 So radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brook Show. All right everybody, welcome to Iran Brook Show on this Wednesday, November 22nd, the day before Thanksgiving. I hope everybody is excited and is looking forward to a fantastic Thanksgiving, so happy Thanksgiving to everybody. Go out there and celebrate productions, celebrate productivity, celebrate the producer in all of us. So my internet, playing weird games with me. There we go. All right, we have got a lot to talk about today. As always, the world produces tons of newsworthy stories for us, and we will get to those in a second. I want to remind everybody that you can use the Super Chat to ask questions and support the show and show your thanks to this particular producer. You can use the Super Chat, you can use the sticker, however, whichever way you want to do it. I want to remind everybody under an institute as a sponsor of the show, and ARI has on Tuesday, November 28th, an event celebrating the success of a program that is providing Fountainhead books to young people, not just Fountainhead, but Fountainhead in addition. It's to celebrate the inspiration that INRAN's books provide for all of us and young people all over the world. So you can join. You'll hear about the work. You can hear about the progress being made in terms of providing books to young people all over the world and inspiring them, kind of the results of all of that. I encourage you to participate. It's going to be a lot of fun, and I think it's going to be very motivated. We are looking for some good news in these bleak times. This is certainly some good news. So you can go to INRAN.org slash start here where you can learn more and sign up. It's free. It's on Zoom or Zoom-like or whatever. And yeah, go sign up and participate. It'll be a lot of, it'll be really worthwhile. So I think it will inspire and be something that you will enjoy. And it'll show those of you who are contributors to the INRAN Institute, it'll show you how your dollars are being spent. And those of you who are not yet contributors to the INRAN Institute, maybe this will inspire you to actually become contributors because of the values that the INRAN Institute actually produces. All right, I need to click this button and do this and that, clear that, and we are good to go. All right, so let's focus today on, let's focus on our news. As I said, there's a lot to talk about. As you probably have heard, because it's all over the media, it's everywhere, Elon Musk has sued, I think he filed the lawsuit on Monday, an organization called Media Matters. Presents itself as an organization that is out there to let advertisers and let others know about the media, about fringe opinions, about extremism, let's call it that. That's what they call it in the media. To let the advertisers and others know when they identify bad stuff, bad ideas being prevalent out there and look, an organization like this is valuable, it could be valuable, put it that way, providing information and providing screening of the media, which a lot of us don't have time to do and a lot of advertisers probably don't have time to do. And I know a lot of advertisers would prefer not to be associated with certain fringe views and certain fringe opinions. But of course, Media Matters is dominated by the left and it's dominated by a leftist agenda. So you're unlikely to see Media Matters flag for advertisers support of Hamas or support for the Palestinians or support for other crazy left-wing agenda items, so they're not going to identify CRT or any of the kind of postmodern left's agenda as worthy of flagging because that is to them mainstream, so they're much more focused on anything on the right that they view as offensive. In particular, they're going after X or Twitter, as I like to call them, or as they used to be called and as they still should be called, you know, Twitter since Elon Musk has taken over is being portrayed as this right-wing nutty place where right-wing crazies, the nutty part of the right-wing is dominating the conversation. I don't have the stats on it. There is a lot of crazy right-wing people on X. There's no question about that. There's a lot of racism, anti-Semitism, new right, alt-right, whatever you want to call it. There's also a lot of crazy left on X, so there's a huge number of them. And the standard by which Elon Musk allows some people to be on and other people's not to be on is still ambiguous and undefined and ill-defined, just like it was before Elon Musk joins. I guess he allows a bigger spectrum, but my opposition always has been to the lack of objectivity. What I want is an objective standard. He has still not provided such an objective standard, and that stays detriment, and that is really unfortunate. Anyway, Media Matters last week flagged Twitter as basically showing ads for mainstream companies out there with adjacent to posts that were anti-Semitic, what they defined as far right, but no, really racist anti-Semitic alt-right type posts, and next to them you would find ads supposedly of Apple or MGM or other companies, regular companies out there, NBA, NBC Universal, Amazon, and companies like that. Right next to fascist, alt-right and racist ads, and so they let the advertisers know, hey guys, your ads are being shown next to, and it appears that you're promoting these racist tweets. As a consequence, partially of that, but to a large part because of Elon Musk's stupid retweet and support for a tweet by a known anti-Semite promoting an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, which he then kind of narrowed and backed off of, but never deleted the tweet and the tweet still stands, and he never renounced the fact that he retweeted a tweet by a known anti-Semite. That's okay to comment positively on a known anti-Semite's tweet according to Elon Musk. It was stupid, again, I don't think Elon Musk is anti-Semite, but what he did was stupid. He was responsible, shows awful judgment, and his backtracking from it was weak and pathetic, and yeah, I get that people like Ben Shapiro and others need to talk to Carlson and others need to support Elon Musk