 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 Thursday to Israel and to Europe and all of that kind of stuff. But in the meantime, we're here to do our daily shows. If you want to be entertained, you should go in and read the comments on the two short videos that Christian posted. One on my critique of the Tucker Carlson and the other on my critique of Matt Walsh. I mean, it really is funny and it's entertaining. So just go read them. You can find them online. Basically on the Tucker Carlson, I'm accused of not knowing anything. You know, starting with COVID, Ukraine, January 6 election fraud, and generally, you know, the deep state conspiracy against all of us. That I know something about capitalism, maybe a little bit, but nothing else. And then if you go over to the Matt Walsh video, I mean, people have watched that so carefully that they're accusing me of being pro-reparations because I criticized Matt Walsh's video. Anyway, really entertaining, luckily for me and for civilization and for all of us, it represents a tiny fraction of the people who actually watch my videos and a tiny fraction of humanity. So don't be too upset about that. But talking about things I'm wrong about, I did want to make a couple of points. One is, you know, we've talked quite a bit about the settlement between Fox News and Dominion. A topic I was strangely enough right about and the fact that Fox News is not willing to defend the conspiracy theories around the 2020 loss. I guess because they're part of mainstream media. I guess they've sold out. I guess they're just part of the deep state. But, you know, one of the interesting things about that particular situation is that Fox News is not out of the woods. Fox News still has to face at least one more lawsuit with a company called Smartmatic over the same issue, over the issue of computers and election fraud related to computers in 2020. The lawsuit is actually for $2.7 billion. So it'd be very interesting if this lawsuit goes to trial and again, whether Fox finds a way to settle. I don't know how many of these lawsuits Fox can afford to settle. $800 million settlement with Dominion is quite a big bite. But, you know, we'll see what happens in that lawsuit that is still a developing story. And then there's also the producer, the Maria Bartolomo and Tucker Carlson, producer who is suing Fox and claims that she has recordings of conversations with, I guess, other producers with Tucker Carlson, maybe with Maria about all this stuff that are very revealing. So a lot of information is still going to come out about the complete nonsense around the 2020 fraud allegations. Well, one more piece has come out and this one's just too funny and too much fun not to include in my daily news roundup. You remember my pillow founder? You remember my pillow founder, Mike Lindell, who was 100% bought into all the conspiracy theories and was 100% bought into the election fraud allegations and has been an actor promoter of these allegations, you know, constantly. So Mike Lindell in August 2021 in South Dakota, there was some kind of conference cyber symposium, he claimed that he had data showing Chinese interference in the 2020 election and said, said that he would pay $5 million to anyone who could prove the material was not from the previous years US election. So he called the challenge prove Mike wrong. So here you have Mike Lindell, one of the promoters of the nuttiest of all the conspiracy theories out there, prove Mike wrong, you know, $5 million prize. Anyway, on Wednesday, yesterday, a private arbitration panel ruled that somebody did. Somebody is Robert Ziedman, a computer forensic expert and 63 year old Trump voter from Nevada, and the arbitration panel said that he was entitled to the $5 million. He examined all of Lindell's data and not only did he conclude that it did not prove voter fraud. He also concluded that the data had nothing to do with the 2020 election was unrelated to the 2020 election. See, the arbitrators have demanded that Linda 100. They were 23 page decision. They said that Ziedman have proven this unequivocally that this is not reflected November 2020 data they were they demanded that Lindell pay pay this. Mike Lindell's company refused to pay it when Ziedman first approached them. And this is hysterical. This is funny. We'll see if Mike Lindell is a man of his word, or if he's exactly the kind of unethical human being I suspect he is. And he tries to evade paying this bill. But anyway, there you have it. Another one of those ridiculous conspiracy theories around the 2020 election has now another one has been shown to be completely and utterly false. We'll keep keeping track of these for you just in case some of you might be tempted to believe any of it. All right, let's see. Where are we? Yeah, we've still got the actual news to cover. I'll just remind everybody the show is funded by by contributions from listeners like you. You can support the show through monthly contributions on Patreon or PayPal through your own book show dot com slash support. You can also use the Super Chat feature right here to support the shows. We have a $250 goal for every show that is a newsy show through the Super Chat. So please consider using that in order to support the show. All right, quickly, you've probably seen the news that Starship is SpaceX's basically rocket, this