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 February 1st, beginning of February. Time continues to fly. Last year flew by. It looks like this year is going to be the same. All right. I know you guys want to do a poll and favorite founding father, but it takes work and I'm not sure what the point is. I am torn between, if I had a pick, I'd be torn between Thomas Jefferson. You gotta love Jefferson. He wrote the Declaration of Independence, the greatest political document in all of human history. And James Madison, who I think is the mind behind the Constitution. So those two are my favorites. But all right, let us see. Elon Musk. So in 2018, Elon Musk got a pee package from the board of directors of Tesla. And it was, I don't think it was negotiated. That is one of the issues. I think it was what Elon Musk asked for and what they gave him. Anyway, the pee package was composed of a variety of stepped options. That is, the better Tesla stock did, the more money Elon Musk would make. And the package in total, if he achieved all the goals, all the stretch goals, all the ultimate goals, the max he could make was the ridiculous, astounding figure of $56 billion. It used to be that $56 million was a lot of money, not anymore. $56 billion would be his competition. If everyone, if the stock price achieved what it needed to achieve all those options to go into the money and make him a lot of money. Anyway, it turned out that's exactly what happened. That indeed, Elon Musk got $56 billion in compensation, which is just extraordinary. I've never heard of a pee package any way close to this, nothing even similar. Anyway, a judge yesterday threw that out, basically said that the compensation package was voided, was illegitimate, and it claimed that Tesla's shareholders were basically being exploited by this pay package, and he not only voided it and it's gone, Elon Musk is going to have to return to Tesla, the company he founded, but that is owned by many, many people because it's a public company, it's traded on the stock market. He's going to have to return to the company $56 billion. Now the judge was a Delaware judge. Now, I know most people don't know this, but most corporations in the United States, certainly most large corporations, but even small corporations, I have some corporations that are registered in Delaware. Delaware is where people register their corporations and most big businesses are registered in Delaware. Delaware, the state itself, has very low taxes on pretty much everybody. It makes most of its money on the various fees associated with registering your corporation in Delaware. And the reason Delaware attracts so many businesses is because Delaware has built up a reputation over, I don't know, 50 to 100 years, I would say, being a pro management, but also pro often pro shareholder, but primarily pro management and pro board of directors, jurisdiction, that is you register your company in Delaware, therefore all lawsuits go through Delaware and judges in Delaware tend to be pro management and pro board of directors. And this has been many, many, many famous cases, corporate governance cases over the last, that I'm familiar with certainly since the 1970s, maybe even really going back to the 60s, in which the court ruled in favor of managers of board of directors often to the detriment of shareholders. And it's got that reputation, it's had that reputation for a very long time, and it's why managers and board of directors love incorporating in Delaware. Delaware has pretty strong liability protections for board of directors. It's hard to sue them. I actually did my dissertation. I did my dissertation on board of director liability. And I can't remember Delaware, I can't remember specifically Delaware, but I'm pretty sure Delaware has strong protections for, so it's hard to sue directors. Anyway, this is why so many American companies are incorporated in Delaware. Delaware has always been a business friendly, CEO friendly, board of directors friendly place. And that's why I think a lot of people are shocked by the verdict. On the other hand, this pay package is shocking. But, and one of the things that judge cited was the fact that it doesn't look like the board negotiated with Musk. I mean, one of the things the courts look at is to what extent is the board executing in their fiduciary duty. And the fiduciary duty is not just to accept the pay package that the CEO submits, but to actually negotiate and get often compensation consultants involved and so on. And it doesn't look like the board did any of that. They basically rubber stamped what Musk gave them. The pay package did go to shareholder for a shareholder vote. 70% of shareholders voted for it. Minority shareholders that lost the vote sued and asked the court to protect their minority rights. I don't know what the right decision here is. It was probably, given that 70% of shareholders voted for it, to leave it. The only victims here, if you will, are shareholders and they voted for it.  