 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, December 23rd, we're really close to Christmas. For another episode of Iran Does the News, I guess, and today I guess the number one news item on every single channel I looked at is the fact that you guys, I'm talking about you, Daniel, and you, Jennifer, and the rest of you out there that are on the chat. The number one item on the news is that you guys are freezing. That it is super cold out there and it, I don't know, it's not even a white Christmas in many places, but you're still freezing. So cold, cold, cold, I'm sure I have no doubt about this. This is related to climate change because it's different than last year and we've seen a change, so it must be related to climate change. And it's freaking cold out there, five degrees in Memphis, Tennessee. Yeah, Tom, you can't really complain when Jupiter is saying it's negative four over there, negative eight in Iowa. I don't know, but I still don't know what, you know, I remember Chicago days where it was negative 30, windchill factor, Minnesota in February where it was minus 20. I mean, I don't know, I mean, five seems warm. Now I have to admit that right here in Puerto Rico outside, it is, I think this morning it was 81 degrees. I think probably right now it's 85, 86, sun is shining. It is truly a beautiful day. Why you want to live in minus 12 in Denver, oh, a few days ago in Denver, minus 35 where I used to live in Edmonton. Yes, Edmonton. I mean, that's why nobody lives in Edmonton because it's minus 35. Florida, Nick has it right here, 72, but I have it even better at 85. It's gorgeous. It's cool because there's a nice breeze. It's just amazing weather here. And I'm doing this just to rub it in because I enjoy doing it. Jupiter says it's minus 29 wherever he is, a windchill factor. All right, don't go outside. Be careful, guys. I hope this didn't screw up anybody's travel plans. I'm sure it did for a lot of Americans. Hopefully none of you guys. Jennifer loves the cold. I know. I'm sure many of you do. And that's why you live in the places between Arkansas. That's pretty cold for Arkansas. I know Texas is freezing. I think Texas is below freezing. They're worried about power. We'll see what happens. We'll see what happens. But hopefully everybody stays safe and it doesn't screw up your Christmas and you manage to have a phenomenal weekend. All right, let's jump in with news news. Let me start with what wasn't in the news yesterday, the day before yesterday and today. And it is just being completely quiet, which I find just interesting. And what wasn't in the news and what hasn't been in the news is Ron DeSantis' view of Zelinsky. Zelinsky visited. Everybody commented. Trump commented. Republicans commented. Democrats commented. Everybody commented. Silence from, I mean complete silence from DeSantis. Complete silence from the DeSantis campaign. Complete silence from DeSantis' proxies. On this issue, they yapped around and all kinds of other stuff. But on this issue, so interesting. Doesn't want to piss anybody off. If he comes out for Zelinsky, pisses off the crazy right. Not just the crazy right, a lot of the right. If he comes out anti Zelinsky, he alienates independence and more moderates. So he's just quiet. He's really, he's got a playbook for running for president. And he's just following it to the tee. It is pretty amazing, pretty amazing. All right, make of that what you will. All right, let's jump in with really, really bad news. I mean this is just, I mean it's bad news for two reasons. One is for the actual news that's involved in it. And second, for the stupidity of the headlines. The headlines are US life expectancy fell to lowest level since 1996. If you look somewhere else, it's COVID-19. And overdose deaths drive US life expectancy to a 25 year low. And all of that in a sense is true. We're seeing a massive rise in excess deaths, if you will. Most of those generated from opioid, the opioid pandemic. This is a trend that started in the mid, I'd say 2016, 2017 and really accelerated over the last couple of years with COVID. It is a, it is, you know, those excess death primarily in middle aged white men. So not the people susceptible to, you know, really to COVID. So not dying from COVID, this is clearly those people that middle class, not middle class, middle aged, working class, white men. This is a phenomena that was identified while before COVID has nothing to do with COVID, has nothing to do with vaccines, has nothing to do with anything else associated with COVID. It is purely a phenomena of overdose over. And it was enough already, I think, in 2018, 2019 to literally lower average life expectancy. You know, we'll get in a minute to the fact that life expectancy, average life expectancy doesn't mean anything, really. But it's a massive number, it's a significant number and it's focused on particular groups. You know, we'll see COVID is particularly focused on particular groups, but this, what do you call it? The opioid epidemic is primarily a working class and primarily a white phenomena. But we also seen 2020, 2021, and even now, but certainly 2020, 2021, excess deaths as a consequence