massive unbelievable rocket that is supposed to ultimately be able to carry cargo and people beyond Earth to potentially colonies in the moon. NASA is kind of counting on Starship to help return us to the moon, not us, but them. It's also, I think, SpaceX's long term plan is to use Starship as the rocket that will ultimately help us get to Mars. Well, I mean, Starship today had its first ever launch. And in spite of the fact that it blew up after launch, it was a huge success. And I think this is a really, really important point to dwell on. Because this is what makes the difference between, this is what makes the difference between great entrepreneurs. I mean, really worth changing entrepreneurs and to some extent the rest of us. Entrepreneurs realize that the only way to change the world is to try, fail, learn, try, fail, learn constantly. That failure is the way in which you progress. That there is no real alternative. That there's no way to design Starship so it never fails and it will never fail. The only way to design Starship is to design it to the best of one's ability and then test it, put it out there. Too many variables, too much data, too much unknown technology. Failure is part of the process. Failure is part of the innovator process. It's part of building, creating, making. It's part of the wealth creation process. And Elon Musk has been very explicit about this. They've talked about it at SpaceX. They've talked about fail to learn. That is, you fail in order to learn. And you design experiments that you know you're going to fail, but that in the process you will learn so that ultimately you will be successful. And these launches they were described well in advance as they expected the rocket to explode at some point. They expected failure. The fact that it got off the ground was success. Everything else is a bonus. They will learn from this. There's another launch in a few months. And in that launch they will hopefully be successful or that'll be the in a sense the testing ground for the third or fourth, the fifth, the hundredth launch until they get it right. This is super exciting. This whole methodology is a methodology you see in Amazon with Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos was very, very good at trying things, letting them fail, cancelling them, learning from them, doing it differently, and constantly shifting and changing and being willing to make quick decisions and being willing to fail, constantly willing to fail. Do you remember the Amazon phone? Probably most of you don't because it failed. And they cut it loose very quickly once they failed. But you got this is how you learn. What's your good at? What works? What makes money? What's profitable? Where you can progress? And you know, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, these were all some of the great failures in history, right? People who knew how to use failure to move forward, how to use failure to advance their projects to help pursue their ultimate values. So huge kudos to SpaceX and Elon Musk, who I think in the current times exemplify this kind of attitude, particularly at SpaceX, more than anybody else. It's very explicit. It's SpaceX and it's how they will conquer this challenge and how ultimately they will use Starship to conquer the moon and ultimately conquer Mars. So congratulations to Elon Musk for a successful launch in spite of the fact that it failed. Yeah, I mean, I wish in many respects, I wish Musk would stick to stick to rockets rather than Twitter, but hopefully he's being that same attitude to Twitter where there'll be a lot of experimentation, there'll be a lot of trials, there'll be a lot of failures and there'll be there'll be significant progress to make Twitter a better platform over time. All right, let's see, subsidies. So we all know the United States has taken a real turn towards greater subsidies for business. The Inflation Reduction Act that the Biden administration passed was clearly an attempt to bring certain industries to the United States. There are massive subsidies there for battery makers, for alternative energy, for EVs, for electric vehicles, but not just for the electric vehicles. The electric vehicle in order to get the subsidy has to have so much of a percentage of the products that go into it produced in America. And it has to be, you know, so there's all these incentives and subsidies and motivations to get businesses to build in the United States. And of course, when this passed, the Europeans were very upset. Other countries were very upset because what they feared was that the United States was doing something similar to China. It was incentivizing people to build businesses in the U.S. and that would deny those same businesses, a build in Europe, in Canada and other places. And this, of course, went against the principles of free trade that the United States had been a champion of, at least until the Trump presidency. So there was a lot of angst and there was a lot of allies who were upset at the United States for the Inflation Reduction Act. Sometimes I think there were more non-Europeans upset at the Inflation Reduction Act than there were Americans upset at this. But of course, you know, the solution was always pretty obvious in terms of what would happen. What happens is that all these other countries start offering the same kind of