 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Book Show. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Book Show on this Friday. It's a frazzled day. It's one of those I can't keep track of days. February 2nd. All right, we're going into February. This is good. All right, we're going to jump into the news in a second. I want to make a quick request because I keep thinking about this and forgetting to do it during the show. So if you've got to do it right at the beginning and then jump into the stuff. I'm looking for somebody who is willing to either volunteer or with a big discount, redesign and redo my website. So create a new website for Iran Book for the show, for my books, for my appearances, for all of that stuff. So if there's anybody out there who is willing, interested, either as a volunteer or as a significantly reduced rate, to design a website, hopefully somebody experienced. And if you want to see the kind of website I would like, Sam Harris, John Peterson, look at those. Even Joe Rogan, that style of website. We can talk about more details if there's anybody interested. But somebody who's good at this and can really do it well and make it look great and make it easy to manage and easy to change and easy to update. All right, if you are interested, iran at iranbrookshow.com. Iran at iranbrookshow.com, just write me an email and we can figure out if we can do something. All right, let's jump in. We don't have a lot of time today. I thought I'd give a quick update on the wars out there. Let's start with the US response to the killing of three American soldiers in the base in Jordan. When was it? Almost a week ago now. It's coming. The response is coming. Don't worry, people. There will be a response and it's going to be any day now. And officials have leaked confidentially, but confidentially, of course. But unequivocally, they will not attack Iran itself. They will attack Iran's proxies in Syria and Iraq. And they've had five, six days now to prepare. So hopefully, I assume all those proxies are now dispersed and all their bases are empty. And so, you know, but it's going to be a thorough response to clearly dissuade Iran from attacking and hoarding American troops in the Middle East in the future. This will be decisive in terms of expressing America's commitment to protecting its own troops and its own military. So yeah, that is what the Biden administration has communicated. Biden's being super tough on this, of course. I mean, this is absurd, ridiculous. The fact that you have to wait five days, six days, and who knows when it'll happen. The fact that you telegraph exactly what your targets are and who's you're going to attack. The fact that they repeatedly every single day or more say, oh, no, no, we don't want to war with Iran. Pathetic, weak, and ultimately will only make the Middle East more deadly, more dangerous. For anybody who wants peace, anybody who wants a life, anybody who wants, you know, whether the Arab Jew is really American, whatever, the stronger Iran is, the more emboldened Iran is, the more crazy and violent and disruptive the Middle East will be. But the Biden administration is playing its part in making sure that they only become bolder. You know, part of this might be politics, right? Because although this is Iran, but Biden was in Michigan and Michigan has a large-arrow population. Michigan, of course, is a swing state. It could go Trump, Biden, pretty close. It's just a few thousand votes either way. As I mentioned earlier, there's a large-arrow population in Michigan, particularly in the Dearborn area, but generally largest-arrow population in the US is in Michigan. And is the video OK? Are we frozen? Is this thing OK? Can somebody confirm on the chat that everything's OK? Anyway, Biden was there yesterday. Maybe they delayed whatever attacks they were going to do because of that. So because they didn't want to do it while Biden was there. So maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe who knows? Sometime, sometime in the next year, the United States will respond to what happened. Let's see. I closed the window. Anyway, I also wanted to quickly update you on what's going on in Israel. I think the biggest thing in Israel right now is that Hamas is reviewing the ceasefire deal that Israel negotiated with the Egyptians and the Qataris. And Hamas is reviewing it now. I mean, this is great. Hamas has been elevated to a legitimate political entity that you negotiate with and you review proposals with. Israel won't actually deal with Hamas face to face. But intermediaries are fine. And think about the morality of this, of dealing with people who are monsters, people who clearly want to kill you, people who want to destroy you and commit it and keep saying that. Yes, they have hostages. But the whole point is with terrorists, with evil regimes is you do not negotiate with them. And Israel continues to negotiate them. And by that sanctioning Hamas, making emboldening it, making it clear that it is a legit