 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Brookshow on January 3, 2024. Amazing. It is a good beginning to the year. The number of bad guys have been eliminated. That's always a good thing. So let's jump in. We talked about this yesterday a little bit. Al-Arouwi and a number of his colleagues, Fawna Hamas, were assassinated yesterday in Beirut in Lebanon with a guided missile from probably from an Israeli airplane or drone. If you've seen pictures from the apartment building, the drone basically went through the window into the apartment, exploded, killing everybody inside, and doing relatively little damage to the rest of the building, which is pretty amazing. One of the things that's important about this particular attack is that it happened in a part of Beirut that is controlled and really the bastion and the home of Rizballah. So in some sense, this is to tell Rizballah, we can reach right in to where you live. We can reach right in to the territory you control. I think it's a message not only Hamas, it's a message to Rizballah. And it'll be interesting to see if Rizballah responds and what that response is like. Nasrallah has been talking for the last hour or so from what I can gather on the internet. People are pretty bored by what he has to say. Nasrallah is, of course, the leader of Rizballah who has been in hiding since 2006, a fear of exactly this happening to him. So it'll be interesting to see what are the consequences of the speech he's giving and whether he is going to announce some kind of retaliation against Israel for this attack in Beirut right in the middle of Rizballah territory. The mother of Saleh al-Aurui who was killed yesterday basically had this to say, may Allah have mercy on his soul. He sacrificed himself for the homeland. We congratulate him and the whole world on his martyrdom. She also went on to say, I'm really happy today that he got a martyr's death. He was expecting to have a martyr's death a long time ago. Many of his friends that already died a martyr's death and he had not. He was still alive. He was late. He very much wanted to die this way. And his sister added that this was a good death. Many of Hamas and Rizballah's leadership died such a good death. Hopefully that'll be the way they all go. I wouldn't want any of them to die from natural causes. This is the way they should die. Let's see. There's been a major, they're calling it a terrorist attack, how to tell who's responsible exactly, but two bombs went off during a memorial commemorating four years to the death of the Iranian Republican God, Commander Salimani. If you remember, Salimani was killed in an American airstrike ordered by Trump four years ago. And Major General Qassem Salimani was one of the most important leaders within the Iranian theocracy. He was the leader of the Republican God, which basically maintains that theocracy. Salimani was also the link between Iran and the various Iranian elements in Iraq, in Syria, and ultimately with Qizballah. So he was the guy who coordinated much of the interchange between Iran and Qizballah, probably Hamas as well. He was a key figure and responsible directly and indirectly for many, many attacks, terrorist attacks and just military attacks against Israel and against the United States. So one of the good things that Trump did in office was eliminate him. It's too bad he didn't use the opportunity to do more than that, but at least he got rid of this guy. Well, today was four years to that day. There was a big memorial at his grave site in Kerman, Kerman, which is, I guess, the hometown of Salimani. Kerman is in the southeastern portion of Iran. So quite a distance from Tehran, close to Pakistan and Afghanistan, if you're thinking geographically. Anyway, this memorial was in Kerman. Two bombs exploded at this memorial in two different areas. Over 103 people have been killed. At least that's what's confirmed, about 170 are wounded. So far, the Iranians are just calling this a terrorist attack. They're also blaming the United States and Israel not for the attack itself, but in a sense for somehow facilitating this attack. So hard to tell who did this. It could very well be Iranian opposition forces. It could be hard to tell. It could be some opposition forces within Iran, or it could be the Israelis and the Americans. But I find that unlikely. It doesn't fit the MO of what Israel and the United States have typically done in Iran. But again, another kind of poke at the Iranian regime. I have very little sympathy for people who were commemorating the death of a monster like Salimani, who had so much blood in his hands. So it is a legit target, in my view. But hard to tell what repercussions are going to be from this. But clearly, I think the Iranian Hezbollah Hamas axis is feeling a little heat right now, which is definitely a good thing. All right, let's see. That is Iran and Beirut and the assassination of Uri. I will remind you that in Beirut, there's a famous assassination case in Beirut years and years ago of one of the Munich terrorists was killed in his bed in Beirut by a team of Israeli Special Forces. El Barak was part of the El Barak that, who later became Prime Minister of Israel, was part of that mission. They basically came in to Beirut through the sea. Some others flew in with fake passports. They killed the people they had to kill, and they got back on boats, sailed out, and were carried away by an Israeli ship or an