 The radical fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. Alright everybody, welcome to Iran Brookshow on this Friday, September 29th. Tomorrow, last day of the month, last show of the month. Today is the last news roundup of the month. Alright everybody. Reminder, you can use the super chat to ask questions, you can use the super chat to support the show. Those of you who'd like to become monthly contributors to the show, you can do that easily on Patreon, or on Subscribestar, or on Iranbrookshow.com slash support. Just go in there, put your on book show, and you can become a supporter, which would be great. Value for value. Let's be traders. Let's jump right in with the news for today. Earlier in the week, we talked about Coleman Hughes, and Coleman Hughes not exactly being cancelled by the TED talks, but certainly not TED talks, kind of not living up to their agreement with Coleman, or seemingly not, and creating a lot of problems because of the radicalness of his position. After all, I mean he called for a colorblind society, and as the best way to deal with racism. And so we talked about that, and today Andrew Sullivan in his, what do you call this, is a sub-stack? Yeah, it's a sub-stack, and a sub-stack, the weekly dish, writes about that, but he also gives some additional examples of things that have just happened in the last few days, that are kind of in the same woke kind of attitude, that generate the same kind of general attitude, and I just thought I'd share a couple of these examples with you. So one is the American Anthropological Society. American Anthropological Society had a conference, I guess the American Anthropological Association. That conference and the panel was supposed to be a panel at the annual meeting of the importance of biological sex in anthropology research. In anthropology research you would think that biological sex has some relevance. Well, there was a statement made by members of the association, and ultimately the panel was canceled. The group that complained about this claimed the statement was transphobic, that is the name of the panel was transphobic, asserted that it, quote, relied on assumptions that run contrary to the settled science in our discipline. I guess the settled science in anthropology is the additional such thing as sex and would harm vulnerable members of the community. They further accused the panel, this panel at a conference, people talking about ideas, of committing, quote, one of the cardinal sins of scholarship, such as assuming that, quote, sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline. Of course the panel is about sex, not gender. Maybe now it turns out there's more than one sex, or there's more than one sex, more than two sexes. And it goes on, quote, people whose gender roles did not align neatly with their reproductive anatomy would be offended by a panel like this, and, quote, there's no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into binary, male, female sex clarification. On and on and on. I mean, even if you believe that there is something here, that is that the whole trans issue, there are some subtleties, there are some issues that are worth thinking about, that are worth acknowledging with regard to gender and gender dysphoria or anything like that. The reality is that for an academic institution to ban a panel, to cancel a panel, because it deals with the importance of biological sex and anthropological research to cancel it, is absurd, ridiculous, goes counter to the very essence of what a university is supposed to be doing and what a conference like this is supposed to be doing, where people discuss ideas, and ludicrous in a sense that biological sex matters. Biological sex exists even if the margin, you think there's some shady areas of where it's not binary. Okay, bring it up, have a discussion about it. And indeed, the title of the panel is not even about whether it's binary or not, it's just, again, the importance of biological sex and anthropological research. But no, some people in the American Anthropological Association can't handle even that, right? And yeah, there are people who are into sex, right? So what? It's still the importance of biological sex, it is biology or not, and it is still true that even something like intersex is pretty marginal. All these issues are pretty marginal. They are basically for the vast overwhelming majority of human beings, there are two sexes, male and female, that's it. And that doesn't mean that the margin, they're not some gray area, you know, unique cases. All right, that's one in an almost even more ridiculous occurrence in Comic-Con. Comic-Con, right? Comic-Con, you know Comic-Con? In London, there was going to be a discussion, a panel discussion about Harry Potter's newest, I guess, play. There's a new Harry Potter play that's going to be produced in London, and there was going to be a panel discussing the play. Well, an LGBTQ plus charity complained of the potential impact on trans individuals of the fact that they would not, they didn't have to attend, but just hearing about the fact that there was going to be a panel to discuss something that J.K. Rawlins might be associated with in some way. And just the fact that J.K. Rawlins is a creator of Harry Potter was enough to get the panel at Comic-Con. Comic-Con, not an academic institution, canceled. Canceled. J.K. Rawlins was not going to be there. I'm not even sure J.K. Rawlins was directly associated with this production, but J.K. Rawlins who've used on trans issues are not consistent with LGBTQ plus whatever, and therefore it had to be pulled. It truly is stunning the extent to which these crazy woke leftists, particularly in the transgender community, it seems like it affects that question more probably than race now. It really seems like the trans issue is the number one issue. One can get canceled out there for. It is amazing how much power they have. It is amazing how few people are willing to stand up against them. It is amazing that everybody