of COVID. And again, you can see the demographics. The demographics are old people, old people that are dying, you know, they usually would live a few more years and they would drive the averages down, they're dying a little earlier and driving the averages up. With COVID, you've seen that its minorities are hardest hit when it comes to COVID. You can look at other reasons for excess deaths, one of the others, I mean, we talk a lot about opioid overdoses, but another reason for excess deaths, particularly in the last, I'd say six, seven years, has been liver disease, kidney disease, and that has to do with alcoholism. So diseases associated with excess consumption of alcohol are also seeing a significant rise. So what you're seeing really here, put aside the COVID stuff, what you're seeing here is people basically committing suicide, not maybe committing suicide explicitly in the sense of I'm gonna kill myself. But you remember that line from, remember that line from Shoshak Redemption, my favorite line in Shoshak Redemption, I wonder who of you remember my favorite line of Shoshak Redemption, one of my favorite lines of any movie, because I think it's absolutely a true line. And that line is, it's just a great line, right? Get busy living or get busy dying. And what we're seeing in America, sadly, tragically, horrifically, and I've done shows in the past about the causes of this and I'll do another show in the future about the cause of this, because it's important, is we're seeing people getting busy dying. And they're getting busy dying by becoming drug addicts, by getting hooked on painkillers, by over-consumption of alcohol, by being obese, by not taking care of themselves, by taking no person of responsibility for their own lives, by letting themselves decay and die, and die at a much younger age. And this is not a condemnation of the American healthcare system, although it has gazillion problems. This has nothing to do with the American healthcare system, which I still think is superior to most others in spite of all its problems. This has everything to do with our culture. This has everything to do with people's motivation. We talked about ambition yesterday. Has to do with a lack of ambition. It has to do with cultural alienation. It has to do with something really fundamental, something really deep in our culture that is rotting. And maybe we'd expect when cultural collapse, we'd expect to see cultural collapse manifest itself in economic crisis, in increased poverty, and all kinds of things like that. But it looks like the early warning sign of civilization, cultural collapse in the United States, are early deaths. People just giving up on life. People embracing lifestyles that are gonna kill them. People getting busy dying. And that's just, that's horrible. And again, we can talk about why I think it's the betrayal of our intellectual class. It's a betrayal of the mixed economy. It's false promises. It's our educational system that has insisted that people not take personal responsibility for their own actions and for their own life. A warfare state that doesn't expect them to do so. But then you also have to explain the differences between America and Europe, where you're not seeing quite the same phenomena in Europe. You're not seeing people giving up on life to the same extent as they are in the US. She'd have to, I think you have to contrast it with the underlying culture in the US and the disappointments so many people feel in life because they're not achieving what is known as the American dream. The Europeans don't have that American dream. They don't have that standard from which to be depressed when they don't achieve it. And here they don't, not achieving it, they don't understand why it's easy for them to blame the other. It's easy for them never to blame themselves. And our politicians encourage that for them not to blame themselves. And they feel betrayed and they feel isolated and they feel lonely and they're not focused on living. They're not focused on living. And it's not because they have a lot. It's because they can't see themselves improving over time. They can't see themselves moving in the right direction over time. And they don't understand the world around them. That's a big part of it. And that's the fault of our leadership. That's the fault of our intellectual leadership. It's the fault of our political leadership. All right, we'll do a show on that. And I have already in the past, but I'll do it again. There's so many structural problems in this country that make it a place for people to decay rather than to thrive. And that we're not even talking about getting rid of, but that exists out there. So, I mean, you're seeing these headlines all over the place. Oh, the reason why it's silly. So I saw it says, you know, if you're born today in America, the chances are, instead of, you know, five years ago, you expected to live until, let me see, 77 in 2020, and now it's 76.4 years in 2021. But that's silly because that assumes COVID is gonna happen every generation or every couple of generations. It assumes the opioid epidemic, it's static. But really what it assumes is, it assumes