political entity, and increasing the expectations among Hamas and among the Palestinians that Hamas will play a role in whatever happens in the Gaza after this war is over. Again, I think a travesty, I mean, saying it all along, right now there is this deal. It's hard to tell exactly what's in the deal. You keep reading conflicting comments. But it's something like a ceasefire from between 35 to maybe a month and a half, 35 to maybe 45 days, with the release of hostages, maybe one a day. So 35 hostages. Israel would release hundreds, maybe thousands of Palestinian prisoners. It sounds like Hamas is demanding that one of the released prisoners be Balguti, who is a prominent Palestinian leader who's got the blood of many Israelis on his hands from, I think, the Second Intifada. And so they're negotiating, made it forth, right? Just like you do in a deal with another site. Negotiations always assume that both parties have some equal stake here, and both legitimate parties to cut a deal. Deals are usually win-win. Yet this is any deal that's cut here is lose for Israel, big time lose for Israel. It's not clear if they can come to terms. It's not clear if Israel will agree to this. But the deal, I guess, the Hamas leadership is in Cairo right now to negotiate. And of course, the military wing of Hamas, which is in Gaza, still in Gaza, is reviewing this. And they're in communication. And everything is just hunky-dory. They're sitting in bunkers surrounded by hostages that Israel can bond those bunkers. They're sitting in tunnels that Israel cannot enter because they fear killing the civilians. But let's negotiate through Qataris and Egyptians. Qataris were insulted a couple of weeks ago because somebody in Israel said something nasty about them. Nobody said enough nastiness about them. They should have just got it. I mean, Qataris, again, are the funders of Hamas. They've supported this. They've encouraged this. They've made it. They made it October 7th possible. Now they're in a position to negotiate. Let's see. What else did I want to say? Israel seems to be in control of most of Hanyunas, which is in the south of the Gaza. This was the other big base of Hamas operatives other than Gaza City itself. They seem to have destroyed most of Hamas' fighting capabilities in Hanyunas. But there are still tunnels. There are still Hamas' leadership somewhere, somewhere maybe further south in what's called Rafa on the Egyptian border with Israel. But the reality is that while Israel seems to be in control in some areas, and casualties among Israeli soldiers seem to be down significantly, no progress it seems like has been made militarily to the free hostages or to kill the leadership of the Hamas. And this will be a defeat for Israel if it doesn't kill the leadership of Hamas and really occupy the entire Gaza Strip and destroy their capacity to inflict violence in Gaza or anywhere else. So there's still a long way to go if they want to win. I'm just not sure Israel, at this point, is committed to victory. It just isn't clear. Yeah, so I think those are the Middle East war updates, the Houthis. Yeah, the United States bombed the Houthis again. The Houthis attacked a US naval ship. I think that all the drones and ballistic missiles were knocked out of the air. But the Houthis are not going away. They're still blockading trade. The United States again bombed a few facilities, I guess, places where they navigate the drones to go and attack the ships. Drones are cheap. China will provide them to you by the dozen. And you're not going to win. You're not going to stop the Houthis by destroying drones or even by destroying the command control of the drones. That can be easily replicated. Sinking the Iranian ship in that area, the Iranian military ship, that would go a long way to deterring Iran and deterring the Houthis. Actually, intervening in the Houthi war, even just from the air, on the side of the Yemeni government and destroying the capability of the Houthis to defend themselves against the Yemeni government, that would go a long way for deterrence. But hitting a facility here, a facility there, on every second, Tuesday, or whatever, that ain't going to do it, guys. That's not how you fight a war, silly. Not how you fight a war to win. And all we're doing is emboldening the enemy. And if we're talking about emboldening the enemy, one of the consequences of, I love these headlines, Biden team signals calibrated response to US troop deaths. It's signaling, not saying it's a calibrated response. What does that mean? They killed three. What killed three? They maimed seven? I mean, what is calibrated? Calibrated to what? You would think that calibrated should be calibrated to victory, to victory. And the response to US troop deaths just to the deaths. You can attack American troops all you want. You could destroy American facilities all you want. You can challenge the United States all you want. What you can do is kill Americans. And if you kill Americans, our response will be calibrated. And