 The radical. Fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest and individual rights. This is The Iran Brook Show. All right everybody, welcome to Iran Brook Show on this Tuesday. Tuesday Thanksgiving week. Hope everybody's having a great short week. Almost time for the Thanksgiving holiday here. All right, we are going to jump in here tonight. There will be a show at 7 p.m. east coast time. Topic to be determined, but it will be related to Thanksgiving. So something on productivity, production, optimism, future. How can one be optimum? Anyway, we'll see. But that'll be later today at 7 p.m. east coast time. Tomorrow will be continuing normal schedule. Probably skip Thursday. Take the day off for Thanksgiving. And then return on Friday with a regular schedule. And probably an evening show Friday instead of the evening show that I'm canceling on Thursday for Thanksgiving. So that I think is the rest of the week. We will do a show or so on Saturdays. We'll always do it 2 p.m. east coast time. All right. Reminder, we have two sponsors. The Enred Institute is a sponsor. Enred.org slash start here. Next week there is a celebration of the Fountainhead and a big event online. Go there and register. You know, again, Enred.org start here, register for the event. And it's going to be focused on the Fountainhead for young people and how to get the Fountainhead for young people. Two young people, the importance of the Fountainhead and it being read by young people. So jump over to Enred.org start here. And of course we have ExpressVPN.com slash Iran. And if you go there, you'll get three extra months of free subscription to a incredibly valuable VPN. All right. Let us see. Oh, let's start with the breaking news. Any minute now we should hear about a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Details are still to be determined, but it seems like there is some information that we can discuss. The Israeli cabinet is meeting maybe now, maybe in an hour or so, probably to finalize this and to approve the deal. The deal appears. Again, this is all just appearances. This is just all rumors at this point. There are 22 sources deep inside whatever. It is a two-phased deal. Phase one includes the release of 50 Israeli women and children held in Gaza. And Israel is expected to release about 150 Palestinian prisoners, mostly women and minors. And I guess the emphasis on the first 50 hostages released by Hamas is going to be on dual citizens, citizens of other countries. You know, they have a bunch of their ties and I think for the Philippines and of course Americans and others. They will, as part of this, there will be a four-day ceasefire. Israel will cease attacking Hamas and supposedly Hamas will cease launching rockets and attacking Israeli soldiers on the ground. You know, none of the prisoners that Israel will release supposedly have been convicted of killing Israelis. And the names are going to be made public so that Israeli citizens can appeal to the court against their release if there's any particular name there that is particular offensive. So the names will be released in advance. As part of this deal also, Israel will allow around 300 aid trucks per day to enter the Gaza from Egypt and they will allow fuel to also be brought in during the ceasefire. In the second phase, Hamas will release dozens more women, children and elderly people in return for Israel extending the ceasefire by several more days. You know, the Israelis are arguing that Hamas can probably get 70 to 80 more hostages released. Even though Hamas doesn't necessarily know where all the hostages are, some of the hostages are held by Islamic jihad. So anyway, that is the deal. As part of this agreement, Israel will prevent the return of Palestinians from the southern Gaza to the northern part of the enclave during the pause. And the IDF will resume military operations once the pause is over. Anyway, this is where we are. I think everybody seems pretty happy about this, although I'm sure some of the right wing and some of the opposition parties in Israel are against this. Hamas leader Ismail Hananya, who is in, of course in Qatar, who is rumored to be a billionaire. It's because of all the startups he has built and created, a billionaire. The only way he could be a billionaire is by siphoning off some of their money that the Americans give the Palestinians every year and have been for decades now. And all the money Qatar gives them and all the money Saudi Arabia gives them and all the money everybody else gives them. And he's siphoning quite a big percentage for him to be a billionaire while people are starving in Gaza. He said a truce is very close. I mean, this is a model abomination. You cannot have a truce with evil. You cannot negotiate with Hamas. Basically, Israel is sanctioning the existence as a legitimate political entity with which we now have a truce. Hananya should be dead. He shouldn't be negotiating. He should be dead. When the Mossad chief went to Qatar to negotiate, he should have left the bomb. I mean, I'm being ridiculous, but he should be dead long time ago, decades ago, but certainly now. All this is an example of Israel's weakness. All this is a consequence of America's weakness. All this is a consequence of Israel's fear that the West will