because they depend on him so much, but I call it the way I see it. Anyway, a lot of these companies withdrew all advertising from Twitter, Twitter, which is barely surviving financially anyway, which is struggling financially in terms of generating revenue, has been from before Musk, but is more so with Musk because there's been less advertising once Musk has taken over, can't afford to lose their biggest advertisers, including Apple. The concept of that could be devastating for Twitter and could be devastating for Musk himself. Right? And so Musk filed the lawsuit on Monday saying the media matters is purposefully, purposefully manipulating the screenshots that it's getting from Twitter in order to show something that doesn't really exist. And they're making the case that what Twitter's doing, what media matters is doing is they're gaming the algorithm. They found ways to game the algorithm so that the algorithm will produce on the same screen tweets by ultra racist tweets, anti-semitic tweets, and right next to them advertisement. So Twitter's not denying that such occurrences happen. But Twitter's denying that they happen systematically at all, they're claiming it's very, very rare, and that the only reason you see so many of these, I'm not sure what I did there to make this full screen, let's see if that fixes it, that fixes, there we go. The only reason that media matters can show so many of these and so much of this is because they've manipulated the data, they've manipulated the algorithm, and therefore it is suing them for all the lost business that they have as a consequence of their recommendations. It's going to be interesting to see what happens. I'm not surprised at all to find that Elon Musk is right about this. Media matters I'm sure is manipulated this in one way or another. Another report, this one in the New York Post claim that they basically refresh the screen, refresh the screen a billion times in order to find one screen where they found this relationship and it's very, very uncommon and it's very rare. And so it'll be interesting to see how the lawsuit plays out. Media matters clearly is a partisan, biased organization, it is sad that there is no better entity to provide this kind of information for large corporations, but it's also sad as I said that Twitter does not have some kind of objective standard for what it permits on its website and what it doesn't. It really is and has been since he took over, it really is whatever Elon feels like that is permitted and whatever he doesn't feel like that is banned. And the sense is that it's completely up to Elon Musk and there's no standard way which creators and posters know whether something they're doing is not acceptable or is acceptable. And in that sense I'm not saying it's worse than it was before. I'm saying it's not that different than it was before. The only difference is now it's one man's whim determines the standards and before it was a committee's whim that determined the standards, but in neither case have the standards being in any sense objective. Objective, I mean, I don't mean objectivist. I mean objective in the sense of understandable, when I read a post I know this is acceptable, this is not acceptable, what is acceptable or what isn't acceptable. Who knows? Nobody knows. What is acceptable is anything that doesn't piss Elon Musk off. If it pisses him off it might become very quickly unacceptable and booted off of Twitter. That's sad. You'd think you'd have these smart guys, they'd be able to come up with some objective standard that we can all live by. Anyway, interesting to follow media matters and see what the ultimate outcome is going to be. All right, so as you know I think it's common news right now that there is a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, just saying that is pretty disgusting. And under this agreement Hamas has promised to release 50 maybe a little bit more, 50 hostages, children and women and in exchange Israel is going to release 150, that's three to one, 150 children and women. And when you look at that, you go, I'll talk about that, you know, you look at that and go, okay, women and children, you know, why is Israel holding women and children? What is going on here? That is, it again almost creates this moral equivalency, you know, Hamas kidnaps women and children and Israel, you know, puts in jail, women and children, it's pretty much the same thing. And then you look at the list of the people being released. And the Hamas list is, you know, of Israelis being released of the four-year-olds, one and a half year olds, a few weeks old, women who are still breastfeeding their baby with their baby, six year olds, 10 year olds, 11 year olds. These are the children that Hamas is releasing, real children, right, real children. Let me just comment on this quickly, Ken says, Elon Musk is in control now, we need an objective standard. Yeah, Elon Musk is a complete flake who changes his mind constantly and who says really, really stupid things and changes his mind about the standards in really, really stupid ways. Yes, because Elon Musk is in charge, we need an objective standard. He is not objective. That's just reality. All you have to do is follow his tweets and you can see that. Anyway, so you've got Hamas is releasing children, really, you know, little kids, that they kidnapped with their mothers in some cases, some cases without their mothers. Fathers will not be released because in some cases they took over whole, they took whole families. But you look at the list and you look at the ages and it's stunning. These are truly little kids. You look at the list Israel publishes. When you look at the children, the children are 16, 17 and 18 year olds. They're accused of attacking Israelis with knives. They're accused of throwing stones and rocks. They're accused of violence. These are not children in the same category as the children Hamas is releasing. And then you look at the women, the list of the Israeli women Hamas is releasing, or all mothers, you look at the list of the children or women that they just kidnapped, basically off the street. You look at