just falls before them. And in spite of the fact that I think there's been already a lot of backlash in England, a lot of the clinics or the main clinic that was doing a lot of the transitioning for underage people, for kids has been closed and there's a lot of backlash against the whole trans phenomena and educational institutions in the United States. In spite of all of that, so many of our cultural institutions, even Comic-Con, are kind of sensitive to this and capitulate and fold. And I highly recommend the weekly dish, this particular one, could MLK give a TED talk today. It's called Andrew Sullivan examines the question of why? What is it that makes all this possible? He doesn't go all the way. He doesn't give the full answer. But what's really powerful about what he writes is his identification, which shouldn't be new to any of you or shouldn't be new to anybody who's read Iron Man, that ideas matter, that ideas move the world, and that leftist ideas from 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years ago apply to all of this and are dictating the way people respond to all of this. And that the left's focus and the left's focus on capturing the academia, capturing the intellectual high ground gives them kind of a disproportionate, unbelievable power over the culture more broadly, over every aspect of the culture. And that this is just an expression of ideas matter and ideas shape the future. And so he talks about Chris Rufo's latest book, America's Cultural Revolution, which he likes parts and doesn't like other parts. I probably agree with which parts he likes and which parts he doesn't. But the book focuses on radical leftist thinkers that have shaped the modern left, Herbert Malker's, Malkuse, Angela Davis, Paolo Ferrer and Derrick Bell. And so I encourage you to read the article. And Chris Rufo's book is probably worth reading, even if at the end of the day, even if at the end of the day, you know, even if at the end of the day you don't agree with everything he writes, it's probably worth reading. All right. What's the journal has a lengthy story about the Biden family and the Biden family's, you know, dealings and the Biden family's use of the Biden family name, really for decades, writing off of the coattails of Joe Biden's name recognition, Joe Biden's position of power and the implication that doing business with a Biden buys you access to those in politics who can grant you favors. The article makes the case that this has been going on for decades, that this goes back to Joe Biden's brothers, James and Frank Biden, that this is not new with Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden may be made, like everything Hunter Biden does, made it more grotesque and more flashy. But that this has been going on for a long time within the Biden family, that his brothers and Hunter have made a lot of money over flashing their name and providing the pretence, providing the implication that they can get you special favors because of their closeness to, as one of the family called him, the big man, the big guy, the big guy who was, when the big guy was mentioned was a vice president, but of course was a senator for many, many years before that. The journal looks into a lot of the business dealings. He looks into the entire family, Biden's brothers, their kids, how they've used it. And the conclusion is that this was done extensively, that this was done for years and this was part of the family business, was to throw this around. It has not found any proof and does not find any real evidence that Joe Biden granted anybody any favors, that this was more than just flashing the name around or that Joe Biden made any promises to anybody. It's certainly true that Biden was sometimes in some of these business meetings, just like we know that he took phone calls with Hunter Biden associates and kind of small talks and just chatted, but there's no evidence at least that there was anything direct that he actually benefited or that he actually changed policy in any direct way to favor any of these business ventures. That's going to make it difficult to impeach him. This is the kind of corruption, and I do think it's corruption. This is the kind of corruption, this is the kind of behavior that I think is common to pretty much everybody in Washington. I am very skeptical that the Bidens are unique here, that the Bushes not do this. Of course the Trumps did it. I've already talked about that, but the Gore's not do it. Gore, father and son being senators, was that not flashed around? Did they not make a lot of money off of that? Associates of Obama are not doing it. Has everybody not done it? They all do it. This is the problem with having a political class that actually has power, power over our lives, or more importantly in this context, power over business. The only way to get rid of corruption in DC, the only way to get rid of cronyism, which corruption is one aspect of that cronyism, is to dramatically curtail the power of politicians over business. It is to dramatically reduce the power of politics over business. As I've said many times before, if I were ever president, the first thing I would do, not the last, but the first thing I would do, was initiate legislation that reduced the power of politics over business, whether that means eliminating all subsidies for business forever, whether that means eliminating corporate income tax, or making it simple and flat so there are no exclusions, deductions, no favors, nothing can be given, and of course starting the long process of systematically, but systematically not, when I feel like it, systematically eliminating the regulations over business. So doing away with all the favors and doing away with all the regulations, often the regulations are favors in the sense of regulations often protect businesses from competition. That would be priority number one. Before welfare reform, cutting taxes, before any of that stuff, the first thing to do is reduce the power of politicians over business, and it'll