stab it in the back, which it's going to anyway. As soon as the ceasefire is over and Israel resumes military operations, the world is going to go apoplectic anti-Israel. They're going to non-stop accuse Israel of war crimes, of killing civilians, and October 7th will be forgotten. Netanyahu in this famous book on terrorism states that you cannot negotiate with terrorists. This is an abomination. It is a disgrace. I mean, I'm sorry. I really am sorry for that. I know the families of the hostages are, you know, and I'm glad for them. I'm happy for them. I'm happy that people get their family members back. You know, and I'm happy for the families and for their friends and for everybody and for the hostages themselves to be freed and to be able to come back. I'm happy about all of that. And yet, I said on October 8th when it was clear there were hostages, I said, you've got to act as if they're dead. Rescue them if you can. But they cannot be negotiations with Hamas. Hamas is not a legitimate negotiating partner. It is a genocidal, homicidal, barbaric regime that needs to be eliminated. Everybody eliminating, including those who you negotiate with, sitting in Qatar, eating, you know, magnificent dinners and negotiating with Israel as if they are human. They are monsters. So, you know, I get it. I get it. Netanyahu is under pressure from the families. He's under pressure from Biden. He's under pressure from the Europeans. I'm sure some people in the military are probably saying, yeah, a few days of rest are going to be good. But what people don't understand is to regain the momentum and to regain the world's attention to the evil of Hamas and the need to destroy it. That is gone. And it's bad enough that it's wasted two weeks after October 7th not doing anything. It's bad enough that instead of flattening vast parts of Gaza, they have sent in ground troops. It's bad enough that they constantly compromise in their own self-defense. And now a truce might last four days here and then a few more days later and, you know, over a week. And then go do what's necessary after that. It's just maddening. And, of course, continues to madden me is the fact that on social media and everywhere, the anti-Israeli propaganda, and often in the name of objectivity is just, just horrific. Maybe one of the worst, you know, let me see if I can find this guy. One of the, yeah, one of the worst of these people is Mario Nafal. Mario Nafal. And Mario Nafal is, what is he got? A million followers. He's got like a 1.1 million followers. He, you know, is a real big shot, real big shot when it comes to, when it comes to, how am I live on acts right now? It says I'm live on acts that I am hosting. Is that real? I'm just on acts and I see this, this show. Oh, I guess my feed counts as live on acts. Huh, interesting. All right. Anyway, Mario Nafal, who is a Elon Musk darling, is a Twitter darling, is a Twitter favorite. He is the guy who supposedly, you know, is, you know, he runs some of the biggest, what do you call it, events on Twitter. He is, he calls himself, in his title, unfiltered, unbiased, verified 24-7 breaking news. No bias, no Waker chambers. God is he biased. He is so anti-Israel. Every time Israel publishes something, well, I don't know if we can believe this. Do you really believe this? Is that really evidence? Does it? And then every time Hamas publishes something, see, maybe Israel's not right. Maybe they're on tunnels under the hospital. Maybe this isn't right, maybe that isn't right. It's so biased. It's so disgustingly biased. I mean, he should be sued for, I don't know, for fraud, for putting in his description, no bias, no Waker chamber, when clearly he is biased. And look, to be biased, you can be biased by being balanced. The world is not balanced. There is right and wrong. And unbiased means to seek out truth. Unbiased means to seek out right. Anyway, I'm looking at my show. So yeah, we've got three, 13 viewers live right now on Twitter. So you can watch this show live on Twitter. You don't have a chat on Twitter, but you can make comments, I guess, on Twitter. I'm not sure how exactly this works, but this is being broadcast live on Twitter. It's also being broadcast on Facebook live. I stream this on four different places, two different places on Facebook, one Twitter, and one on YouTube. So no excuse not to watch the Iran book show. All right, let's see. So yeah, so you get my sense of the ceasefire. In the meantime, Israel is making progress both in the north and starting to prep the ground for ground troops to enter the south. One of the things that will happen if the ceasefire happens is that it will give Hamas the time to coalesce its forces in the south to figure out where Israel is going to enter into the south and to prepare ambushes, booby traps, and to kill as many Israelis as possible. So that's what a ceasefire will indeed achieve. Nothing good. I mean, not nothing good. The release of the hostages is good. But nothing good in terms of its long-term consequences for this war. I just don't see how Israel can win the war as long as it's willing to engage in ceasefires when every single element within the Israeli military and intelligence agencies should be focused right now on one thing and one new thing only. Not negotiating, but