the women that Israel is releasing again. Women accused of attacking people with a knife. Women accused of violent acts or conspiring to violence. There was no moral equivalence. The people Israel had in jail deserve to be in jail. And yet this hostage release exchange is just horrific in terms of the image it presents and the way it's being spun in terms of Israel. While Israel imprisoned children, why shouldn't Hamas? Big difference between a three year old and an 18 year old who's throwing rocks at people. Big difference between a 18 month old and a 17 year old who attacked a civilian with a knife with an attempt to kill him or a soldier. Doesn't really matter. All right. I'm going to say one more thing about Twitter because it's Scott and Kana incapable of actually listening or they're just blatant liars, which is quite possible, you know, but they can keep up with actually understanding an argument. They're just obviously too dumb to do it. It would be my only or they're dishonest because it's one or the other. It can be both. Elon Musk and the previous owners of Twitter can do whatever the hell they want with Twitter. I've always said that I continue to say that they can run it any way they want. I critique the previous owners of Twitter and I critique Elon Musk in the same way. For us, users of Twitter, we would like to have objective values, objective standards. It doesn't mean they can't do whatever the hell they want. They can't. It's private property. I've always said that I've never flip flopped, never flip flopped. You just can't listen because you can't accept an attack on your God, pretty much anybody on the right, but certainly Elon Musk. And you certainly cannot listen to the fact that when I said Twitter was privately owned and therefore should be able to publish whatever they want, you attacked me for that. And now when it's somebody you like actually owns, you think, yeah, it's his company. You can do whatever he wants. So you're the ones flip flopping. You're the ones who are inconsistent. And you project that inconsistency onto me. That is just not true. So all you have to do is go listen again, but you can't listen because you can't hear. You just can't hear. All right, that's a problem you find in our culture. People can't actually, because they pigeonhole you into, oh my God, he's saying something I'm against, therefore he must be wrong, therefore I can't hear what he's saying. All right, so the hostages, this is a huge setback for Israel, but it's a moral setback for Israel, the fact that they negotiate with Hamas, the fact that there's a certain moral equivalency between the people that they are releasing and between the people Hamas is releasing. There's an acknowledgement of Hamas as an entity one negotiates with. I mean, there's all of that. So just on a moral front, this is obscene. It should have never happened. And then at the military front, Israel is making real systematic progress. It is days, maybe a week away from completely controlling Northern Gaza, from having complete control over that pot and destroying the entire infrastructure of Hamas in Northern Gaza. It is just starting to enter to major Hamas bastions in Gaza, in the northeast of Gaza. And it is basically almost finished in circling them. And it was going to go in and dismantle it. There are very few civilians in that part of Northern Gaza, and they can basically go in and flatten the place and destroy Hamas, at least in that part of Gaza. They were also days away from starting a campaign in the south and starting to enter Southern Gaza to destroy Hamas infrastructure over there. This basically stops them. The ceasefire right now is for four days. But if Hamas continues to release hostages, Israel will continue to extend the ceasefire. A ceasefire could be extended to 10 days. Now what's going to happen in those 10 days? Hamas is going to reorganize. It's going to bolster its positions. It's going to either abandon its positions in the north and get the people into the south, or it's going to allow them to build more defensible positions in the north, thus facilitating the killing of more Israeli soldiers. That seems weird. It is weird. Okay. In other words, in addition, Israel is committed to huge amounts of aid, including gasoline, into the Gaza Strip during this period. During that period, all this gas and all these goods that are going to be delivered, they're going to be handed to Hamas. On top of that, I want to bet about the ability of Hamas to smuggle in weapons with all that aid. We know what the aid agencies are capable of and not. So this is massively strategically a horrible decision. It is going to cost the lives of many Israeli soldiers. It is militarily just insane. It is morally treasonous. It is horrible. It is horrible. And this is by your hawk, the person so many of you admire and love and that is Bibi Netanyahu. This is his choices, his government, his prime minister, his responsibility. And when those kids die, when the ceasefire is over, what's he going to tell their mothers and fathers? Now, true, he released 50 hostages. How many of these soldiers does that warrant having killed? How much legitimization of Hamas was all this worth? Anyway, horrific, sad, and predictable. I told you this would happen. I told you this on day one. I know Netanyahu. I know the kind of pressure he's under and I know his inability to withstand that pressure. And I don't know how Israel starts up again the war once the ceasefire is over. I don't know how successful they will be in doing that. I don't know, you know, it takes a lot of energy to start up again. Israel had the momentum on its side. By the way, one of the conditions of the ceasefire is that Israel flying no surveillance aircraft in the sky above Gaza. Can you imagine agreeing to that so that they can't spy on what Hamas is doing? So the Hamas gets four days where they can do whatever they want. They can move around, they can reinforce, they can go into hiding, they can do what they need to do. We replenish their supplies, build barricades, build booby traps. All the stuff they will do to kill Israeli soldiers. And