behavior doesn't change because a lot of this is caused by behavior, not by a healthcare system and not by our genes and not by anything biological, it's caused by our choices. The fact is that if you're born today and if you take responsibility over your own health and your own life and you exercise and you eat well and you don't become obese and you don't smoke and you don't drink excessively and you don't take opioids and you don't take drugs, I'd be interested in that number. What is your life expectancy then? Because that is most of us. What's our life expectancy, right? And my expectation is that that life expectancy is well into the 80s, well into the 80s, right? And that ignores any advances in medicine, right? So let's assume static, no medicine. Even without any advances in medicine, if you take care of yourself, and I'm not talking about being an athlete or I'm not talking about being the most rigorous diet, whatever, eating, being vegan or something, I'm just talking about just basically taking care of yourself and you don't do the stupid things, right? Just eliminate the stupid things. Drinking excessively, obesity, drugs. Then you're likely to live well into your 80s, if not these days into your 90s. So it's kind of a dumb statistic to extrapolate from today to what young people are. I think most people, each today, if civilization survives and who take responsibility of their own lives, even in a relatively minimal way, will probably live to be over 100, over 100. Did I not say exercise? If I didn't say exercise, yes. Do those things. Exercise, eat well. Exercise, don't be obese. Don't smoke, don't drink excessively, and don't take drugs. And you're probably gonna do fantastic in terms of living to be 85. Now, if you're like me and wanna live to be 120, you gotta do more than that. And you gotta hope, hope, hope. Science really advances fast, which is what I'm doing. Hoping, I guess that's what I can do. Hope is not a virtue. Let's see, talking about COVID, it's truly stunning what is going on in China right now. I've seen reports out of China from people on the ground, from residents, that cities are more empty and it's more spooky and it's more ghost towny right now in some cities in China than it was during lockdowns. People are just not going out. Almost everybody is infected. That is the percentage of infected people is massive. Many of the people outside are infected. I read this story by a subjectivist in China and he said, you can tell the non-infected from the infected. The infected are walking around with confidence outdoors because they're already infected. The non-infected are the ones that are dodging and zigzagging and trying to avoid other people and socially distancing. But all indications that there are millions of infections right now in China. Hospitals, including the very weak hospital systems that they have in rural areas, overloaded with COVID cases in spite of the fact that these COVID strains are less deadly than the previous ones. They're still deadly for people with pre-existing conditions, deadly for people over a certain age. You have to remember China has an elderly population. It is an elderly country because of their one child policy. It is a shrinking population and it is quite elderly. So you've got a lot of people who are probably landing up in hospital with the disease. They have approved Paxiloid, the drug that Pfizer has, the antiviral, but they don't have enough quantities. They only thought about buying it late and they don't have the kind of quantities that are needed, even for the older people who should be taking it once they're diagnosed. And the country, so while people are healing, zero COVID now is gone, so supply chains are gonna be all great. That's not the case. The fact is that the country is not paralyzed by the fact that people are staying home because they've got COVID or they're staying home because they're afraid of getting COVID. But the reality is that manufacturing production is gonna be slow coming out of China for at least the next few weeks as this kind of rips through the country. Everybody gets it. Everybody, you know, and you get, I guess this is, they'll get herd immunity at some point. But it's probably gonna come in waves in terms of the different areas in China. Right now it's hitting Beijing really, really hard and it's hitting the south of China, Guangzhou, really, really hard. I don't know, I haven't read about Shanghai and so the other places. So this could be a while, but it is, China, of course, officially is reporting, I think 10 COVID deaths, but again, people on the ground are suggesting it's much, much worse than that. China's also announcing very few infections. People on the ground are suggesting pretty much everybody's infected. So yeah, China's going through probably much faster, probably weaker, but probably much more intense. Well, the West and many of us went through in 2020. They're not lucky now in their population, lockdowns are voluntary right now. People are staying home, which is what would have happened anyway, which would have happened in places like New York if they hadn't forced us to lockdown. Most