subsidies. So just like when you raise tariffs, you almost always engage in some kind of tariff war, where your tariffs lead other countries to raise tariffs and you raise tariffs in retaliation and they retaliate. And this kind of game that is lose, lose, lose, lose, lose kind of strategy evolves. Well, the same thing happens with subsidies. The United States has an Inflation Reduction Act that subsidizes batteries and electric vehicles and all this other stuff. And guess what? Europe is going to have subsidies and Canada is going to have subsidies and everybody else is going to have subsidies. And they're all going to compete for the same businesses, but in a lose, lose, lose, lose, lose kind of parameter where everything is subsidized. Indeed, maybe, I'm not giving Biden enough credit, but maybe what's really going on here is by passing the Inflation Reduction Act, what the United States has really done, is it's forced the Europeans and the Canadians to subsidize a bunch of businesses so that we can then import from them at a cheaper cost. Maybe that's what's going on. Because I like it when other countries subsidize their businesses and then we import it because we get it at a cheaper cost. And we don't have to spend that tax money on the subsidy. They spend it on the subsidy. So maybe it's just a ploy to get everybody else to subsidize this stuff so we can benefit from the final product. Somehow I doubt that. Wouldn't that be reassuring though if that was what's going on? Anyway, there's a story coming out today about Canada. Canada has just agreed to subsidize at the tune of 13 billion Canadian dollars over a decade to, in order to land, a Volkswagen AG electric vehicle battery plant. This is the first such plant outside of, for Volkswagen outside of Europe. The money is a lot of money. It's unprecedented. This is Canada's foray into this kind of subsidies. They're going to provide annual production subsidies as well as a grant towards the factory's capital costs. They'll match what the German auto company would have received from the Inflation Reduction Act if it had been located at the plant in the U.S. You see there's a competition for the bottom, a race of who will subsidize this. And Canada won this particular race. Good for the Canadians. This is why what the United States should actually do is let everybody else subsidize everything and then lower tariffs to zero and we get the chief staff without having to pay for it. This is such an obvious, brilliant strategy. I don't know why everybody doesn't actually adopt it and encourage it. So, there you go. This will be the largest manufacturing site in Canada once this plant has been built. So, cool. I'm glad we have NAFTA. I'm glad we get stuff from Canada relatively cheaply. I think that Canadian batteries count as if they were made in the U.S. for the purposes of electric vehicle tax benefits. I think that's right. So, we get that subsidies all over, you know, we as consumers benefit from all these different tax breaks and subsidies. But it's just stupid. Again, a race to the bottom, a race for lose, lose, lose. All right, this next story is just fun, right? I mean, it's... I read this and I was like, some of you guys are going to be so upset at this that I have to do the story, right? I have to do the story. And maybe not so much my listeners, but there are going to be people out there in the world. I wish this story had more circulation. I wish I could get this video out to more people. Because there are going to be people out there in the world that are so upset by this that they will be freaking out and they won't know what to do with themselves. I'm thinking, Matt Walsh, somebody should send this story to Matt Walsh at the Daily Wire. So, this is from a New York article. It's about scientific breakthroughs in the field of fertility. And it builds and works from Japanese scientists in 2016. So, I'm going to read a little bit of this for you. Let me just give you the name of the article so you can find it if you wanted. The Future of Fertility. I think it's a fascinating article. It's wonderful. If you like science, if you like biology, you should read this article, The Future of Fertility. I don't think you need to subscribe in order to read it online. In 2016, two Japanese reproductive biologists, Katsu Hiko Hayashi and Mito Roni Saito, made an announcement in the journal Nature that read like a science fiction novel. This is, again, I'm reading from the New York article. The researchers had taken skin cells from the tip of a mouse's tail, reprogrammed them into stem cells, and then turned those stem cells into egg cells. The eggs were then fertilized and were transferred to the uteruses of female mice. They gave birth to 10 pups. Some of the pups went on to have babies of their own. Gametes are the cells such as eggs and sperm that are essential for sexual reproduction. With their experiment, Hayashi and Saito provided the first proof that what's known as in vitro gametogenesis, or IVG, the production of gametes outside the body. Beginning with non-reproductive cells was possible in mammals. The mice that had descended from the lab made egg cells were described as grossly normal. Not gamet, gametes, sorry, gametes, gametes cells, gametes cells. So this is truly astounding. You can take a skin cell, manipulate it into becoming a stem cell, and