 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 this first show of January of 2024. First show of January of 2024. God, I can't talk. All right, hopefully everybody is having a great start to the year. You had a great long weekend. I am recovering from whatever bug I had over the weekend. Not completely recovered, but on the way. I'm close, almost there. So definitely, definitely on the healing path. So my voice is not quite there yet. Just remind everybody we'll have a show tonight, 6 p.m. east coast time, topic to be determined. All right, the first topic I have on the title is it begins partially because 2024 begins. I'm excited about 2024. I really am going to work to make this a breakthrough year for The Iran Brookshow. I want to expand our audience. I've got a few ideas bouncing around. You've probably seen a little bit of it with our artificial intelligence produced one minute videos. We've got a bunch of wonderful videos going out that have been created by artificial intelligence, by AI, by a new app that is increasing subscribers quite a bit. We're going to do more of that. So we'll see what else we can do to really grow the channel, grow the show and have a great 2024. We will continue with the news shows. I know many, many of you really value these shows. We will definitely continue with them on a daily basis. So no plans to change that. And then we'll see where we go from there. And we'll see how the year evolves. I'm excited, excited about 2024. But the second reason I wrote it begins as the first title is that something else begins sooner than I expected. But it started maybe a couple of hours ago, maybe three hours ago. I don't have the exact time stamp. But Israel assassinated the first Hamas leader outside of Israel a few hours ago, two to three hours ago was this evening Middle East time. And it did so in Beirut, where they took out kind of the number two guy of the Hamas leadership, political leadership. His name is Al Awouwi. He was, I think it was a drone attack that took out a specific apartment. So this is one of those smart missiles that came through the window where there was a meeting of six leaders of Islamic terrorist organizations, two of them, two of them that we know of that have been named so far, are two Hamas leaders. One, this guy, Roury, and the other is Khalid Al Hayya, both senior officials within Hamas, based in Lebanon, within Hamas's political wing. But this sent a clear message, a clear message to the rest of Hamas leadership, whether they're in Qatar, whether they're in Turkey, wherever they happen to be, this sends a clear message, we're coming for you, we're not going to stop. And this is the spite of the fact that the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, has said that if you attack Beirut, attack Hamas in Beirut, we will count that as a declaration of war or something, and Hezbollah will enter the fray. We will see what Hezbollah decides to do, and Nasrallah is supposed to give a big speech tomorrow. Now that this assassination is taking place, we'll see how he takes it. But yes, two of the leaders of Hamas in exile have been assassinated. I believe this is the beginning of hunting them all down, at least the top leaders. Salah El-Roury was the deputy chairman of the Hamas political bureau and the commander of the Qasam Brigade's military operations for the West Bank. So he was responsible for the West Bank. Good riddance. Good riddance. This is good news, a good way to start the year by taking out one of the world's bad guys, always, always, always pro that. All right, a more negative news, but still related. Turkey, today, basically has detained 33 people. Not clear who these people are, if they're Turks, Israelis, or other nationalities. 33 people that they are suspecting of spying for Israel. They're also looking for another 13. So they are searching for another 13. These, they were detained during raids in Istanbul and seven other provinces for allegedly planning to carry out activities that include reconnaissance and pursuing assaulting and kidnapping foreign national living, foreign nationals living in Turkey. I think the assumption is here that these were people who were recruited by the Mossad in order to keep track of Hamas leadership that are in Turkey for the purpose of the Mossad assassinating them. Now, that sounds right to me whether that's exactly what's going on here. It's hard to tell exactly what Turkey's angle is. It's hard to tell. But Turkey is at the end of the day an Islamist regime. It plays moderate in order to play nice with Europeans in order to remain a member of NATO. But the one, the president of Turkey is an Islamist, is committed to the jihadist agenda. He just wants to do it in a peaceful, at least semi-peaceful way. He has called Benjamin Netanyahu basically compared to Adolf Hitler. He has described Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide. He is very anti-Israel and he goes back and forth. Sometimes he realizes this strategic interests are lined with Turkey and therefore he befriends Israel and sometimes he realizes that Israel is really the enemy and he attacks Israel. Right now Israel is the enemy. If I were Israeli, I would not go to Turkey. There's a lot of tourism. A lot of Israelis go to Turkey for tourism. I would not risk it. You get caught up in one of these dragnet searches of spies. Yeah, I'm skipping the flights that have stops in Istanbul airport. All right, so yeah, that was last minute. News broke just before we started the show. That's why I said it was really, it's beginning. The alignment of Israel to take out Hamas leadership is at the start. I will say that the mission and the success of the assassination in Beirut is testament to the fact that Israel still has some good intelligence still out there in spite of the intelligence failures. The Mossad is still and the Shin Bet and knowledge of intelligence is still capable organizations to be able to identify this particular apartment where this meeting was happening and to be able