 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... I can't keep track anymore. Wednesday, Wednesday morning, December 28th. We're approaching New Year's Eve very quickly here. Don't forget we've got a big show on December 31st. I hope you can all join us at 2 p.m. East Coast time. All right, let's jump right in. Title 42. Yesterday, Jennifer asked me a question about Title 42, which was that the Supreme Court had just ruled to keep Title 42 basically indefinitely until the court hears arguments and then makes a decision. So we're looking at probably well into spring of next year. Title 42 allows the border police to instead have people who cross over and want to apply for asylum instead of them filling out the forms, doing everything and then waiting in the United States, I guess, in detention until they have their day in court, which is taking longer and longer and longer because of how many people are coming for asylum. It allows them to send them back across the border to Mexico. And I guess there's a Trump administration cut a deal with Mexico to do that. All of this was passed during COVID and the excuse, the justification for the executive order to, in a sense, overturn regular legal American procedures was COVID. So this was explicitly a executive order signed in the context of COVID, in the context of a health emergency. And whether you like this particular provision, Title 42 or not, it's a question of the rule of law is that is the health emergency has passed should the law keep going or should there be something else passed? There should be some other law rule that is passed in order to deal with this. This went to the Supreme Court. 19 Republican states, red states applied to the Supreme Court to ask the Supreme Court to extend Title 42. The Supreme Court chose yesterday to grant that extension and to hear arguments about it later in the year and to see whether they would extend it permanently or not, but it for now will extend into the spring. What I found interesting when it all came out was that Judge Gorsuch, Neil Gorsuch actually voted against this decision. So the decision was five to four in a 63 conservative majority. Gorsuch sided with the liberal justices. And I predicted when I talked to Jennifer, I predicted that he did it on the basis of a rule of law division of powers and so on. And that's exactly what happened. So this is the quote from Gorsuch's opinion in opposition to keeping Title 42 around. And he writes, the current border crisis is not a COVID crisis. Courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency, only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency. The different emergency is all those people on the border who want to come, who would cross over if Title 42 was eliminated and wait for their asylum in the United States. He added, we are a court of law, not policymakers of last resort. That's good. He's a good writer. So I agree completely with Gorsuch. You want to solve the border crisis, pass a law. You want to solve the issues, the underfunding of the courts, the underfunding of Border Patrol, the crazy asylum laws that we have, pass a law. You want to institutionalize Title 42 as forever, pass a law. The courts should not be here allowing the executive to use a order that was passed to deal with one emergency in order to deal with another emergency. I think it's wrong. I think it's a violation of the responsibilities. So it's a violation of the separation of powers. Congress should do its job. The president should do its job. You remember when Conservative used to complain about the courts legislating from the bench and Conservative says, no, no, the court shouldn't legislate from the bench. It's not their responsibility. Well, that's what the Supreme Court just did. They legislated from the bench. Here's a continuation of what Gorsuch wrote. He says, quote, the states may question whether the government followed the right administrative steps before issuing this decision, an issue of which I express no view. But they do not seriously dispute that the public health justification undergirding the Title 42 order has lapsed. So whatever you think of Title 42, and I don't have a strong opinion about it, I would like the whole immigration law changed or at least the whole portion on asylum change. There has to be a more rational way of dealing with these kind of things. And it cannot be that anybody, the United States must, in its immigration law, prioritize asylum over everything else. So you need a new immigration law. You need a proper immigration law until Republicans and Democrats come together to actually do something rational here. The border will continue to be a mess. Building a wall will not help. Having Title 42 has not helped. Getting rid of Title 42 will not help. None of these things, these all little, they're not even band-aids. They're nothing. They're nothingness. And they're just a waste of resources, a waste of energy. What needs to happen is to actually, and there was talk about a compromise bill that just dealt with the issues happening on the border these days between, I think, cinema and one of the Republicans, and they had a compromise bill, but maybe because cinema has left the Democratic Party, the Democrats didn't want to support it, and maybe because Republicans are just obnoxious about immigration, about any aspect of immigration, and don't want to offend the base, which is fanatical about immigration. A compromise bill around something like this cannot be achieved, and therefore you can't have a solution. If your legislature is dysfunctional, there are no solutions, and the court should not provide a solution. Let the constituents of the politicians who cannot get their act together, let them suffer the consequences. All right. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Ryan. We do have our usual 250 Super Chat goal, so please jump in with your support. Mike and Ryan didn't even ask a question, just showed support. But you can ask a question, so far no questions. So we, there's plenty of room and time to ask a bunch of questions, Super Chat questions. Tesla stock. Tesla stock. Tesla stock has been going down all year together with the NASDAQ. It has high beta, high correlation with the NASDAQ, but over the last month or so, it has accelerated its decline. I think yesterday it went down something like 11%. It is down 71% since the beginning of the year. It has done dramatically since its highs at the end of last year. You know, it has come down to earth. Now, you know, some of you think I enjoy saying this, and I guess maybe I do. I told you so. I told you so a long time ago. Tesla stock, I think, was bubbly. It was overvalued. It had a lot of hype associated with it. It was associated with a hype related to Elon Musk, Magic Touch. It was associated to the hype around electric vehicles, but more than that it was associated to the hype, I think, associated with the fact, oh no, no. And I was told you in the chat, Tesla is not an electric vehicle company. It's a data company. It's really competitive with Apple. Really? So yes, Tesla has a lot of data on people driving. Whether that data can easily be monetized, it's not clear. What Tesla can exactly do with that data that is monetizable is not clear. A lot of companies have a lot of data. I don't think you build a business just around having that data. Yes, Tesla also builds robots. My guess is those robots are expensive to build. A lot of R&D goes into them. But where is the monetization of those robots? It hasn't happened yet. On the car side, on the EV side, Tesla faces ever-increasing competition. It faces competition from American automakers who are using electric vehicles, building electric vehicles because they're mandated to do so. They're building electric vehicles because they are being subsidized to do so. They're building electric vehicles because electric vehicles can be lost. Leaders, American auto companies can afford to sell electric vehicles at a loss. Or generally, people who manufacture automobiles in the United States, and that includes German car manufacturers, Korean car manufacturers, Japanese car manufacturers, who actually manufacture cars in the United States, can afford to sell their electric cars at a loss because where do American car makers make money? American car makers make money on only basically two types of cars. And this has been true for decades now. They make money off of pickup trucks and SUVs. They make money off of heavy cars where these cars for a variety of reasons are less regulated. They have less restrictions on gas efficiency. And there is a 25% tariff, 25% tariff on importation of pickup trucks. Maybe SUVs, but certainly pickup trucks. So American companies face a lot less competition, a lot less competition. Ford, GM make their money on pickup trucks. So they can afford to sell cheap EVs at a loss. They can over time compete with Tesla. Even if Tesla makes the best, competition will drive down profit margins. That's what it always does. Competition will reduce its market share. It has to just run the numbers. And the second, the other aspect of this is one of the great advantages that Tesla had is its networking, its network of, they've decided to clean the windows just outside my office right now. So if you hear booming sounds in the background, that is they got pounding in my window as he's cleaning it. What was I saying? Yes, Tesla has an advantage because it's built this charging network, right? It has these electric charging networks that are specifically for Teslas. And it has that advantage. That advantage is going away because the bipartisan bill, the bipartisan bill, infrastructure bill that was passed this year, earlier this year, actually allocates gazillions of dollars to build a massive charging network all over the country, basically subsidized by the US federal government, subsidized by all of us who are taxpayer money and our children and grandchildren. And so that advantage that Tesla has is going to go away over time. So all of that does not bode well for Tesla. You know, generally electric vehicles are a ridiculous vanity, the virtue signaling or just fun exercise, they make no