by the way, we'll signal to you exactly what it's going to be in advance. I mean, the Biden administration is about as bad as it gets in these things. And it's been bad for a long, long time. The United States has been pathetic in these things for a long, long time. It's bad. All right, an example of the pathetic nature of American self-defense, it was, of course, the retreat out of Afghanistan that the Biden administration did a couple of years ago, which was just absurd and immoral. People lost their lives for no reason. American troops died in the evacuation. Many, many, many Iraqis who'd been promised safe haven by the United States were abandoned. Many of them killed Afghanistan, which had been kind of liberated from the Taliban 20 years ago, returned to the Taliban. Of course, we were told by the Trump administration, who signed a peace deal with the Taliban and the Biden administration, that the Taliban had changed and the Taliban had committed to not letting Afghanistan turn into a base of terrorism and they would not allow al-Qaeda back in. Well, I mean, everybody with a brain knew that was a lie. Anybody with a brain knew that the Trump peace deal with the Taliban was a complete betrayal of America and a complete betrayal of all those troops who had died in Afghanistan and a complete betrayal of 9-11 in America's attempts to defend itself for 9-11. It was worse than doing nothing. It was worse than just bringing the troops home without a peace deal. The peace deal again legitimized the Taliban, legitimized the claim, legitimized it in their own eyes and in the Afghan eyes. Anyway, the UN, the UN, I mean, here's an organization I don't trust, but if the UN says something like this, this I believe about the UN. The UN reports that al-Qaeda has established eight new training camps in the Taliban ruled Afghanistan and is increasingly assisting anti-Pakistan militants to launch cross-border attacks. So the al-Qaeda has established eight new training camps. I don't know if there were how many old training camps there were, but there are eight new training camps. They're training their own people by assisting the anti-Pakistan militants, terrorists. They, of course, are training on suicide bombing and infiltration and everything else. They have a base of operations. They have a command and control center now. I don't know who the current leader of the al-Qaeda is. I kind of haven't followed al-Qaeda in the last few years. I probably should get to know who it is because my estimation is that over time, as they grow, as they become more entrenched, as they gain resources, maybe they get some Qatari money or maybe Saudi money or maybe Kuwaiti money, any of those Gulf state might be providing al-Qaeda money. They will get stronger, more ambitious and that they will come or they will attack US somewhere in the world as well. But here you go. This is what American weakness, from Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden, looks like. It looks like the emboldenment and the success and the growth and the continued aggression of American, of the enemies of America, all over the world with really no consequence, really no consequence. All right, I thought this was a pretty cool story. This is from Topeka, Kansas. Topeka, it turns out, is actually the capital of Kansas, of the state of Kansas. Topeka has a problem, which I think many cities in the United States have. Indeed, we know there are many businesses in the United States have and that is, Topeka has a lot of unfilled jobs. There are a lot of jobs that just are empty and can't, a lot of people have left Topeka. And it doesn't have a large population. It's not a big city. I think it's a city of 126,000 people, something like that. Topeka is the capital, state capital of Kansas. I didn't know that. Don't know what I would have thought if somebody had asked me what the state capital of Kansas is. But anyway, it's Topeka. It has a shortage of workers. People don't move to Kansas. It just turns out a reality. So Topeka have come up with a creative way. Topeka is now marketing itself to immigrants. Anybody who has a permission to work in the United States can come to Topeka, is encouraging them to come to Topeka. They're going out and they're trying to attract primarily Latin America migrants who are coming in. Maybe they're seeking asylum. And after a certain amount of months where they can't work, they get a work permit. And Topeka wants you. If you're out there, if you're in a legal, illegal, illegal, it's hard to tell these days how you count what. If you have a work permit to work in the United States, no matter how you came into the country, Topeka, Kansas wants you. They are right now short of about 6,000 jobs. They would like to get you. Of course, what happens when migrants move in? More jobs are created. So 6,000 jobs is just to fill in the current gaps. But there will be more so they can absorb a lot more than 6,000 people. The school district is ready. Topeka already has a large Hispanic population. But