people, particularly the vulnerable, would have stayed home. I mean, it would have been the rational, logical thing to do is to stay home. You didn't have to send out the police to drag people into their homes. All right, let's see. This is kind of an interesting story, particularly in the context of Twitter being a pressure being put by the government on Twitter to, I don't know, Hunter Biden's laptop computer, other things, basically this intermingling politics with media, right? With media, Twitter is media and silencing some voices on Twitter, encouraging others. Now, we all know that Fox is biased, but it is fascinating to read stories now about the testimony under oath by Fox personalities, the leading voices on Fox in terms of the lies that they told after the election and how willing they were to tell those lies, knowing at the time that they were lying. So this is part of the lawsuit. If you remember, Dominion voting systems sued Fox. They also sued the pillow man. They sued a bunch of different people. They sued that Powell, that Trump's lawyer. They sued a bunch of different people over defamation, I guess, I guess, it's defamation of the company because they said, you know, there's nothing wrong with our voting machines. Our voting machines are fine and these people basically, with no evidence, made out of, it took out of the air, invented the stuff and accused us of all the stuff. Hannity, Hannity of course has, I think at the time probably had the most watched show on Fox and a close associate of Donald Trump and somebody Donald Trump I remember was president when this happened. So basically Hannity was towing Donald Trump's line on live television, reporting on stuff that he knew was fabricated, that he knew was a lie and he was willing to report it. According to his testimony, it was part of discovery in this defamation lawsuit brought in by Dominion Voting System. He was asked, he was asked, let's see, he was asked whether, when he was interviewing Powell and when he was arguing, the points that she was arguing, whether he thought that what she was saying was true and he said in his testimony, I did not believe it for one second. That's what he gave under oath in a deposition in the 1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News. Now, I don't know what the argument's gonna be. This was entertainment, this was, but it just shows that, did Hannity get a phone call from Donald Trump saying, I want you to interview Powell? Did Hannity get a phone call from Donald Trump saying, I want you to follow the party line and advocate for the stolen election? Does Fox News believe the election was stolen? No, you read the depositions, they did not, right? So, you're pumping this nonsense out every day. Clearly, there's a link from the White House to you encouraging you to do that. You're lying, bull face lying to the American people. Tucker Carlson is doing the same thing. I think he's still doing it to this day. Is this censorship by proxy? Donald Trump put pressure on Murdoch? Did Murdoch and Donald Trump have a deal? No, I mean, Fox can say whatever they wanna say. If they lie about a company, that company can sue them for defamation and I hope Dominion voting machines wins. And Hannity wasn't just interviewing her, he was repeating the accusations, he was doing it all through that period. He was doing it on a nightly basis and he and others were actively supportive. And you know what, the same thing happened during the January 6th riot. I mean, if you look at the tweets that Hannity was saying, he was condemning those riots, he thought they were horrible, he thought Trump was responsible. When he went on there, he said the exact opposite. This is, in that sense you could argue that Fox was the Trump propaganda machine, the Trump propaganda machine. Of course there's that defamation lawsuit, if you guys still believe that there was this grand conspiracy to steal the election, then you can believe it. All the evidence, you'll have all the time in the world during this defamation lawsuit to bring out all the evidence, Powell and all these people will have the opportunity to bring out the evidence and show it in a court of law, you'll be able to review it and we can all see whether the Dominion machines were rigged. And Sean Hannity, under oath, has said, I do not believe it for one second. So I know that people like Ken and other conspiracy theory inclined people are going to latch onto that forever, just like the 9-11 conspiracy theories it doesn't matter what you tell them, it doesn't matter what you show them, it doesn't matter what experts say or what anybody says they will believe that it was the Bush administration or the Mossad or something else brought it down. But there is no evidence, there's no evidence, there's zero evidence and you will see, I'll make a prediction here, the Dominion will win, whether they get 1.6 billion and if they don't win, they won't win because it'll be found that defamation is very, very, very hard to prove. So it'll be found that it wasn't technically defamation but they will not win, they will not lose on the basis that yes, they actually cheated. That will not