be interesting because I think the kind of people running for politics will change, because it'll stop being people who want to go into politics in order to be corrupt, in order to lord over business, in order to self-favours the business, and you'll get people maybe running for politics who care about establishing a legal order that is protective of the individual rights of Americans. So that would be a complete cultural change, nothing else. I mean, welfare can wait. This is more important. All right, we talked about all prices going to 100, both Russia and Saudi Arabia have reduced the output of oil. As a consequence, all prices have gone up quite significantly over the last few weeks, months. You would expect as a consequence of that to see American or manufacturers rushing in to invest in more oil production in order to take advantage of it, which is what they've historically done. But this time they're being more disciplined, and they're being more disciplined, I think, for at least two reasons. One is investors are basically saying, look guys, in the past you've taken our money and you've rushed in, and by the time you've rushed in, all prices are back down, and we never benefited from it. How about you enjoy these high prices, you pump whatever oil you can at these high prices, and you give us the investors some of our money back before you rush in and invest our money into more production. And that's indeed what's happening. Exxon, Chevron, and even many of the independents are keeping the profits. Exxon and Chevron are paying them out as dividends and stock buybacks to reward their investors and to provide liquidity for their investors. They're not investing it in more drilling. They have the capacity, they know where the oil is, they know they could frack and get it out. But they're going to sit on that capacity and enjoy the high prices, enjoy the record levels of profitability in the industry instead of undermining it by increasing supply. One of the comments one of them said is, look, if Saudi Arabia and Russia can jack up prices this easily, they can jack down prices this easily. I don't want to invest all my money in drilling and then tomorrow Saudi and the Russians announced that they're increasing capacity by so many million barrels and then supply will go up, prices will plummet, and I will lose money on my investment. On top of that, you can add to that the fact that there is real awareness of investing heavily in fossil fuels just as the world is turning anti-fossil fuels. And are these going to be good investments or are these going to be easy to raise capital? When some of the standards by which capital is raised like ESG, why not wait until they're desperate for fossil fuels rather than do it now when it's so difficult to get capital? And then finally, so there's three reasons. One of the reasons for this is it's just expensive right now. Costs have gone up throughout the industry, inflation, but also interest rates are very high. So any kind of capital that is raised is going to be expensive. So for those reasons, we can probably expect all prices to stay high for a while. I don't see why the Saudis and the Russians have a strong incentive. Now, there are other players in the oil market that might try to cheat. It usually happens. Somebody increases supply out there and drives the prices down. So we will see, I don't expect prices to stay high very long given the number of players in the market and given the ease at which I think certain players can increase supply. But for now, I think prices are going to be high and going to stay high. And that means higher expenses as well. This one's kind of interesting, depressing and interesting. So for a long time, it seemed like real progress had been made in combating... Let me just remind everybody, this show is funded by you guys. It survives because of your support and your contributions, value for value. I produce these shows and you pay me. One of the ways in which you pay me is through the super chat. And you can ask questions on anything pretty much. But you can also just support the show with a sticker or something like that. So please consider doing that. We have a goal for these news roundups of $250, a show. I hope you'll consider supporting that goal and getting us there. We do have to meet the goal today and tomorrow in order to get us to our monthly goal for the show. So I'm hoping today we can meet the goal. Thank you, Jeremy, who just did a $10 sticker. And thank you for TZ for also doing a sticker earlier. And we've got like three questions that we'll get to in a little bit. Anyway, one of the things that I think a lot of people have assumed, and I think there was a lot of data to support that over the last few decades, we had made or humanity had made significant progress against malaria. You know, malaria is the number one killer of a human killer, I think of all time, right? I mean, there was a period where malaria was basically malaria deaths a year were close to a million, a million people dying every year, every year of malaria. And during the 2000s, that came down to around almost 500,000, maybe 600,000. There was still a pretty high number, 600,000 people dying every single year because of malaria, because of mosquitoes. And of course, the one way to kill mosquitoes, one very effective way to kill mosquitoes used to be DDT. DDT just crushed them. But DDT has basically been banned globally because of its environmental, suppose that the environmental issues, remember DDT was at the heart of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson's book on the dangers of DDT and generally advocacy for environmental policies, which basically came to shape the environmental movement and basically came to shape environmental regulation after that. You know, nobody ever does the weighing of, okay, so yeah, DDT is pretty toxic and a lot of mosquitoes and other species might die. But we save, I don't know, half a million people a year from death, children might primarily. Versus, okay, we