economic sense. They don't even make sense from a carbon emissions perspective given the cost and the difficulty of creating the batteries. But the real problem, I mean, there are lots of real problems with EV, we'll have to do a whole show on them. But one of the big problems with EV is we're going to have hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of charging stations all over the United States. Most of them are going to be in the middle of nowhere and are going to fall into disrepair and nobody's going to have the incentive to maintain them and to repair them because the government is subsidizing, building them, paying to build them, not to maintain them. But second, where's all the electricity going to come from? I mean, nobody talks about this. We have blackouts everywhere. Where's all the electricity going to come from? The grid that the United States has cannot, cannot sustain everybody driving electric cars. It cannot sustain charging stations all over the country, including in the middle of nowhere. There is just not enough electricity flowing through the grid. The grid is not stable enough, the grid is not robust enough, and there's just not enough electricity generation. I mean, if we replace fossil fuels with electricity to move our cars, you're just going to have to burn a huge amount of additional fossil fuels in order to create that electricity during the cars. So it's just, it really is insanity. Instead of letting the electric vehicle market grow organically based on demand, based on people's priorities, instead of letting charging stations grow where they're most needed, where they sell the most electric cars, that's not going to happen because the government is just going to plaster the whole United States with this and it's going to create, it's going to create massive problems both for electric car owners and for the rest of us because our electricity is going to get sucked away into electric cars instead of lighting our homes and running our computers. So yeah, nuclear power should be a big part of the solution, but good luck with that. Good luck with that, right? Again, way behind on the 250s is just a reminder on that. And then finally, the reason for Tesla stock, the reason given by many Tesla stock investors for selling their Tesla stock and putting downward pressure on the price is the fact that their CEO, the CEO of Tesla, is a little distracted by the fact that he is basically a full-time CEO of Twitter. And the Tesla investors are claiming is a massive destruction. Tesla is also, you know, those kind of signs that Tesla might be having problems selling all their cars. They might having some problems with production in China again because of COVID, but they're trying to get rid of inventory right now. So all kinds of business signals that Tesla might be having problems. And then the CEO is not running Tesla and has not appointed a replacement CEO, but instead is running Twitter and engaging in Twitter wars and devoting all his time to that. And we might all love it that Elon Musk is at Twitter. I think it's super entertaining and I think probably the end result of it will be a better Twitter. But in the meantime, but that's because I don't own Tesla stock. If you own Tesla stock, you're pissed off. Where's your CEO? And on top of that, he's selling Tesla stock. Not a good sign when your CEO and largest owner is selling stock. Now he's not selling stock because he's lost, we think he's lost faith in Tesla. He's selling stock in order to beef up his position in Twitter. And rumors have it that Twitter bondholders, the banks are basically putting pressure on Elon Musk to buy their debt or to basically put up collateral Twitter stock as collateral for the debt. And they're asking for $100 worth of Twitter stock for every $25 of debt. So of Tesla stock, $100 of Tesla stock for every $25 of Twitter debt. So Elon Musk is going to have sold a lot of Tesla stock in order to be able to fund and run and sustain Twitter. He's basically subsidizing Twitter after Tesla stock. Now maybe he'll turn it around and make it profitable, but that is not in the near future. Not in the near future. So there is downward pressure from Elon Musk selling from people upset at Elon selling. People have set it along because he's not running the company and because he's selling and because he's distracted and because the company might have some issues and then people are also coming to realize maybe it was never worth as much as it was worth. Maybe it was just a bit of a fantasy to believe it was worth as much as it was worth. Now I know I'll get people telling me that oh it's going to be a $2 trillion, if the first $10 trillion company or whatever and wait and see you're on. Yeah, I'm here. I'm waiting. I'm not going anywhere. You can come back and tell me, told you so down the road. But for now, I don't know if all of the bubble is burst, but much of the Twitter bubble, sorry, much of the Tesla bubble has burst and the people have lost a lot of money and the people who were buying on dips have been losing a lot of money because the dips are