 The radical. Fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Book Show. All right everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show on this second of January, Monday. First Iran Book Show of the new year. Welcome everybody and happy new year. And I'm looking forward to 2023 and continuing these news roundups that we do every day, five days a week. I'm not sure if today's a holiday or not. I haven't even checked the markets to see if they're closed or not. But anyway, it is a new year and we are starting up with a bunch of news. The reality is there's nothing big in the news. It's like the news, world events take a break for the season, Christmas all the way till now. There's just been nothing shattering, which, you know, it would be nice. It would kind of be cool to go through like a whole year without any COVID, wars, stock market collapse, big bankruptcies and whatever. But I have, you know, this inkling, this feeling that 2023 is not going to be free of news. It's going to be filled with news. So we're here. We're here to comment on it, to present it, to comment on it, and to try to bring an objective perspective to it. All right, so let's jump in. Reading this morning over the weekend some stories about a CPA shortage in the United States, it turns out that accounting firms cannot find enough talent. University programs cannot attract enough students, but even when they attract the students, you know, when students actually go in and when students actually go in and study accounting, it turns out that they don't, they don't want to go into the accounting field afterwards. So many of them are going into consulting, going into banking, going other routes rather than going into tax accounting, corporate accounting, other forms of accounting and working for the big or medium-sized accounting firm. And there is a massive shortage for years. Salaries didn't go up. You know, accounting firms have this tendency, certainly around tax season, but also around like a quarter, year and quarter, end of quarters for corporate accounting and so on, to really, you know, require that young accountants coming out of college work 80, 90 hours a week. And it's very similar, even worse, I'd say, in the investment banking industry. But the difference is that most of the stuff that the accountants do, by their own account, is boring. And so you get a boring job, you get very, very long hours, you don't really get wages for the account for that, at least not until now, I think Salaries are going up dramatically now. The work is not that interesting while you can progress and you can advance. There are limitations in the work. I don't know that it gets that much interesting, although I know a lot of people start out in accounting and then go into all kinds of fields from there. So it is a launchpad for other things. You finish a degree that takes a long time, requires a lot of credits, requires a lot of time at school. And then you have to take a test. You have to qualify as a CPA, so the fact that you have an undergraduate degree is not enough. So it's a hard work. It's an enormous amount of work. And they're just not a lot of people willing to do that. And we'll talk about another worker shortage in a minute, which is very relevant to the American economy. And as the state of course becomes, as we regulate businesses more, as the government controls more, as we create more complexity in the tax code, we need more accountants. But as, you know, one of the things we learned, for example, with FTX is if firms skimp on accountants, if firms skimp on accounting, particularly young, cool, dynamic crypto firms, then bad things, it's easy for bad things to happen and that's what happened with FTX and who knows in how many other places. So the bad news is for a lot of legitimate businesses, for a lot of us who have tax accountants doing our taxes, you know, things are going to get delayed more, things are going to be slower, and the existing accountants, the accountants that are around today are going to be working even longer hours than they have in the past. That is, the burden is only going to increase because the fact is that even as accounting firms are now starting to raise salaries, they're not raising them yet, as far as I can tell from the stories I'm reading, they're not raising them yet enough and it's still true that salaries are going up in other areas as well and other areas are quite attractive. Accounting firms are going to have to do something pretty dramatic here and drastic to raise accounting salaries to supply and demand, to attract more accountants to it and maybe figure out how to loosen the load or create something else to make these jobs more attractive, maybe give them more variety, give them more exposure to a variety of different areas within the accounting firm so that they don't get bored quite as fast. And again, it's on me saying it's boring, it's what the accounting students are saying as a reason for not actually taking a job in accounting. John, as a Super Chat that's relevant, so I'm