they're also looking at Ukrainians and others. Anybody who can come in and can get a work permit to legally work in the United States, Topeka wants you. This should be the base and the foundation, the base and the foundation of the entire immigration system. Anonymous users says it's almost impossible to get permission to work in the US. This is the funny thing is that those people waiting for asylum for the courts, they can't work in the United States for something like six to nine months. But then they can get a work permit as long as they're in the system. As long as they're waiting for the court hearing, they can get a work permit. So it's a completely perverse, stupid, ridiculous system. They get a welfare for nine months, then they can work. And then they can work. Why them? Why not let anybody come into the United States? You can find a job. Why not make that the basis for the whole thing? So anyway, Topeka has discovered the model for immigration in the United States. Let employment agencies connect immigrants with jobs with employment, let employment agencies connect immigrants with businesses seeking workers and give them the permission to issue work permits after running FBI checks on the people who want the jobs. And anybody who gets a job through these work agencies can come into the United States. You can set up these work agencies all over the world. And you can bring in the best people, people who are connected directly to an employer and who hit the ground running in the United States with a job and therefore are not a burden on the welfare state. So the entire immigration problem. And then if you want to close the border, close the border. But you've made it so easy, nobody's going to try to sneak in anyway. And the people who try to sneak in are probably the criminals and the terrorists. So as I've said somewhere, I don't really mean this, but the equivalent of shoot them, right? They're criminals. But people coming for work are not. But if they're coming for work, they could get a visa. So they're not going to risk their lives. Easy. I just solved the entire border crisis. Set up the employment agencies right there in Mexico. Might take a little bit of time to make the connection. Don't think it would take that much time. And then they won't just go to one place. They won't go to New York City unless they can find a job in New York City. They won't go to Chicago unless their job's in Chicago. They won't go anywhere unless their job's in that place. Perfect, perfect solution to the immigration crisis. By the way, not my idea. This is an idea by a woman by the name of Helen Crebel, who's passed away now, but she for years tried to get Congress to take up this idea. And a few congressmen considered it, but it never, never managed to get any kind of momentum, never, ever managed to resonate with anybody. At the end of the day, Democrats don't want it because the unions don't want it because they don't want people coming in and taking jobs. They want to labor shortage because that drives up wages and in the unions. And of course, Republicans don't want it because, oh my god, we'll get all these people coming in here and they don't look like us and they don't have a culture ice and they might even vote Democratic. So you don't get it. So neither party really embraced this. But it is, of course, the solution. Anonymous says a lot of international students are not able to get work permits when they graduate. It has become quite difficult. Tell me about it. I was one of those international students. And I agree, absolutely. It is really, really, really, really difficult to come to the United States to work or if you're a student to get a work visa. But if you're an asylum seeker and you're willing to be on welfare for nine months, you can probably pull it off. Again, crazy policy that doesn't make any sense, not pro-America, isn't America first. America first would be pro-immigration. America first would encourage these migrants to come in. America first would not give them welfare, not one day of welfare. Daniel reminds us that today is Iron Man's birthday. I will be on the radio in half an hour. This is where I have to end on time, a little over half an hour, just after the hour in Denver in Colorado to do a segment on Roscoe Minsky's show on Iron Man's birthday. All right, Bukele. Bukele, remember we talked about Bukele? Bukele is, of course, the president of El Salvador, hugely popular. He's about to win an election in El Salvador by a huge margin. This is the guy who took the most, the deadliest country in the world with the most highest moderate in the world and has made it relatively peaceful. It's not completely peaceful, but it's completely livable. It's down. It's America standard. It's the US standard, most cities in America. So Bukele is going to win this election by landslide because he's made El Salvador livable for the people, even though he has authoritarian tendencies. And the way he did this is pretty authoritarian. Elements of it