to thread a bomb in there probably using a drone. Pretty impressive and good for them and good riddance to the Hamas operatives and leadership that they managed to assassinate. Let's see. All right, 2024 is a massive election year. Something like 60 countries are going to be holding elections. They constitute about 4 billion people around the globe. That's about half the population of earth are going to be eligible to, well, countries in which those people live. There will be elections in and there will be regional elections, legislative elections, presidential elections, including European wide EU elections. And these could be pretty significant. Of all the elections this year, there are two that I think are of huge significance and where the outcome is still uncertain. There are others where the outcome is pretty guaranteed, but there's some where the outcome is certainly uncertain. And those two are Taiwan and the United States. I think those are two key elections that are super important and we don't really know what the outcome is going to be. The Taiwanese election is going to happen soon. It is on January 13th, so it's in less than two weeks. It's in 10 to 11 days. And it is happening amidst heavy lobbying by the Chinese, heavy misinformation by the Chinese, heavy influence campaigns by the hands of the Chinese who are lobbying for the opposition candidate to try to, who is friendlier to China and friendlier to the idea of one-day reunification with China. You have, I think, four candidates running, three opposition candidates. One of the opposition candidates is kind of an independent candidate who is the CEO of Foxconn, if you remember Foxconn. They're the ones who basically build iPhones. And you've got, so you've got in addition to him, you've got Hou Yi-il, the standard bearer of the Kuomintang party, which is one of the opposition parties, but it is the party that ruled Taiwan from the end of the Chinese Civil War from 1949 until 2000. This is Chiang Kai-shek's political party. And the Kuomintang is more friendly to Beijing and an explicit advocate for reunification, but under its term supposedly. So we will see, obviously, the Chinese would like to see who win this election and given that he's friendlier. And then you have, as I said, the Kowen Jay, the CEO of Foxconn. And you've got the major political party, the political party that is right now, right now, what do you call it, in power, Lei Qingte, who is the current vice president. He's the epidemiologist who did such a good job with COVID in Taiwan and basically saved Taiwan from lockdowns and saved Taiwan from really an epidemic. He is running for president. He is the front-runner right now, according to polls, but it's not a sure thing. This election will determine to a large extent kind of the future of Taiwan vis-à-vis China, at least in the near to medium term. Lei is not an advocate for Taiwanese independence, but he's certainly an advocate for Taiwanese, Taiwan not reunifying with China as long as China is a communist country or run by the communist party more accurately. So we will see how this plays out. Beijing despises Lei, Lei, who is the front-runner, and basically placed him and his family on a sanctions list for their pro-independence sympathies. So yeah, I'm whatever China hates. I'm with them. So I'm fly, you know, Taiwan is thriving under their rule. So I hope they continue and I hope they're successful. So this is a big one. We've got breaking news that this is more good news. I mean, we're starting off the year really, really well. We've got more breaking news that Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, is just resigned. I'm getting this from Z400 Racer and from Druski from some of the chat. But it seems, I mean, I'm not surprised, given the pressure that the Harvard Corporation has been under from both donors and politically and from just alumni and from everybody and just the obvious hypocrisy with regard to plagiarism that they would put themselves in. So it doesn't surprise me that she is resigned. It'll be interesting to see what happens now. Who gets elected? Who gets chosen for this position? Who replaces her and what else and how this is spun by Harvard University? I assume that this is going to be primarily focused on the plagiarism, not on the anti-Semitism, not on the Israel. Yeah, we will see how this plays out. Some more on that story tomorrow, given that it basically broke while we were doing the show. All right, let's see. So that, oh yeah, so election year, God, did I close that document? I didn't want to close that document one second. So we talked about Thailand, Taiwan. Of course, we've got the massive, we have the massive, the election in the United States, which is going to have huge consequences. But there's also a lot of elections in Africa. In South Africa, there's a significant election where the ANC will actually face, you know, have to face its lack of popularity. What is going on? What is going on here? Why is that doing that? The fact that it is incredibly unpopular, the fact that it's driven the economy close to collapse. So the ANC is up for re-election as the ruling party in South Africa. That will have huge implications, I think, for the rest of Africa. South Africa, of course, is also a crucial member of the BRICS. And we will see. I think that's an election that's worth following primarily because the ANC has basically ruled South Africa since the end of apartheid. But its corruption, its just incompetence has taken this country that has the potential to be unbelievably rich, basically to become an incredibly poor, stagnant, decrepit place. So is there an opposition party that could win? Is there anybody who could stand up to the ANC that has this tradition of getting rid of apartheid? We will see. But it is time. There's no question it's time in South Africa to replace the ANC. Senegal, another large and significant African country, also has elections as the Mali and Chad which had military coups. The military regimes have