Israeli submarine. So Israel has a history of assassinating its enemies in Beirut, a history that yesterday they did well. They did well yesterday. All right, and this will send a message. I think you're not going to escape your fate. We are after you. Israel is after you, and Israel will get you. I think the head of the Israeli internal security forces yesterday said, we will find those responsible for the October 7th, and we will make sure that they pay the price, even if it takes us years to do it. So all of you guys, all of those guys in Qatar who are lounging around in whatever hotel they're at, their day will come as well. Their day will come as well. All right, as you know, because I mentioned this yesterday during the show, because it happened literally during the show, Claudine Gaye, the president of Harvard University, has resigned. She is the second of the three university presidents who testified in front of Congress and who could not answer the question about harassment to resign. The University of Pennsylvania, of course, president resigned first pretty fast afterwards. Gaye resigned yesterday, and all that's left now is to demand the resignation of the president of MIT. Gaye, of course, in a resignation, let her attribute the cause of her resignation to racism and hatred towards her for being black, and no mention of plagiarism, and no mention of just sheer incompetence in dealing with the question of anti-Semitism and the question of the safety of your students on campus. It's not clear how much the Harvard Corporation, the board of the Harvard Corporation was involved in getting her to resign, my guess is they were. But the real question now is, I think, that many people are asking is, what now? So there's an interim president, nobody on the corporate board of Harvard resigned as far as we can tell. So right now, the questions are, what now? Who is going to be the new president of Harvard? Are they going to use DEI criteria in order to hire the next president, or are they going to use Merritt as the criteria? What happens to the DEI infrastructure that is deeply rooted now in Harvard and really is institutionalized? Is that going to hold? I think it's pretty safe to say yes. Is the Harvard Corporation itself, are there going to be any changes there? Are there going to be any resignations there? And a board may be more reflective of the views of the alumni. Not clear. Ackerman, the hedge fund guy who has been a vocal opponent of gay since the hearings in front of Congress and certainly with regard to the plagiarism issue has put out a long statement about the need for Harvard to change, to change in terms of faculty hiring, to change in terms of intellectual and viewpoint diversity, to change in terms of the board to be more reflective again of the alum. And for all of that, in a sense, to change. But whether any of that will actually happen is doubtful. That, of course, question is going to be, will what will be learned from this and what will be the conclusion here and how is this going to affect the functioning of the university into the future? Will alumni like Ackerman keep their donations away from Harvard until they reform more deeply? Or will now that gay is gone, will all the money start flowing again? Supposedly Harvard lost about $1 billion in contributions since October 7th. Whether that changes or not will be really, really interesting. How to what extent are the Harvard alumni willing to stick by their guns? To what extent are they willing to really insist and work towards real changes at Harvard University? Harvard Corporation was created in 1650. I didn't realize it was that old. And the fiduciary responsibility is for the school. And, of course, that corporation will search for a new president with input from faculty, staff, and student advisory committee that exists now. So we will see what happens, how it happens, and how all this works through the process. I mean, the accusations of plagiarism, the factor on the plagiarism were just so bad, so obvious, so ridiculous that she had to go. There was just no way to keep her given that. And she is now being portrayed as some heroine for leaving. But I mean, she should be portrayed as a fake, as a fraud, given that more than half of her publications have massive, massive occurrences of plagiarism. Challenging times for Harvard University. If you were thinking of sending your kids there, I don't know, wait and see. All right, yesterday, the last few days have been a pretty bad day for Japan. I think it was Sunday that Japan had a major earthquake, a 7.6, something like that, and on the western side of the island, west of Tokyo. That's a large earthquake. And there were real fears of a significant tsunami that didn't materialize, luckily. But that is a significant earthquake. A number of people died. But given the size of the earthquake, it was actually quite small, 7.6 on the Richter scale. It was actually, the number of casualties was quite small, just a testament to Japanese engineering and their ability to build buildings, bridges, and everything else that can sustain massive, really massive earthquakes. Japan is an incredibly seismically active place. And it constantly suffers from big earthquakes. Over the last 20 years, we've seen quite a few massive earthquakes with significant casualties. Although the last one, the casualty, of course, with the Fukuyama nuclear power plant, the casualty is their wall