are elements that are right. Beef up your court system, do very speedy trials, arrest anybody with a gang insignia, the assumption, and then put them through speedy trials and be willing to incarcerate very, very large numbers of people. And that's what he's done. He's built some of the largest jails in the world and they've incarcerated tens of thousands of people and anybody associated with gangs is in prison now and crime rates have plummeted, plummeted. El Salvador now is a relatively peaceful country. That means investment is coming in. That means entrepreneurs are building up. The economy is going to flourish. Remember, the first job of government, the number one job of government is peace. It's to get rid of the criminals. It's to put the criminals, particularly the violent criminals and the fraudsters, but the violent criminals behind bars. Only once you take the criminals out of a society, particularly the violent ones, can you get civilization and can you get an economy going? Can you get markets to thrive? This is why one of the reasons I'm against anarchy is you need a mechanism to extract violence from society. Anyway, part of what's happened though is, and this relates to drug war, as long as we have a war on drugs, there is going to be high profits in running these gangs and dealing with drugs. And when they're high profits, if I can't do business in El Salvador anymore, because the drug members are all being arrested, then I just look for another country. And what's happened is violence has been exported to Costa Rica. Costa Rica violence is spiking. It used to be an incredibly peaceful place. Violence has been exported to Ecuador and to Honduras and to the rest and other countries in Central and Northern South America. And what is happening there is local politicians in these countries are now embracing the Bukele's methodology. And you're seeing big prisons being built in Honduras. And the Honduran president, for example, Castro, has declared a state of emergency and is facilitating a crackdown on organized crime. The mayors in Peru successfully pressured President Dina Urate to emulate that to some extent. And they're calling it the Bukele plan. And they've suspended constitutional rights, which is sad, but they've suspended constitutional rights. And they're allowing the military to take charge of work normally done by police. That was also something Bukele did. He used the military to do that. In Ecuador, where there's been, as I said, an explosion of violence. I'm reading from a Bloomberg article. Exposure of violence tied to Honduras drug gangs, of course. This used to be one of Latin American peaceful countries. The president, Daniel Nuboa, is planning to build a prison on ships and Bukele's time to mass detention centers on land to accommodate all the people that he's arresting. Some mass arrests going on all over the place. Now, the challenge here is twofold. One, OK, so you can't do it in Honduras and in Ecuador and in Peru. Do you go now to Panama? Do you go now to Colombia? I mean, this is a shift. You cannot solve the problem without legalizing drugs. I mean, that's the stunning thing. You cannot solve the problem without taking out the unbelievable, insane amount of profit that comes from something being illegal and the violence that is applied by dealing with something illegal. Where will the violence go in South America as a consequence? So that's problem number one. Problem number two, of course, is individual rights. What happens to your rights under a system like this? Are they ever returned? All these countries declaring states of emergency, are they always going to be in a state of emergency? Is there ever going to be an unwinding of the emergency? Or is this the new authoritarian push that's going to dominate Latin America in the name of doing away with violence? So things to watch and a real challenge in Latin America in one hand, I very much sympathize with this desire and need to clamp down on these violent gangs and to rid the world, rid the country, of their motorist behavior. On the other hand, I am worried about whether individual rights, whether the mentality, that kind of mentality, then affects the rest of the economy, the rest of the country, and emboldens the government to be more authoritarian or whether they limit this just to murder, violent crime, and gangs, and whether they keep respect for individual rights in every other realm. It's a tricky, very dangerous balance to do. All right, whoops, what happened to these? All right, these things disappeared. All right, two AI-related stories, one negative, one interesting. One of the legitimate worries about AI is the ability of people to use it, to do bad things. And some of the stuff that you've seen, bad things. Oh, we've got a Taylor Swift example of a bad thing that was done where AI has been used to put as Taylor Swift, I think it was Taylor Swift, on a porn star's body, put her face on a porn star's body as she commits sexual acts, as she stars in a porn video. And