going to take it quickly, he says 150 credits de facto a master's degree to be a CPA is ridiculous, I agree. Big four surpassing wages for two decades, zoomers hate long hours, yes, generally I think that's true. It's boring. John said that not me, I know some of you get upset when I say accounting is boring. Zoomers hate long hours, it's boring. The PCAOB is a terrible regulator. I wonder who's a good regulator, John? I mean, I don't know anything special about the PCAOB but all regulators are terrible. But I make a lot of money consulting now, yes. Consulting, I'm curious if you're consulting on accounting or consulting on something else, business consulting, what exactly, what exactly else are you doing? So that's from John, he sounds like a former accountant, a former disgruntled accountant. Now the good news of this is, and somebody in the chat has already picked up on this. The good news in this is, for all of you who are panicking and hysterical about the expansion of the IRS, you can calm down, really. I mean, $80 billion additional budget for the IRS is really bad and horrific and awful and so on. But the idea that they're going to hire what was it, $78,000, $87,000, $50,000, whatever, new workers to audit you at the IRS is a, I won't call it a joke because if it is, it's a pretty nasty joke, but it is a joke. I mean, where are they going to find? Where are they going to find $87,000 accountants? Where are they going to find the manpower to be able to bring into the IRS to audit all of you? You know, KPMG, the big accounting firms are not finding the talent. Where's the IRS going to find the talent? By the way, IRS is about to hire a new, I guess, leader or whatever, I'm not sure what the exact title is called, chief executive. Somebody who did the job on an interim basis in 2013 under the Obama administration, Danny Werfel, it'll be interesting to see what he does. You know, he's going to go in and suppose he completely reorganize. The agency including hire the additional IRS agents, but again, I mean, the first thing that struck me when I saw the fact that so many accountants are quitting that they can't hire enough of them, all of that, I mean, the first thing that struck me is good luck IRS. I mean, as it is, it was a plan to do it over five years, but they're not going to be able to get, you know, 15, 16, 17,000 a year over the next five years. It's just not happening. There's just not enough accountants available. So that is the good news. The good news is there are less accountants available for the government to dig into our taxes and to try to get us. All right, let's see. So that is, you know, a little story about the accounting profession. But I think the important thing for us is IRS is going to struggle. All right. You know, we've been talking a lot about chips, semiconductors. And I talked quite a bit about the chip bill that Congress passed where there's some controversy whether there's 50 billion of government subsidies or 76 billion of government subsidies. But there's a lot of money that the government now is going to throw at the chip industry, the micro processing industry to subsidize chip manufacturers. The government is now in a position where it's going to pick winners and losers. And there's already a rush by the industry to, you know, basically to get pieces of this, to get a hold of some of this money. I mean, the government has this massive pool. You know that businesses are going to start now structuring their business operations in a way that attracts that money and announcing big initiatives and doing things that encourage the government to give them the money and not somebody else. And this is happening on a grand scale right now. I mean, all of this based on the idea of government subsidies. You know, it's a sad day. It really is a sad day. It's a sad day when we lose so much confidence in the U.S. in U.S. technology and our ability to build technology, create technology that, you know, we give up on actually competing globally, give up on the ability of our companies to actually compete and win market share where the U.S. government has to step in and act like China and act exactly like China. And not only like China, act like what a lot of people who criticize me for opposing tariffs said that they condemn China for. China does industrial policy. China subsidizes their industries. China grants all these favors to the industries. Yeah. And who does that hurt? China, primarily. But since I think so many people believe that China subsidizing, China helping, China providing funding for their industry is actually helps their industry. It's not free market, but it helps their industry. We now in America have adopted this. I mean, the Trump administration was supportive of this kind of stuff. 