Israel will not have eyes on it, not have eyes on it. It's just insane. It's just we live in an insane world. In an insane world, a truly insane world. You know, when I talked about media matters, I wanted to talk about one other story that has to do with journalism and just the level of dishonesty in journalism today, as it, in particular as it relates to Gaza. But generally, you know, I think the media matters exhibit that dishonesty. But here's another one. This is a story of a journalist who's decided to break his silence. Jan Frank, who is, I guess, a Dutch journalist. And he decided about six days ago to publish his first-hand experiences at Auschifa Hospital in Gaza. He used to be a Tel Aviv-based freelance reporter for Dutch and international media outlets, frequently worked in Gaza between 2014 and 2019. And as he says in this series of tweets, I mean, he witnessed firsthand Hamas operating within the hospital. But more than that, he witnessed firsthand that other reporters saw it. He witnessed firsthand that UN operatives saw it. He witnessed firsthand that WHO people saw it. And yet when the hostility started and all this about Auschifa Hospital started, where were these reporters? Where's the WHO? WHO denied that the hospital was being used by Hamas. The UN denied that it was being used by Hamas. The reporters all denied that it was used. They all lied. Journalists lied explicitly. That's what Jan is claiming. And I believe him. They lied to protect what? Their sources? Or out of their hatred of Israel and their support for the Palestinian cause? We have, I mean, there are exceptions. Jan is an exception here. He's willing to speak up. And there's no question that since he started to speak up, his life has been pretty intense. He's received death threats. He's been cursed at. His professionalism, integrity have been attacked. Even by other Dutch journalists who know he's right, who know it's the truth. Journalists today, sadly, so many of them are either cowards or ideologically motivated to lie to us. Because that are further the cause that they believe in. Rather than the fact that they believe in the truth. Than tell the truth. Douglas Murray is not a journalist. So somebody said Douglas Murray is doing a good job. But he's not a journalist. And he's not perceived as a journalist. He's not taken as a journalist. I mean, media matters is not the only journalistic enterprise that is completely capitulated to politics and completely capitulated in this case to the left. I mean, the dishonesty of the UN, the dishonesty of the World Health Organization, I mean, these alone should warrant the United States leaving these organizations, abandoning them. But the dishonesty of the journalists makes one have to be suspicious of anything they tell us. All right. Okay, let's shift to a minute to tech. Two tech stories. One we've already talked about, but just want to wrap it up. And another one, which is new. The new one is Binance. Many of you might not know Binance. Binance is a massive company. It is the largest crypto company in the world. It is a crypto exchange among many other things all related to crypto. It was started by, its founder was, his name is abbreviated as all of these guys' names are abbreviated, I guess, in the crypto world. To CZ, his name is Changping Zhao. Changping Zhao is rumored to be worth something like $23 billion. The company has been incredibly successful and wealthy. He, Zhao, has been one of the most vocal advocates for crypto, one of the most powerful people in the space. And to a large extent, if you remember, it's to some extent his beef with SBF that led ultimately to SBF's company going bust when it did. It would have gone anyway, but CZ refused to bail them out. Well, yesterday there was this big press conference that wishes just this department and a number of government agencies all announced that they had come to a settlement with Binance, where Binance had agreed, basically pled guilty to money laundering and all kinds of other regulatory and federal legal violations. Right. As part of this, there is a consent order which is going to require Binance to disgorge $1.3 billion of ill-gotten gains and pay $1.35 billion civil monetary penalty to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, all to be used to fund the Commodity Futures Trading Commission going after the next people. And I don't know who gets this money. I guess it goes to federal government. As Treasury Secretary Yellen said, Binance turned a blind eye to its legal obligations in the pursuit of profits, its will for failures allowed money to flow to terrorists, cyber criminals, child abusers through its platform. CZ himself pled guilty to turning a blind eye, basically, to money laundering. As a result, he faces a maximum of 10 years behind bars. Given that he pled guilty, I doubt he'll get that. He'll probably get about 18 months behind bars. He is also, this, though, he says he's going to pay $200 million fine. I bet somebody else, he's going to somewhere else, he's going to pay $50 million fine. Yeah, it's just $50 million. So I'm not sure. There's some inconsistency around this. Binance's operations are going to be watched by somebody from the U.S. government. It's, you know, this is, again, this is all kind of a coordinator sediment with a bunch of regulatory agencies, the Treasury's financial requirement enforcement network, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Justice Department. The only party that's not part of this is the SEC, which is interesting because my suspicion is that the SEC is going to go after them for other things. And therefore, it didn't want to be a part of this and what this provides it, it now complete visibility into everything Binance because this will open up the entire books to the U.S. government. The U.S. officials say the Binance allowed for more than 100,000 transactions involving illicit activities, as well as more than 1.5 million virtual currency trades that violated U.S. sanctions, including sanctions on Iran, Syria, and Cuba. They allege that all kinds of laundering of dark net market transactions, hacks, ransomware, and