it looks like Taylor Swift is on there. And of course, that is horrible. It's a violation of somebody's rights. But the laws are not, we don't yet have proper laws to protect ourselves in these cases. We know that AI now can mimic a voice. AI can probably take my crazy accent. And it can actually create videos of me speaking that sound like me, or videos, audio of me speaking. And you wouldn't be able to tell. So if you see audio of your own book advocating for communism, it's AI. It's an AI fake. Well, one example of this was in Slovakia. Slovakia is Slovenia. I think it was Slovakia. Slovakia, yes, Slovakia. A fake recording of a political candidate, like two days before the election, went viral. The recording sounded exactly like him. And he was talking about how they'd rig the election. He was also talking about how he wanted to raise taxes on beer, making beer much more expensive. You don't do that in Slovakia. I mean, one can't tell how much of an effect it had on the election, but he lost. He lost the pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine candidate one. And the pro-EU, pro-NATO one lost. And Russia's very good at using AI for these kind of things. And it's definitely possible, right? It's definitely possible that AI could swing an election by creating newsworthy audio or video that has a candidate saying stuff that they don't believe in, but that could have a real impact on an election. So yeah, I mean, and it's interesting, because they can deny it. You can deny it, but it's very difficult to identify and prove that a particular video or a particular audio is fake. So it's going to be interesting to see how this is dealt with in the legal system over time. And whether anybody is prepared for this, and I expect to see a bunch of this kind of stuff going into the US 2024 election. I wouldn't be surprised if the Russians and the Chinese and do all kinds of things to kind of screw with our minds in terms of creating these AI-generated audio or video. And how do you know? I mean, you have to assess whether something is reasonable or not. But we know, you look at Taylor Swift being a psych-op operation of the Pentagon, people will believe pretty much anything. So the reason and common sense has gone out the window when it comes to elections. And lots of players are going to utilize that for all kinds of weird effects. By the way, that video that that Fox host Jesse Waters showed of the woman presenting, and he said it's a Pentagon presentation in front of NATO, she doesn't work for the Pentagon. She is an academic. The conference was not a NATO conference. I mean, nothing about his reporting. Nothing that he said there was true. Blatant lies. She's some academic. She was using this as an example. Had nothing to do with the Pentagon. It had nothing to do with NATO. It's all made up. And yet it created this firestorm in right wing circles that is still convinced the Super Bowl is rigged. Anyway, finally, about AI. And this one is to put AI in perspective. This is a kind of a cool story. It's an MIT technology review. And basically what this is saying, just to give perspective, and I'll read a couple of paragraphs on this, is human babies are far better at learning than even the very best large language model. Now, there really is a sense in which large language models are not learning, not if you view learning as an active, conscious process. But OK, and you can compare it to babies, I guess, because how conscious are they of what they're doing? Anyway, the point is human babies are better. To be able to write a passable English in passable English, chat UPT had to be trained on massive data sets that contain millions or even trillions of woods, trillions of woods. Children, on the other hand, have access to only a tiny fraction of that data. Yet by age three, they're communicating in quite sophisticated ways. A team of researchers at NYU wondered if AI could learn like a baby. What could an AI model do when given a far smaller data set, the sights and sounds experienced by single child learning to talk? So this is pretty cool. It turns out the AI could do quite a bit from that. So babies do a lot. But AI is just not, a human brain doesn't come close. It doesn't have any of the characteristics. And of course, again, not conscious. Yeah. So there is an interesting article in science about this experiment. The AI actually learns quite a bit from just they've got a helmet. They've got the children on a helmet with a camera here. And the AI model does pretty well. And it might be a new way to train these models. Because I think part of it is the way children expose the language is in a productive way. It's connecting words to objects. And the parents reinforce that. And it's all being reinforced. And rather than just unleashing an AI model on the language, here it's somewhat guided. And there seems to be a real benefit to that. Anyway, interesting article, matching words to objects, how AI does it versus how a child does it. Fascinating. And these