it's killing the Hamas leadership as quickly as effectively as possible. There's still a significant number of Hamas leadership that have not been located and are still alive. Not good. None of them should be alive. We talked yesterday about Milay. We talked quite a bit about Milay. So, I mean, as you know, I'm excited. One of the things that I think is particularly interesting and exciting about this is kind of the response from the world and the challenge that Milay's presidency is going to provide, particularly if he goes through, let's say Milay goes through with getting rid of the Argentinian peso, shutting down, as he has promised to do, the Argentinian central bank. Now, this is not going to be easy. I don't know how quickly he can do it. Hopefully he can do it quickly. The quicker the better. And basically, dollarize the economy, allow for other currencies, but basically it will be dollarizing the economy. In other words, the government will take dollars for taxes and the government will transact in dollars. The government is still a big part of the Argentinian economy. The government is not going to start using whatever currency people feel like. The government is going to standardize over dollars and therefore the entire economy ultimately, given the size of the government, is going to standardize over dollars in the short run. In the long run, you might imagine a gold standard. You might imagine Bitcoin, but I'm skeptical. But let's say that happens and he gets rid of the central bank and he gets rid of the peso and he dollarizes and let's say it succeeds, which it will. In stabilizing the Argentinian economy, providing a basis for growth, obviously prices would stabilize, but then what you would get is... Now, look, this is not going to be painless. You're going to get real creative destruction in the Argentinian economy. And then you get real growth, particularly if he goes through with deregulation and cutting taxes and all of that. What kind of vibrations does that send around the world? Do other countries start looking at the central banks with suspicion? What I found interesting was I saw this today on a website called Eurointelligence.com. Now, Eurointelligence.com is no kind of free market, anti-fee-up money, gold standard, Bitcoin, whatever website. This is a, I think, fairly mainstream European publication. Anyway, today there is a story which is free, so I don't have to go behind the firewall because I haven't paid. And the story is abolish a central bank near you. And, you know, they talk about, you know, have Yamile being elected president and how people always underestimate the popularity of populism, and they attribute this to populism, but here he is. He didn't just win, he won by an unprecedented margin. And then they go on and he talks about, they talk about the 140% inflation, and then they talk about this. And this is what I found really interesting, and I'm quoting an article. Fiat money is the most vulnerable part of our economic system. We in the West have been using it to bail out banks after global financial crisis, to bail out our governments in the sovereign debt crisis, to stabilize economies during a pandemic, and to pose sanctions on our opponents. The economic consequences of our abuse of the fiat money system are not nearly as extreme as they are in Argentina. Not yet, at least, nor is the backlash. But we should not be surprised to see the German AFD at over 20%, or the UK's Conservative Party being taken over by right-wing extremists. If we continue with the same macroeconomic policies, we could end up in a scenario where the political outsiders are no longer focused on immigration as they are now, but on the abolition of money. Well, at least fiat money. The real danger for fiat money systems is not a scenario where Argentina falls into an economic hole, but one in which Millet appears to succeed, and where his ideas catch on. It will come as a total shock. So, yeah, the center, if you will, and I think your intelligence is pretty centrist, is starting to be afraid that, at least in the short run, and I think even more so in the long run, some of these free market policies might actually be good, and then what? Then everybody might want to adopt them, and then the far right will become pro, I don't know, abolishing fiat money, what's alternative, maybe a gold standard, and that would be horrible. So, I mean, this is good news. This is good news. It means people are paying attention. It means the right people are worried, the state is so worried. It means that there's speculation that the right will move away from its focus on nationalism to move to focus on free markets. I doubt that's going to happen, but we'll see. I doubt it's going to happen, but we'll see. Basically, the mainstream in Europe is putting the world on notice that Millet might succeed, and that is not good news for central bankers and the people who work for them, and that is fantastic news for us, if that's the case. Now, I see people are saying here that Millet believes in psychic powers. He's definitely into tantric, but I have nothing against being into tantric. Yeah, I mean, Millet is a mystic of one form or another, not exactly clear what form. He is religious, again, not clear exactly what kind of religion. He is