then make that stem cell into an egg, fertilize that egg and plant it into the mouse, and you get a completely normal baby mice at the end of this. This does suggest that maybe life begins at skin cell, I don't know. So there is that issue about when does life begin. But here's the interesting part, right? When they did this, when they took the skin cell from the tip of a mouse, they did this on the tip of a mouse of a female mouse, and they turned it into an egg. So you had the female's genes, and then the sperm came from a male mouse, and you had the male genes, and then you plant it into a female, and you get baby mice that come from a female and a male. But this March, that is just a month ago, Hayashi had another announcement. His lab had repeated the IVG process in mice. But this time, it had produced fertilized embryos whose egg cells had been developed using stem cells from male mice. Mice were two dads as a headline in Nature magazine that published this research presented it. Now think about that. You can now take any cell from a man or a woman, and you can convert it into an egg cell. I don't think this has happened yet with sperm, but then you can take sperm from a man, and now you have a baby that represents two men, two males. Now that means that homosexual couples can now have the potential to have babies that represent their genetic makeup. They would just need a surrogate to carry the fetus to term, or another sci-fi development, but it's in the works, have external artificial wombs that can carry the fetus to term. But more than that, you can now theoretically, and you can imagine a world in which you can create an egg cell out of more than one person, potentially. Maybe four people instead of two can have a baby that represents the DNA of all four of them. Or you can have somebody, here's a real kicker, right? You can have somebody reproduce with themselves. That is, I could take one of my skin cells and fertilize it with my sperm and have my baby, which is all mine. Now this is fascinating. And this has the potential to completely change reproduction, separate it from sex, which is of itself interesting, right? And create a situation where we're not anymore dependent on age, for example. One of the big uses for this technology, one of the big uses for this technology is that we extend female reproductive longevity. That is, more and more females, of course, are having babies later, but some women would like to have babies discovered that they become too old to have a baby. Well, this takes that out as long as you can use a surrogate to carry the fetus. And again, if you have external artificial wombs, that solves that problem. But now you can extend female reproductive capacity much, much longer. Men don't have to have periods, men don't have to have anything. All men have to do is provide a skin cell and they need a surrogate. So this has the potential to extend female reproductive longevity, which is a lot of the research going into this. But it also represents this breakthrough in terms of whether one needs an egg and a sperm. One might just need a cell from one person and cell from another person and create a baby out of just any cells as long as they can be converted into stem cells and ultimately into reproductive cells. Again, none of this has been tried on human beings, but it's been successful in mice. There is a lot of work now being done in order to try to work towards ultimately doing this with human beings. And it's fascinating. I really do think. Now again, imagine what Matt Walsh would do with all of this. I mean, he would just flip out, completely flip out. I mean, you might even have to reconsider your definition of woman to take out certain reproductive aspects of it, because that would no longer be the case. Anyway, I find this stuff fascinating. I also think we're living through a unique period in human history where I think there are two just stunning technological revolutions going on. They're going on right under our nose, but I don't think we fully appreciate them. They're truly going to change human life in the decades to come in dramatic and significant ways. And the two revolutions really are, I think, AI on the computer front, together with, of course, the increased speeds and increased ability and the biotech revolution and everything that that implies, the biotech revolution from what we can do with gene therapy to our ability to manipulate the DNA in a cell. By the way, this has nothing to do with masculinity and femininity. None of this has anything to do with masculinity and femininity. You're still either born a male or a female. It just means that two men can have a baby representing their DNA, one day two women can do, and you could have a baby with your own DNA. That is, it doesn't make one IO to have a difference to the fact that a particular baby is born either male or female. It does make a big difference to how we reproduce and what that means. The real question to ask is, what does this do to sex once you completely divorce sex from reproduction? I mean, I don't know, but these are the kind of really fascinating things that are in our future. And I think it's exciting. It sounds a little scary and it sounds weird and it sounds strange. And I know for a lot of people, it definitely sounds scary, but it's fascinating and exciting. And this