children with the helmets on are a little spooky, a little scary to see them. But I mean, children, babies. But it is interesting. The whole field is an interesting field. And yeah, I'm excited about what the future has to bring us. All right, let's jump into some super chat questions. Little behind on the super chat. So just a reminder that the show is funded through support from listeners like you. The show doesn't exist without that. We have targets because those targets represent kind of what I need to earn in order to make this viable. If I own less than that, I have to think about other things to do. But that is the function of the targets. And that is the function of having these super chats. You can also support the show. And when we support the show, that way, the less super chat we have through Patreon or uranbookshow.com slash membership. Membership. All right, David. David, thank you, David, for the support. $20 really appreciate it. We need a few $20 right now. Off topic, when you refer to marginal investors making sure prices in markets don't stray too far from par level. Are you discussing hedge funds, CTAs, or other large speculators? I think in the world in which we live today, it's a lot of that is hedge funds. But it's also people like, maybe not in the moment, but over larger spaces of time. It's people like Juan Buffett, who identify opportunities and come in and buy. So it's anybody who is good at this, who has at his disposal a lot of money, is looking for opportunities in the space, looking from the perspective of valuation. And I think today hedge funds serve a big chunk of that. And they have to be active investors. They have to be willing to buy at a certain price and not buy at another price and engage then active in the process. Let me thank anonymous user for the $0.99. Jonathan Honing, thank you as well. We've also got Mike, who put in $20. Thank you, Mike, really appreciate that. We've got Andrew with the question, $20 question. Interested that the right claims, the things they don't like are the results of being rigged? Is that lazy thinking, ignorant cynicism, cynicism interested in your general thought on the rigged phenomena? Look, I think rigged is exactly the same phenomena as conspiracy theory. And both left and right suffer from that, particularly as you move further out into the fringes of the left and the right. The left thought elections were rigged, and the left has its conspiracy theories. The right, of course, is more prominent these days as advocates for conspiracy theories and rigged election. It basically comes from emotionalism, a rejection of facts, of reality, of evidence of the census, and of reason. It comes from, I don't know, ignorance is the right word, evasion. Evasion in order to justify your emotions, in order to justify your anger, your rage, your frustration, your wanting the world to be different, kind of a primacy of consciousness attitude. I want the world to be a world in which I won. And that is held deep down, and that causes you to come up with all kind of rationalizations for why you didn't win, or they cheated. That's a good way to rationalize it away. And it's certainly a consequence of cynicism about the system, about the world, about truth, about justice. But at the core, it's a rejection of reason, which you can see in these fringes. And it's an embrace of, I will find rationalization for whatever I feel, whatever I feel. And you could see that with all the election denial in 2020. You refuted one set of facts. Say when, I mean, one set of claims, not facts. You refuted one set of claims. So they go and find another set of claims. And you refute that, and they go find another one. You refute that, and they go find another one. It's all based on the emotion and facts. Reality don't matter. Don't matter. And yeah, I did want to add this point. And this is part of what makes it so popular, so widespread, is a cynicism, is a cynicism and a suspicion of our institutions, a lack of trust in the legal institutions, the courts, they're all rigged against Trump. In the election system, it's rigged. In football, in popular culture, well, I mean, politics is everywhere. It comes from this attitude, yes, that our institutions are crumbling, and that they've been politicized. Every single institution has been politicized, even football has been politicized. Biden wants Kansas City to win, Kansas City will win. Matthew, as it's February 2nd, do you have any thoughts on the philosophy of the movie Groundhog Day? Personally, I love most of it. Yeah, I mean, it's very clever, it's funny, it's fun. And I think that it's basically, it's a good movie. It's a movie about the pursuit of values. It's a movie about a cynic, somebody who is driven, again, by hate and by resentment and by anger, and he doesn't care about anything, he doesn't like anybody, he's just nasty. He's just an angry, nasty human being. And he comes around and he falls in love. He discovers values, he discovers what it takes to pursue values. And