just getting deeper and deeper and deeper. We will see what happens next year with Tesla stock. Maybe now is a good time to buy. Certainly wasn't a good time to buy late last year and early this year. All right, let's see. Quick update on a developing story in, oh, just as an aside, I just wanted to, just because I've been covering this story about Russia for a while, a Russian tycoon a couple of days ago died after an apparent fall from a hotel window in India. He fell from the third floor. I think he was probably going for a low floor because of this tendency of Russian tycoons, oligarchs to fall out of windows. This guy fell out of the window, the third floor and died in India. Reports say he was depressed and he committed suicide. And the reason he was depressed, we are told, is because his travel companion, who was also a Russian something, wealthy Russian person, died a few days earlier in the same hotel from what is described as a heart attack. So, whoa, it's just, I mean, you couldn't, if we created a comedy, call it, Russians falling out of windows, you couldn't come up with this stuff, you couldn't make this stuff up. Of course, Indian authorities are saying this is all, there's no far play here, no far play. I mean, one Russian drops dead out of a heart attack, wasn't poisoned, I'm sure Russian heart attack, and then the other, and both of them in India are not in Russia. I wonder why they're not in Russia, maybe because Putin, maybe because they were running away from Putin. And then the other one falls out of a window and the assumption is it's suicide because he was depressed because the other guy had died. You cannot make this stuff up, but this is the news as reported by TheHill.com, right? And I think it was in Reuters and it was elsewhere. Russians, and you know, for those of you who are pro-Russia, all these Russians are falling out of windows in spite of the fact that Russia is this wonderful country with this amazing, masculine, phenomenal leader and Russians is just who the Russians love and embrace. And the Russian economy is doing fantastically well. This is why all these Russians are falling out of windows, particularly in places that are not in Russia. Although, they're falling out of Russian windows too. God, and people still defend Russia after knowing that basically what Putin is doing is killing off all his opponents all over the world in what look like accidents. And yet, he's the good guy. No, Zelensky, he's the bad guy. Putin's the good guy. Bizarre. All right, there is a region in Europe which is on at the brink of war again. You know, and again and again, this is the Balkans. There seems to be significant tension between Kosovo and Serbia. Troops on the border and a lot of Saber-Ratling. This is, Kosovo is, the common tension is an outcome ultimately of the war that was fought between Kosovo or people who live in Kosovo and Serbia, what both used to be part of Yugoslavia. This is a war fought in 1998 and 1999, a war that NATO, including the United States under the Clinton administration, participated in on the side of Kosovo. Kosovo wanted to split off and create its own entity. The Serbians objected. There's a significant, so here's the thing. People who live in Kosovo are ethnically, whatever the hell that means, right? They are tribally part of the Albanian tribe. They are Albanians. They are Albanians ethnically or, I don't know how you want to call it, tribally. And they are also generally Muslims, very secular Muslims, but they are generally Muslims. The Serbians who live there are Slavs. They are not from the Albanian tribe. They are from the ancient Slavic tribes. And they, you know, so that's Serbia. There's also, of course, Bosnia. There's also Croatia. There's also Macedonia. Sorry, northern Macedonia is not a lot of call themselves Macedonia, the northern Macedonia. And there's Montenegro, each one claiming some kind of tribal identity that separates them from what used to be Yugoslavia. And of course, God forbid the tribes actually lived together under one shared national roof. What would happen if all governments did was protect individual rights and actually let tribes live together under the same place? I mean, maybe we'd get something like the United States of America, God forbid. But in Yugoslavia, when the communist government ultimately was eliminating Yugoslavia, what happened was a shift from communism to tribalism. And the shift from communism to tribalism involved wars, where the Serbs who were the dominant faction within Yugoslavia tried to keep Yugoslavia together under their rule, of course. And the Croatians, the Bosnians, the Montenegrins, the Macedonians, and then ultimately the Kosovoians all rebelled and tried to establish their own little domains. Ayn Rand wrote in anticipation of this in the 1960s, she wrote an essay called Global Buccaneization. This is before the 1990s Buccaneization, but it's been known for 200 years that this part of the world is insane, nuts, murderous, tribal, and tribal to the extent of being willing to basically massacre the other side and the wars when