from the tsunami, less so from the earthquake itself. Tsunamis are much more difficult to build infrastructure against. You can't build walls across your entire country. And across the entire shoreline, it's much easier to build buildings that are earthquake resistant than to protect yourself from tsunamis. I think what they have installed now are much better tsunami detection mechanisms to give people more time to evacuate to higher ground. Anyway, that happened, I think, on Sunday. Then yesterday, I don't know if you saw the pictures of this, Japanese, Japan Airlines airplane that was landing, hits a Japanese Coast Guard airplane on the runway as it was landing. And the Coast Guard airplane burst into flames. Almost everybody in the crew, except for the pilot, died as a result of it. But the Japanese airline, which had over 350 passengers, was set aflame, was on fire. But it managed to evacuate. Everybody found the plane, all 357, I think it was. Passengers and crew members got off safely. Nobody was killed, which is amazing. Particularly given that it didn't go that smoothly, the evacuation of the airplane. It took about 18 minutes. Supposedly, it's supposed to take 90 seconds, but it took about 18 minutes. It took time for the airplane to stop. It then took time for the doors to open, somewhere around five minutes for the doors to open, which is a long time as smoke is filling the cabin. It's truly scary for the people on board. And then they couldn't evacuate through all the doors because of the fire. So they could only evacuate out of what is it, eight different doors and eight different slides. They could only use three of them. And this is a big airplane. I think it's a A350. So it's one of those airplanes that has a center aisle, so three sets of seats. It's a lot of people, a lot of space. And they work to evacuate this plane. So one of the problems, of course, when you evacuate any plane like this, is that passengers tend to instinctually try to get their bags that slows everything down that just completely makes it really, really hard. I think the flight attendants here and the crew from everything I've read really did their job, got the passengers to leave their belongings, and to just get out of there quickly. And even though it took 18 minutes, which is much longer than it should take, the 18 minutes, they still managed to evacuate everybody. So good for them. That is definitely good news for everybody. But it is scary. You watch that plane in flames, and given how many planes I'm on every year, you start thinking, oh my god, I never want to be in that situation. I can't imagine how scary it is. And you're cramped in like sardines into this plane, and they smoke filling in their flames all around. Not a pleasant experience for anybody. All right, one of the things that the war in Ukraine and the war that Israel is engaged in have basically shown us, shown the world, is that the West really has a shortage in weapons production capacity in a major war. And given a number of major wars going on around the world, and a lot of countries worrying about other major wars arming themselves, the manufacturers of weapon systems in the West just do not have the capacity to make the amount of artillery shells, the missiles, and everything else that are required to replenish an active, engaged war. I think for much of the 21st century, and really since the bullying war came down, the West has basically assumed that war will not happen. A major war would not happen in the world, and they couldn't believe that a war would happen in Europe. And there was no real, they figured even a war in Israel, Israel could take care of pretty quickly. And they just didn't see the need to build the kind of reserve capacity for massive building of weapon systems. I mean, there's a story in the Wall Street Journal today about a company in Norway that builds something called the National Advanced Surface to Air Missile System, which has been deployed in Ukraine since 2022. It's recorded 100% success shooting down cruise missiles and drones. And it launches 72 missiles into the sky all at once. And right now, a lot of countries want to buy this. Everybody has got orders in to buy this National Advanced Surface to Air Missile System. And the waiting list to get this is now many years long, many years long. The company's called Kongsburg Defense and Aerospace, Kongsburg's Defense and Aerospace. They're saying they've never seen so much demand. I don't think they've expected so much demand. And yet, here it is, there's real problems in the United States with keeping up with the amount of ammunition and equipment being sent to Ukraine. Now, most of it's old, but new stuff needs to be produced. It was probably going to expire anyway, but nobody was in a rush to replace it. Now, they're in a rush to replace it, because who knows where the next front is going to be? And manufacturers in the United States are struggling to keep up with the demand just in the United States, but demand driven by Ukraine and Israel and, of course, by the US Army itself, trying to arm itself in preparation for potential conflict with China. Kongsburg, this Norwegian company, also makes ship-based missiles and also makes parts of the F-35 fighter jets. They've now moved to 24-hour, seven-day shifts and has workers in for some holidays when the factory would typically have been idle for maintenance. And it's still not enough. Again, if