scams, basically it was a free-for-all for all criminals and evil regimes out there in the world. Now Binance is a huge player. Let's be real here. I mean Binance is, to a large extent, the number one player in the crypto world. This is the big, the only player left now that is not being gone after by the government is Coinbase, although they have some lawsuits as well against them. But they were the only player in the space left that has not come to some either shutdown or come to some kind of agreement with U.S. government. Of course, this is also a major blow to crypto. It's a major blow to people who believed that crypto could allow you to do anything you wanted and that the government would not do anything about it or that the government could not do anything about it. And this is really what the government here is trying to do. The government here is trying to assert they control. I don't know how many of these claims are true or not. They probably are. But the reality is that U.S. government went after Binance and was going after crypto, not because they're afraid that their rights being violated. The U.S. government is going after Binance and crypto because they have no control over them. The U.S. government is going after Binance and crypto more broadly because they don't want transactions to happen that they can't control, that they can't manipulate, that they can't regulate, that are outside of their sphere of influence. This is status asserting the power, asserting their control. Now, I know the crypto world will say, well, yes, but now we'll go to decentralized exchanges and decentralized this and decentralized that and we'll get around the government and ultimately we will win, the government will lose. Maybe we will see. I doubt that. I think we should all take this very seriously in the sense that the government has every intention to either make crypto part of the system and thereby regulate, control it and make sure that it behaves according to the status demands and needs or shut it down. But it will not tolerate rogue activities. For all of you who think bitcoin is going to replace money, the government is never going to allow that. They will use these kind of laws to shut bitcoin down. In one way or another. Now you say they can't, sure they can. They can make it illegal to sell a product for bitcoin. That's observable. They can track down who owns bitcoin and where the transactions are going. Bitcoin is not anonymous. The chain of custody is knowable. The government is going to pull out all the stops to again take control of a crypto. They're now going to be ETFs on bitcoin. And what that means is what the government wants to do is it wants the certain corners of the crypto world. They want to bring under their regulatory regime. They want to bring out of their control. And the parts that they cannot bring under their control, they want to destroy. And I think many of you are naive enough to think that they can't do that. Bitcoin is not freedom. It's a false definition of freedom. And bitcoin cannot facilitate freedom because it's not truly anonymous. And the government has a lot of control of how it's going to be used. And it will bring it in to that control. I mean it might be the case that in Argentina, Milay allows bitcoin to be used. But when the US government decides, we don't like that, then what they will do is they will tell Argentinian banks to stop with bitcoin. Otherwise, they'll kick them out to the Federal Reserve System. And that's impossible then to use dollars in Argentina. And I'm not sure which way Milay will then go if the US government ever does that. Bois emphasizes bitcoin is freedom. No, I mean you guys have a false view of what freedom is. Really false view of what freedom is. Bitcoin is bitcoin. It's just me, it's just a, right now it's just something you can play around with and you can watch it go up and you can watch it go down. And you can, it's just an asset. An asset cannot be freedom. It's not money, it's just a digital asset. And whether it's worth anything or not is completely dependent on other people's belief system. Anyway, I think it's a big story, the Binance story. It's, it's shaken up this world. It's shaken up the crypto world. It is, and it's clearly made the government intentions very clear if anybody didn't understand them. The government is, is not going to allow this to go rogue. And so it's not going to allow bitcoin to become a facilitator of freedom because the government doesn't want it. It wants to control. It wants to control you and it wants to control you through controlling your money. And they're not going to let, they're not going to loosen that up. They're not going to allow that to go away. Sadly, sadly, I'm all for it. Sadly, I'm all for money, private money, all of that. Government will never allow it. I mean, never's a long time, but it's not going to allow it anytime soon. Okay, quickly, open AI, a lot of stories around open AI, but the bottom line is Sam Altman is back. The board, most of the board that was there has resigned. You know, the two, the two outside directors are gone. The one outside director, the guy from Quora is staying for now. I'm not sure what happens to Chief Scientist. A new board member has been added. The interim CEO that they brought in for open AI is gone. It does look like Sam Altman has one control over open AI. I think as a consequence, we haven't announced this yet, but as a consequence, they will be changing their corporate structure. I think they will be turning the whole thing into a for-profit. They'll be bringing in investors onto the board of directors. And that will be the completion of the story, will be Sam Altman's complete dominance of this. In the background, there is a fascinating story about effective altruism and the rationalist community, and the A.I. Dumarism and Dumas, and that battle between A.I. Dumists, who are mostly effective altruists and rationalists, and the rest of the tech community will continue that battle. To some extent, it is a philosophical battle. They are now being presented to the world moral alternatives to