promised to have elections this year. So those are other places that if they revert back towards democratic governance, maybe we'll send a message across Africa to move Niger, Gabon, and Sudan, who also had military coups, to move in that direction. We will see, anyway, significant elections in Africa. I think the most significant of those is South Africa, obviously, the continent's wealthiest country, certainly in potential. Just a basket case. Also, we've got elections in Russia, not very meaningful, because it doesn't matter who votes and what you vote for. Vladimir Putin will be elected. We also have elections in Belarus. Again, irrelevant. It doesn't matter what the vote is. Lukashenko will be elected. And in Iran, there will be some elections. And again, it doesn't really matter. These are all kind of elections that are predetermined. And although the election in Iran is a parliamentary election, it will be interesting to see how many of the, you know, what exactly the turnout is, do people go out and actually vote. And at the end of the day, we will see whether, for example, women use this opportunity to either boycott the election or elect reformers or whether there are reformers on the ballot. Hard to tell. But we will know more about that later in the year. It's actually March 1, so it's coming up when there's going to be an election. All of those three countries, Russia, Belarus, and Iran have real potential for demonstrations and some political upheaval as a consequence of what are obviously, and without any question, going to be corrupt elections. We also have big elections in India. India, it looks like it's pretty clear that Modi's ruling party will win. They're incredibly popular. They basically dominate Indian politics. They've done very well in regional elections last year. So expect them to run away with this. Pakistan, hard to tell what's going to happen, given that their previous prime minister, who was deposed, who was at a no-confidence vote against him, is being banned for running. There's a lot of, there's a lot of accusation of fraud and everything else, so a lot of upheaval there. And finally, there will be a European parliamentary election, a European Parliament parliamentary election, and expect this is an election where you will see a significant rise of the new right, of new right political parties, the far right. This is an election to the European Parliament. This is an election in which the far right will be considered kind of the opposition vote, the opposition vote to the entire European project. It's going to be interesting, but it's likely that the far right parties will basically constitute the third largest voting bloc in the European Parliament at the end of these elections. That's up from sixth, sixth largest. So it'll be, it'll signify a significant shift to the right, and in this case to the far nationalist right of European politics that will be represented, I think, by this shift. So it will be interesting to see how they play it out. And then I said that was finally, but I've got one more, well, two more, two more important ones actually. One is Mexico, which is going to be important for a lot of different issues regarding the United States. The election there is on June 2nd. We have two political candidates. So far, it looks pretty evenly matched. The Obrados, Obrador, which is the leftist political candidate, he can't run, he's termed out in Mexico, you only serve one term. So there is a, this is political party will be represented by Claudia Schienbaum. I think that's, yeah, that's kind of the leftist political party that she will face. She will face a right wing. So, you know, right wing is not exactly the terminology, but a more kind of traditionally right representative. You know, a senator should, I can't pronounce her name, first name, but Galvez. She will be, she is a, I guess, indigenous. She is also, she is also an independent. She doesn't belong to any of the big political parties. It will be, it will be really interesting because both both political, both candidates for the top point position. I don't know what's happened to super chat has gone nuts. Let's try this again. Reload. Anyway, whatever happens in in this coming Mexican election, one thing is for sure, Mexico will have a woman president for the first time in its history. So that should make that election, that election is going to be interesting no matter what. And finally, it's likely that the UK will have an election probably towards the end of the year, or whenever Sunak thinks he might have an edge, even though, you know, he's trailing by a lot, trailing behind by a lot right now. But Sunak, Sunak represents the conservatives, the Labour Party is soging, has done much, much better than conservatives. The conservatives could lose this election, even though they have a majority in House of Parliament right now. The Labour Party has moderated its crazy socialist views, quite a bit under new leadership, and they look ready to kind of underkeat Kirstammer as bad as he is, he's moderate as compared to his predecessor. They're currently enjoying 43% support from the polls with the conservatives only getting 25%. So it looks like you'll see a shift to the left in the United Kingdom. Now, there's a lot of times still a lot of things could happen. So anyway, a big year coming up, and of course, the US election, we've talked about that many times, we will talk about that, but the US election is going to be big as well. So massive, interesting, you know, election prospects on the horizon. Let me see what happened. All right, so one of these new stories has shut down. Let me find it. Not that. All right, I might as well start the new, or the year with a story out of California and out of the stupidity of the Biden administration. If you look at the, you know, one of the latest bills, the Inflation Reduction Act, I think it's the Inflation Reduction Act, you will find buried in the Inflation Reduction Act, a line item, not for a lot of money, just $3.1 