don't use DDT and those half a million die or a million die and we have a more pristine environment. No, I mean that calculation is never done because who cares about human life, it's a pristine environment that matters. But what's scary is that while we've had about two decades of systematic declines in malaria deaths, two decades of systematic declines and appearances of things like denu, fever, yellow fever and other kind of mosquito-borne diseases, we are now seeing a real spike in mosquito-borne diseases and in malaria deaths back up to 627,000 over the last couple of years. So the last couple of years, well, I think this data goes back to 2021. So for 2019 to 2021, it may just spike in malaria, but also we're seeing malaria in places like Florida and Texas and Maryland, places where we haven't encountered malaria in a long, long time. Denu fever in Florida and France, we're seeing mosquito-borne diseases more prevalent. Of course, we had that horrible Zika outbreak a few years ago in Brazil and then across Latin America and even some fears about Zika in the United States. All of these mosquito-borne diseases, we see not new but invasive species of mosquitoes entering into areas where they weren't there before and just a general increase in the prevalence of mosquitoes. And a lot of this, so a lot of this they say is caused by the fact that mosquitoes have become immune to many of the anti-mosquito pesticides that are being used. So they've evolved and they have strategies to evade these things. One of the big problems around that is that the World Health Organization and the CDC and other regulatory agencies are really, really, really, really, really slow to approve new pesticides, new methods to mitigate mosquitoes. And think about this, 627,000 people died of this in 2021. Over half a million people have been dying of this forever, probably around a million people have been dying of this for a long, long time. You know, if you go back long enough. I mean, hundreds of thousands of human beings. You'd think that this would be like number one on the agenda of the CDC and the World Health Organization to approve. Of course, why do we need these organizations? But given that they exist, to approve these treatments, to approve these pesticides or whatever else they need to do in order to get rid of these. And yet this slow, this slow to do it, which is, I mean, criminal, criminal, millions of people are dying, millions. And nobody seems to care. I think it's primarily because it's in Africa and nobody cares, right? I mean, if this was really widespread in America and Europe, there would be more action. But it's in Africa, so nobody cares. One solution to this would be to wipe out mosquitoes. Or at least wipe out mosquitoes of breeds that we know carry diseases. We know how to do this. We absolutely know how to do this. During the Zika outbreak, there was a discussion in Florida to genetically modify the mosquitoes so they would all basically die. They couldn't reproduce. We have the capacity to modify the genes of mosquitoes to kill them all. Now, many of the mosquitoes, for example, in Florida, are invasive species. Why not get rid of them? Why not kill them? Ooh, Frankenstein. You can't play God. Don't mess with nature. And on and on and on and on. But no, this is exactly what we should be doing. We should be engaged in a campaign to use genetic engineering to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people a year. Millions and millions of people over decades. And let's get rid of these mosquitoes. They're a pest anyway, even if they don't kill you. They're just nasty little creatures and they don't serve much of a purpose. Yeah, well, screw up the food chain. Who cares? Again, a lot of these invasive species and nobody's going to miss them. Nobody's going to miss them. Nature will adjust to the disappearance of mosquitoes. Fine. All right. Finally, there is a lot of talk right now, a lot of talk about the normalization of relations between Israel and the Saudi Arabia. There is a lot of talk about the Saudis basically signing a peace deal with Israel and completely normalizing relations. I think the Saudis would like this. They'd like Israeli technology. They'd like Saudi Arabia is engaging in a multi-year process of trying to diversify its economy away from oil. It's very difficult for the Saudis because they really don't have expertise outside of the oil industry. But Israel is right there. It's a neighbor with some of the most advanced technological expertise in the world. And Saudi Arabia would like to access that and other Gulf states have already signed peace deals with Israel. And the next obvious one is Saudi Arabia. But Saudi Arabia has a price. And they realize that the Biden administration would like to have a peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel as a trophy, particularly given that there was an election next year. Trump has the Abraham Accords, where the other Gulf states signed a deal with Israel, and Trump is taking credit for it all. Well, Biden would like to be able to take credit for a peace deal with between Israel and Saudi Arabia and be able to say, look, it wasn't Trump, even I can do it. I don't think that's how we'd phrase it. And so Saudi Arabia is basically saying, look, we don't really need much from Israel. Israel, we don't really care that much about the Palestinians. We'll probably want you to make a statement about how you're going to be nicer to the Palestinians. Maybe you can do some symbolic things that involve being nice to the Palestinians for a little while so we can take credit for it. But we're not extremely too much. But America, if you guys want us to sign a peace deal with Israel, a peace deal that Saudi Arabia will benefit enormously from, but if you guys want us to sign a peace deal with Israel, you have to promise to protect us. You have to sign a defense treaty with us. And basically that is what Saudi Arabia is demanding right now. It's demanding it from the U.S., not