Yugoslavia broke up were horrific and brutal and involved massive massacres. To this day, Bosnia-Herzegovina is this mishmash place of trying to have two tribes under the same roof and flare-ups come up. Anyway, in 1998, 1999, Kosovo decided it wanted to split from Serbia. Serbia objected. They started massacring the Kosovoians. NATO said, wait a minute, this is in Europe. We need to intervene to a large extent out of guilt because they didn't intervene in the wars with Croatia, in the wars with Bosnia, in the wars with the other wars. So they intervened here. They intervened on the side of the Kosovoians because they were the weak side and basically allowed Kosovo to win the war. NATO troops were stationed in Kosovo, including American peacekeeping troops, and for a while Kosovo had no real political identity, but then in 2008, 10 years after the war, Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia and now there are basically two countries where Serbia doesn't recognize the existence of Kosovo and is objected to things like Kosovo joining the UN and all kinds of other things. There are still NATO troops, by the way, in Kosovo patrolling them. So that's kind of the background, but there's always tension there because Belgrade, Serbia still thinks Kosovo is part of it and it doesn't really recognize the government in Kosovo. Kosovo claims independence and has NATO troops to protect it. Other aspect of this is partially because of historical reasons, partially because of tribal reasons and partially because of being anti-NATO reasons, Serbia is aligned with Russia and aligned with Putin and there's no question Putin would like to distract NATO, Putin would like to distract the Europeans, Putin would like to create tension somewhere else in Europe to distract everybody from what's going on in Ukraine and therefore over the last few weeks we've seen a significant escalation of tension between Kosovo and Serbia. That tension really escalated when Kosovo arrested a Serbian police officer claiming he'd attacked something or other. I don't think the details are that important. The Serbians insist he didn't do it and insist that he be released. The Kosovoans say no, the Serbians then, this is Serbians inside Kosovo. These are the Serbian minority tribe within the Kosovo majority, Albanian tribe. So they start attacking each other, they set up roadblocks, they closed the border with Serbia. The Serbians then objected to the way the Serbian brothers, in quotes, were being treated by the Kosovoans and now they're all in the bink of war and NATO's frantic because NATO has troops there, NATO would be in the middle of it and the Russians are of course egging on the Serbians and who knows, I don't know if Albania has any stake in this, but it's just insane, it's just crazy, it's just irrationality, tribalism, this is what it leads to, this is what happens when countries split up and fragment into this tiny little thing, this is what happens when you let everybody secede. But of course the alternative to letting everybody secede is to have a massive war and force them to stay, which is untenable either. So all of this is basically a consequence of irrationality, of tribalism, of a disrespect, a fundamental deep disrespect of individual rights that permeates the world. Ayn Rand talked about it brilliantly in global organization, an essay that should be read today, it is essential for reading today, and God help us from a world descending into tribalism is a world of violence. It is a world, this is what the National Conservatives want, a tribalistic ethnic based world where every little ethnicity and tribe has its own little country, and of course this is complete fragmentation, this is disintegration, this is how the world disintegrates into little wars and goes back to the Middle Ages where that's what we were, little tribes fighting each other. All right, that's the Warner Balkans. I thought you'd want a quick update because it's in the news and it's all over the place. Tiktok, Tiktok continues to be in the news, Tiktok, there's still no kind of solution for the issue. Tiktok is a company that owns it, by dance is headquartered in China, every Chinese company by law has to be willing to give its data to the Chinese government. Whether Bitdance has given the Chinese government data or not is unclear but it could and therefore there are privacy concerns and there are national security concerns or at least claims of national security concerns. Part of the national security concerns have to do with disinformation, oh all our young kids are going to be brainwashed by Chinese propaganda on Tiktok and therefore we have to stop Tiktok from brainwashing our kids. I don't buy any of the disinformation BS. What we need to do is, I didn't buy it when Russia was trying to change the election results, people need to be responsible for the information they consume, they need to be responsible for figuring out what's true and what's not and stop blaming foreign agents for quote disinformation. I think we need responsible people in the United States who are fact checkers, responsible