billion, $3.1 billion, which has penny change in Congress these days. Anyway, $3.1 billion that have been awarded by the White House to California High Speed Rail Project. Now, High Speed Rail Project in California is an interesting project, right? The idea was it was, the idea was to build a high speed railroad between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Now, this is a brilliant idea. San Francisco and Los Angeles are, you know, close to one another, relatively close to one another, that the traffic in San Francisco and in LA is horrific, so getting to the airport, getting out of an airport adds a huge amount to the commute to get in and out of out of LA in San Francisco. You could take rail from downtown San Francisco all the way to downtown LA with a high speed rail. It should be, it should be super fast, just like in Japan, just like in parts of Europe, you would think that the United States would have one piece of, you know, high speed rail somewhere, and this makes complete sense and should be, should be something that somebody does. Well, the state of California decided it was going to do it and California voters authorized a $10 billion bond issue for the train in 2008. I voted against it in 2008. Anyway, the original total estimate for construction, all of it, from San Francisco to LA, was $33 billion. Now, that $33 billion was the initial estimate as construction on the project began, or even before construction as more investigation into the project was pursued. The cost of the project rose to $100 billion. That's a big, that's three times from $33 billion to $100 billion. And then they said, okay, we still want to do San Francisco to Los Angeles, and we're actually going to make this more ambitious, and we're going to extend the rail to Sacramento and to San Diego. And wow, this was going to be amazing. I mean, really amazing. You can get on a train to San Francisco in San Diego and go to San Francisco probably at the same time or less than an airplane and given security and given everything else, probably less time than an airplane. And wow, I mean, this is major at the time when all of this was proposed. Phase one, the Los Angeles to San Francisco portion was supposed to be completed by 2020 by 2020. Anyway, so then they realized, look, this is going to be really hard and getting into Los Angeles and getting into San Francisco, we're going to have to dig tunnels and how we're going to get there, how we're going to actually get into Los Angeles. We're going to have to dig underneath Los Angeles. It's going to be really, really hard. Maybe we can have a slow rail from like the outskirts of Los Angeles into the main city. But then that defeats the whole by speed concept. So, and the same with San Francisco, so we're going to do slow rail. Well, that's kind of stupid. So then I said, okay, okay, okay, so what we'll do since we can't really solve all these problems is we're going to just start with a piece of this. We're going to start with a piece of it and we're going to build a rail from Merced to Bakersfield. Now Merced is basically 130 miles from San Francisco. It drive and Bakersfield is 110 miles from Los Angeles. They said, at least we'll have that piece done. Why you would want that piece, nobody can say because nobody actually wants to go to Merced and nobody actually wants to go to Bakersfield and certainly nobody wants to go from Merced to Bakersfield. These are two towns in the middle of nowhere, literally in the middle of nowhere. That piece, that segment, which is flat, easy, no tunnels, no underground, no nothing, straight. That segment, which is the easiest segment to build, was going to cost $22.8 billion. Then they said, okay, they started that. The construction is actually happening on that. And then they said, okay, but if we're going to extend this to San Francisco and Los Angeles, that's probably going to take another 15 to 20 years. So now instead of 2020, we're looking at 2040, 15 to 20 years. And it's going to cost three times as much as projected, not 100 billion, maybe 300 billion. And there's no way we're going to be able to do it all high speed. There's going to be slow segments. Anyway, you can see this keeps going. Even the segment between Merced and Bakersfield, it looks like they're going to need 10 to 12 billion dollars extra to complete that. And we're 2024 and nothing is being completed. Nothing has been completed. And the whole thing is just unbelievable fiasco and is illustrative of the fact that in California, you cannot build anything. It's not you didn't build that, nobody builds anything in California. So on top of all this, the Biden administration has decided to take this money pit that will actually result in nothing, maybe a fast train to nowhere, which is what I consider Merced and Bakersfield, a fast train to nowhere. There are costs. Who knows how much 30, 40, 50 billion dollars. They've decided to throw in a little bit of your taxpayer money. Those of you who do not live in California. And those of you who do into the mix, I mean, where there's a, you know, a sinkhole of money, you might as well throw more money at it. Why, what the hell? Why not? It's just unbelievable. It's just unbelievable. And nobody, nobody has any sense of what they're doing, why they're doing it, how they're doing it. In Florida, they built some rail privately in Texas. They're talking about private high speed rail from, but they've been talking about this for 20 years from Houston to Dallas to Austin to San Antonio to Houston. That triangle should be supplied by high speed rail, but again, it should be private because this is what happens. California is a good example of what happens when you let the government do it and when you have the kind of environmental regulations that California has. All right. We're way behind, way behind. We're really, God, how did that happen? All right. Quickly. Fourth quarter of last year was the first time ever that Tesla was not the largest manufacturer of electric cars in the world. BYD, BYD, the