biotech revolution is happening. I mean, I don't know what the limits are. If we can truly go in and start flipping out genes and turning them on and off and changing stuff. And I don't know how close we are, but we know in China they've already done this with human fetuses. The guy went to jail for doing it. We know that gene therapy is possible. Now this ability to not rely on an egg in order to an egg cell, which is a very complex cell. But the ability to turn any cell into an egg cell, wow, I mean that is crazy stuff. And that's just the beginning. That's just that think about what this looks like. And this is not going to happen in the next five years or 10 years or maybe even 20 years. But just try to project out 30, 50 years. What is this ability to manipulate all this? What does this do to ability to live long, to not age, to live forever, to live a very long life? I mean, the revolution that's happening right now in biology. I think most of you, as I said before, who are under 30 are going to benefit the most from this. But it's just fun to watch. If you believe in humanity, if you believe in human ability, if you believe in human reason, think about the reason that goes into the science. Think about the thinking. Think about, again, we talked about experimentation and failure. Think about the experimentation, the failure. And we've really worked on being able to do a lot of the experimentation and failure in non-human models so we can fail without creating monsters or without hurting human beings. We use mice. We use all kinds of methods. And I believe that one of the things that AI is going to be used for significantly is in this kind of research where you model these things and that will reduce failure and increase progress dramatically. So this is one of the most exciting places where I can see AI being used where you need large models, huge amounts of information, not chat-GPT AI, but a different type of AI. But in AI they can model these things and run through gazillions of iterations very, very quickly and ultimately produce. Here are the three experiments that are most likely to be successful. I mean, that is going to cut down research dramatically, research time. It's going to increase the probability of breakthrough. It's going to decrease the pain of failure. Yeah, I mean, these are amazing times to be living in and this is, and it's a lot of fun. And one of the things I enjoy doing on the Iran Book Show is once in a while kind of highlighting some of this research and bringing it to the foray because, you know, that's the good news, which is the important news. That's the news that actually shapes our lives and changes our lives and changes what we do. All right, thank you all. Let's jump into the Super Chat questions and we got Matt. Matt is a first-time Super Chatter. Thank you, Matt. Really, really appreciate it. And Matt came in at $50, so that is tremendously generous. So thank you, Matt. Matt says, how are you on a long time? Fen, any advice for staying informed? You're always on top of the latest important news and I've always found it super impressive. It's hard for me maybe because there's so much news and I don't know what to focus on. Yeah, I mean, this is a legitimate challenge and it's particularly a legitimate challenge because in the old days, there's always been a lot of news. But in the old days, we kind of trusted the filtering mechanisms that existed in the culture. And one of those filtering mechanisms was the mainstream media. You kind of trusted the New York Times and you knew that they were biased because I ran and talked about that in the 60s. But you basically trusted that they were in line to you and that they provided news about the most important stories out there and that you could trust that. And all you needed was a subscription to the New York Times or Washington Post or the LA Times or some of the local newspaper or to the Wall Street Journal. And you felt like you were informed and that was good enough. And I think past generations, that's how we stayed informed. And of course, the challenge has become, as we've seen how biased these news sources are and how much more they're willing to engage in what I would call deception and engage in not covering some news that is important and covering things that are silly and stupid. That's not good enough. It's not a way to really track the news. So then the question for you, Matt, is why do you want to track the news? How much in depth do you want to get and how much? So I spent a lot of time doing this. It's time-consuming. There's just no way to do it. I don't have one news source. I know many people who criticize me tend to have one news source. There might be some wacko conspiracy theory laid in right-wing publication or it's Fox News or it's Newsmax or something like that. And then on the left, they still use the New York Times and NPR and places like that. The challenge is that you can't rely on any of those. So what I try to do, and I don't always do this perfectly, is I try to read as much as I can from the best sources that I think are the most unbiased. I read a lot of stuff that comes out in sub-stack format rather than in newspaper format because I find that A, they do some of the screening and B, some of them are doing now reporting. Pirate wire is doing reporting. Barry Weiss is doing reporting. Dispatch