happen, I'll predict it here. You can call me on if I lose, I said the same thing. We've done this several times now with people who have questioned my predictions and I land up being true and I land up being right and they never come back and say, whoops, you're on, you know what, you were right, sorry, we were wrong. It never happens because conspiracy theories are not kind of things that you can disprove because whatever evidence you provide, there's always another layer and there's always a 4D chest kind of thing. There's nothing you can say to a conspiracy theory nut who's convinced themselves that conspiracy exists. There's nothing you can say to change their mind. And the stolen election is just one more example of one of those kinds of conspiracies. All right, that's Fox News, let's see, yes. We talked about this a few weeks ago but it's a story worth repeating because it's something that always happens and I've talked about this. People get hysterical about stuff. People always think the world's gonna end, people always think, oh my God, and there's no appreciation of flexibility of people, of ability to adjust, make different choices. There's no appreciation of the ability to adapt new technologies, to shift those new technologies, to build new stuff, to change policy. None of that is appreciated. And you're seeing that right now in Europe, the story's just a few months ago where Europe's gonna freeze this winter running out of gas, it's completely 100% dependent on Russia and this is gonna be a catastrophe, Europe is finished. Europe is dead, they're gonna have to come groveling to Putin because they're gonna freeze their butts off because of a lack of natural gas. Now I already told you the story about the fact that they were turning away natural gas because their reserves were already full. The fact is that Europe is gonna be fine this winter with natural gas. Europe is, the reserves are full as we speak right now. In addition to that, they are managed, particularly the Germans, have managed to build a new LNG floating terminal in record time, they build this amazing in super record time. And there are another four of these floating LNG terminals that are gonna be built. New gas projects are being developed to pipe gas in from places like Azerbaijan through Turkey and through Romania into Southern Europe. There's a deal to ship LNG from Israel in Egypt, there's a deal to ship from Qatar and from, although that might be in jeopardy because of this corruption scandal in the EU. Also from the United Arab Emirates of Saudi Arabia, from the Gulf States basically, the United States is shipping massive amounts of LNG to Europe and worship more once these new terminals come on board. So there is, Norway has increased the shipments of natural gas. It turns out that, as I told you, would turn out that Europe is not as dependent on Putin as people thought, though end of the world is not here yet. And don't panic, the Europeans are probably not gonna freeze. Now they are paying very high prices for the gas because the fact is that these other sources of gas are much more expensive than just pumping it in from Russia, which was relatively cheap. But okay, so they'll pay higher prices for gas, high price of gas means lower consumption. Price usually works to lower consumption, lower demand, which means they save more gas, which means they'll have more. And I predict the same thing will happen next year, even if this stuff with the Russian pipelines don't get fixed and so on. There's plenty of natural gas in the world. And it's just a question of how do you get it to Europe? And if they can diversify the means by which they can receive it, there is no limit how much natural gas they can get. So one more frantic end of the world story ended. The Kerry Lake lawsuit is going ahead. I should have done this together with a Fox News story. But going ahead in Arizona, I think they've had two days of testimony. I assume we'll get a verdict early next week would be my guess, maybe the following week. Yeah, I mean, there was nothing there. From everything I saw, there was no there there. My guess is that the court will say there's no basis for her claim. And as a consequence, she will not be, I know it's a shock to all of you, she will not be the next governor of Arizona. And yes, there were no problems in Arizona either. Oh, there were problems, but minor problems that were fixed and the election was legit. But again, once you start believing the conspiracy theories, there's no exit ramp or the exit ramp is traumatic and it's gonna take some real shift. It's not gonna come easy to those who bought into these. That's just the reality. All right, that is, let me see, did I have another, I got that, that's the Hannity story. Yep, we got them all. All right, I'm saving the Stanford Language Guidelines for another show. We'll do that at some point. Let's see, let's do super chat. Let me just say, Vladimir, thank you. Noel, thank you, these people didn't ask questions. Colt, thank you. And Nick, thank you. And that's it. And I'll go to the questions. We're like $92 short of our goal and a very few questions. So this will be a short