But this judge did not think so. Again, a judge in a jurisdiction, a judge that is well known as generally favoring management and favoring boards that ruled against them primarily because he did not believe that the board of directors fulfilled their fiduciary responsibility in negotiating a deal with Elon Musk. Share prices gone down by 3% after our trading when this happened. Tesla shares have already been sliding recently. They've already been going down recently. In response to all of this, Elon Musk has said that he will move the state of incorporation for Tesla from Delaware. This has nothing to do with factories or personnel or offices. Everybody incorporates in Delaware has kind of hired a firm, a legal firm in Delaware, to represent them in Delaware to get the mail. But really, nobody actually does any business in Delaware. So this will not affect any business that Tesla does, but it will affect where lawsuits are filed and under what jurisdiction the board and the CEO are under, and he wants to move it to Texas, with the idea that Texas now has an even more pro board, pro management friendly legal environment. Whether that's true or not, I don't know. I haven't seen the empirics on it. Again, this is the kind of stuff I actually did as an academic is look at these kind of things, but that was a long, long time ago. And so you might incorporate in Texas. It appears that he's going to hold a special shareholder meeting to vote on this and to reincorporate Tesla in Texas. How did I must decide to consider this reincorporation in Texas? The way you wanted to decide who the best, I'm giving you a hard time, but who the best funny father was, he did a poll. He did a Twitter poll. He basically went out and did a poll saying should Tesla reincorporate in Tesla and make it its home? And 80% of the people on Twitter thought it was a good idea. I'm sure they all have deep knowledge and understanding of corporate governance and corporate law. And I'm sure they did it because they were convinced it was in the best interest of Tesla and not because it's Texas. Anyway, we will see. I'm pretty sure once it comes to shareholder vote, they will move it to Texas. And of course, what will happen once that happens is Musk will renegotiate a compensation deal that I'll give him back the 56 billion that the judge wiped out and so he'll get it back. So no worries.  So he gave a very kind of utilitarian explanation for his salary. It's almost like an effective altruism explanation. If I make a lot of money, then I will give it a I will invest it in ways that all of humanity will benefit from by going to Mars. So that was kind of entertaining. All right. That is in the headlines everywhere and certainly all over Twitter. So yesterday, the CEOs of the CEOs of, let's see, Discord, Snap, TikTok, X, i.e. Twitter and Metta, who all seated in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss or to be accused of, to be lectured to on big tech and online child sexual exploitation.  And according to senators, mainly Republicans, the responsibility for this exploitation and for this crisis, I didn't know there was a crisis, but they get there is. I mean, if the Senate says there's a crisis, they must be. All the CEOs of social media and generally social media is is responsible for this. I mean, you, I guess, if you follow the Iran book show for a while, you know that there's nothing that infuriates me more than seeing incredibly productive, creative, innovative entrepreneurs and managers and people who actually work for a living, being brought in front of Congress and lectured to by the parasites, the looters in the Senate. This is particularly offensive when those looters are Republicans and claim to stand for free enterprise and, you know, free markets and capitalism. And they come across as micromanaging central planning socialists. Yesterday was no exception. The Republican senators and most eclipse I've seen it for Republicans, because I think they were the ones who got most passionate, you know, were pathetic, ludicrous.  You might not like social media. Most of these social media platforms. I don't even know what they do. And I don't particularly like them. And I don't know how to use them and so on. But they built something. They created something. They built and created something of value to people. And we know that because the review of preference, people use these websites, use these services. A passionate, many people are passionate about them. They add value to some of them that value is reflected in their stock price. Many people's perception of these different social media sites has more to do with their political stand than they have to do with the actual value of these things. And the reality is that most of these social media platforms are not used primarily for politics. Politics is just the entertainment. But the accusation is that these are used for child sexual exploitation. And the blame for any exploitation and suicide of teenagers has to blame with the technology with the platform itself. God forbid we should blame the exploiters or even more, God forbid, we should blame the parents. No, it's the entrepreneurs. It's the value creators. It's the people who create and build and make these technologies, who advance new technologies and try to make them safe. I don't think anybody on this panel, even CEOs of companies that I do not like, I don't think any of them built their companies or run their companies because they relish the idea the children are going to be exploited on them or that they are going to do harm to children. The harm that social media does to children is questionable, put it that way. There's a lot of dispute within the scientific community about how much harm and