people in the United States who are trying to present objective information and let everybody try to fight that. The issues of privacy are a real concern but you know those are issues that individual Tiktok users should be able to deal with. There's absolutely zero reason to ban Tiktok unless there's an actual national security issue. What the US government can and should do is tell American people, look, if you use Tiktok, understand the risk. The risk is that China might use your, might have access to your user data. If you don't care, if you don't care that the Chinese government might have access to your user data then keep using Tiktok. If you do care, stop using Tiktok. It's very, very simple but it should be an individual decision. I don't see how the government has any business in this except if there's a national security issue. And where is the national security issue? Okay, so CIA operatives, please don't use Tiktok. FBI agents, please don't use Tiktok, although FBI, I'm not sure, sensitive people in the Defense Department don't use Tiktok. So I'm fine with not allowing federal employees to use Tiktok although most federal employees are not exactly, you know, dealing with classified information so who cares. But this whole thing that Trump started and now is, you know, the whole government is against this, Democrats or Republicans, they all share one thing. They all want to get rid of Tiktok. Why? What the hell is going on? Everybody is eager for us to be in some real conflict with China and I'll do a show next week about this. Why? I mean, there's certainly reasons to worry about China and to be concerned about China and to deal with China on a national security level and to arm ourselves and prepare ourselves. But there is clearly a desire on left and right to escalate this and to make it worse than I think it has to be. And maybe, and I think that is going to push us into a situation where we will have a cold or maybe even a hot war with China where the United States is pushing in that direction. So, Robert says, the national security issues that they obtain enough metrics and uses that they more easily able to manipulate users to be Chinese sympathetic. There is no national security, propaganda is not a national security issue, sorry. Manipulating people, people have free will and, you know, treat people as adults. It's time that the American government treated us as adults. And the more they treat us as children to be manipulated by the Chinese government, the more we will become children. The more the government treats us as children with welfare and everything else, the more we will be children. It's time for the US government to treat us as adults. We can figure out what data, what information we should use or shouldn't use. The idea that we're all just easily manipulated by some Chinese bots or some Russian bots is an insult to human beings. In addition, supposedly there's a solution whereas Oracle has agreed to store all the data of American citizens on servers in the United States and not allow the Chinese access to it. I mean, I think it is incumbent on the US government to warn Americans about the potential use of this data, to warn them about what China might do with this data, to warn them about potential manipulation. But it's individuals' responsibility to decide whether to use the platform or not and then whether they are willing to be manipulated or not. Bree says, I have wholesome videos on TikTok and so does Iran. I have videos on TikTok. I guess I do, but I've never been on TikTok. I know what TikTok is, but somebody puts videos of mine on TikTok. I have no idea what's on there. All right. You know, an American company should compete instead of going to the government to protect themselves. Who benefits from banning TikTok? Facebook, Twitter, those are the beneficiaries. Instagram, which is Facebook. Oh, and YouTube. YouTube has short YouTube shorts, which are basically competition to TikTok. Obviously not very successful. So Google, Twitter and Facebook are the beneficiaries of banning TikTok. I don't think those companies have anything to do with the fact that there's so much hype about banning TikTok in the United States. All right. So that's my spiel for today, December 28th. All right. Let's turn to Super Chat. Before we do that, I'll just remind you, I don't know why I keep clicking on the button three times. I'll have to control myself and only click once. Oh, $180 short of our goal of $250. I know we do have the December 31st show, which is going to have a $10,000 match on Super Chat. And some of you might be saving your ammunition for that. So it's whatever I want to say. Yeah. Anyway, so some of you might be saving it, but hopefully there won't be then a downfall in Super Chat money after the 31st. But we'll see. Anyway, we do have a $10,000 match. I hope you all join the show. It's going to be a long show, but you can come in and out, say hello, make a contribution and support of the show. It'll be December 31st at 2 p.m. East Coast time. All right. We don't have a lot of Super Chat questions. That's