show, which is fine. Actually, Glenn, $100 just says thank you for shows, insights and practical implementation of Objectivism. My pleasure, thank you, Glenn. And thank you for the support. That $100 is very generous. And if we're gonna make it close to our goal today, Catherine is really working hard here. $92 should be, and we've got a lot of people watching relative to the morning shows, 130. So please, we've only got 50 likes. Please give it a thumbs up if you like the show. If you gain any value from the show, please put a thumbs up. The algorithm, the YouTube algorithm really likes the like button. So please like the show before you leave today. Make a comment. Of course, if 130 people are on, if everybody just does a dollar, then we would easily get to our goal. So please consider making a small dollar contribution to the Iran Book Show on the super chat while I answer these last three questions. Of course, you can also ask a question, which would be even better. Okay, William, everyone I know working in art animation is worried about AI art. There are many protest boycotts across multiple arts websites. Should they be wired or are they missing out on a useful new tool? Well, I think both, right? I think some of them should be wired. I think if you are a mediocre or below animator or artists, if you lack the qualities that differentiate I think AI from human being and imagination and ability to really think beyond kind of the predictable, then you should be worried because AI is gonna, again, AI in every profession, almost every profession should be wired. AI in every profession is going to take out those jobs that are easy to repeat, that are easy to take, and AI is getting so good that it'll take out higher and higher level jobs as it moves forward. But there'll always be a place for human beings, and again, I agree with you completely, AI should be viewed as a tool for the best of us and how to use it to improve our own creative abilities and our own art, and that's what the best will do. That's what the most, those are the people who adapt will do. They'll realize, they'll figure out what is it that I add versus just the mechanics of the thing. I'll let the machine do the mechanics and I'll focus in on what I can add. And the whole trend of technology is to move us, to move us, what is going on here? My monitors are stepping into the picture there. I'll have to adjust for next time. To move us away from simple activities, to move us away from repetitive activities, move us away from mindless activities, and to allow us to focus on the greater value added mental activities, the things that involve what is uniquely human, creativity, imagination, and the ability to actually reason. And machines will take away the Boeing stuff, will take away, but that'll mean that we will have to elevate ourselves. It means that we will have to elevate, it means that different people are gonna be good at different things, so some people should be worried. I mean, doctors should be worried about the ability of AI to do some levels of diagnosis. Certainly radiologists should be worried, but not every radiologist, right? The mediocre radiologists should be worried. The really good radiologists shouldn't be worried. And the same with doctors, the same with any professions. And new jobs will be created to fill in for the jobs that in a sense are going away. But jobs will go away, there's no question about that. But it is also important to view it as a tool. All right, Richard said, seed funding for Catherine to trademark value for value. Value-y, value-y, I'm not sure what that is. All right, thank you, Richard. And yes, we need to, Catherine needs to get on. She's still got $47 to raise here to get to her morning goal. Usually she does this much faster and it's much easier. So I think she's getting frustrated. She's like doing, ah, I mean, she's in pain. Again, $1 for a person online right now would relieve, 50 cents actually, would relieve Catherine of her pain. Frank says, can you do wool show about dealing with criticism? Yeah, I can do a show on dealing with criticism that is, I mean, I'm thinking of ending my wool show. I think I've already done dealing with criticism, but I'm happy to do it again. I know, I mean, I think one of my mistakes in these shows is not repeating more because I think that actually repetition is good. And when you listen to a lot of these commentators on shows like mine, they repeat themselves all the time. They basically cover the same topics in the same way over and over and over again. And they become very popular. I try to mix it up constantly because I hate repeating myself. I think that's probably a mistake. I think it's probably better to repeat. All right, we've got two last questions. We've got $47 to reach a goal. Catherine is going wild on the chat trying to get people to contribute. It's fun to watch. Landon says, getting to 100 takes a lot of work. Cepita Atia, getting to 100 in age, I guess. Either it does or it doesn't. I mean, I know people who got to 100 and spend no work in getting to 100. But I think for somebody who doesn't have necessarily the genes or the luck to get to 