only when he is fully committed to values, only when he's fully committed to his love, and to, again, the pursuit of values in a proper sense, only then is he transformed as a human being. And this is where you build your own soul, only when he's built a new soul, when he's changed who he is, transformed who he is. And that is possible to human beings. Only then does whatever happens in the movie stop happening. And the repeat, the fact that it's repeat. So I think it's a very clever movie and very enjoyable. Jacob, would the agency be the hook to remove the immigrants if the jobs, would the agency be the hook to remove the immigrants if the jobs dried up, a certain timeframe to find a new job? Yeah, I guess. I mean, all you have to do is make them ineligible for welfare. If they want to stay, if they made enough money on the job and they want to stay, I'd say the visas would be five-year visas. They'd be renewable automatically if you had a job, but it wouldn't have to be the original job. It could be any job. I wouldn't want people removed unless they're five years or up and they don't have a job. But I think the whole idea is if you come and you have a job and you have money, you can stay the five years, as long as you're not living off of welfare. So yeah, so they'd be finite visas. Fender Harper, PSA, Public Service Announcement, AI used to replicate the voice, image, and person of a real person is referred to as deep fake in case you want shorthand term for the phenomenon. Yes, deep fake. Thank you, friend Harper. That is right. All right, this is the last question. What happened to your hedge fund? It's still there. We still have it. It did not have a good year last year. What happened to the banks in March of last year really hurt us. We had a large investor leave. So the amount of money we managed has shrunk. And as a consequence of that, I just don't have any income coming from the hedge fund in a short run in this year. So I'm basically living off of the show and lecturing and things like that. So that is the issue. But the hedge fund still exists. And if it grows, and I hope it does, and working towards it doing, we will do OK. And we didn't end the year badly. We ended the year. I mean, December was a phenomenal month. And we added the year only down, I think, 3% for the year. So I'm not pitching. I'm not doing it. Anybody's listening. So you asked. I'm telling you. But hopefully, we'll have a good year this year. We'll get new investors. And we will stop making money again, which is the whole goal. Andrew, following up on the rigged and not just to find a mentality, but how much of the distrust in the cultural institutions do you view as warranted? I think some distrust is warranted. But for different reasons and in different aspects, I generally trust the electoral system in the United States. Is there fraud? Sure. But it's probably on both sides. And it's not. I don't think it's usually large. I would like to see the electoral system in the United States so I can many other countries shift to all electronic computer-based. The Republicans want to shift it to all paper-based. It strikes me as we live in a technology world. You'd think you'd be able to, through a blockchain, be able to secure an election system that can be verified and where you get vote tallies instantaneously. You know, as soon as the thing closes, exactly who lost and who won. I don't see how the United States cannot build something like that. But the court system, hard to tell how much to trust it, how much to trust it and where to trust it. But the reality is that once we lose trust completely in a court system, it's anarchy. I mean, then it's over. As a culture, it's completely over. So still at the margin, but still for the most part, unless there's evidence against, I trust the court system in the United States, I don't trust politicians of one iota. I think they're all philosophically corrupt and many of them are monetarily corrupt. So a lot of the distrust of political entities, but that doesn't manifest itself in, I don't know, going after Taylor. I mean, if they were in pizzerias with, you know, funneling pedophiles or space laders is run by Jews or Taylor Swift being an operative of the Pentagon, none of that distrust justifies any of that. All right, guys, we will call it a day. I have a radio interview in a few minutes. I will say that I've, you can expect, hopefully, see me or hear me a lot more on radio in the coming months and maybe on TV. We've got a PR firm that is trying to pitch me and it should be interesting to see if they can. I'm doing two radio shows next Tuesday. We'll see if we get some TV or not. The radio show I'll be on in a few minutes is in Denver or Colorado. It's Roscoe Minsky's. I can't remember the name of the show. He just asked me to come on this morning, so I don't really have it. All right, happy birthday, I'm Rand. Thank you all of you. I will see you all tomorrow for an AMA for ask me anything tomorrow, 2 p.m. east coast time. Bye, everybody.