good because I went over today as usual. Schausbach says, how many solar panels does it take to make a solar panel? I don't think solar advocates have thought of that. How many solar panels does it take to make a solar panel? You know, solar, I have no idea. I don't know. All right. Schausbach says, what would happen to Putin and Russia if he televised the executions of his opponents rather than disguised them as accidents? Well, some of these, I don't know. Some of these oligarchs might group up together and try to depose him. I'm not sure there would be much of a difference because everybody knows what these things are. And so it's a very thin disguise, but I really don't know. Maybe some of the governments where agents are killing Russians off, like India and other places, would be more forced into being more hostile towards Russia. Right now, they can pretend that these are all accidents, but maybe if they couldn't pretend that, maybe they would actually be more hostile towards Russia. Jeffrey, thank you. Really appreciate the support. Ryan says, let's see, I call current government dictates and subsidies eco-fascism because they are manipulating business economy to meet societal goals. Is this a good term? Will there be a reckoning at the ballot box? No, I don't think there'll be a reckoning at the ballot box. Nobody cares. And is this a good term? Yes, but it's an insider term. Most people don't know what fascism is. Most people don't understand the relationship between fascism and economic control. They think of fascism as racism or Nazis or things like that, and they don't quite see it. I would call it eco-statism. It's broader. I think it's more understandable. It's a state trying to intervene in what we do, and it's broader appeal to both left and right. Eco-fascism, they'll assume it's all on the right somehow. They won't know what to make of it because it's taking a leftist and a rightist term and combining it. So I don't know how useful it is, although it's true. And I don't see what reckoning there'll be at the ballot box. Certainly wacky environmental ideas, when they are explicitly expressed, tend to lose at the ballot box. But the Republicans are afraid to attack many of these wacky ideas. And the ones who do attack them have their own issues and problems that make them unelectable. So that's the problem is we don't have an alternative at the ballot box. A legit alternative. If we did, a lot of this nonsense would go away. Bash, Branigan, in your view, what monetary investment value is there in the prospect of self-driving cars? I mean, there is massive value in the prospect of self-driving cars. Self-driving cars will truly be a revolutionary thing. It will change the way our roads function. It will reduce traffic jams. It will reduce accidents. It will free up all of us, free us with time to do other things while the car drives itself. It'll make carpooling more logical and reasonable. So in every respect, it will be incredibly valuable and there'll be money in it and it will destroy the current model of autos because it's not clear that individuals will own automobiles. I mean, it could be that Uber, things like Uber come to dominate, you know, just cars roaming around and picking up passengers and dropping them off. So there's a lot going on there. But I think the question is not the value of it. The question is when does it happen? And I think we're far away from that, from it actually happening. I think that the promise of self-driving cars, just like the promise of electric cars, is a lot further into the future than what we think. It's a very complicated problem to have. It's a self-driving cars are facing massive regulatory barriers. They're basically big technological barriers, but also massive regulatory barriers. There's going to be a lot of lawsuits about self-driving cars once they go into place. So the vision of everything is self-driving and no traffic jams and all of this stuff. That is in the future at some point, but it's in the, I think, quite distant future, much more distant than most people believe. And therefore very hard to estimate its value today on a particular stock or what the cash flows are going to be and what the discount rate should be. Frank says, what is the difference between A is A and A equals A? I think is stronger. It's the same thing. It's an indication it's exactly the same thing. Equals is, you know, I can't exactly, equals doesn't always imply that it's the same thing, the same entity. It's more of a quantitative measure. A is quantitatively the same as this other A. Whereas A is A says that exactly the same thing. They have the same identity. It's beyond just quantitative. Colt says, I think that the breakup of Yugoslavia was more a bad thing other than socialism ending. Before I watched your show, I never had the confidence to say how stupid it was to break away based on ethnicity. Well, thank you Colt. I'm glad, I'm glad I've had a positive influence there. But yes, I think it's a horrible thing and it's inspired lots of other breakup movements, including Scotland. I did this talk about