12 Republicans voted for this bill. And it wasn't just the rhinos. It was more of the industrial policy, pro-industrial policy type of Republicans. And now we have industrial policy in the United States and we're subsidizing our own chip industries, unless we ever complain again about China subsidizing its industries or Taiwan subsidizing or South Korea subsidizing. We're doing exactly the same thing. We have no more high ground on which to stand when it comes to free markets or when it comes to not subsidizing, when it comes to not favoring certain industries of other or certain producers of others. So in September, you know, Intel announced they're building a $20 billion, two factories actually in Columbus, Ohio, of all places. Notice the locations. I think the locations in the, in the heartland are geared towards attracting federal dollars, right? If you build all the factories in Silicon Valley, yeah. I mean, how many, how many senators in congressmen are you going to get a lobby for you to get some of the money? But if you're building a heartland, if you're building this in smaller parts of the country or so-called less developed part, or if you're replacing steelworker jobs, then you're much likely, again, government picking winners and losers is not about technology. It's not about business. It's not about profit. It's not about ability. Government picking winners and losers is about politics. That's what government is, politics. So you want to play the political, political game by figuring out where can you put the plant to attract, to attract the most political favors. Micron, technology. Micron technology is a U.S. manufacturer of memory chips. We have a tiny fraction of the world's memory chip capacity. Micron, I think, sold many of its fabs, many of its manufacturing facilities years ago. But it's building a new manufacturing site near, not Silicon Valley. Anybody know where Micron Semiconductor is based? Interesting thing is Micron technology semiconductors was founded in Boise, Idaho, and the capital that made Micron Semiconductor successful was from the French fries king of the world. The guy who ultimately landed the contract of supplying potato chips to McDonald's and became a billionaire as a consequence. He is the guy. It's the potato king. He's the guy who actually was the money behind Micron technology. They are building a new manufacturing site in Syracuse, New York. Syracuse, New York. They're expecting to spend, magic number turns out to be 20 billion by the end of the decade and eventually perhaps five times that maybe up to 100 billion Micron will spend on new fabrication facilities. Of course, we've talked about the fact that Taiwanese company TSMC is doing something in Phoenix. None of them are Silicon Valley. None of them are in Austin, Texas. We had plans to triple its investment of 40 billion and build a second new factory to create advanced chips. There are others. I mean, there's a whole list of these companies that are announcing in a variety of different places around the country. There's a facility being built in Indiana near Purdue University by a chip maker that I don't know. The reality is though, the reality is that basically all the three nanometer and going to two nanometer in a couple of years chips. This is the most advanced chips. Almost all of them, over 90% of them are going to be made in Taiwan. Intel claims that within a year or two we'll be able to make three nanometer chips. We will see. Hopefully that is true. But they have been working hard on catching up technologically to TSMC. Samsung is another one. It's a little behind TSMC, but not by that much. A lot of facilities being built in the United States are going to build chips with older technology. It's not going to be cutting edge. We're still going to rely completely and exclusively almost on Taiwan for the most advanced chips, and we all know what kind of national security threat that poses for the United States. I do believe that the Pentagon, so the military in the United States, which uses some of the most advanced chips in the world for many of its systems and indeed maintains, I think, an edge in weapons system over both Russia and China and pretty much everybody else in the world. Because, maybe with exception of Israel in some areas, because of its ability to use advanced chips and integrate them completely into weapons systems, I believe that the most advanced chips that are made for the military are made in the United States. And I think that some of the factories that are being built in order to make more advanced chips in the future in the U.S. are built primarily to supply the Pentagon, and indeed I would advocate for the Pentagon paying TSMC or Intel or whoever to build plants in the U.S. to supply it with advanced, with the most advanced chips, the most advanced technology and so on. And that's the only form of government spending on microprocessors I think is appropriate and applicable. Anyway, we will see how this, I'm going to keep you updated as the story unfolds, keep you updated about winners and losers, where the government money is actually going to flow, what impact it has, can Intel catch up. I mean, I think this is one of the most interesting stories for the next decade, and it's going to be, it's a national security story, it's a trade story, it's a