Chinese electric car manufacturer actually outsold Tesla in the fourth quarter selling over half a million cars, 526,409 to 4,507 for Tesla. I expect this will be a trend. I expect BYD and other Chinese companies to be the dominant players outside of Tesla in the electric car world. I think BYD and other electric cars again, Chinese electric car companies are eyeing Europe. Europe has all these mandates to move from gasoline cars to electric cars. BYD and others are moving in to supply that. The European companies are way behind American companies other than Tesla, way behind. This is China versus Tesla basically at this point. It's going to be a competition between I think those two, unless the Europeans somehow pick up or the other thing is they could place trade barriers to prevent the Chinese from selling into Europe. That is a possibility. I'm sure that's what's going to happen in the US ultimately, but maybe they already exist. I don't know. But it does really look like China is going to dominate. The thing about Chinese electric car companies is they control the entire supply chain for mining of the minerals that are required for battery production to battery production to the vehicles themselves. Most other companies around the world have to import pieces of in order to build the batteries. I think the 15, there are 15 electric cars being sold in the United States right now. Half of them, I think it's eight of them, have lost the government tax detectability that the tax benefit because they use batteries that are not 100% America made. So only seven electric cars right now are getting the tax credit from the government. That obviously puts the other eight at a huge disadvantage because the United States will only give the tax advantage to cause that every single component within them comes from the United States, including the components in the batteries. US doesn't produce that many batteries right now. That's why there's a lot of battery building factories going on out there to get the government subsidies. This is going to distort the market in all kinds of ways. It's going to distort competition in the market. It is pretty sad. BYD is already announcing its first EV factory in Europe. The first one will be in Hungary. You will see lots of announcements about Chinese companies building cars in Europe and maybe even building cars in the United States in order to get around all these trade barriers that are going to be created, that are going to be instituted by different countries. Incredibly destructive, incredibly destructive, but there you go. Talk about destructive and distorted. This is a complicated story. I don't know how I'm going to, I'm just going to simplify it. So studying January one, drug makers that have raised prices significantly are going to face stiff new penalties. They'll acquire them to pay Medicaid, not Medicare, but Medicaid. A significant amount of money for patients who use their drugs. So if you have raised the prices on your drug more than inflation in the past, you will owe huge amounts of money for Medicaid for every time a Medicaid patient buys one of your drugs. Now this is super complicated because drug pricing is super insanely complicated. So a lot of drug companies are cutting prices significantly on New Year's Day, as of yesterday, in order to basically reduce the price so that they don't have to pay these penalties. This is the government forcing them to do this. Glaxo decided on a different strategy. So it's basically, it's got this asthma inhaler, flow vent. And what it has decided to do is take flow vent off the market. And basically it's teamed up with another company to offer a generic version of flow vent, manufactured in the same way, exactly the same design, everything the same, but a generic version that does not carry the Glaxo name at a significantly reduced price. But at a price that even though it's reduced, if Glaxo was selling the product itself, if it was the same product, it would have to pay penalties. So but by renaming it, it won't have to pay penalties, but it will be cheaper for consumers. It's kind of trying to play a game. But what has actually happened is that a lot of the pharmacy benefit managers are refusing to cover the new generic product. The basic saying this lower priced product is actually more expensive than the previous product once you take into account all the rebates that exist on it. And again, this is the insanity and the complexity of drug poison. So basically this asthma medication, flow vent, which was heavily used by young children, it was sold like 2.2 million of these last year just to Medicaid. It's not available anymore in the market. They can't get the new one, they can't get the old one. It's just off. It's just not available, not available. And all this because Medicaid is forcing drug companies to lower prices. So you're forcing a drug company to lower prices. Sometimes there are unexpected consequences. And in this case, the drug is just not available. And young, this is supposedly in terms of asthma inhalers. This is the easiest one for young children to use. And now they can't get it. And this is a consequence of government regulations, the consequence of these penalties that Medicaid and Medicaid are now inflicting on drug companies. It's also a consequence of the you know, kind of Gothic Byzantium. I don't know what you would call it complex, irrational, insane method by which drug pricing happens in the United States. You would have to really rationalize drug pricing. You would have to completely scrap the existing system, the existing relationships, and start almost from scratch, which you could do pretty quickly if you were like a president, melee, and really could just start over people, start over with no government constraints, no government regulations, and whether government is not dominating the buying of all this stuff. It's just insane. Of course, the drug companies will be blamed for this, not the Biden administration, not Medicaid, not the