100, yeah, it probably takes a lot of work. But I'm seeing more and more people in good shape reaching into their 90s. And that's inspiring in terms of what's possible. Sean is about, thank you for the $20, got us really close to our goal. Was Alec Baldwin motivational speech from Glenn Gary Glenn Ross, say that fast a lot of times, a valid method for improving ambition in slacker salesmen? This is the speech where it's quite abusive. Is that right? I mean, I don't think always be closing. I remember the speech. I don't remember it well enough to really comment on it. I mean, I didn't particularly like that movie and I don't remember, you know, I don't remember the speech. It struck me as a used cost salesman kind of speech. Closed no matter what, devout of values, devout of it's pragmatism, it's there's the number, get to the number, do whatever you have to do, close on it with whatever you have to do. So if that's what I remember is right about the speech, then no, I don't think, I think it might get people motivated in the moment, but it doesn't last because it's not oriented around real values, sustainable values. And it doesn't, and it promotes a methodology that I don't think ultimately works, right? Just telling people to close, close, close, close, and the value of closing rather than, what is this all about? Why am I doing this? What motivates me? Which I think is much more valuable. All right, Geoffrey says, what's the Brooke family Christmas dinner? Christmas dinner every year in Puerto Rico is at Marmalade. Geoffrey, when you come to Puerto Rico, we'll have to take you to Marmalade. It's a good restaurant by a, the chef is a guy from the Midwest who married a Puerto Rican, moved to Puerto Rico. The restaurant's been around for a long time. It's kind of an institution here in Puerto Rico, but the food is really good. It's modern and light, but with a lot of Puerto Rican kind of flavors. But it's also, I think his wife is vegan, so he specializes a lot of the dishes, kind of vegetarian dishes, vegan dishes, and actually those are some of the best stuff he has. But yeah, everything there is just, it's good and it's a fun place. It's a nice place. So that's what we do for Thanksgiving and Christmas is Marmalade when we're here in town. Yeah, and then we've got another one of our favorite restaurants we're doing for New Year's. That's Vianda, which is also a really nice, really, really nice restaurant that we are regulars at and we're gonna do New Year's. They're doing a special prefix dinner for New Year's there. All right, Mary Benz, she asks, what is your Thursday interview lineup? Oh God, let me see if I can pull up the schedule, pull up my calendar, maybe it's on the calendar, maybe it's not, I don't know if Angela's put it there yet. I know the next Thursday, I'm gonna be interviewing Tara Smith. So that's gonna be fun. We're gonna talk about a lot of different things. It'll be close to New Year. We'll talk about New Year. We'll talk about looking forward, looking backwards on the year and all of that. So I'm really looking forward to that. That should be a fun show. By the way, we're $15 short. $15 short. 10 cents from anybody listening right now would get us over the hump. Let's see, that's next Thursday. Let's see if it's on the calendar. I think the Thursday after that, Jenny Fifth, we are talking to Robin Marquette, who is a scientist in the field of life extension. So he studies, he does research on life extension. So we're gonna talk about his views on life's expression. He's a bit of a, I mean, his views are more, how should I call it, pessimistic. His view is, it's much harder than a lot of the popular stuff is saying it is. It's gonna be a lot harder to do. It's a lot more of a complex than, let's say, Sinclair says. So he's, I think, quite critical of Sinclair. I don't know who I have after that. So I see it's not in my calendar. So Angela doesn't put it in my calendar yet. So I'll try to announce a couple of weeks in advance, but we have, I think, people lined up through February, March, but I'm also traveling a lot come February, March. I hope you enjoyed, hope everybody enjoyed. We are now $5.82 short. All right. I wonder if somebody will save Catherine for the agony of defeat. Mark asked, do you want Puerto Rico to be a state? No, of course not. I mean, I would lose my tax status if it was a state. You know, Puerto Ricans would have to pay federal taxes. So the tax burden in a sense would go up. They would get more benefits from the federal government as a consequence, but that would make them even more dependent on the welfare state, if you will. I just don't think that it would be good for Puerto Rico. I think right now, in many respects, thank you, John. John just got us a $5.82 and he made it happen. Thanks, John. Catherine, thank you from the bottom of our hearts. There's Kenny, Vladimir, they're all coming in to save Catherine at the last moment. I just don't think it would be good for Puerto Rico. I think actually Puerto Rico has the best of all worlds right now. It is part of the US. Puerto Ricans do pay into Social Security, they get Social Security, they pay into Medicare, they get