technology story. It's a story of rise and fall, potentially rise and fall of America, potentially not fall of America. It's a story about Taiwan and China and maybe the next war. So a lot of stuff ascended around the semiconductor industry. Of course, it turns out that one of, if not the greatest barrier for building significant facilities for the production of chips in the United States is, as I've said many times, is a lack of engineers. There's just not enough engineers who are, you know, who are studying and learning, getting the kind of skills that are applicable to be working at one of these facilities, both on the production side and particularly on the R&D side. So what we have in the United States, just like we have shortage of CPAs, even more importantly, we have a shortage of engineers who have the ability to fill these plans, to actually man these plans. You can announce a $20 billion here, $20 billion there, but if you can't have, if you don't have the personnel to actually fill them, you're in a big problem. The chip making boom that is currently manifesting itself in the U.S. is expecting to produce 40,000 new jobs. That would add to 277,000 people working in semiconductor industry today. Now, chip factories need technicians to run factory machines and scientists in fields like electrical and chemical engineering, and there's a massive talent shortage. One of the reasons one of these chip facilities is being built in Indiana is because Purdue University has just put $100 million behind an initiative to actually try to graduate a thousand engineers each year for the chip making industry. And a company called Skywalker Technology is building a 1.8 billion manufacturing plant near Indiana campus as a result. So it's a very difficult industry. It's short on staff. They're looking for 40,000 new people if you're young and you're looking to do engineering and you're looking for something that can guarantee a job, do something related chip making. It sounds like they're looking for industrial engineers and chemical engineers, electrical engineers. It's not just, you know, these are the kind of thing. Skywater, not Skywalker, skywater technology. So 40,000, in the end of the day, the only way we're going to fill those 40,000 jobs, particularly the ones in the scientists, particularly the ones for scientists, the only way we'll fill those jobs is through immigration. We need to be able to give engineers and, you know, STEM students who come from all over the world and study in the United States. We need to be able to expedite them to a green card. We need to get the visas immediately to work in the United States. We need to make sure not a single one of them gets kicked out. And then we need to open the floodgates and allow immigrants from all over the world. You know, Russia right now, for example, a lot of Russian engineers would love to come to the United States and avoid conscription and come to the United States and come and work in the semiconductor industry. There are Chinese, there are people all over Asia, Indians, a lot of Indians, and of course there are lots of Europeans, Israelis, who would love to come to this country and contribute to the semiconductor industry. Only way, only way, you want a robust semiconductor industry in the United States, you need robust immigration of high skilled people. Now, I don't think we should only have robust immigration of high skilled, but yeah, we could start there. That's a good start. And that should be a low hanging fruit. That should be super easy to do. All right, quick one. Latest exodus out of Hong Kong is lawyers. Lawyers are leaving Hong Kong in large numbers, particularly lawyers who are human rights lawyers or lawyers who have defended and or lawyers who have spoken out against the fading of rule of law in Hong Kong. The fading of free speech in Hong Kong. Lawyers who supported a lot of the push towards freedom over the years in Hong Kong. There is a mass exodus right now of lawyers who are clearly being persecuted by the new Chinese regime. There's real intimidation against them particularly to the extent that they are active and that they are actively helping and supporting those who oppose the regime. But to stay as becoming possible, they are becoming victims of the authorities, they're being arrested, they're being harassed, they're being intimidated. And what you're seeing is the freedom oriented lawyers leaving Hong Kong and probably going to places like Taiwan, Australia, the UK. Unfortunately, sadly, again, the United States has not opened up two Chinese immigrants, sorry, two Hong Kong immigrants. We did not give them special ability to move to the US even though that would have been fantastic. That would mean the right and just thing to do. Alright, lastly, there is a battle right now for House leadership to become the Speaker of the House. Kevin McCarthy, a longtime Republican congressman from the state of California, is the GOP's candidate for House Speaker. The problem is that there is a group of Republicans, I mean the Republican