is doing reporting. So you can get some information from them that's reporting, but also that a lot of them link to some of the best and most interesting stories out there. But even when you find an interesting story, you then have to cross-reference it. You have to figure out, A, you develop a radar for what is ridiculous and what is not or what makes sense or what doesn't. Sometimes that radar's off, but you have to develop it. And on stories you're not so sure. Generally, you start cross-referring as well. What do some of the crazies on the right say about this? What does the mainstream media say about this? What does somebody you maybe trust in the middle say about this? So it requires a lot of work. So one of the reasons I do and one of the reasons I think you guys enjoy the news roundups that I do is because I'm trying to keep you informed about what I think are some of the most interesting important stories. I try to avoid the gossipy conspiracy laden or just the minutiae politics, partially because I'm not interested in McCarthy. Kevin McCarthy right now has hearings about New York case against Trump and it's just boring. It's just not interesting. I mean, the case against Trump is somewhat interesting just because it has implications because Trump is running for president. But all these machinations or for example, the machinations of DeSantis and Disney that I know a lot of you probably go down rabbit holes to get every last little tweet that's being said about it. It's just, you know, DeSantis is coming off looking pathetic from it. I think it's going to hurt his ability to run a general campaign. I think he's losing even among Republicans right now because he's focusing on this nonsense. I've come to the conclusion. I don't think that I don't think DeSantis can either win the primary or win a campaign against a Democrat because I just think he's too focused on niche issues. So I don't follow a lot of the kind of nichey political minutiae kind of stuff because I think it's uninteresting. I strive to focus on interesting stories and stories that have importance beyond just the sound by today, that have importance long term, that have a certain theme around them. And dig deep into those and make sure that what I'm saying is right about those. And so listening to me is one way to stay informed, at least up to a point. But beyond that, I would scan the major newspapers. I would scan the major media outlets. I wouldn't watch any television news, no television news, zero. It's just a waste of your time, a waste of your energy. And there's no actual factual information that comes out from watching that. So I would read. As I've said before, I subscribe to, I don't know, Google News, Apple News, which are just great to scan the headlines and see what's out there so I can pick and choose what I go for and what looks interesting and what seems like it's worth digging deeper. They're often divided into sections, sections like technology, and you can focus more of your attention on those sections that interest you and dig deeper into those kind of stories. There's also a service called News, it's called OtherWeb.com. Check it out, OtherWeb.com. They're a provider of stories. They have, again, it's a lot of the mainstream, but also non-mainstream news sources, domestic and international. I mean, they have a lot on here, but it includes French and a bunch of European sources, American sources. I don't see any Asian sources here, but it's just a lot. You can actually go in and decide if there's a source you don't want to hear from because you think they're just too biased. I hate the New York Times. Don't hear anything from the New York Times. You can unclick it and then you won't get any news stories from that news source. They also have, if you want to emphasize politics or if you want to emphasize technology or if you want to emphasize entertainment or business or science, you can actually choose what is the most interest and what is the most important. And again, it's not the definitive source, but it's, again, you can scan the headlines. Okay, these are the big stories that are happening out there. I'll then ask you, Ron, what do you think about these stories in a super chat? Or I'll go and do more research and dig deeper about these stories. So right now, the number one story under politics is North Carolina Republicans aim to revoke governor's ability to pick community college boards. I mean, not a story I'm particularly interested in. I'll move on very quickly, right? Reserve bank governor to meet board of directors of public sector banks. Again, am I interested in that? Probably not. I'm not a BQ prime. I'm not even sure what that news source is. Maybe that is an Indian news source. Looks maybe that's coming from India. But you can calibrate all this, which is nice. So there's just a bunch of these aggregators, and make life just a little bit easier. All right, thank you, Matt. Thanks for joining and for doing your first super chat. All right, so I'll just let you know we're like 60 bucks short of a goal. So hopefully we can make that up in the next few minutes. I don't have a lot of time today. So please feel free to use stickers. We've got 77 people watching. So 62 bucks should be easy to raise. Just do a sticker with a couple of bucks and we're there. I really appreciate all your support