weird and strange, and he's got some really good policies. Let's see what happens. Let's see what happens. So he is not a savior. He is not John Galt writing in to save us all. He is a strange aberration who happens to have some really good ideas, economically at least, and who's going to run the experiment in Argentina, and we're going to sit back and watch, criticize, or it needs to be criticized, applaud what needs to be applauded, and we'll see. Jason asks, this is related, so I'm taking it. Did Argentina try dollarization between 1991 and 2002? It worked until it didn't. No, they didn't dollarize. What they did is they linked their currency to the dollar. So it was the equivalent of dollarization, but not quite because the central bank still existed. It stopped working when the central bank started cheating by printing more pesos than would be justified by the amount of dollars it held, by the amount of dollars flowing into the Argentinian economy. What Millet wants to do is abolish the central bank. So everybody traded in pesos in Argentina in 1991 to 2002, but those pesos were linked to the dollar. They were pegged to the dollar in a hard peg. But that's an opportunity for the government to cheat. It's the same thing happened in the United States when the dollar was pegged to gold, but you had a central bank. And then what the central bank in the United States, the Federal Reserve, did was cheat. They printed up more dollars than they had gold, which is exactly why a pegged currency, whether it's pegged to gold or pegged to the dollar or pegged to anything, is not good. What you want to make is you want to make that currency the thing you want to peg it to. And you want to abolish the central authority that can cheat. So Millet's innovation here, which is not new because Panama and Ecuador have done this before, is to get rid of his own central bank and to actually make the dollar, the currency, that people are going to use to buy and sell things in the stores. So a pegged currency is something completely different than a dollar rising because you sustain the central bank. So the only country that has managed to have a pegged currency that was sustainable over many times is Hong Kong, which has what's called a currency board, and the currency board only allows the issuing of Hong Kong dollars as dollars flow in. And it sucks out of the Hong Kong economy dollars as US dollars flow out. And it's managed to keep that stable, but that is very unusual. And I don't know that that will last given the influence of China. But no other country in the world has ever been able to make a pegged work. Ecuador has had a dollar and Panama has had the dollar as their currency in the country since, and I think that's true of El Salvador as well, you know, since the 80s, since the 1980s. Anyway, oh yeah, we're still on this. Okay, quick update on open AI. The whole open AI saga continues. It is fascinating. It is really, really interesting. And to see is really shaking up Silicon Valley. It's shaking up the venture community. Clearly, the venture capitalist and Microsoft made a huge mistake. I mean, the CEO of Microsoft, who's obviously quite brilliant and an incredible businessman, is realizing this. I mean, basically, you know, he is now trying to push open AI's board A to resign B to completely change open AI's governance structure. We talked about the governance structure yesterday, how it's run by a nonprofit and to dissolve that nonprofit and to allow investors onto the board. But, you know, the venture capitalists in Silicon Valley must be freaking out right now because suddenly they realize that in a setup like open AI, they have no power, they have no control, they have no say in what happens. They're considering lawsuits against open AI, but it's not clear those lawsuits will have any teeth, given that the structure of open AI was completely open and available to them when they made the investment. Open AI's employees have signed a letter. I suppose the 710 of 770 employees have signed a letter to the company's board asking members of the board to resign and to reinstate the former CEO, Sam Altman and the president, Greg Brooklyn, to the board. So the board should resign, go away and reinstall them. Again, that is still a possibility. Microsoft is still talking about that. They're still talking about it. Interestingly enough, the board of open AI has not made any comments. We don't know what they're thinking. They still haven't explained why they fired Sam Altman. But a lot of accusations sent around what I talked yesterday about effective altruism, about the fact that some Altman was moving too fast at commercialization. Now remember, this is a battle between AI doomerists like Sam Altman and AI super-doomerists like the board. They think it's imminent. He thinks maybe it takes long. I don't know what the difference is between them, but they're all on the doomerous side. There's some sense in which Sam Altman is saying, it's doing gloom, but let's do it anyway. And the board is saying, no, no, no, step back as if it matters because so many other people are investing in AI. I mean, I don't know if you know this, but Microsoft is investing $50 billion with a B. $50 billion in basically AI, in building massive computer networks that