whether there is any harm created by social media. I have to say that when I was growing up, we were told constantly, even though I didn't have TV until I was about nine years old. And after that, it was only black and white and small and only programming in the evening. I was still told that TV was destroying my mind. Certainly in the 80s and 90s, as a young adult, I was told constantly that too much television was destructive when I was raising my own kids. I remember how much that was said. My mother actually told me that I read too much. I was doing too much reading. Parents constantly complain about whatever technology exists at the time. Then it was too much internet. Then it was too much video games. Now, it's too much social media. Now, there's no question there is such a thing as too much of any of those things. But the panic and hysteria and the blame always go in one direction. And indeed, at the end of the day, the people responsible for how their kids spend their time are not social media entrepreneurs. They're not CEOs of companies. The people responsible for how their kids spend their time and what they do online and who they interact with online are parents. I also should state that there are a lot of technologies now to help parents filter and control what their kids do. But let's not blame the parents. The parents are the victims. The real enemy is social media. The real enemy, I mean, at the top of the pyramid of all enemies, really of all time is Mark Zuckerberg. Everybody loves to hate Mark Zuckerberg. Everybody. He's being accused of being a monopolist. He is obviously needs to apologize to parents whose children have committed suicide because it is Facebook that is driving them towards that suicide. It is he who is responsible for the decline in our culture. He is, of course, a lefty. So therefore, he is evil because he is left wing.  Disgusting. The behavior of Josh Hawley yesterday, the video is viral.  Ted Cruz sitting smugly next to him. Disgusting, offensive. Another senator, who is the other senator went after the TikTok guy and it was funny because it was like he was he was channeling the old 1950s things and it was like the CEO of the CEO of of of TikTok is in Singapore, lives in Singapore, is a Singapore native. And the questioning went, are you, have you ever been, are you, have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? And the guy saying, no, or the Chinese Communist Party guy says, no, I live in Singapore. You know, do you do this and this no, you know, I actually just live in Singapore. I'm not Chinese. I'm not a Chinese. You know, I might be technically Chinese, but I'm not. It was embarrassing. And you think they've done the research and they know this.  So the reality is that our political culture is just horrific. And it's only getting worse. I mean, it's been horrific for a long time. I mean, how it's used was brought in front of Congress and treated like this after World War II. But how it's used spoke back. CEOs today stay silent. They don't fight back. You get you get the bankers coming in during the financial crisis and land blasted. You get the auto company CEO brought in during the financial crisis and land blasted. And I think if I remember, they had a drive in because, you know, there were reports that they were going to fly in on corporate private jets and everybody freaked out because they were going to fly in and spend all their money. So they drove in as if the CEO's time is not valuable. And they said nothing. Of course, they ultimately got a bailout. So a bailout that was not particularly favorable to them or shareholders, but primarily to the union. And over and over again, you know, Bill Gates, Microsoft executives were brought in front of Congress in the 1990s over and over and over again. And to see again, these senators who are not in my view that smart. Oh, it was Tom Cotton.   Ted Cruz, I don't know how smart he is. I don't know how smart Tom Cotton is. Josh Hawley, just based on his credentials, is smart, but his mind has been polluted by Catholic fundamentalism. Anyway, another pathetic display by our senators, senators who should have more urgent business, for example, you know, maybe solving the immigration problem, maybe voting about aid, one way or the other vote against the four vote for against aid for Ukraine, aid for Israel, aid for Taiwan, maybe cutting spending, maybe reforming out. I mean, there are a million things I could list of things that our senators should be worried about other than uh, bringing in front of us, um, the CEOs of social media companies and landblasting them. Basically, this is virtue signaling on steroids. They don't care. I mean, if you think for one Iota, Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz or Tom Cotton or any of the Democrats on that panel, okay, one Iota, they don't. This is all about going after these, these generally leftist with the exception of Linda, uh, Jacuino, who's the CEO of X who might not be a lefty. Everybody is a lefty and just going after them and doing a lot of virtue signaling. It's why they're tougher on these executives than the Democrats because it's all about politics. It has nothing to do with the safety of Americans. And it certainly has nothing to do with protecting the individual rights of Americans. Facebook does not violate your rights. Twitter, even TikTok does not violate