effective altruism, because people are disgusted by the effective altruism movement, partially because of SBF and partially because of things like what just happened at Open AI. I think it's going to be a fascinating story. It's going to, to some extent, at least, the struggle is going to shape Silicon Valley. It is interesting that some people are labeling them effective AI and rationalist community as those atheists and presenting this as believers versus atheists. I mean, that sounds weird to me, but I have seen reports over that, left versus right in Silicon Valley. What I think is good here is that Sam Altman, who clearly has a vision for AI, who clearly is one of the pioneers in this, who clearly wants to move forward and commercialize this and create something, build something. Sadly, he's also a guy who's gone to the government to regulate. He's also a guy who's talked about demeritism. But one wonders if the whole doom stuff and the regulatory stuff wasn't something he had to do to appease his board, now I'm starting to wonder, what does Sam Altman actually believe? I don't know. And if he's got ridden of the board, particularly the most obnoxious people in the board, will he be able to speak freely now about what he really believes about AI and the future of AI? I hope so, because I'm curious, and clearly this is a pioneering guy, a great entrepreneur, and I want to see him succeed. I want to see AI revolutionize the world in which we live. I want to see the changes it brings to us. All right, let's see. Quick reminder before we go to the Dutch elections, please consider liking the show. It doesn't cost you anything. It doesn't require anything. Just a click of the button, and it helps a lot with the algorithms. It really does. We've got 153 people watching live right now. Only 67 likes. We can do better than that. Also, I want to encourage those of you who are not subscribers to the show, please consider subscribing and finding out about more shows and, again, it'll help the algorithm. So, please, please, please consider subscribing. Also, those of you who would like to support the show, to keep it going, to support what I do here, please consider asking a question or doing a sticker. Those of you who can afford so, it'd be great to get some $20 questions. We need five, six of those to meet our target. And so, please consider supporting the show. There's a lot of you who probably knew, who probably never done a super chat. Please consider doing it. It's that dollar sign at the bottom of your screen there. It's pretty easy to do. And it supports what we're trying to do here, and it's what I live on. So, and I do a lot of these shows. So, if you support what I do, please consider making a financial contribution. All right, Dutch elections are happening right now, as we speak, or maybe it's already over. They're five hours ahead. Maybe polls have already closed. They're about to close. It is a close competition. It was a close competition between two center-right parties. And then there is one kind of green party that is also running. But it really does seem like the center-right is the dominant force here. A surprise, I think, for many people is that a third-right-wing party is doing very, very well. And that is Goetz, Rinders, and I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that. A political party is going to come out of nowhere. And now might win the election. It might get the most votes. If not, it might get the second or third-most votes. It's going to be a major player in the next government. It also appears that the likely party that will form the next government will agree to form it with Goetz, in spite of the fact that in the past, nobody wanted him in the government. It looks like this time he will be in. He is known for being super anti-Islam. He says some good things. He says some really bad things. He's a really, really mixed bag. But generally, I think the coalition that will be formed after these elections is likely to be very anti-immigrant, very anti-EU. I don't think Brexit like anti-EU, but generally skeptical of EU. Probably more friendly to the farmers. You remember all the farming kind of demonstrations in Holland over the last few years and focused on the economy of the Netherlands and making sure that it is not used to subsidize the failures within the world of Europe, Southern Europe primarily. So it's going to be interesting. I'm just pointing this out. I don't know what the outcome is going to be. Once we see the outcome, we can comment more. And of course, people are worried about cost of living. There's a horrible housing crisis like there is everywhere in the world. And of course, that is primarily a consequence of lack of supply and high interest rates. High interest rates, they have very little control over. That's basically said by the European Central Bank, the same with cost of living inflation. But they have control of supply of housing. So we will see what the party looks like and what the government looks like and what are likely to be its agenda items. We'll probably look at that on Friday when we do the next news roundup. But it looks like Europe is swinging to the right a kind of what do you call it, social issues right? Not a right when it comes to economic issues, but certainly Europe is swinging to populism and to a nationalist anti-immigration but also a kind of a eurosceptical and not particularly free market right. Not particularly free market right. So it's going to be interesting. And of course, the big election coming up I think is next year in Germany. That'll be the one most interesting. All right. We still got about $100 short of our goal. So please consider helping close that gap in the next few minutes in our lot, probably five, 10 minutes. And we are done. And let's look at some of the questions we have here. Andrew Traeger, Andrew says, Israel-Israeli spokesman should be more aggressive and challenging the UN in the media. Oh, yeah, absolutely. They should be 100 times more aggressive. They're way too meek, way too not willing to piss people off. They need to be a lot more aggressive. They do try to