can crunch numbers. They're building the infrastructure of future AI, $50 billion. I mean, and people say that the private sector is short-term and it's government that invest long-term. This is real investment in infrastructure and research and development in science in moving AI forward. Anyway, the saga of open AI continues. The saga of effective altruism continues. I'm going to talk about this alternative to effective altruism that is coming out of the woodwork in Silicon Valley. I'll do a show on it soon. That's kind of an alternative to effective altruism, but a lot of people are now with the demise of Sam Beckman. Something SMB. His demise is a big effective altruist guru. And now with this nonsense at open AI, effective altruism is getting a bad name. People are looking for an alternative. Silicon Valley is offering alternatives. Sam Beckman freed, something like that, freed, SBF. Anyway, it's going to be, it's really interesting because here's a group of really, really smart people struggling with morality, struggling with their attitude about the future, struggling with optimism versus pessimism about technology. You know, you've got basically, Mark Andreessen, who I think is really cool about these things, saying the whole problem with AI is you've got a category or era. This is not intelligence in a sense of human intelligence. Therefore, it's not a risk. You guys are completely wrong and pushing people to his techno optimism agenda. So you've got a real conflict. You talk a little bit about that tonight, talk about some of the voices in Silicon Valley that are oriented towards growth and prosperity and technology and achievements and rejecting some of this fear-mongering nonsense. And this fear-mongering nonsense is really coming to a kind of political head in the open AI battles. To be continued, I will let you know what I discover as we move forward. Again, taking longer than I intended to, but I guess these topics are bigger topics. Okay, what I want to say about the economy, there's a lot to be said here, but it does seem like inflation is, at least in the short run, has been brought under control. Prices are down, actually, if you look at food prices. If you look at what the American Farm Bureau's survey shows, as the average cost of a 2003 Thanksgiving dinner for 10 is $61.17, which is down 4.5% from last year's record high. Americans are spending like crazy. Consumers are spending as if they have a lot of money. The flip side of that is consumer confidence is really, really low as if consumers are in some kind of recession. And to match that in a survey by the Fed, asking people if they had a $2,000 expense, unexpected expense, could they manage it, right? Only 65.8% of Americans said they could, which is the lowest level since the beginning of this survey was taken, which was 2013. But this is what's amazing about it, right? So Americans are saying, $2,000, I can't handle that. I don't know where I'd come up with the money for $2,000 expense. And they're spending like crazy. I mean, consumer spending is way up. It's what is driving the GDP numbers right now. GDP has a heavy weighting on consumption. It's basically mostly consumption. And Americans are consuming. Now, there are various theories of how they're consuming. Is it that they're consuming the remnants of the savings and the stimulus from COVID? Are they taking on more debt? I think it's some of both. But they're not stopping to consume. It's the fact that sentiment is low. They're worried about the economy. They're worried about the future. They're worried about inflation. They're worried about their jobs. And employment is at almost record lows of 3.9%. So we have this weird scenario where people are spending like there's no tomorrow. They've got jobs, plenty of jobs, and lots of jobs going filled. But granted, since COVID, since 2001, the real wages are down, even though more recently, over the last six months of the year, real wages are up. But before that, real wages tumbled when inflation was high and it haven't completely recovered. They're pessimistic. They think the economy is doing terribly, even though they have jobs and real wages are up significantly over the last year. It's a complete mess. And a lot of this is the fault of economists who sustain the messiness of it and explain it in terms of mess and a fault of our politicians and economists who have politicized the whole question of is the economy doing well or badly. And of course, the other problem is that we don't have a really good sense of what is a good economy. A good economy is a free economy. A good economy is a free economy. GDP measures are not particularly valuable. But we are captured by them and chanted by them and that's what counts. So I guess the point is it's really, really hard to tell what's going on out there economically. There's a lot of confusion and there's a lot of misleading numbers. But there is a lot of pessimism in spite of the relatively good numbers and there's still this question of will we have a recession? And if we do, how deep is it going to be? That has not been resolved. Although I'd say more people now believe that we won't, more people now believe in a soft landing that did in the past. All right, finally, there's a brain drain going on and that