your rights unless you have not approved their use of information and they are stealing information and giving it to China. And if that is the case, bring a lawsuit against them. Pretty straightforward, pretty simple. This isn't, this isn't the medium. This isn't the place to try them for abusing their privacy laws. Ukraine, while the United States won't do anything, can do anything, is too impotent to do anything to support Ukraine. The European Union has just approved aid for Ukraine, $54 billion. This is, this is in spite of coming into the meeting in, I'm not sure where the meeting is in, but coming into this meeting in Europe with fear that Orban would again veto this proposal, and Orban turned around and supported it in the end. He negotiated, he cut some deals, not clear what the deal is. It's not clear what Hungary is going to get in exchange. But he basically voted for this. This bill has gone through. There is now a money to support Ukraine in terms of buying military equipment and defending itself against Russian aggression. So while the United States did this and, you know, and plays politics, and, and Trump basically shows off his commanding control, absolute commanding control over the political party that is the Republican Party, in Europe they actually get some stuff done. In this case, even Viktor Orban, surprise Viktor Orban doesn't get his marching orders from Trump or Putin, for that sake. Anyway, he voted for it and it's going through. You know, Ukraine will get some relief. Of course, the war is not going well for Ukraine. It's not going horribly, but it's not going well. It's basically at this point almost like trench warfare. It's very difficult to advance. The intelligence in the field is so good because of drones. Basically both sides have drones in the air 24-7. They can see anybody advancing anywhere and, and react. It's very difficult to advance under such conditions. The Russians are not advancing, at least not in any significant way. The Ukrainians are not advancing in any significant way. They're both stuck. They're killing each other like crazy. Yeah, it's become like almost like World War I. It is truly horrible. The, the advantage the Russians have right now that in such a passive war in which, you know, drones provide all this intelligence, having artillery and having the firepower artillery gives you is a huge advantage. Now, Ukraine had cut into that advantage with, with the purchase of American hemorrhage or the receipt of American hemorrhage. The problem is they don't have the ammunition of fire. So while the Ukrainians can max the Russians in terms of artillery, at least sophisticated artillery, they don't have enough shells. Russia ran out of shells as well, but Russia found a solution. Russia has a worthwhile ally, whereas the allies of Ukraine are kind of weak.  And what is happening is that the North Koreans are supplying thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of shells to the Russian army to execute. And the North Koreans can do that because again, they can deploy everything for that. They don't produce anything really of value other than weapon systems.  There's no challenge. There's no body to offend. There's nobody to upset.  A bloody, murderous dictator who can't wait for Donald Trump to get back into the White House and to have Donald Grovel before him. That is super exciting for him. Anyway, the battle is unbelievably tough battle. Ukraine is trying to build up its ability to build shells for artillery. And it's a wonderful, it says the Ukrainians just received the Himal compatible glide bombs today. I saw that. So they'll have a much longer range bombs. But again, the main issue is supply. So they haven't had as many now they have some but this is again the very end of what the United States can supply them without another package out of Congress. So somehow now twice, it looks like you, the you and NATO are going to overcome Orban, you know, objections and get stuff done in spite of Orban, which is great news because Orban is a very, very bad guy. All right, let's see. Oh, me lay, quick me lay update. So, you know, it's all mixed when it comes to me lay in the sense of what he can get through a bunch of the things that he wanted to pass some of the the the spending cuts. And actually some of the tax cuts, he is not being able to get through parliament. Parliament is resisting and have been taken off the table. Some of the privatization that he wanted to do Congress will not let it pass. You I think we talked about in the past, the fact that the courts have hung up, have held up the deregulation of the labor market, which is a very, very, very crucial part of his program. So he's struggling internally to get enough passed to get everything passed. The IMF, the International Monetary Fund has come to the conclusion though that me lay is doing enough to justify them providing another tranche of of the debt that has been promised to Argentina over time, but it's always conditioned on how the macroeconomic changes heading. They've approved a $4.7 billion disbursement to the government of Argentina. This is part of a $44 billion program that Argentina negotiated with the IMF way back. But there was a lot of uncertainty about whether they would get it or not. The previous government wouldn't have got it. But I think the economists at the IMF, while they're not