ridiculous nature of the system. Or if the ridiculous nature of the system will be blamed for it, the solution offered will be why don't we just have socialized medicine so single payout, that'll solve all our problems. And then there will be no drug companies and no new drugs being developed. All right, two last issues quickly. I won't give you an update on Gaza. I'll do that next time. I started off the show with news from the Israeli Palestinian war, the assassination of two senior Hamas leaders in Beirut. But I do want to give you this piece of news out of Israel. Israel's Supreme Court has struck down the judicial overhaul law that the Netanyahu government passed, and which resulted in those massive demonstrations in Israel, if you remember, before the war started. And those demonstrations probably provoked Hamas to do what it did October 7th because they believed Israel was particularly weak. Anyway, the law has struck down. Now, what's insane or what's interesting about this law and it being struck down is, remember, Israel has no constitution. The law limited the power of the Supreme Court, limited the power of the Supreme Court. And now the Supreme Court is striking down a law limiting its own power. That's a tough one. That's a really, really tough one. Should the Supreme Court have the power to strike down laws affecting the Supreme Court? Should laws affecting the Supreme Court pass by supermajority votes, given the fundamental separation of powers that is involved here? These are difficult issues when you don't have a constitution, you don't have a methodology. What happens now if the government just ignores the Supreme Court? We passed a law, we passed parliament, we don't recognize your authority over this law. You have a constitutional crisis in Israel, but no way to resolve it because no mechanism by which to have it resolved. I mean, you could have the same thing in the United States. If you could imagine Trump doing something, the Supreme Court claiming it's not constitutional, Trump's saying, I don't really care. I'm going to continue doing it and go to hell. Now, I think we have enough protections in the United States to stop that from happening. Maybe even Trump would be impeached for doing something like that by Congress. Maybe, not sure, but maybe. But Israel has no mechanism to do that. So how do you deal with this? So it is really, Enric says, Kafka asked, yeah, it's really Kafka asked. This is in the middle of a war, a war which requires unity among Israelis. This is not a good time to start a fight. My guess is the government will hold off on starting a fight with the Supreme Court. But what will happen once the war is over is uncertain. The other thing that makes this so much more divisive, the Supreme Court in Israel has 15 members. Usually it's a subset of those 15 members that makes decisions. For the first time in Israeli history, the entire Supreme Court voted on this, and they decided to overturn the judicial overhaul law by an eight to seven vote, basically write down partisan lines. That is not a strong message either. And it is a message of kind of party loyalty rather than which suggests that the Supreme Court is very heavily manipulated and controlled by party politics. So not good for Israel. They're going to have to find a way out of this. It's a real impasse. It doesn't bode well for what happens after this war. And certainly if this becomes an issue during the war, it could really be a disaster. It could really, really be bad. All right, finally Iran, a couple of stories in Iran, quickly. One, Iran has basically dramatically increased the output of near weapons grade uranium. They now have a significant stockpile of what's called near weapons grade uranium, which means that they could make it weapons grade within days once they decide to go nuclear. I think that they've let the world know this, and they've made this announcement to put pressure on the United States to compromise that with them. This is pressure on the Biden administration to cut a deal and to put pressure on Biden administration to decide one way or the other. Of course, one of the challenges is that if the Biden administration strikes Iran, it might be saying we can turn this weapons grade uranium into weapons grade uranium in days and have a nuclear bomb. And then what would you do Biden administration? So this is a gambit by them to hold off the Americans and the Israelis, I think, from doing anything to stop them and to stop them from attacking Israel, to stop them from attacking U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria, to stop them from blocking the Red Sea. Basically, it's a way for them to tell the U.S. don't mess with us. And it's working, of course, because the U.S. is doing nothing vis-à-vis Iran, and the best representation of that is what's happening in the Red Sea. Right now, Iran has sailed one of its warships into the Red Sea very close to where the United States, Britain, and other countries have their fleet. As we all know, I said at some point last week that maybe the U.S. was getting ready to attack the Houthis in Yemen. There was supposed to be a press conference with the winner. Now something never happened. Maybe the Iran ship is there to kind of poke at the Americans. Do you want to control the Red Sea? Uh-uh. We're going to be here. We're going to be here, and we're going to support the Houthis. And the Biden administration is coward. So far, they are completely coward. So striking, stunning, you know, and of course, the U.S. is doing nothing. Zero zilch. I mean, Israel should attack this Iranian ship in the Red Sea and declare the Red Sea territory that Israel is protecting. But it won't. Not without U.S. Go ahead, and the U.S. will not allow it. Anyway, Iran is taking everything going on as America weakness, and therefore it is raising the stakes dramatically going into 2024. It's going to be quite a deal. It's going to be quite intense, I think. By the way, over the weekend, the Houthis attacked a ship with four