brain drain is going on in a country that deserves it. That is in Iran. Iran is seeing a substantial brain drain. Massive numbers of Iranians. Steep rises in application of Iranians for asylum or work and student visas overseas in recent years. Iran is going through a phase of uncontrolled mass emigration. People leaving the country versus immigration. The countries experience the world's fastest growth in migration rate to wealthy OECD countries between 2020 and 2021. This is according to OECD data. Both in terms of seeking political asylum and in terms of just student visas, but you know that they come into Europe or the United States on student visas, they're not going back. They're going to try to stay abroad. The number of Iranians studying abroad has risen for eight consecutive years. It is now, or at least in 2021, was at 70,000 and will probably increase. I'm sure that the Go Revolution will only have increased the demand and the desire of young people in Iran to leave Iran. So, yeah, there is a significant brain drain and it is significant. It would be cool. Again, just one of my crazy ideas that I keep referring to, if the United States, so Europe said, if you want to leave Iran and you want to come to school or you've got a college education or you're qualified to do this or that, here's a visa. Stamp, here's a visa. No income. No passals. Encourage the brain drain. Increase the brain drain. Stimulate the brain drain. Make it happen faster. We should do that in China. We should have done that in Hong Kong. We should do it really. Why be selective about the countries? Just do it everywhere. Good for the Iranians managing to get out of there. I hope they find hospitable homes in the West. I hope they don't get kicked out of the West. And I hope that emigration out of Iran continues at ever higher numbers. All right. Oh, I did want to make a small recommendation. Given what's going on in open AI, there's a TV show on Netflix right now. I guess it came out in 2022 and was on maybe Showtime or something. Yeah, Showtime, but it's now on Netflix. It's called Super Pumped. It is basically a TV show based on the story of Uber, the founding of Uber, and ultimately the battle, the boardroom battle for control over Uber and ultimately the ouster of Travis Kalanick, Kalanick who was one of the founders and the CEO of Uber. Kalanick is an interesting character, very mixed character, inspiring in some regards. Just stupid in other guards. You want to shake him up from his stupidity and insensitivity. But Kalanick is also known, although it doesn't come out in the TV show. And I think it's good that it doesn't come out in the TV show because in a TV show it's portrayed particularly badly. So I don't know if that's real life. I don't know how accurate this is to real life. Clearly he was a significant a-hole. But how bad was it, it's hard to tell. But Travis Kalanick was a huge Iron Man fan, particularly of the Fountainhead. And for a few years that he had the Fountainhead in his Twitter kind of identify ID. And I tried to meet Travis several times, but he didn't want to meet. Anyway, the show is really interesting. You know, it's hard to tell how accurate it is again. But again, it's interesting. It gives you an insight into some of the Silicon Valley culture. But it also gives you insight into what it takes to be a successful founder of a successful company. A lot of Silicon Valley people, well-known people make appearances. I mean, not the real people, people acting them. Anyway, from Ariana Huffington to Bill Gurley, the famous benchmark venture capitalist, to Tim Scott and Eddie Q from Apple, to the two founders of Google. And the internal politics and everything was quite interesting. To watch. So, you know, if you're interested in American business, if you're interested in Silicon Valley, if you're interested in the dynamics, again, I don't have a sense of, I mean, I assume it's fairly accurate from what I know about what happened and it covers events the way in the news. I don't know in terms of conversations in back rooms and in terms of boardroom, what happened, how much insight information they have. Although it's pretty detailed. But I found it interesting. So Super Pumped, The Battle for Uber, it's on Netflix. This is a first season, supposedly season two will be about Facebook. So supposedly this is not going to be a fictionalized account of the founding and the crisis management in America's major tech unicorns, major tech companies. So it'll be interesting. It'll be interesting. All right, let's see. Now, a lot of people watch this on Twitter. I wonder if it's even worth streaming onto Twitter. I don't know. Maybe the few, I capture a few. Right now, there's only like three people watching on Twitter. There were 13 before. I don't know if it, how it appears that is how does it get into the stream? I don't know how you retweet it. I don't see a retweet function. Anyway, let me know if you guys, maybe you can go onto Twitter and retweet it on Twitter or something like that. All right, let's see. Where are we? Super Chat. We're a little behind where we usually are this time during the Super Chat. Yesterday, we blew through the numbers, but we still have to try to make our target at least for each one of these. We only have five