Party is split. There's a group of Republicans to his right, if you will, that refuses to vote for him because they consider him too moderate. And then there is a group of Republicans on his left, if you will, usually kind of broad notions of left and right, who will vote for him but refuse to vote for anybody more conservative than him, and would actually have threatened to support a Democrat for the House speakership, a Democrat for the House speakership, if somebody to the right of McCarthy is brought up. Now McCarthy himself is staying for nothing. I mean McCarthy has, Kevin McCarthy has been a staunch conservative when it has suited his ambitions. He has been a moderate when it has suited him. He is flexible. He is whatever fits at the time on whatever issue it needs to be fed. It would make him the ideal politician and it was led, it is what led his rise of leadership in the Republican House. It's the fact that he has upset everybody but also befriended everybody. And the problem is if somebody has committed a committed right-winger, then, I mean right-winger not in the positive sense, committed right-winger then the left part of the party won't vote for him. It's committed moderate then the right-winger. And he's managed to be all things to all people. And now because of the midterms gave the Republicans such a tiny majority. He needs almost every single Republican to vote for him. All it takes is five holdouts. Five Republicans not voting for him and he can't win. It's going to be interesting. He's trying to make it sessions. He's trying to figure out how to get those last few votes on his side. And this is the Republican Party. This is the Republican Party. There is nobody else who could win the speakership. Jim Jordan ran who is more conservative than him or more right-wing. I don't know if conservative is the right term. Some moderate Republicans wouldn't vote for him. So this is what they are. I don't have an opinion. I don't really care. I find it entertaining to sit back and watch the Republican Party shoot each other and implode. It looks like there was a chance earlier today that there would be a vote and he wouldn't win. And then nobody knows exactly what would happen if he didn't win the vote. Nobody knows if another candidate among the Republican Party would arise. Maybe would some Republicans vote for Democrat. Would he compromise with some more people and they'd be a second round and he would win. Don't know. It's more entertaining than everything else. Kevin McCarthy is a man for everybody. He was a staunch Trumpist when it was, that was the thing to be. He's been a real moderate when that was the thing to be. So this is who gains political leadership positions in a party that has no unifying core anymore. Has no unifying set of ideas anymore. All right. That is my news briefing for today. I did find it interesting. There was a, I guess there's a ranking now that has come out on who's the most likely to gain the Republican, be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. And this one was put out by Nile Stan Chair. I don't know who that is. But anyway, it's in the hill. It looks pretty reasonable to me, at least the first two candidates. One is the Santas is supposedly leads the field. So he's the favorite. Two is, of course, President Trump. Three is Senator Ted Cruz. That one I don't buy. I don't think Cruz is going to do well in a Republican primary. Four is my favorite, which is Nikki Haley. Five is Mike Pompeo. Yeah. Anybody associated with the Trump administration doesn't get a lot of credit with me. Six is Yonkin, the governor won in Virginia. It would be interesting to see if he even runs, given that he's just become governor. He won last year in 2021. You're in a bit ago, late 2021. But it would be interesting to see. He won in a very Democratic state. He was a Republican who won and yet is still considered a real conservative. So a conservative who won in a Democratic state, that is something that Republicans will have to think about when, about that. Mike Pence, number seven, I don't think he has a chance. I don't think he might run, but he doesn't have a chance in L. Number eight is Tim Scott from South Carolina. I find Tim Scott really interesting. He's the only black Republican senator. He strikes me as a good guy. So I like Scott. So there we go. I've got two candidates. For all of you cynics who think I know, I've got two candidates too. I've got Nikki Haley and Tim Scott. Both minorities for what it's worth. Nine is Chrissy Nome. I don't think she has a chance. She's not Dakota. Nobody's going to vote anyway. And 10 is Chris Sanunu from New Hampshire. Yeah, I mean, I don't think he has a chance. He's way too, way too middle of the road, way too establishment for Republican for the Republican, the modern Republican party to nominate, to nominate him. All right. Let us move to the Super Chat. Again, we will be doing this all week. We will be doing these news updates. I do want to, before we get to the Super Chat, I do want to say I do have a new sponsor for the show