today. Okay, Noa says, you're on. I was very interested in your Federal Reserve, Jekyll Island talk. And you mentioned in going to private banking that each bank might have its own currency. Could you please expand on how that might work? Yes, I mean, this is how it worked before the Federal Reserve. JP Morgan had basically issued its own currency. I had, I don't have it on my wall anymore. I used to have a poster on the wall, a dollar bill. And the dollar bill basically was from, I can't remember, the Bank of New York. And it issued the dollar bill. And what that dollar bill really represented is you could take that dollar bill in to the Bank of New York, and they will issue you the equivalent of gold in exchange. And the beauty of that is that you could use that dollar bill to buy and sell stuff all over. And, you know, everybody knew that they could go and get that little bit of gold from the Bank of New York and get it back. So, you know, that's how basically the system worked. Every, the dollar bills were backed by gold sitting on the reserve in the banks. Now, if you suspected that a bank had issued too many of these currencies, and there wasn't enough gold in its bank, then theoretically, or indeed in fact, the dollar bills from that particular bank would be discounted. There would be discount on them. Now, in the old days, that was very cumbersome because different banks had different exchange rates with other banks. A dollar wasn't always worth a dollar because it depended which bank it was at. But today, with the technology that we have, where everything is electronic, I don't think that would ever be a problem. You would have rating agencies that would basically tell you which banks basically have reserves and which banks don't. And I think it would flow beautifully. Whether that's the exact system that would evolve in a free market today, I don't know. But the essence of the system is that banks issue currencies. Banks issue currencies. So, you know, that is that it's not the government that issued the currency. It's the bank. So, the only way people will take those currencies seriously is if the bank has something behind the currency. That is, if the bank has something to exchange for the currency that's tangible, and gold might be the tangible thing that the market chooses. Daniel says, what's the difference between speculating and investing and gambling? Where does Bitcoin fall? I mean, gambling is basically a rig probability system where you're always betting against the house and the house is always going to win. Now, you know, some gambling has a more skill associated with it. If you can count cards in 21, you can win. But that's why it's banned if you're gambling in a casino. You're not allowed to count cards. Poker is gambling, but there's skill involved in their professional poker players where it's not really gambling. It's a form of entertainment where you're making money off of the people who can't do what it takes to win in poker. Speculating is much more of trying to assess parameters like supply and demand, trying to assess parameters like what does this business do, what is profitability going to be, and then assessing price movements based on some kind of fundamentals. And I think in that sense, Bitcoin is more speculating than gambling. Bitcoin is not about particular odds. Even in poker, poker is all about the odds. And you can play the odds, and if you figure out the odds, you can win. And if you can't, you lose. But it is all about just the odds. And speculating is not about simple odds because speculating by its nature involves significant uncertainty. All right. It's not just playing with existing odds. Okay, Catherine says, let's keep this series going for our sanity. Thank you, Catherine. We're $36 short, by the way. Should be able to make $36. 76 people watching live. You know, it's not much. Michael says, is there anyone today? Is everyone today awarded down now to a communist? No. No. Why would you think that? I mean, Nazi's in communism is not something you water down or updone. It's a particular ideology and people can be Nazis and the rest are not Nazis. They might have similar philosophical premises than Nazis, but that doesn't make them awarded down Nazi. And the same with communism. No, no, don't. I mean, I think it's a mistake. I don't even like where everybody on the left is called the communist. I think it dilutes what communism actually means. I think it dilutes its severity. And I think it misrepresents. It confuses a particular political stance with the philosophical foundations. So no, I don't view the world that way. Michael says, are you and Alex Epstein the only successful objectivist in the mainstream? I don't know. Adam Mossoff is pretty successful when it comes to property rights, intellectual property rights. I'm sure there are others. But, you know, and I don't know how you define mainstream. Am I successful in the mainstream? I don't know how you define success and what you define as the mainstream. I don't know if I'm successful in the mainstream. Adam says, the Santas joked about building a prison next to Disney World. This man is a smug nihilist and unfit for the presidency deployable. I agree with you, Adam. I really find his behavior the last six months just beneath contempt. And this was an opportunity for him to establish himself the