correct the record, but there's a lack of passion that comes from moral certainty. How would your communication strategy differ? Well, look, I would do just a whole thing on the UN and I would go through systematically the ways in which the UN is unbelievably biased against Israel. I would do the same with the media. I would do it the same with the WHO. I would systematically present the evidence and call them out and call them liars. Call them liars. I mean, the Secretary General of the UN right now is lying regularly, constantly on Twitter. This is the more people, civilians are dying in this conflict than any conflict that Syria, Yemen, just two examples. Sudan, we're more civilians have died than what is going on in Gaza right now. Many more civilians have died. So, I mean, it's ludicrous. It, they are liars, cheaters. Well, Rwanda might not, Rwanda may be ancient history for him. We're talking about in just now this so they should call them anti-semitic. Call the UN an anti-semitic organization, which they are clearly an anti-Israel organization. Organization unworthy. I mean, Security Council, you've got Putin who basically is doing in Ukraine what Hamas would like to do to Israel. Killing civilians indiscriminately. Rape and pillage were part of the Russian initial invasion. He's taking children away from Ukrainians and taking them into Russia to be re-endocrinated. And he's on the Security Council. Somebody should call that out. If America had balls, America would call that out. But no, nobody in the world in which we live has that kind of courage to talk about these issues, to call them out and to give it, kind of put it in moral terms. This is evil. This is, this is an evil organization. The UN is an evil organization. I would call it that. I would call it that. Wow, Sivanos. Thank you. Sivanos just came in with $100. Always short is $11. Somebody could do that. Tell us, please, as best you can, how would you convert civilians in the West Bank Gaza from Islam and the wrong thinking that has perpetrated the problems over there? Sticks or carrot? Well, you have to start with stick. And I don't think you have to convert them from Islam. I do not believe that this is necessary in terms of Islam. Just as Christianity was pacified and Judaism was pacified, so can Islam be pacified. Indeed, there are many countries that have Muslim majority people, Azerbaijan, Albania, where there is no barbarism, there is no this horrors and where the population is Muslim but secular. And indeed, I'll say more than that, the Palestinians used to be pretty secular. They used to be the most secular people in the Arab world. It's only the last 30 years of they being become more and more and more religious under the influence of Hamas. So the first thing you have to do is through military action, you know, through military action, they have to be subdued. They have to be brought to their knees. They have to understand and this has to be told to them. They have to understand that their cause will always lose, that they have absolutely zero chance. Now they hang their chances on, well, the world will be on our side. Israel needs to say, to hell with the world. And it has to act on this. We are going to suppress you. We are going to destroy every single capability you might have to kill Israelis. You must submit. You must reject the idea of destroying Israel. And if you don't, then we will continue to dismantle the infrastructure that makes life possible for you. And then at some point after they've kind of devastated the place, they need to occupy it. They have to make sure the curriculum in the schools are very different. Yeah, I wonder if you would say Islam is submission. Yes, but submission to something else, not to Allah, but to Israel. They need to make sure, as I think was the case in the 70s and 80s, that the curriculum being taught in the schools is not anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli, hate-filled garbage, but that they're learning math, science, reading, literature. They're learning Hebrew and Arabic. They need to be under the control of Israel, occupied by Israel, full occupation, you know, probably for a generation until the kind of thinking that the Palestinians have today, the kind of attitude they have today towards Israel, the kind of views that they have today towards Jews and Israelis, are history, are gone. They are re-educated, not brainwashed, but that propaganda is gone. They need to rename their streets and their schools away from naming them after martyrs who kill Israelis. Their political leadership needs to be dismantled, and I include here the Palestinian Authority, which is just marginally slightly better than Hamas. Their entire political leadership needs to be dismantled. Their entire military infrastructure, policing infrastructure, weapons infrastructure, needs to be destroyed. And they need to be told, you will never win. We will always be here, and we will destroy you, and we will do whatever is necessary to protect ourselves. You either want to live with us as your neighbors, or you want to die. Those are the two options, and we will not tolerate you being a threat to us. And that's why Israel's response to Hamas needs to be massively disproportionate. They need to feel the pain in a way that is sad that you have to inflict it, but they have to feel the pain. And that's true in the West Bank and in Gaza. And Israel needs to take care of its enemies, because that's part of it, right? As long as Hamas thinks that Hezbollah is going to save them, or Iran will save them. Hezbollah needs to be demolished, destroyed completely and thoroughly. Whether now or in a month or in a year, it has to happen. Otherwise there will be no peace. It needs to be destroyed in southern Lebanon. It needs to be destroyed in Beirut. It's, again, political, spiritual and military leadership needs to be killed. And then, of course, to find a piece of this has to be, in one way or another, an Iranian revolution that gets rid of the theocratic regime in Iran. And if Israel has to support that by bombing the institutions of power in Iran, then that is what Israel needs