and that the new sponsor is the Inland University. So, you know, I encourage you to look up the Inland University even if they weren't the sponsor. I do that regularly on the show. But look up university.inland.org. I think you'll find it really interesting, particularly those of you who are young who are interested in really delving in and getting a solid grasp of the Objectivist corpus. I don't think you can do better than signing up for the Inland University. You know, third only to reading Inland, reading Leonard Peekoff. This is the way you're going to learn Objectivism. And if you're interested in actual taking classes and getting graded and having professors and being in class and asking questions and having that kind of experience. You can't get that experience anywhere in the world. Other than at the Inland University is where you can study Objectivism and the application of Objectivism into a variety of different topics. I'll be, for example, teaching two courses in the summer on public speaking. One in a beginner's course for the first years and one in intermediate course for later years on public speaking, on verbal communication. So you will find that a lot of different courses there was a course last year. I think there's one in the semester on critical race theory, the NECOS is teaching. So there's a variety of course that's fascinating and interesting. So those of you who are young, I highly encourage you to sign up university.inland.org. But those of you who are not that young or who are not interested in pursuing this as seriously as taking classes or actually doing homework and being fully engaged, you can audit it. You can audit the Inland University courses and I think you'd get a fabulous experience. So university.inland.org. Do it now. Go to the website. Check it out. And I think what we need is people with a deeper, stronger, and I think all of us need a deeper, stronger understanding of objectivism, of this life-enhancing philosophy. The university, ARU, Inland University is the place to get that knowledge. All right. Tejikin. Sorry, I still can't pronounce your name. For $100, thank you. Or 1,000 Kroner. Happy new year. Happy you reached your target. Yeah, it was fun. It was fun on Saturday night. I hope most of you were there. If you weren't there, you can listen to the show now. It was a blast. We raised like, I don't know, $13,000 overall. Then plus a $10,000 match. So about $23,000, we raised in three hours. Well, no, $11,000 match because we got one more thousand. So $24,000 was pretty, pretty amazing. Pretty amazing. So thank you. Thank you for all the superchatters who participated. Thank you to the contributors who did the match. Thank you for the people who contributed on PayPal and Venmo and everywhere else. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Wow, what a way to start the year. What a way to end the year. What a way to start the year. And it was a lot of fun. And I think quite informative and cool. All right. He says, one serious recommendation, Tokyo Vice. I agree. I really enjoyed Tokyo Vice. I'm actually kind of anticipating really waiting for season two. Based on a true story of an American journalist who goes to work in Tokyo, speaks fluent Japanese and who gets real exposure to the Japanese mafia. Really interesting stories. So I highly recommend, check out Tokyo Vice and then one shout out to Kent Lansing, who has not talked enough about who is a real G. All right. I don't know what that means at all. But check out Kent Lansing. All right. John says, hey, Iran, here's the rest of the $500 I owe you for my movie review I requested. I still owe $20. I get to run for now, but I'm going to watch this a little later. Thanks for everything you do. Thank you, John. Really appreciate the support. All right. Let's see. We're like $22 away from reaching our goal for the super chat for today. All right. I like numbers asked, still my goal has had a piece about grooming. Is grooming a valid concept? Should parents let their kids see gay culture to show tolerance and openness? God, is grooming the way it's used is not a valid concept. I mean, grooming is that, I don't know, your kid is exposed to a drag show. That's grooming and somehow that's ridiculous. I think grooming has to be properly defined if it's a concept and that is taking children and systematically influencing them and manipulating them to become sex slaves or open to sex when they shouldn't be because they're too young. I think what the gangs, the grooming gangs in England did to young girls, I think that was grooming. There was a systematic effort through all kinds of manipulation, bribery, flattery, but it was systemic and it was manipulative and it was targeted in a sense that they knew exactly what they were doing, they knew what they wanted, they wanted to create young prostitutes. That is real grooming. But is, I don't know, taking your kids to a pride parade in the middle of West Hollywood, grooming, no, of course not. So there's a bunch of gay people out there dancing around and making idiots