations is the way to go. It's the way to discover what the best way to compensate writers and actors, particularly in an era of AI, where whatever agreement they come to now, what AI is going to evolve in five years is going to be completely different than it is today. And the agreement today is not going to take into account those advances. And that kind of flexibility cannot be built into a long-term standardized union contract. You need competition. Michael says, did you watch UofL Harawiri's interview with Lex Friedman? It's mostly hot air, intellectuals and social sciences with no objectives, training are largely useless. Yeah, I did not watch it. I don't intend to watch it. I find Harawiri insufferable. I don't like him. His arguments are, I think they're silly. They don't stand up to simple logic and yet he's almost never challenged. He's never pushed. And so I'm really not interested in watching what he says. And I agree with you. It is mostly hot air. Michael asked, Trump just said, yes, I saw this, Xi Jinping is brilliant. Hey, he runs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. I mean, this is not the first time Trump has repeatedly expressed admiration for Xi Jinping. Trump has repeatedly expressed admiration for all authoritarians. They like authoritarians. He likes authoritarians. He likes their power. He wishes and he said this. He wishes he had that kind of power. He is at heart and deep down and authoritarian. There's no question about it. He just can't get away with it completely because of the American political system. But he will do whatever he can to undermine that system to gain as much power as he can. But he has complimented other one. He's complimented Putin. And he's several times complimented Xi and all sent it around the power that they have over their people. I mean, he's a monster and Trump celebrates. I mean, look what the way he behaved towards the monstrous dictator of North Korea ruled him out in my mind from being president. That 4D chess thing that he did was so disgusting, so despicable that an American president would grovel before such a monster as the barbarous leader of North Korea is really despicable. Michael says, enthusiasm is common, endurance is rare. Thank you, Iran, for your consistency. Don't have to thank me. I don't know how to do it any other way. Michael says, are some psychological problems above the misuse of free will? Some people are just born with certain wires crossed, presenting with the weight philosophy is worthless. Well, again, I don't know if it's worthless, but there's no question that some issues are beyond free will. That is, some things are imbalances in the brain, things that happen, things that are so deeply ingrained in us or things where there's a chemical imbalance that's either caused by own decisions or caused by some defect where we were born. There's all kinds of things that are beyond our free will. That doesn't mean they can't be dealt with with the right kind of psychology. That's why psychology is a different field than philosophy and it doesn't mean people can't overcome certain psychological issues that are not thinking mistakes but much worse than that. But it requires real work and it requires real effort of them and this is why psychology is a field that's so important because psychology is the one field that can help them get over those kind of things. Alright guys, I'm still looking for two bucks from everybody who's listening right now to get us to the target because we're way off right now. So if you guys can do a $2 sticker, $5 sticker, $10 sticker, $20 sticker, $100 would be good to get us to our target for the day. This would be the first day in the week where we haven't met that target and that would be a shame but it looks like it's going to happen. Alright, last question. Michael asked, do both the left and the right yearn for the dark ages in different ways? Yes, I mean suddenly the environmentalists yearn for us to return to the caves, I think, they want us not to use our environment so they were like minimum footprint. So yes, the environmentalists certainly yearn for that. Of course they all think that nobody has to die and that we can still keep our technology but of course they also have to evade to believe that. They all know at the end that that's what they yearn to and of course we saw from Michael Knowles the yearning of the right to some kind of utopian Christian era where we had nothing. But we didn't have woke. We didn't have woke and the hatred of the left makes the right wants, not the caves, wants the dark ages. Everybody's a good Christian in dark ages. Everybody except the popes. The popes weren't very good Christians during the dark ages. If you've read anything about the way the popes behave back then, pretty horrific. All right everybody. Thank you. I appreciate all the superchatters. Thanks for providing value for value. Those of you who are not listening live and cannot use the superchats, you can do it on YouTube. You can press applause and make a contribution that way. You can become a member. There will be a members only show on Sunday. Sunday evening we will have a members only show topic to be determined. And you can email me a topic if you're interested, if you have an idea at Iranbrookshow.com. And you can also support the show on a monthly basis at patreon or iranbrookshow.com. Robin Asia, thank you. I appreciate the support. Thanks to all the rest of the superchatters. I will see you tonight. We've got Amos Adulja and bring your questions. Challenge him. And thank you Debra. Really appreciate the support. Thank you for all of you for helping chip away at this. Don't forget to like the show before you leave. It really helps with the algorithm. And of course share this show or share the short shows or share whatever you can so that we get as wide a distribution for these shows as possible. Thank you so much. Thank you guys. I will see you all tonight. 8pm East Coast time.