from Israel. It's basically saying if you, the U.S., want us to sign a peace deal with Israel, you have to provide us with a defense guarantee, right? It could be an iCloud NATO-style defense guarantee, but we're willing to, this is what I think Saudi Arabia initially wanted, we're willing to compromise a little bit. We're willing to get something a little less iCloud, maybe a treaty like what the U.S. has with some Asian countries that would win U.S. congressional approval. But it might not win U.S. congressional approval because the Congress might not want to sign on to a deal like that with a country like Saudi Arabia. So instead, maybe we could do something like a U.S. agreement with Bahrain where the U.S. basically is protecting it, the Fifth Fleet is based there, and that doesn't need congressional approval. Oh my God. The United States could basically sign a deal to protect an authoritarian, thuggish, anti-American principle country like Saudi Arabia without congressional approval, just with the president signing something. I mean, that's pretty, pretty pathetic, and I think it goes counter, I think, to our constitution. We could also, the U.S. could also designate Saudi Arabia what's called a major non-NATO ally, a status that has already been given to Israel. That's not a guarantee for security, but it's a pretty major step in terms of defense contracts and making it easier to sell weapons to and so on. So basically what Saudi wants is protection. This should be familiar. This is basically what the Saudis wanted from the United States in World War II. There was a deal between the Saudi family, the Saud family, the rulers of Saudi Arabia, and FDR, which basically exchanged the free flow of oil for security guarantees. So that was done already by FDR in the middle of World War II. Implicitly, Saudi Arabia has assumed, and we have assumed that we have given them a security guarantee. Indeed, you could argue that 1991 Gulf War was the United States living up to that security guarantee. That one, you remember when Iraq invaded Kuwait, and we kicked Iraq's butt, kicked them out of Kuwait. That was basically at the request of the Saudis, and that was part of this security guarantee. Saudis wanted explicit. They wanted it in writing, and the U.S. would probably give it to them for peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Politics, politics, politics. All right, for Biden to have some kind of crowning achievement. All right, we are way behind on the goal, so I will remind everybody that we need to try to make it, so I'd appreciate it. Some questions would be amazing. $20 questions would be particularly good that would help us get to that goal faster, so please consider that. We've got 83 people watching right now, so it wouldn't take much to get us the way we need to be, so please consider supporting the show with a sticker or with a question, a question better, and please consider doing it $20. I understand some people can't afford that, so whatever you can afford, whatever you think the value for value is in this trade that we should be engaging in. All right, David, thank you for the $20 question. And an easy one too. Are you going to be at the Iron Man Con with the Iron Man Conference in Amsterdam in March? Yes, I am planning to be there. This, I think, is on the second or the first weekend in March. In Amsterdam, I love Amsterdam. It's a great city. March will be a little cold, but it will be fantastic. One of the best museums in the world is in Amsterdam. And just a beautiful, beautiful city. If you've never had an opportunity to go to Amsterdam, this will be a great opportunity to spend a weekend of classes and courses at the Iron Man Institute and also hang out with other objectivists and get to visit one of the most beautiful, interesting cities in the world. I don't know exactly what I'm going to be speaking about in Amsterdam. One of my plans was to do something about the kind of the history of Amsterdam and how it became the fountainhead, in a sense, of individual rights and of capitalism. I don't know if that's what I'll be talking about, because it really depends on the plan, what the theme of ARC will be and what they want me to talk about. So, we'll see. But hopefully you guys can come and attend. It will be a blast. Andrew says, what is going on philosophically with Jewish people who feel an alliance to Israel, nevertheless support Palestinian rights and condemn Israel? It's called briefly and short altruism. I mean, you can't actually stand by a strong Israel, a competent Israel, a success for Israel. You can't stand by them, because that would be too, if you will, egoistic to pro-success, to pro-prosperity. You've got to look at who's suffering and shifting. And it's not just Jewish people, it's people generally. I think the support for the Palestinians has everything to do with altruism. The perfect example of this was the Six-Day War. Before 1967, Israel was perceived as a place where pathetic, poor Jews who somehow survived the Holocaust were living. And everybody loved Israel. Everybody loved Israel. Europe was Israel's best friend, partially out of a sense of guilt for the Holocaust, but also partially because of the altruism. Here were these poor, pathetic Jews trying to make it in a place without much, without much prospects for success given how desolate Israel was. And Europe, I don't know if you guys know this, but America in those days didn't supply any weapons to Israel. America had an arms embargo on Israel. And other arms that Israel fought with were European arms because Europe was Israel's best friend. In 1967, Israel whipped the armies of Arab countries in six days, they crushed them. And suddenly, everybody looked at Israel and said, whoa, these Jews are not so weak. They're not so pathetic. They're strong. They're competent. We hate them. And then immediately, the search was on for who is suffering? Who is the downtrodden? Who is, you know, this is intersectionality before there was such a term of