you think about building one of these systems, air defense systems, and the kind of supply chains and specialization that occur in the world today, there are 1,500 suppliers who contribute to products in their factories. So they have a complex supply chain with over 1,000 companies across two continents, primarily with the United States, obviously. And everybody, of course, the supply chain is seeing challenges in meeting the demand for weapons systems. I think one of the lessons of the last couple of years is that if the West wants to take seriously its self-defense responsibilities, it needs to build idle capacity. It needs to build capacity that can be turned on in times of emergency. Now, that's not easy to do because a lot of this requires highly skilled labor. And that's hard to train very quickly. But they're going to have to find ways to deal with this. You know, rely more on robots or whatever it happens to be, AI. But they're going to have to figure this out unless you think that war is over and you're not going to see, you're not going to see major conflict in the world anymore. Every single weapons manufacturer out there is going to have to figure out more capacity. If you look at the order books from Lockheed Martin to Northern government, to BEA systems, which is UK, GGN Dynamics, RTX, all American companies Boeing, almost all of them are at record highs. Almost all of them far exceed 2021 and they all exceed by a lot 2017. And they are all struggling, including companies in Italy and in France and in Germany who are weapons manufacturers. So I don't think anybody is really prepared for the kind of industrial production that would be necessary if a significant conflict broke out with China. And if you think about the focus the US economy had to make towards weapons manufacturing during World War II, they just had the orienting time manufacturing base of the United States in World War II towards manufacturing weapons. Nobody wants to be in a position where they have to do that because that would cripple the US economy and reduce the standard of living and quality of life dramatically. But if you don't want to do that, then you better have significant inventories and you better use the years where you're not literally fighting to be able to develop the weapon systems for the years that you are fighting. All right, I just came across a story about the fact a new study came out, the fact that over the next few years many regions in the United States and in Canada are just not going to have enough electricity to deal with the demand. The tech industry, what do you call it? All those computers, server farms, the cloud, if you will, requires huge amounts of electricity. And the cloud is only going to get bigger. And the computing power that's required and the electricity that's required is only going to get more massive as AI becomes more dominant. So you're going to have more and more and more of these computer farms, these massive computers, and those suck up huge amounts of electricity. Also, you've got a lot of electrification of things like electric heating versus using natural gas to heat. This is the move away from fossil fuels. And of course, crucially, everybody in the world, in the United States and Canada included, is encouraging their citizens to convert to electric cars. But the reality is there's just not enough electricity for all this. Not the grid is not robust enough to handle this much electricity demand. We don't have enough capacity of electricity there's just not enough electrical manufacturing plants creating electricity. The fact that everybody's moving towards solar and wind creates massive bottlenecks and problems, particularly at night when electricity demand is high and particularly when the weather is a little off. I mean, basically over the next few years, you can expect in North America massive electrical shortages. And of course, nuclear would be the solution. But even if they adopted it as a solution and there's no inclination they have because there are no major nuclear power plants being built in the United States right now, even if it was adopted as a solution, even if they went all in on nuclear as a solution, given the regulatory environment we're in, it would take a decade or two to get nuclear up and running. I mean, the solution is massive new natural gas plants to manufacture electricity and a complete upgrade of the grid. But the current system is so regulated and ridiculous and there's so much anti-fossil fuel. And the grid is such a mess because there's no proper property rights on the grid that the likelihood of this happening is very, very, very low, very low. Anyway, we're way behind. The grid should change. The grid should be redesigned. The grid should be upgraded. There are lots of things that could be done. The question is, will they be done? And who has the incentives to do it? And because most of this is up to government funding and everything else, it's likely not to actually be done. So we're in trouble, guys, in real trouble. All right, finally, Mickey Mouse. You probably read this, so we maybe mentioned yesterday. Mickey Mouse has gone into the public domain. Now, it's not all Mickey Mouses have gone into a public domain. Only one particular Mickey Mouse is in the public domain now. And that is the Mickey Mouse that was copyrighted in 1928 in the short film, Steamboat Willie. That is the first Mickey Mouse that really was