why Scotland shouldn't be an independent country. It's worth watching. I didn't. I think it's a good talk. You can find it on my channel. Just put you on book Scotland. I think you'll find it. John says, I've never understood the hysteria about TikTok. What's the worst a Chinese company could do? Send targeted ads to those who watch dance videos, et cetera, on TikTok. Well, they could write the algorithm to emphasize Chinese propaganda and they could suppress anti-Chinese content on TikTok and stuff like that. But that would make them very much the same as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube using the algorithm to suppress certain information, to highlight other information. And this just would be from a Chinese perspective. Who cares? So I would say it's good to have the information. It's good to know that this is happening and then adjust your behavior. They're a private company. Again, they can do what they want. You can use them or you can choose not to use them. And maybe you should choose not to use them, partially because they're Chinese, they're disturbed. But yes, this is part of Donald Trump's campaign to make us all hysterical about China. And again, part of certain elements within the conservative movements campaign to push for a type of Cold War with China. And again, I will talk about what I think their motivation is on a show maybe next week. John says, do you have any plans on visiting Austin or Mexico City in the near future? I was just in Mexico City a few weeks in, what was it, October, November? I was in Mexico City recently and gave a talk. And I gave a talk with Gloria Alvarez. And yes, I've done a lot of events with Gloria. Several of them in Mexico City, but we've done events together in Brazil, in Argentina, in Guatemala. I think in Guatemala, yes, Mexico City in Costa Rica. So yes, I'm quite friendly with Gloria. I like Gloria. I mean, I don't think she's a fighter. She's a popularizer. She's not a philosopher. Don't hold her up to those kind of standards. But she is, she's impressive. And I think she does good work and she tries to get the ideas out there. And again, I'm sorry you missed us, John, but we were both, we did events recently in Mexico City. I will be in Austin on, let me pull up my calendar. I will be in Austin in January giving a talk. It will be open to the public. So I hope if you're in Austin, you can join us. I will be in Austin. And I'll be talking about, you know, the fight for freedom engaged in the world today. I'll talk about Iran. I'll talk about China. I'll talk about Russia. That'll be on January 26th. More information coming soon. But January, what did I say, 26th? January 26th in Austin, Texas, at the university, I will be giving a talk. So I hope you can be there at the University of Texas, yes, at UT. So hopefully you guys can come. It'll be open to the public. And it will be something around what's going on in Iran, China, Russia, trying to see a connection between this and the broader fight for freedom. And the fight for liberty. All right. 50 minutes. All right. I just can't control myself, you know, and talk for less than 45. Thank you, everybody. Really appreciate it. Really appreciate the support by the superchatters. We didn't make our goal, but I understand people holding back, given the anticipation of the December 31st show. And so I appreciate those of you who did the show just quickly. Friday, oh, there's Armin and just basically got us almost to the target. So thank Armin. Thank you. Really, really appreciate the support from you over the last few months. I do want to mention, and this is to encourage everybody to become members. You can become a member by joining YouTube here. There will be a members only show. So only members will be able to see it live and only members will be able to participate in the chat. There will be a members only show on Friday at 7 p.m. East Coast time. Look for that. You should be able to get a notification about it. If when you signed up for membership, you asked for a notification. It will be 7 p.m. So look forward East Coast time on Friday. And it will be about my thoughts and changing the world. And I'm interested in your thoughts about how we change the world, how we change the culture, how we change politics, how we do that. So become members. You can join. It's only $4.99 a month. You can join and I will do a members only show every month. And it could be, it should be a lot of fun. Press the join button. Not a lot of money. And you can also give a lot of money through that function, but not a lot of money for most of you. Join and join us on the Friday show. We'll also have a news show in the morning tomorrow and we'll have an interview with Tara Smith tomorrow night. So a bunch of shows coming up. Two morning shows Thursday and Friday. A Thursday night show with Tara Smith, a Friday night show for members only. And of course, December 31st, Saturday, 2 p.m. East Coast time, the 10K match, overview of 2022, looking forward to 2023. See you all on one of those shows or maybe on several of them. Thanks guys. Have a great day.