looking like fools and idiots. So what? There are lots of people who act in stupid idiotic ways and our kids are exposed to them. Just look at their TV shows that they watch. Is this going to make them gay? Watching a gay parade? Of course not. Did any of you as kids watch a, I don't know, when I was in the military, well, not me in the military, but the military for years used to have drag shows for young recruits. Were they grooming those young recruits to be drag queens? The whole idea that particularly with adults that you can expose them to a few things here and there and you're brainwashing them and you're forcing them and you're grooming them. And then when it comes to parents, to children, it depends. Am I exposing them to gay culture? Because the neighbors next door happen to be gay and once in a while, you know, we have coffee together or once in a while we chat or the kids know that these two males are living together in their apartment next door. Is that exposing them to gay culture? Is that grooming? That's certainly ridiculous. You know, and the reality is that, you know, gay people are part of life and quite a visible part of life and they're everywhere, right? And it's not a bad thing. And it's not something that... but the fact that your kids know that they're gay people out there and I think it'll dawn on them over time. It doesn't hit them right away. And when is grooming only for... I mean, the whole thing is ill-defined. It's an anti-concept the way it's being used right now. It's a completely anti-concept. And the idea that the state in some way knows better than parents which shows the parents should take them or which shows they shouldn't is absurd. You know, it's enough that the state forces music labels to put, you know, warnings on their labels or forces, you know, by implication forces the movie industry to categorize their movies and as a consequence of that system for years and years and years, we had basically censorship in Hollywood over sex. I mean, over the mildest things, any discussion of sex. So, I mean, married couples weren't allowed to be shown as having... being sleeping in the same bed. It was that bad in the 1940s and 50s in Hollywood. Really, we want the state to step in? So I haven't read Stuart's piece. I don't know what Stuart writes about grooming. I have no idea. But I think the way grooming is thrown around right now, Disney was grooming kids, really? I mean, that's absurd and ridiculous. And again, it does a disservice to when grooming really happens. If you read what happened in England, these Muslim, primarily Pakistani gangs that were grooming young, very young girls for sex, I mean, what they did is so horrific, is so disgusting, is so... And the fact that nobody did anything about it is even... is so horrific. To compare that to a Disney movie that celebrates a gay person or things like that, give me a break. I mean, it can't be the same concept. So if you think what Disney is doing is bad, okay, but find a new concept for it. It's not grooming. Not in the sense that the grooming gangs were grooming. Jeffrey, thank you, really appreciate that. Volta, thank you, really appreciate the support. We have achieved our goal for the day. Let's go through these quickly. Michael, does evil typically not manifest itself in the same way again? Why is this? Well, I mean, there's infinite ways in which evil can manifest itself. Why should it repeat itself the exact same way? It's always the same consequences, but partially because people on the lookout for a certain type of evil and to be effective, it's easier to disguise it in a different way. Certain ideas get discredited, so you have to present them in a different way not to be completely dismissed. So evil constantly is shifting and changing, and there's an infinite way. So why not, in a sense? Evasion allows you to do anything in a sense of coming up with variations and ideas, and then it's just a question of what works. But once you ignore reality, you can fantasize, you can create any kind of list of fantastical ideas and theories. J.J. Jigby's, I got to live in Hong Kong for six months in 2019. I actually got to meet you at the university when you lectured there. Cool. The whole situation makes me sad. I still want to go back though. It makes me sad too, but I don't know when and under what circumstances I could ever go back. Kent Lansing is from this fountainhead. I missed that reference, sorry. I guess I'm due for my periodic meeting at the fountainhead. I need to get caught up with you guys. Colt says, I wanted to say this at your New Year's show, but I was busy. The positive is that I've learned a lot from you over the past year, also growing, increasingly more pessimistic about the future, right wing. Thank you Colt. And yeah, there's reason to be pessimistic, but there's also reason to be optimistic because we're still fighting. Bach band again says, what's the greatest downside to DeSantis as president? That he's really smart, that he's much more effective at establishing the anti-liberty agenda of