in a movie. It is different than the later Mickey Mouses in terms of the drawing and the exact characterization of Mickey Mouse. So the Mickey Mouse is 95 years after the movie is released. The Mickey Mouse, that Mickey Mouse, the Steamboat Willie Mickey Mouse, is in the public domain. Already, the day it went into the public domain, two horror films and a video game featuring the Steamboat Willie Mickey Mouse have been announced and will be coming to the screens soon. So they are going to take Mickey Mouse and turning him into a monster, maybe, or maybe he's the hero who saves us from a monster. But we will see. One of these is going to have a mass killer dressed as Mickey Mouse. But don't worry, the other Mickey Mouses, the ones you're more familiar with, they're not necessarily the ones that the older Mickey Mouse or the newer Mickey Mouse is not in the public domain yet. There's a picture here of the horror film with Mickey Mouse. It looks really scary. Mickey Mouse really looks scary. It's sad, right? It's sad that they're going to use it in this way, but that's what happens. You can't get a copyright forever. All right, let's see. Oh, we're doing really well on the Super Chetza. Thank you, everybody. Let's start with El Smith says $100. Thank you. Happy New Year. Keep up the amazing work. Really appreciate it. Thank you. El Smith, appreciate it. Michael for $100. How would you respond to this? The ego, and I'm quoting, the ego is not who you really are. The ego is your self-image. It is your social mask. It is the role you are playing. Your social mask thrives on approval. It wants control. And it is sustained by power because it lives in fear. I mean, my response to that is certainly some people's ego are that. There's no question. That's Peter Keating. That's El's with Tui. That is the ego. And your responsibility is to identify what your ego is. What are you? Are you just kind of an empty soul? Is it shaped by your environment or maybe shaped by fear? Shaped by your engagement with other people? Shaped in order to keep a mask on? Or do you have a self-made soul to use Iron Man's words? You have actually chosen values where you have actually chosen a way of living, a way of thinking, a way of acting that has nothing to do with other people's assessment of you and their perception of you. So do you have a soul of how it works? How it works does not carry a social mask. He is a self-made man. He's a self-made soul. It's the responsibility of every one of us to introspect, to try to understand who we really are and what our ego really is. And to the extent that you have a social mask, we'll get rid of it. To the extent that your soul is not self-made, start making it. Start building it by choosing a purpose, by figuring out your values, by orienting your life around your chosen values. That's how you do it, by living it and by using reason in making your choices. So it's up to you. It's up to you to do the introspection. It's up to you to figure it out and to think it through. And again, yes, there are plenty of people who this description of the ego fits them perfectly. But to say that that's everybody's ego is just not true. Just not true. Michael says, it's hard enough to understand a nihilistic mindset. It's even harder for me to understand how these people run our academic and cultural institutions. You think people that nefarious couldn't make it past their mother's basement. But again, you guys have Michael and I think we have a few others who ask these kind of questions that they're not nefarious in an explicit sense. They're not sitting around thinking, oh, I want to burn it all down. I want to destroy it all. That's not how the nihilism gets expressed. And they never face their own nihilism. The nihilism is implicit in what they do. It's implicit in the ideology that they embrace. They don't face it. They don't consciously embrace it. They embrace the ideas that necessarily lead to it. So it's not that they're nefarious schemers in the back rooms. Because you're right. If that's what they were, they couldn't survive. Tui is the closest you'll get to that. But most of them are not Tui's. They're not aware of what they're doing. They're not aware of the consequences. They could be aware. They've chosen not to be aware. They've chosen to evade. But I agree with you. It's hard to understand irrationality. It's hard to understand how they could be this irrational in the face of the evidence and what drives them or what motivates them. But for them not to understand the destructive path that this leads, it's hard to understand the ability of people to evade. But they have it. And they can also compartmentalize. People can be very good at a particular area of their life and awful in other areas. Not over time, over their life. The integration kind of falls apart. They can for a long time hold a completely rational view in one realm of their life and a much more rational view in another realm of their life. Probably not sustained throughout their life, but sustainable for a long time. You see that in lots of people who are really good at their jobs and then have an awful family life, an awful political life. The compartments leak, as Jennifer says, yes. But they can hold those compartments sealed for quite a long time. And that's what makes it possible for them to stay competent in a particular realm. But look, I mean, look at Gail. I mean, as an academic, her discipline was