intersectionality. Who's beneath us in the pyramid of oppression, right? And of course, the consequence of that was that they discovered the Palestinians and the Palestinian cause. Obviously, if the Jews in Israel were powerful, they must be oppressing somebody. Obviously, they must be oppressing the Palestinians because the Palestinians seem to be oppressed. And therefore, the alliance shifted. The alliance of the left, Jews being among them, shifted from supportive Israel to supportive Palestinians. So it has, altruism is more powerful than tribalism in this case. Richard says, would the Saudis pay in full for U.S. defense under the Israeli peace treaty? They should, of course. I don't know. That will be interesting to see what happens. Will the Saudis pay the United States for the defense treaty? I don't know. They did in 1991 after the Gulf War, at least for the most part. They paid for a lot of the U.S. involvement in the Gulf War was paid for by the Saudis. But I don't know if that's part of the negotiations right now. So we'll know more in the weeks to come when this deal is finalized. All right. Thank you, Enric, for the sticker. Thank you, Linda. Thank you, Paul. Really appreciate the support, guys. I thank you, Mike, for the probe. And, of course, Robert, Neser, Roosevelt, and then Jeremy. I think Jeremy, we caught before. So thank you, guys. We still need more, basically. We're still about $100 short of our goals. So please consider doing more stickers, more questions, $520 questions, basically. You know, it's not much. Michael says, have you read Psychology of Totalitarianism by Matthias Desmet? I have not. I have not. Michael asked, did you watch Musk's interview with Ben Shapiro? I haven't yet. It's on my list. It's on my list. I will watch it, but I just have not had any time to do any additional stuff like that. But I will watch that interview. It's also not too long. Shapiro's interviews are relatively short, so that's good. Scott, was Djokovic good for not waving on Vax pressure? I don't know. I mean, I guess he was good in the sense that he stuck to his beliefs. And he stuck to what he thought was good for him. But was that the right thing to do? I don't know. But integrity is integrity to rational values. Was that completely rational? Did he do it for rational reasons? I don't know. I mean, he might have. There are rational reasons as a young athlete like Djokovic not to take the vaccines. But to what extent was he rational? I don't know. So I'm not going to make him a hero because he did that. The tennis association, of course, can make whatever rules they want. Australia, jailing him was pathetic and ridiculous and disgusting. So that was horrific. But Australia was committing even greater crimes towards its own people on a daily basis in those days by locking them up. And the lockups we had in the US were nothing as compared to what Australia went through. It was really horrible. So absolutely, I thought Australia locking him up was horrific. I can't remember. I guess the tennis association was willing to let him play. But Australia, they wouldn't say he showed up because the association was willing to let him play. And the Australians were the ones who jailed him. I mean, that's just an absurd, pathetic, evil thing that they did. The private organization, which was the tennis organization, which had the right to make the decision, was the one it should have. Again, I'm not in a position to say whether he was rational in his decision-making because I don't know. There's a good likelihood that he was. I'm not sure I, in his place, would have taken the vaccine. Given that he was young. He's in incredibly good shape. And that the vaccine didn't reduce by a huge amount the probability of getting it. And he was never going to land up. The likelihood that he would land up at the hospital was close to zero. So, you know, it might have been. So I don't consider him particularly a hero. But I do consider the Australian authorities villains without any question. Robert, click like, friends. It's easy. It's free. And it's powerful. Yes, please like the show before you leave. We've got 93 people watching the show right now. So basically everybody, like doing a sticker with two bucks or one buck would get us to where we need to be. So if you're here and you value the show and you get something out of it, please consider supporting the show by asking a question or doing a sticker and helping us get to our target. We'd really, really appreciate that. Robert, and yes, don't forget that like the show. Now do it now before you forget to do it. A lot of people, I think, forget to do it. Stringer Bell. Stringer Bell, that's from the wire, right? Stringer Bell asks an odd question. What are your thoughts on Caravaggio's the card shops? Now, I don't know the painting well. But you know what? Let's do this. Let's see. I don't know if I can do this. Let's do this quickly. Because it's hard to talk about a painting without you actually seeing it. Let's make this smaller so that you can see the painting. I think it needs to be a little smaller than that. All right, I think you can now can see the painting. Most of it, yeah, most of it you can see. Yeah, I mean quickly because I haven't really studied the painting. So just my first kind of observations about it. I mean, it's beautifully done. It is, you can see kind of the intensity of it. You can see that they're betting on this card. So it's not just a friendly card match. You can see the money over here. You can see the intensity, which they all are participating in it. You can see the play on the right cheating, right? You can see his hand back there drawing a card from a pocket that he has in the back. So there's clearly some cheating going on. The play on the left is has an innocent look on his face. He looks like he's the sucker that's going to be played here. The guy in the back there, hard to tell what his role is here. My guess is he's helping the guy who's cheating and maybe giving advice to the innocent guy. But