questions. We zip through these and we'll be done. So if you want to support the show, you can use a sticker or you can use Super Chat, value for value. You can also become a monthly subscriber on Patreon or urunbrookshow.com. Support or Subscribe Star. So feel free to do that. But right now, it'd be great if some of you did some stickers or asked questions using Super Chat so we can make our targets for the day. Oh, and just a reminder, I should do this every show. Those of you who are listening right now will not subscribe to the show. Please subscribe. Subscribe. You'll get announcements on upcoming shows and when they start, when they're happening. We've got 160 people watching right now, a buck from each person, and we've made our targets. So it shouldn't be that hard if you're interested in offering value for the value you get from the show itself. All right, Rimo asks, in your Enlightenment show, you talked about paintings portraying the Industrial Revolution. Do you know Hermann Hedgelbrock? Please Google it. I think you are like the themes of the paintings. Interesting. I do not know him. Let me copy paste so I can Google it later. I assume he's like a German painter or something like that. I need to open a great file. But yeah, always looking for interesting painters, sculptors or anything like that and always looking for to enrich. By the way, tonight I will review some, not all, of what you've asked me to review. So I will be reviewing... I will try to review some of the songs and I definitely will review the Star Trek movie that Charles Butt wanted me to review. Rimo, do you see Israel still flourishing in the future when one-fourth of its population is ultra-orthodox? Clearly, that one-fourth is going to be a continuing drain on the Israeli economy and a drain on Israel's capacity for economic growth and capacity to flourish and capacity to defend itself because that is a fourth of the population that doesn't go to the military and so on. It also depends on how the politics of this plays out. If they lose political power as I think they can and I think October 7th might speed that up in a sense that Israel will look to establish a government that is more on religious issues, more to the center and more stable and a government that will cut, maybe even eliminate the kind of subsidies that make it possible for this community to live without working and not serve in the Israeli army. But mainly the fact that they get subsidized, their schools get subsidized, their lack of work gets subsidized. So all of that, you know, if that is drained from them I think they'll have to become productive in some way so I'm hopeful that that happens but it is a real danger and a real risk. That is to the extent that they continue to suck money from the Israeli economy to the extent that they continue not to work, to the extent that they continue to advocate for policies that are anti-human flourishing, they are a break and a restraint on Israel's ability to flourish as a modern, civilized country. And, you know, that is the threat from within. The threat from within I think is not so much the Arab population. I think the threat from within is the ultra-orthodox population. Ultra-orthodox are the very religious Jews. One Jew still wear the same clothes they wore in the 18th century. Jeffrey says, in appreciation for the fact that we had two separate parties of YBS friends in the restaurants on Saturday, excellent. I'm curious if they came to which restaurant did they come? Has anybody yet tried Jeffrey's table? Right, I'm curious about that. So great, I'm happy to send YBS fans to the restaurant and for people to enjoy it. Yeah, I get a lot of questions about it, so happy to. And Jeffrey just opened a new restaurant called Jeff's Table, right? So I think it's Jeff's Table, right? Jeffrey's Table, something like that. So happy to support the restaurant. All right, let's see. Yeah, I didn't mention the name, but the name, of course, is Rosella. Rosella is the existing restaurant, and then again, there is this new restaurant right next to Rosella that was opened recently. You don't get a discount, Richard, you cheapo. All right, Daniel says, thank you, $50, thank you, really appreciate it. In a capitalist society with a separation of state and economics, would there be a role for the state to limit hostile governments from investing in property ownership in said society? Yeah, of course. I mean, you can imagine a lot of different things happening in terms of, certainly, hostile governments would be banned from owning property or investments companies shares in your country. Certainly, if they're hostile, and you could make an argument that the ban would even be for any countries. That is, countries should not participate in the economy. And other governments, other countries should not. They can do what they want with their own economy, but they can't actively engage in the company. They should know land. They should know businesses. But there's no question that if they're hostile, that's absolutely the case. The government is responsible for regulating its, the relationship between country A and all other countries. It is responsible for anything at the governmental level. And to the extent that other countries have, I don't know, investment