completely irrational. What she wrote was completely irrational. The whole focus she had was completely irrational. And the irrationality leaked into her inability to write and therefore leaked into her willingness to be lazy and plagiarize in a way that if you projected in the future, you'd realize that you're going to pay for somebody's going to catch you at some point. OK, Bradley, empathy has become the moral standard with many, including Jordan Peterson, labeling anyone who deviates a narcissist. Is this a form of altruistic shame or is it a valid standard of morality? No, it's not a valid standard of morality. Empathy is not a valid standard of morality. There's nothing bad about empathy if you're empathizing with something in a sense that's right or empathizing with somebody who's good and somebody who you love or somebody you care for, somebody who's close to or just somebody who's a stranger. But to have empathy towards evil or to have empathy towards just whoever is absurd and it's certainly not a moral standard one way or the other. It is a form of altruistic shame. Absolutely, you're absolutely right. It's a replacement for morality. It's a replacement for theory of morality. Why be altruistic? Well, because we all have empathy. So it's an alternative to having an actual worked out theory of morality and an application of that theory. Instead, we're told to go on emotion and a particular emotion that relates to altruism is empathy. Michael asks, if Trump wins, will the left start another war on police followed by into fodder rioting? I mean, it's hard to tell, right? Remember that they took advantage not only of the Floyd of what happened of George Floyd, but also they took advantage of COVID. It's hard to, I don't think that what we would have seen in 2020 would be quite the same if not for COVID, if not for the lockups, if not for the kind of frustration that the lockups built up. But will the left become more aggressive? Absolutely. I think Trump brings out the worst in the left, which makes complete sense, right? As I said, at the time, the left would be a lot more, to some extent, pacified by a Biden administration. And they have been. They will be more outrageous under Trump. But it won't do them good because the American people are anti the far left. There's no question about that. The American people do not sympathize with the far left. Out of guilt, they might tolerate certain parts of the DEI primarily agenda. And they might go out for Black Lives Matter for a while because, yes, something horrible happened. And yes, we have had racism in this country. But once they realize what the full agenda is, they turn their back on it. They really turn their back on it. Enric, probably a question for Adam Assoff. But any thoughts on Japan not restricting copyright input into AI? I mean, I think this is going to be a huge AI copyright issue, is how do we do this? And how does it work? I don't have any thoughts on what Japan is doing. And I'm curious what Adam Assoff thinks. And I'm curious what he thinks the solution ultimately is going to be. But I think the solution has to be deals between content producers and AI manufacturers, AI companies for the AI companies to pay the people who are producing the content. But we will see. It's going to be an interesting problem to solve. Michael says, you noticed none of the Republican candidates talks about the welfare reform anymore. That's right, not only that. They don't talk about entitlement reform, which is the ultimate welfare program, the welfare for the middle class. They don't talk about some security reform. They don't talk about Medicare reform. None of them do. Basically, Trump has said, it's off the table. They won't do it. He won't do it. Haley and the Sanders, I think, are just not talking about it. And that was the Trump effect. Before Trump, everybody, the entire Republican Party, was concerned about some kind of reform of entitlements. They really talked about it. They really, there was some plans proposed. Paul Ryan, you can hate him as much as you want, but he actually proposed one of the best plans to reform Medicare and actually got a vote on the House. And it passed. It went nowhere because the Democrats controlled the Senate and the White House. But under Obama, he actually got the House to pass a Medicare reform bill, which was quite revolutionary. That's gone. I mean, Congress wouldn't pass that. The House wouldn't even bring it up. They're so afraid. And they become such leftists when it comes to these issues. Matthew says, hey, Ron, you said you prefer monthly contributions through PayPal. So I switched my membership from YouTube. Thanks for everything and happy 2024. Thank you, Matthew. I appreciate that. Yes, PayPal or Patreon are the best ways to support the show. At the end of the day, I get a higher percentage of the money that you contribute I get versus the services getting. All right, Matthew says, I'm 24 and discovered you and therefore ran through Lex Friedman. That's fantastic. Thank you, Matthew. Could you do his show again? I'd love to. Talk to him. Send him an email. Send Lex a tweet or something and tell him he should have me on. I'd love to do it. With a focus on moral courage and certainty, would love to. He needs to hear your ideas. And I feel you'd capture more young minds. Yes, I agree with you. I'd love to do it. Lex, if you're listening, sometimes he's listening to the show, have me