Donald Trump than Donald Trump was. That he will be better at silencing opposition voices, that he will be more effective at organizing industrial policy, more effective at government intervention and economy. But on the cultural side, more effective at basically suppressing free speech as long as it's part of a package that stops the left. That's I think the biggest danger. Colt says, part of my pessimism is the right support for Russia. I agree. In fact, this is going to be a future trend. The new right says something horrible, and the rest of the right drugs often says, but what about the left? Yeah, yes. I mean, the new right dictates the terms because it is consistent. The not new right, the moderate right has no values. It has no anything it stands on. It has no principles. So every time the new right comes up with something horrible, the moderate right might say, oh, we don't know. And then the new right will say, yeah, but what about the left? And then the old right, if you will, will say, oh, OK, well, then we're with you. And that's what's happening. And that's what's happening here in this chat exactly. Exactly right. But what about Biden? Anything is OK. As long as it's on Biden, as long as it's not the left, we're fine. Fashionism is great as long as it's not communism. How was dinner? Fantastic. Really, really nice. One of our favorite restaurants. So we had a great time. Thank you for asking JJ Jigby's. And then last question. Frank, in Game of Thrones, their take on slavery was once that they were freed, the society lapsed into anarchy. What was the problem with the nearest slave plan? Well, I mean, there is a certain sense that that is true, that slaves have a hard time governing themselves because they don't have, they haven't been, in a sense, provided with the intellectual context, the intellectual framework to do it. There's a biblical story that illustrates this, right? Here's Iran's Bible study. Why are the Jews left in the desert for 40 years after leaving Egypt before they can enter the Promised Land, the land that is Israel? Why do they roam around the desert for 40 years? Because the fact is the desert is pretty small. The area of the Sinai, even if they went into Saudi Arabia, that area is small. You can't roam there for 40 years by accident. God keeps them out of the Promised Land for 40 years. Why? An explanation there, and there is some truth to this. That is, because they were slaves, they don't have the mentality to hold on to independent free country. That what God says is, you'll only get the new country. When, for the generation that was born in freedom, the generation that was not born into slavery. So there is a sense in which it is right now, I think you can accelerate that through learning, and certainly slaves in the United States would have been accelerated, and you can see in Frederick Douglass, the possibility of a real intellect understanding liberty better than anyone else, probably, of his generation. I can't think of any intellectual. Frederick Douglass is one of the best intellectuals in all of American history in his understanding of liberty, and his understanding of freedom, his understanding of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and yet he was born a slave. So this is not deterministic. So it can be overcome, and indeed slaves in America, if I think the period after the Civil War had gone differently, if the North had been more assertive, I think it would have been absorbed and ready for freedom and liberty and not immediately, and this claim that the South had, oh, we can't let them vote, so on, that aren't ready for it. It was completely bogus, but it won the day, unfortunately. It won the day. The name of his slave plan, the name of his all of her plans are problematic because they're enforced by force, because they're ultimately top down. Now she lives in a culture where everything is enforced by force, but at some point she needs to have a plan to devolve power, and she doesn't. And therefore, ultimately, and I think this is one of the positive, the good things in Game of Thrones, ultimately, even though she has good intentions, power goes to her head, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and she's corrupted by her own power, which leads her to do horrible things, and leads her to be authoritarian of the worst kind towards the end of the show, and that's why she has to die. But that's what power does to you. And I think it's very hard to avoid, even with the best of intentions. All right, thanks, everybody. I will see you all tomorrow at about the same time. Tomorrow night, we will do a show on looking forward to 2023. I didn't get to that on Saturday. And then I'm not sure who we're interviewing. We're doing an interview cancellation for Thursday, so we'll see what we do on Thursday and whether we can get an interview in or whether I'll do something else. All right, everybody. I hope you enjoyed the show. Thanks to all the superchatters. Thank you for getting us over the $250. And I'll see you all tomorrow. Bye, everyone.