funds other countries have, you know, take the money of their central bank or take the money of their tax money invested in other countries. It is the government's role. It is not a violation of the separation of state from economics for the government to be involved in it. It is responsible for all activities of foreign governments vis-à-vis the existing government. They won't go. They won't country. All right, Shelley, thank you for the $20 that helped a lot. Get us closer to where we need to be. Of course, Daniel's $50 helped with the question. And then Paul, Paul did a sticker as well. You too can do a sticker and get us there. It shouldn't be that difficult to get us there from where we are, but we don't have time. So there are only two questions and then I'm done for the day. And we'll keep it under an hour. That's good. Unless a flood of questions come in and then I'll keep going. Ion Maycott says, how are we up alone? I want off this planet either that or to convert to Mormonism and get my own. Get your own what? I don't know what. Oh, you get your own planet when you die. That's right. Mormons believe that when you die, you get your own planet. All right, Ion Maycott, I don't think Elon's going to take you off the planet and I'm not sure what kind of society you'll have in Mars. I'm just not convinced that if you just take the same people, the same ideas, the same philosophies that you have now on Earth, the kind of philosophies that are shaping the conflict even at open AI and you bring them to Mars that you will do a lot better. Ion Maycott says, knowing Elon, especially considering he's making the world worse, Mormonism is probably the better option. Probably, although the challenge with Mormonism is you have to wait until you're dead. I see Mark Thomas as your mark. I have a question for you. I saw an email go from Angela to you to try to resolve whatever issues we have. Did you get that email from Angela and will you be responding? So please let me know. But I did see she sent you an email in response to your email. So you should be getting it and you should be able to respond to that so we can move forward. Thank you, Ion Maycott. All right, last question, which I think I don't understand. Historians crying about mistakes in new NAP movie. I don't know what NAP movie is, NAP movie, NAP movie. I don't know what the hell that is. And I don't know what the references with historians crying about their mistakes. I don't know what mistakes or what movie or what anything we're talking about. All right, we are done. Thank you and thank you for all the superchatters. I appreciate the support. Oops, we got another question quickly. Andrew came in with a question. Why is there a lack of work among the religious, regionalists in Israel? Is that an attitude shared by religionists in general? Or because, no, I don't think it's shared by religionists. On the contrary, Mormons work really hard and religious Jews, I mean, ultra-orthodox Jews don't. There is this belief among the ultra-orthodox that men should spend their youth, and I mean their youth at least until the age of 40, being in the Shiva, studying the Bible, you know, constantly, and praying, and going to synagogue, and that work, i.e., taking care of one's material needs, should be during those years the exclusive responsibility of women. That is, women work so that men can study. And this is the amazing thing about these ultra-orthodox communities. The men don't work. They go to Shiva, maybe they work a little bit, but mostly they're at the Shiva, right? The women raise families, and we're talking about families. We're talking about, like, you know, nine kids or something, right? Lots of kids. And of course the kids are trained to take care of kids. So the three-year-old takes care of the one-year-old, and as they grow older, they take care of the younger and younger. So the mother has a whole process of training her daughters, particularly in taking care of the younger kids. But they have lots of kids. The woman works, and the man doesn't. Every morning when the man gets up, he says a prayer, and the first line in the prayer is, thank you God for not making me a woman. Well, of course, given how hard she has to work in order to facilitate his recreational activities at the Shiva, studying the Bible for no real end. So there's no work because they choose not to work, because studying is more important. It's a connection to God. And these are Jews that contribute nothing, really nothing, to production, productivity, wealth, creation, nothing. They are pure consumers, pure destroyers. They massively benefit from the rest of society producing and increasing productivity from the existence. They all use iPhones, even though they don't deserve to. You know, the ultra-orthodox, Israel's barbarians. All right, thank you everybody. We came very close to reaching our targets, so that is good. And it would be better if we made it, but it's still good. And let's see, I will see you all tonight at 7 p.m. Something about productivity, the importance of it, something about Thanksgiving, something maybe about techno-optimism, build, build, build, grow, grow, grow, go technology, go economy. It should be a lot of fun. Join me at 7 p.m. East Coast tonight. See you then. Bye everybody.