back. I'll be in Austin later this month. Love to come back. Just a reminder for all of you in Colorado, I will be in Colorado on a week from Friday giving a talk in the evening in Centennial. You can email me if you're not sure about the information. I think the information is up online on my website under events, so you can find information there. Please come. Say hello for all of you Colorado members who are listening or whether your members are not. Please join us for this talk. It's going to be about setting values for 2024. It's going to be a positive talk about living life to the fullest. So join us. As I said, dinner afterwards. You can sign up on, I think, there's an Everbright page. But it's all on my website, joanbookshow.com, in the events section. The optimist pessimist. I think your criticisms of Vivek have been too harsh. Yesterday in a town hall, he said he is going to make Javier Millet look like a moderate. I mean, yeah, I mean, that's kind of the silliness of Vivek. He mows off nonsense like that. He's not a serious candidate. He is not a serious person. In what way is he going to make Javier Millet seem like a moderate? How is he going to do that? I mean, Javier Millet is about as radical as you could get in his ideas. What exactly has Vivek didn't do that's going to be more than? It's just silliness. It's exactly the kind of stuff that Vivek keeps saying. But look, I think his view is on foreign policy are contemptible. I think his views on Ukraine are horrible. I think his view on Israel is horrible. I think beyond that, that his adopting the style of Donald Trump is beneath him. The idea that the United States should go to war with Mexico over fentanyl is absurd. So yeah, I mean, he mows off half of what he said. It's brilliant. Half of what he says is great. But it comes in a package that is just not credible, that is absolutely flaky, and with a nutty foreign policy and a nutty kind of attitude. So he caters to the pro-abortion wing. Sorry, anti-abortion wing. He's trying to play kind of the free market with the Trump, with the pro-abortion, with the Christian. He's trying to be somebody for everybody. And I think he completely loses it. I think he completely loses it. He's trying to be tough guy with Mexico, but obviously a friend to the Russians. So I was hoping I would really like Vivek because he's a businessman. He's got ideas. Many of his economic ideas and his economic freedom ideas are pretty good, are really good. But he's such a horrible package. I mean, and the way he treated the other candidates on the debate stage is just terrible. And again, he's taken the worst of Donald Trump, and he's combined it with some better ideas. But it's still the worst of Donald Trump, so. I mean, if you could just take those ideas, the good ideas that he have, and put them in a good package, he'd be great. Now, the other point is he can't win. He's not going to even come close in any way. And there are a lot of reasons why he can't win. Partially because some of his ideas are indeed good. And those are the exact ideas that the Republican Party doesn't want. The Republican Party doesn't want Millie. And we say did, but they don't want Millie. You can't win in the Republican Party if you're Millie. They have no interest in, I mean, this is why the Republican Party is so corrupt. It is corrupt. They're not interested in free markets. They're not interested in reforming the entitlements. And his idea about investing the Social Security funds in the stock market is one of the worst ideas possible. It's a horrible idea. That would make the Social Security fund the largest investor in the United States stock market, which basically would make the government an important player in the stock market and in ownership of American businesses. It's a horrible, horrible, horrible idea. I mean, set up private accounts for everybody and put their money in those accounts and let them invest it, fine. But for the government to invest it as a pool, as the, God, that's a terrible idea. It comes across as, I'm pro-markets, but it's not pro-markets, it's anti-markets because it gets, it makes us a security administration, the largest investor in the world. All right, Brie, the Honey Bee Expo is here this week, this weekend, with all the big YouTube beekeepers, around 400,000 subscribers. You might try and get speaking engagements at this kind of specialized event or just networking. I'd love to, but they have to invite me. I mean, I've tried over the years to get speaking engagement. I tend to be too controversial for these groups to invite me in, optimist, pessimist. What are your thoughts on Vivek wanting to get rid of alphabet agencies like the ATF, of all the ones, the ATF? It seems like he has a really thought-out plan strategy. I don't get a sense at all that he has a thought-out strategy. I don't get a sense at all that he's thought through what it would take to actually get rid of the alphabet agencies and which ones to get rid of first, and how to do it, and what's it going to acquire. I haven't seen anything that suggests that that's really thought-out and there's a plan around it. The ATF is the, what is it, firearms? Is that the, I can't remember which one's the ATF. But it doesn't strike me as that is the first one you would get rid of, they're much worse ones and how you would do it and where you would do it. But look, as I said, half of what he says is really, really good. And half