small boats. The U.S. came to the rescue of the ship, I think with helicopters, and basically drowned three of those four boats. These are tiny little boats that are insignificant, right? Tiny little boats. It is absolutely zilch nothing. It means nothing. And it was insignificant action. You know, you're not going to, it's a pinprick. You want to really take on the Houthis? You have to go to where they are, and you have to stop, you know, the Houthis over the weekend also launched several ballistic missiles against the U.S. and against others. They were knocked out of the sky, but it's nothing. It's insignificant. Until you actually deal with the Houthis where they are, you're not doing anything. You're pretending to do something. All right, let's go to the super chat. Wow, I went almost an hour. Sorry, I need to make these shorter. I will starting tomorrow. Thomas says, Happy New Year. Thank you, Thomas. Thank you for the support, the $20. Oh, let's see. We have Eyal. Thank you, Eyal, Gail, Jonathan, West, these are all stickers. Silvanos, Stephen Hopper, Jonathan Honing. Thank you guys. Thanks to all the stickers. Really, really appreciated. Okay, Michael, $50. Thank you, Michael. It's great. My professor has a giant picture of Karl Marx at the front of our class. It's very distracting. Would it be wrong to politely ask him to take it down or tell the administration about it? I need to pass the course and don't want to be, don't want to jeopardize that. I mean, it really depends on whether you think the professor is, you know, whether you think the professor is going to penalize you for it or not. If you think the professor is going to penalize it for you for it, you know, just ignore it. Just ignore it. It shouldn't distract you. Just don't pay any attention to it, you know, or before class, next time, cover it up with a piece of cloth and see what he does. But yeah, I would just ignore it. Now, again, if the professor seems open-minded and stuff, then do it. But isn't it amazing that Karl Marx could be up there? Well, it isn't Stalin or Lenin, but it's Karl Marx, the direct ideological fountainhead of Lenin and Stalin. Imagine if there was a clear fountain into the Nazis. Would they hang his picture up? Clearly not. But communism is tolerated, because communism presents itself as consistent with the dominant moral code of the West, which is altruism, which is the dominant moral code of Christianity. So we tolerate communism because it's not that different than Christianity. We don't tolerate Nazism because it seems at least very different than Christianity. All right, Michael. Yeah, I would just say learn to live with it. You know, shouldn't let stuff like that distract you too much. Glenn says, let's start the year off right for $100, he says this. Let's start the year off right. Really great year and wrap up show. Going to be an interesting year. It's going to be a very interesting year. Huge year with the election coming up. It'll be interesting to see how my anti-Trump stance, which will go all the way through the election, how we will suffer or not on this show as a consequence of the anti-Trump stance. It will be interesting to see how that evolves during the year and whether we can sustain the trend of the last three months of significant subscription growth. We've seen really, really good growth in October, November, December. Primarily, the show I did on Iron Hersey Ali, which is interesting because I criticize Iron Hersey Ali and I criticize religion on that show and yet we got a lot of new subscribers on that show. Then the next is everything I've said about Millet, a lot of subscribers, a lot of new subscribers. It's just slipped my mind what the third big one is, but those two have been big in terms of added subscribers. That is good. By the way, if you're listening right now and you're not a subscriber yet, please subscribe and get notified when I go live and click that bell so you get the notification and so on. Let's see. I'm trying to go here and see if I can generate what else is a big contributor to subscription. It's Iron Hersey Ali, the show, Millet shows and lastly, it was, oh, the Harvard DEI. Harvard DEI. It's interesting because it covers the Claudia Gay. It covers the whole gamut. Iron Hersey Ali, I must have got some New Atheist types. On Millet, I got a bunch of libertarians, primarily Argentinians. I got a lot of new subscribers from Argentina. On Gay, I got white-wing people who are happy to join me in attacking Gay. I got a nice array of different people adding onto the show as a consequence of those particular videos. Just to give you a sense, the Harvard DEI standards allow Claudia Gay, whatever shorts that we produced, it's nine minutes long, nine and a half minutes long, has 35,000 views and we got a lot of subscriptions for that. But the Millet has 17,000 views and then if you go to the shorts, where I'm getting a lot of subscribers also, it's pretty much every short that we put up there, shorts of one minute videos. Pretty much every one minute short that I bring up there gets decent viewership, that is between two to 10,000 and also produces subscribers on all these different topics. So what's interesting is I haven't added a huge number of subscribers on Israel. You would have expected I would. I wouldn't have expected I would. But I know Hosea Ali, Millet and Claudia Gay produce subscribers. So I need to learn from that somehow. I need to figure out what it is that I need to learn from that so that we can continue to produce the right kind of videos so we can continue to add new subscribers. All right. What is the latest on the movement in Iran challenging address code? It still exists. It's still out there. There are no mass demonstrations. It's more of a protest of individual women doing it and getting support from other women and men in the streets of Tehran. But they've been even at one year for the death of the first woman who was killed in what was it, October, November of 2022, there were no real big demonstrations. So