maybe that advice or maybe he's distracting him while the cheetah is doing what he's doing. I think it's a beautiful planning. Look at the light. It's hard to really appreciate it because you can't see the whole thing. Look at the light in the back here. Look at how his feather is lit up. And one of the things the feather does is it attracts your eye. And then the eye goes down. You follow the feather. And I'm going to move it this way. You follow the feather and the feather is pointing. It's actually pointing so that in case you missed the hand, there is the hand with the card. So the artist is guiding your eye to the place where the action is happening. Not in the front of the painting, but in the back where the cheating is going on. And that is a beautiful technique. It's an understanding of how the eye works, how light attracts the eye. You cannot see all the faces lit up really nicely. The light is coming from the left. It's coming down. And it's shining their faces and the hands and the card. So in a sense, the hand that's pulling the card from the pocket is not the first thing you're going to see. You're going to follow the faces. You're going to see the face. Oh, and then you attract it to that light and the feather. And then the feather is going to attract you to the hand. So it's a beautiful painting. It's entertaining. It's interesting. And it really does illustrate, you know, it's a little scary situation here because I didn't notice this, but you notice down here, he's also got a dagger. So this could get ugly. This could get ugly. This is anyway, beautifully done, interesting, stylistically amazing. You know, the theme is cheating. The theme is cheating and the potential of violence in a game. So in that sense, the theme, I'd have to really think about what that theme is, but the theme is probably a negative theme, but suddenly beautifully and stylistically done and also, you know, a world of precision and of focus and of beauty, color, beauty, light. So overall, a masterpiece, even if the theme is a negative one. Thank you, Stringer Bell, for bringing this particular corvaggio to my attention. I think I've seen it before, but I've never looked at it properly before. I don't think I've seen it in a museum. I don't know where it is. I'll have to check out where it actually is in a minute. Maybe I can find out right now. Oh, it's at the Kimball. It's at the Kimball Museum of Art is where I know this museum. Kimball Museum of Art is in Los Angeles. Is that right? Fort Worth, Texas. That's right. I've only went to the museum Fort Worth, Texas once and I cannot remember that corvaggio. But now that I know that the Kimball has a corvaggio, next time I have some time in the Dallas, Fort Worth area, I'm going to go. There's some good western art, if I remember right, in the Kimball Museum. Okay, Stringer Bell also asks, have you read any Nassim Taleb books? What are your thoughts? I read the Black Swan and I've skimmed some of his other books. I mean, I'm very mixed on the Black Swan and Nassim Taleb generally. I mean, he's obviously a brilliant statistician. A lot of his observations about finance are true. A lot of his observations about how markets works are true. But he is also a epistemological skeptic. He doesn't believe, he believes induction is epistemologically worthless, which makes him a complete, and he is a skeptic. He believes you can't know anything with certain except one thing. There's only one thing you can actually know with certainty, and that's what Nassim Taleb tells you. So Nassim Taleb is the only person on planet Earth who knows anything with certainty. And if you follow him on Twitter as I do and other places, you know that he declares stuff constantly with complete and utter certainty. But philosophically, in the Black Swan, he comes across as a complete skeptic where nobody can know anything for certain. Also, the Black Swan is the most arrogant book I've ever read. I've never read a book that comes across as I know everything, you guys know nothing. Indeed, for you knowledge is impossible only for me. He is also from everything I've seen on Twitter, a world-class jerk. So somebody who treats other people really, really badly. Although I have to say I did meet Nassim Taleb and hang out with him a little bit in Belgrade of all places in Serbia years ago. We were both speaking at the same conference and we landed up hanging out and talking. And he was very pleasant with me and very nice. But then I guess I didn't bring up anything that we would disagree about. But I've seen him on Twitter, I've seen him act, and the people who organized the conference said he was very, very, very difficult to deal with. It's a very difficult person, but brilliant and completely and utterly philosophically wrong. Diego says, when in Belgrade, I mean this was, oh, when in Belgrade do as the Serbs do. I don't know what that would even be. Paul says, favorite Baywatch girl, me Tracy Bingham, never watch Baywatch. Don't have a favorite Baywatch girl. David Batson, I have gotten interested in opera as fine art. Any thoughts on it? Oh, yeah, I mean, I should do, I could do a whole show on opera. I should. One of my favorites, I love opera. Opera is one of the more complex of all the art forms, maybe second only to movies in terms of complexity. It has music, singing, stage, dialogue, the whole direction, acting, all of it. And I love opera. So certainly Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, but there's an endless number of 19th century opera. I also, I happen to like Wagner for the most part. Sometimes stuff can get a little weary, but some of the most beautiful music ever written is Wagner operas. So Wagner, but there are tons and tons of good operas. The classics are amazing. Frank says Muscogni and Leo Cavagliu, absolutely. Musnay, it's some beautiful, beautiful Musnay pieces. Bizet and of course, Gluck from an earlier period. But you know, the best, my favorite of course is Verdi, in particularly the middle period of Verdi. Mozart has