of what he said is completely flaky. And it comes in a just unpleasant package. So I would love to be able to support Vivek. Can't. Yeah, I'll call tobacco and firearms. Yeah, alcohol and tobacco should be out. They have no business. The federal government has no business. I'll call it tobacco, firearms, some firearm, you know, we got laws on the book with regard to firearms. Somebody has to deal with those. So whether you relegate it to the FBI, but I thought he wants to do, one of the things he wants to do is close down the FBI. Why does he want to close down the FBI? Should we not have an FBI? Is there no such thing as federal crimes? Are there no such thing as coordinating between states or cross-state lines, crimes at felonies? I mean, doing away with the FBI is just populist BS. So reform the FBI, focus it on real criminals, real crimes, doing away with it completely, really? I mean, does Vivek has a plan to get rid of the FDA? Does Vivek has a plan to get rid of government funding of science, of the National Institute for Health? Does Vivek have a plan to get rid of the SEC? Does Vivek have a plan to deregulate the banking sector properly, if he has, which are much more important than the ATF? The ATF is just populist bullshit. It's just a way to get Trump voters all excited because he's a second amendment guy. That's the most important thing right now for the country? I don't think so. I mean, if you're gonna be a serious candidate, you have to think about these things seriously. You have to have plans. In that sense, I'm impressed by Millay. He came out within days and had 300 things he was gonna do, 300 different regulations, 300, and they weren't random. They were thought out and it was things he's not touching yet that he will touch later that you have to work through. So that's the kind of plan you wanna put together. And I don't think Vivek has it because I don't think Vivek thinks he can win. I'm not sure why he's running and maybe he's running because he hopes to be vice president, but yeah, I just don't like him. And I don't like half of his ideas. Half I like, half I don't. Adam says, a question on jeopardy a few weeks ago was, what is an enemy of the people? Not one contestant even ventured against fluker sign of the times. It's a sign of the times. I mean, how many people know anything about 19th century playwriters? Certainly non-American 19th century playwriters. So doesn't surprise me. It is the, even in jeopardy, the level of education. You know, and there they just memorized encyclopedias and they didn't get to the Ipsen chapter, I guess. Kim, thoughts on paying for children's college as a parent? I'm conflicted, but this on this, they're an adult at 18. Yeah, I mean, it really depends on you, right? I don't think you owe it to them. I paid for my kids' college education because I didn't, I don't like the system where they have to take on this massive debt from the government and tuition is super high because the government has driven it high. I had the money, it wasn't that big of a deal. It was, you know, I was already paying for private school to some extent. So I paid for it and because, again, I could afford it, I wasn't going to go into debt to do it and I paid it. But you have to make that decision for yourself. It also depends on your relationship with your kids. It depends on how independent they are and whether you want to use this as an opportunity to force them to be independent, in a sense, by sending them out there to fund it themselves. And if so, then I'd rather them, you know, they need to fund it by working while they're in school. So it's, I don't think there's one answer to that question. It depends on your particular circumstances and your relationship with your kids. Big Worm says, on energy, do you have an opinion on small modular nuclear reactors? Could you have someone on to discuss their usefulness not within the current regulatory structure but under reasonable one? Sure, there is this guy I know in the nuclear business that I will try to have on. My suspicion is that they're brilliant. That is that the real solution for many places, they're way to bring the power plant close to where the electricity is consumed rather than traveling over hundreds of miles on wires that are not very efficient where you lose a lot of the electricity. They're super efficient and productive. But we live, so I think the potential is massive. The potential is massive. And what constrains that potential are the regulations. And the fact that the government controls it all. Government is the deciding factor. All right, everybody, thank you. I appreciate the support of all the superchatters. We crushed our goal. I appreciate all of you here listening. We will have a show again tomorrow and then in the evening tomorrow at 6 p.m. East Coast time. I'll be interviewing Ivan Carrillo who is a Argentinian economist. We will be talking about Argentina, its economy, and Millet. What is Millet doing? What are his plans? Is it good? What are the pitfalls? Can he succeed? And all of that, we will be talking about that. Tomorrow should be a fun episode. I'm interested. I'm curious. And Ivan is very articulate, a free market Austrian economist. He's very articulate. And it should be, again, should be an interesting, interesting show. Join us, join us then. All right, everybody. I will see you all tomorrow for News Roundup and then the interview with Ivan. Bye, everybody.