it's kind of died down. Of course, the news cycle has not been helpful because there have been other news stories. So it's died down. But what happens in this election in Iran will be interesting. Henry says, are you preserving your shows in case YouTube bans your channel in future? Big tech content moderation could be capricious. Would hate to lose all the content you produced over the years. I do have it all on podcasts. I don't have it in video form other than in YouTube. We just take up so much memory that I don't. Maybe there's a way I can have somebody do a project of downloading all the YouTube shows in video until a massive hard drive somewhere. It does almost all the shows, by the way, are streamed on Facebook. Almost all the shows are streamed on Twitter. Facebook and Twitter, Facebook at least preserves them all. I'm not sure about Twitter. So I would have to be banned from all the social media. But it's a good point you make. I have lost some of my podcasts from the early days. The one podcast, was it something, blog talk radio? I think those would be would delete it at some point. So I lost those, which is a shame. That's a good point. Maybe maybe I'll try to do a backup of all my YouTube shows. James says, did you see my Super Chat yesterday regarding the boondocks? I sent another Super Chat about Godzilla. Yes, I did see the boondocks. I copied it over. There it is. And I mentioned it during the show. You also sent a Super Chat about Godzilla. I will watch it. I will review it. I promise. Don't worry. All taken account of. James also says, do you think the USA will actually have a civil war? Also, I sent Super Chat regarding to Chicago on Sunday. Did you see it? Congrats on 36Ks. Yeah, I did see. I saw all the Super Chats. I'm sure I answered that Super Chat on the show. I can't remember it now, but I did answer it. I don't think the US will have a civil war anytime soon. I can't say that forever. But for now, I don't think there's going to be, not in 2024, probably not by 2030, but hard to tell if Trump's become president. It's just hard to tell where we go in the future years, but I don't think it'll be this year. I don't think it's going to be anytime soon. Michael says, do you think Iron Man was right that it will be students demanding their professors teach Objectivism? Or will Objectivism win out by circumventing academia altogether? I think the circumventing will have to be first, and then it'll also be demanded on campuses. So I think it's a combination of both. You will start with circumventing academia, and then it will be Objectivism. Then it will be students demanding it. Alex, you're on. Are you on TikTok? If you're not, you should be, especially in UAE, I created a short you have. Yeah, we're looking at a way to automatize, uploading all of those to TikTok. I do have a channel on TikTok. I need to get these one minute videos on there. We're looking, I think there is a way within the AI app to just every one that we produce to send it to TikTok. And I think the Instagram as well. So I'm hope I have channels on both. So I'm hoping that happens. Cook, drug prices are so high. Thanks, largely to Medicaid drug rebate program, the Affordable Care Act and the FDA. Yes, no question. Medicaid and Medicare and all of that, it's going to get worse because there are more programs for Medicare to try to lower prices and as some drugs are lowered, other prices are going to go up. Drug companies have to make up for the losses somewhere in order to fund their R&D and their future projects. Optimistic pessimists, what are your favorite books beside and when in your bookshelf behind you? Well, I mean, it depends what you mean by favorite books. I might find Mises books in economics. I have a lot of history books that I love. I don't know that other Mises, a lot of Austrian economists, I don't know they have one favorite author, but I have a lot of history books and economics books that I love. In terms of fiction, my favorites are Victor Hugo. Let me see, Robbler is 93. Man Who Laughs. Those are my favorites. Ayan Milka says, got to change my opinion. F Trump, but F Biden too for being such a wussy when it comes to Iran and the rest of the Axis of Evil, figures which doctors are the crazy woke left variety. P.S. Gaza must be destroyed. Ayan Milka is nothing but consistent. Yeah, F them both. I'm not a fan of either one of them, but everybody expects me to be a fan of Trump. And I think Trump, a second presidency by Trump could be a lot more disastrous than a second by Biden and could be a lot more disastrous than the first presidency by Trump. So I will be anti-Trump. I will also be anti-Biden, but I will be anti-Trump. And Trump did not show any reason to believe that he would be less a wussy when it comes to Iran. All right. And particularly with the new right in America being anti-interventionist, it's hard to believe that Trump would do much with regard to Iran. All right, guys. Thank you. Thank to all the superchatters. I really appreciate it. I will try to make my, he killed Soleimani. Who cares? I mean, so he killed one guy. That doesn't count for anything. There are five Soleimani's for everyone you kill that are bored again. You want to do something, do something. Otherwise, a pinprick like that isn't significant. Then when the Iranians bombed and injured a bunch of Americans, he did nothing. In retaliation for Soleimani, he did nothing. So it's meaningless. Just like it would be meaningless if the Israelis assassinated these two Hamas leaders independent of actually going to war with Hamas. So all right, guys, I will see you all, no, tonight, 6pm. I think it'll be an interesting show. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. I need to see if I have time to prepare for it. One way or the other to be interesting show, but you know, you might, yeah. Anyway, I'll see you all tonight, 6pm east coast time. That's a new time. Remember not 7pm, 6pm east coast time. Bye everybody. Hope you have a great new year. Happy new year, everybody.