Medicare, but they don't pay federal taxes. They can set a lot of their own regulations. They can set a lot of their own local taxes. They could, if they chose to, have a pretty dynamic, pretty exciting economy here on the island. Sadly, they're choosing not to. Sadly, you know, this island is dominated by I think probably a few families that are, and there's a lot of corruption, and there's a lot of conservatism in the sense of how it's always been done, and there's just a lack of willingness to do some radical things to really change this island and make it what I call the Hong Kong of the Caribbean, or used to call the Hong Kong of the Caribbean, which I think it could be and should be, and wouldn't take that much work to be, and I have a whole plan on how to make it, but I don't think anybody's listening. So I think they have the opportunity to do things they wouldn't have as a state, and I think they should leverage that and do it. All right, again, John, thank you. Thank you, Kenny. Thank you, Vladimir. Thank you, Lydia, Linda, not Lydia. Thank you, Oscar. Thanks, everybody who supported the show through the Super Chat today. If you want to become a monthly contributor, probably the easiest way to do it right now is through Patreon, Subscribestar, or locals. I'm working on completely redoing the website, making it simpler, and making it easier to make a contribution through there. If the website's working, you can do it on paper, you can also do it just directly through PayPal, your own book show, or even through Venmo. So any means possible, this is a great time of year to become a member of the Iran Book Show. You can do it on YouTube. You can click Join. There's a button they call Join and you become a member. I'm still gonna have the member-only show. I just don't know exactly when, but it is going to happen soon, and I will give you a few days' notice at least. And Ashton, Ashton, we have missed you. Where have you been? Ashton kind of disappeared for a month, came back for a couple of shows, and then disappeared again for three weeks. Okay, Ashton for $100 says, you always say that wealth is not taken but produced, but don't you need some resources to begin to produce everything? Yes, but those resources have to be produced. There is no resource that doesn't have to be produced, almost no resource that has to be produced. Take oil. Oil is black gunk, which traditionally has lowered the value of your property if you had it on there. It's not a resource, it's just black gunk. You have to produce it to turn it into wealth. You have to take that black gunk and turn it into a resource by refining it and by turning it into something that, or even by just extracting it and being able to move it to the place where it can be refined. So iron ore needs to be separated from the rock around it and has to be treated in order to be useful in machinery. Almost every resource that human beings have has to be, the resource itself has to be produced now. It's true there is some raw material out there, but that raw material has to be mine. That's productive work. So even to gain the resource, you have to engage in productive work. So there is no manner from heaven. Wealth doesn't drop from the sky. Wealth doesn't just appear. Even the wealth that is in your ground and your property has to be extracted and some effort needs to be put into that extraction. That is the process of the wealth creation. Hope that answers the question Ashton. All right, quick reminder, on December 31st, I will be doing a look back at 2022, look forward to 2023. The show will start at 2 p.m. East Coast time. It will go for three hours or so. And we have a big super chat match. We have a match for $10,000. $10,000. So Ashton, please come out and help us. And you've been very generous with the show this year. And many of you, I hope you can come. Contributions of $2, of $1,000, all are welcome. It's gonna take every little squimping dime, every little, every cent to get us to $10,000. That's not gonna be easy. So hopefully you can come for part of the show. Again, it's December 31st, starting at 2 p.m. East Coast time. And it should be a fun show. Hopefully there'll be a little bit of banter. Hopefully we won't get the trolls. We'll just get the fun guys in the chat. And we'll have a good time because it is New Year's and New Year's, you're supposed to have a good time. And I'll tell you what I and I had always did on New Year's itself. This is New Year's Eve, on New Year's itself. So this is December 31st, 2 p.m. East Coast time. See you all there. Thank you to all of you. Thanks, Ashton, for putting the whipped cream on the cake. We made our goal and then much more because of Ashton. Thank you to all the super chatters. Thank you everybody else here. I will see you probably a show tomorrow, not sure exactly what time. I mean, the reality is if I'm gonna do a show tomorrow, it's gonna be during the day because tomorrow's Christmas Eve. So it'll probably be at 2 o'clock Eastern time. I will see you then. There's a possibility. I'll just skip it, given that it's Christmas Eve. But in any case, have a fantastic Christmas. And I'll see you all next.