statesman, to establish himself as somebody radical for something good, not just getting engaged in the minutiae of the of the cultural wars. Somebody who could be presidential, who could take the country in a new direction. He had he had the opportunity to capture kind of the free market wing and the cultural wing of the Republican Party. He's done zero to capture the free market wing. He's focused all his attention again on the minutiae and insignificance aspects of the of the cultural world. And by the way, doing it in the most fascist way possible. So I'm not impressed. I'm not impressed by the strategy. I'm not impressed. And look, it looks like Donald Trump is beating him to a pulp when it comes to appeal to Republicans. All right. I don't want to remind you. You know, okay, I'm not going to remind you. All right. Uh, adherents of Lady Columbia, surrogacy and artificial worms are on the new rights radar. Italy just banned overseas surrogates or citizens. I know there are some people who have difficulty with romantic relationships with one children. There are lots of reasons that the people who have problems with the mechanisms of of of carrying a baby to term, the women who have wombs, wombs that are not functioning properly. There are lots of reasons why they would want surrogates and why official wombs. I mean, pregnancy is a big hassle. It is a major, major project. And, you know, and artificial wombs would be a huge improvement in a woman's quality of life. Now you lose something from it. You don't feel the baby kicking and all that. But people will be able to choose. They could do either way. But yes, I'm not surprised it's on the radar of the new rate. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the new rate was fundamentally and fundamentally antagonistic to any of these developments in science. Jagadjigbis, just took a trip to beautiful Arches, Utah. Yeah, it really is beautiful. Planning is summer. Do you enjoy appreciate the country's national park despite what I assume would be your obvious objection to them? Yes, absolutely. I've been to all the big national parks, all the big American national parks. I've been to Arches. I've been to Yosemite. I've been to Grand Canyon. I've been to Rocky Mountains. I've been Yellowstone, Teetons. What's the one in the very north? Anyway, I've been to a lot of the country's national parks and certainly all the big named ones and love the beautiful, unbelievable. Yeah. Gail, thank you. I love science. Me too. Frank says, I wish the great Keith Emerson had seen MASH episode of the pianist losing the skill in his hand. He might not have taken his own life and had some hope. Maybe. Maybe. It's tough. But the MASH episode was very good in dealing with it and very touching in the way it dealt with it. All right, guys. $36 to make a goal. Yeah. I'm a little struggling here with why we're not making our goal more often recently. There's definitely been a drop off in making our goals in more recent time. But anyway, let's see. Action Jackson says, more conservative shows, the Matt Walsh show is a hit. Yeah. I mean, going after the right is part of the mandate of the Iran Book Show. We'll continue to do those. And I expect there'll be hits. The problem is it's a big hit, but as a consequence of being a hit, I'm losing subscribers. And in addition to losing subscribers, I'm getting awful. The comments are pretty nasty. People surprisingly don't like me. What's they not to like? What's up? All right. Thank you. Thank you, Adam. Adam just put in a couple of bucks. If everybody right now put in a buck or two, we'd make it. Kenny, thank you. Alex, thank you. Gail, thank you. Let's see. Wes, thank you for the $25. I'm just going over all the Jonathan. Of course, Jonathan Honing. Thank you. Steven, thank you. And a NASA center. Thank you for becoming a member. We're 196 members. We're four short of 200. Please consider becoming a men member. It's like five bucks a month. Don't replace your subscription elsewhere. I know YouTube is not the best place in terms of subscriptions. It's good because you get the members only show, but don't use it to replace the Patreon or the PayPal or anything. But if you want to add, if you want to, that would be great and become a member and participate in my member only shows. That is, you can do that for $5 a month by clicking the join button. So thank you, everybody. Really appreciate it. I will see you all tonight. Oh, tonight. Tonight. We've got Greg Salamiere on tonight. Bring your philosophy questions. All those epistemology questions that I've told you. Ask Greg. All those questions I told you. Ask the philosophers. Bring them on ethics epistemology metaphysics. Michael, I'm sure you have some questions that I, you know, that you want to ask. Hopefully we'll have a big audience tonight asking a lot of really, really, you know, good philosophical questions of Greg. So that will be 8 p.m. East Coast time. Thank you, Stephen. And thank you, John. You guys put us over the limit. Really appreciate it. So we did indeed make our numbers. Thanks, guys. All right. See you all tonight. 8 p.m. East Coast time. And don't forget, bring questions. Lots of questions. This will be primarily kind of a Q&A. Primarily be open to you. We'll go as long as we need up to you. Yeah, Adam, you can, you can bring. I know what question you have. Ask it.