to do. You cannot leave the cancer there. You cannot leave any element of the cancer. You need to eradicate the cancer. That means defeating the Palestinians. I'm not saying defeating Hamas. Defeating the Palestinian people. The Palestinian people are the enemy. It's BS that it's Hamas is the enemy. We're not fighting the Palestinian people. Of course you are fighting the Palestinian, they are fighting the Palestinian people. It means defeating Hezbollah. I mean it's defeating Iran. Until you do those three things, there will not be peace. The Palestinians will not be subdued. And you'll just have to keep on doing this stuff. And death and destruction constantly. Ovid Sandvik from Norway. Sorry, I brutalized your name. Mario Nafal is a Peter Keating. Yeah, I think that's right. He has left his thinking and that has been taken care of by others. He doesn't think for himself. He's completely not independent. Are obsessed with being liked by everybody. Yes. And that's being hated by everybody. So he pleases nobody right now. But yes, I think he pleases his intellectual friends who want to be balanced, who want to be fair, who want to be quote objective. But it's all BS. So yeah, he has been terrible. I've been commenting on his posts. Just terrible. Marvel equivalency everywhere. But worse, taking anything the Palestinians are selling and your Hamas says at face value. And anything Israel says, do we really believe this? What evidence have they presented? Do we believe the evidence? Like always with a skeptical tone. But Hamas says something. Oh, that's the absolute truth. He is driven like everybody, by almost everybody, by altruism. The weak, the oppressed are always right. Are always the good. Hey, guys, we need more likes. So don't forget to like the show before you leave. Don't forget to subscribe. If you're not a subscriber and don't forget to support the show on Patreon or in your own bookshow that comes last support. PayPal. Boss says, buy some Bitcoin today. You will not regret it. Or you will maybe. I can't pronounce this name. Kabutra Han from again, no, no way. Are you in favor of urban planning? No, I'm not in favor of urban planning. Not of government urban planning. I'm in favor of private urban planning. That is private companies buying pieces of land, large pieces of land and building cities, neighborhoods, whatever you want to call it on there and having it planned that way. So as long as it's private, fine, planning is good. What I'm opposed to is any kind of government urban planning. That is the imposition of government on how we should live. And it is devoid of competition. And it again is not a world of government. The world of government is to protect us from criminals, frauds, rapists, murderers, but to leave us alone otherwise. And that means to plan for ourselves. And that means that if individuals want to buy up vast quantities of land and plan something and build on it based on that kind of planning, I'm all for. So government should not be zoning and should not be planning. Not the world of government. And it only distorts. Andrew, thoughts on the self-esteem of a country that indicates by its attitude towards immigration. Yeah, I've said this many, many times. A self-confidence country, confidence in its values, confidence in what it stands for, confidence in its system of government, is open to immigrants because it knows that it can assimilate anybody who comes in. It knows that anybody comes in will leave his garbage behind and bring only the good that he has to offer. Because the culture of the country you emigrate to will not tolerate the garbage. Whether that's because of the rule of law or whether that's because just culturally they will not tolerate it. You might in your culture show up to work whenever you feel like it. Not in my culture. I fire you if you don't show up on time. It's one way in which immigrants are forced to adopt the host country's values. But that assumes they don't get welfare. That assumes they have to go to work. Work is an important way in which we assimilate immigrants. Demon, pay, day, son, okay. Hope you are having a good day, Iran. Also, cheers. I convinced my friend to read Atlas Shrugged. Now that he started, can't stop. We discuss each chapter. Fantastic. Thank you. That is great. Also, what would you do financially if you were in your early 30s today as a young objectivist, of course? Well, that's way too vague of a concept. What would I do financially? It depends on how much money I had, what kind of job I had, what my income was. It's very dependent. But why don't we do this, Demon? I will do, I promise this, but since I have to do, since I promise you guys positive shows, I'll do a show on financial planning. And really address young people in that context. But it very, very, very much depends on how much money you earn, how much money you have, your confidence in your future, what kind of job you have. It depends on all of those kind of things. And it depends on how you see the world. I still think a lot of value is going to be created in companies like AI and companies in Silicon Valley and so on. And I would try to invest accordingly or I would not abandon markets out of the notion that the world is going to end. The world typically doesn't end. We're still here. And when the world doesn't end, markets tend to do pretty well. Financial markets tend to be pretty well. All right, but I will do a financial planning class. All right, everybody, have a fantastic evening tomorrow. Don't forget to forget all the wars and struggles and problems and challenges that exist out there in the world. Relax, have a great time with friends and family. Eat a lot. You can exercise later. Don't drink too much. You can't rid of the alcohol if you drink too much. That never comes back. What else? Yeah, celebrate and show some appreciation to yourself, to yourself, to the productive in you. So, have a great Thanksgiving. I'll see you after the holiday on Friday. And yeah, thank you to all the superchattage. You guys were great. Thank you to Savannah, who got us over the top. I'll see you all very, very soon. Bye, everybody.