a lot of good operas. Beethoven has one opera, which is very dramatic and very pro-freedom, pro-liberty. It's about justice and injustice and the fight for justice. You know, pretty dramatic and powerful. Fidelio, it's called. So yeah, I love opera. I love opera. And the singing is the full expression of what is possible for a human voice to express. So it's romantic in its nature because it's what expression could be in terms of fully expressing the range of human emotion. So amazing, amazing. Alright, finally, last question, unless people want to jump in and of course you can jump in with support. We're still $67 short, maybe somebody can jump in and cover the gap. Any comments on the death of Senator Feinstein? I was thinking of mentioning that in the news roundup, but she's kind of been dead for a while now in a sense. I mean, I think the most pathetic thing is the fact that she continued to be a senator in spite of the fact that she was obviously on her death bed and was not functioning, functioning cognitively, functioning physically. And yet she stayed a senator in the U.S. Senate, which I think is just absurd and ridiculous. I mean, finance was a bastion of the left. She represented what 20, 30 years ago would have been a real leftist, a California leftist. And over time, because the Democratic Party moved so far to the left, it was probably more of a moderate in the last few years, right, considered more of a moderate within the Democratic Party to such an extent that I remember that during COVID when San Francisco was renaming schools because that was the priority, not getting kids back into schools, renaming the schools. They actually voted to rename a school that was named after Dianne Feinstein because she was to, I guess, right wing for San Francisco leftists, San Francisco school board members. So, you know, she represented an older left. You know, she certainly was more centrist than AOC, more centrist than a lot of the superstars today on the left. The Democratic Party has moved significantly to the left, sadly, of Feinstein herself. So she served for a very long time. It's sad to see them serving that long. I mean, they really should be in age restriction. She wasn't particularly good. She wasn't, you know, as bad as so many other senators are. You know, I'm worried about who's going to be appointed to replace her. I hope it's not Katie Porter. Katie Porter would be significantly worse. You know, I don't know about the others and how bad they would be, but anybody who's appointed right now would be probably worse than Feinstein. Although I think Gavin Newsom is going to be careful not to point somebody from the way-way left wing of the Democratic Party. Newsom has presidential aspirations, obviously, and he's going to have to want to moderate this to beef up his moderate, what do you call it, credentials. He vetoed, by the way, just last week. I also didn't mention this in the news roundup I was going to, but he vetoed a number of progressive bills that did not become low in California, one of which would have required the driver for driverless trucks. He vetoed that bill. He vetoed a bill related to trans issues. He vetoed another bill. He vetoed three different bills that the progressive part of the Democratic Party really wanted to pass, and he vetoed them. Again, he's trying to build up his credentials as a moderate. Big Worm writes, I understand and agree with the idea that the US should support Ukraine in its fight. How do you square that principle with the money going to Ukraine that is not directly supporting the war? You know, I said this many times, I think, in a rational world with a rational US government, the invasion would have never happened. Or if it had happened, the US would have supplied Ukraine with so many weapons so fast that it would have been a much shorter war. But look, you know, am I happy about all the financial money going to Ukraine? No, I'm not supportive of it. But I'm not that upset about it either given that the United States wastes money, far more money, and much dumber, stupider ideas than that. I mean, there are dozens, if not over a hundred countries in the world that get financial aid from the United States who are far less deserving in that sense than Ukraine. So I wouldn't say that the first country I would cut aid from is Ukraine. There are lots of other countries I would cut aid from even before that. And then, of course, all the money that we spend in the United States that is shameful and wasted and immoral and horrible, I'd much rather cut welfare payments than cut support for Ukraine. I'd much rather cut subsidies to businesses than support for Ukraine right now. So in the big scheme of things, in the list of immoral things that the US government spends money on, supporting Ukraine is not at the top of that list. It's wrong, shouldn't be done, but not high on the priority list, in my view. Favorite weight training exercise? God. I think when I did, my favorite is when I, you know, right now I'm doing stuff that is particularly painful and hard, and I don't have a favorite because it all just is painful. But I particularly liked when I used to do super slow, which was also painful and hard, super slow. And I used to do that high intensity super, super slow. And I used to do, I like the chest press generally. And I used to do, you know, 10 seconds up and 10 seconds down. And I got up to like 330 pounds. It's pretty amazing. That was my favorite because I was good at it. And so, but I don't know. I mean, I guess I like push-ups. I do a lot of push-ups. I do a lot of push-ups as well. All right, everybody. Thank you. I will see you all tomorrow. We have an AMA. Ask me anything tomorrow. And if you support the show with over $25 a month on one of the monthly plans, you should have received an invitation to join my video. Our AMA and conversation in our panel. That'll happen tomorrow at 3 p.m. East Coast time. See you all tomorrow. Thanks for the support. Thanks to all the superchatters. Bye, everybody.