pro-free markets, do recognize that Argentina is doing stuff to balance their budget and actually have a surplus. It does look like this year they will have a primary surplus of 2% of gross domestic product in their budget, which is pretty amazing. On top of that, the IMF wants Argentina to boost the net fund, reserves the $10 billion a year. By year end, I think they seem to think that that is possible for Argentina to do that. So the IMF seems confident that Argentina is doing the right thing. Now, the IMF are pretty conventional when it comes to economics, so I don't want us to rely too much on them. But let's hope Millay is really the one in charge. He did meet with the IMF's number two. Well, no, he met with the IMF people at the World Economic Forum when he was there. I mean, we saw his amazing speech. But what was really going on was going on in the background that was actually going on in the background with the meetings. And Millay was meeting the IMF Managing Director and others. And IMF seems happy with Millay. So far, they seem happy with him. So I think that's good for Argentina because for now, in the short run, they need IMF. Hopefully, in the long run, they'll never need IMF again, and they will be able to reform their economy in ways that never put them in a position to rely on IMF in any way ever again. All right, let's see. Yeah, finally, on the Good News front, we have Vertex Pharmaceuticals, you know, one of those evil pharmaceutical companies that everybody loves to hate. Most people in the left and the right love to hate. The most evil industry, according to Candace Owen. Vertex Pharmaceuticals just announced that they have developed a medicine that can address moderate to severe acute pain. This is real pain. Pain that an Advil or Tylenol or will not help you. Or an Aspen will not help you with. The kind of pain that is typically you get opioids for because they can reduce it. Anyway, they now have immune medicine that can address these pain by a completely new original path. It's a medicine that blocks, right, an experimental drug that blocks the pain signals before they can get to the brain. It works only on the peripheral nerves, those outside the brain and the spinal cord. So it's completely unlike opioids. So it's not affecting the brain itself. This drug has the potential basically to replace opioids. And it is not addictive, right, because it doesn't affect the brain. This is super exciting. They've just completed two end of my studies. The first in 1100 people that had some bad disease. And another thousand people who had bunion surgery. The two procedures are commonly used in studies of people with acute pain because they generate acute pain. And it looks like they worked. That is, you know, patients rated their pain significantly lower after using these drugs, as compared, I guess, to a sample of patients that did not use the drug. So this is great. Great news. Again, more advancements in medicine to look forward to. And I expect you'll see a lot of other medicines like this. And I would argue that a lot of the opioid crisis, a lot of the reliance in medicine today on opioids as the main drug against pain, against pain is the fact that the FDA has made it so difficult, so expensive to develop new drugs to deal with pain. And that has reduced the incentives to do so. And as a consequence, the consequence is this, the consequence is the use of opioids and the fact that for so many years, so many people have gotten addicted to those opioids for no reason. Now it looks like we'll have an alternative. And that is super exciting, just on the same kind of theme of breakthroughs in medicine. This is consistent with other stories I've been talking about. CRISPR now has been used to treat in a very dangerous inflammatory condition. And this is the thing that struck me in terms of the success rate. Nine out of 10 people who received this CRISPR treatment, CRISPR is it goes in, it's a molecule that goes in, basically changes your DNA. It either replaces a gene or clips out a gene that is causing this disease. Anyway, nine out of 10 people who got the CRISPR based treatment for potentially life-threatening inflammatory condition have been cured. That's stunning. A nine out of 10 cure rate is stunning. It's stunning in medicine. So I mean, again, any one of these diseases is not going to affect you. It's unlikely to affect you. These are relatively rare diseases. However, the ability to use CRISPR on more and more and more of these genetic diseases ultimately will affect all of our lives, ultimately will lead to treatments that will cure diseases that we will be infected with and treatments that will ultimately dramatically extend both the duration and the quality of human life. So this is super, super exciting. All right. That's all I had for today. Let's jump into the super chat questions. We're a little behind on those. So if you'd like to ask a question, please jump in with one. $20 above get priority. Of course, this is the way we fund the show, at least from most live people. You can also support the show on a monthly basis by through Patreon or youronbookshow.com slash membership, which is PayPal. All right. Let's jump in with Clark. All right, Clark Young. All right. Do you think many bad evil people can't escape their hate? They don't know how. Yeah. I think certainly some of them don't know how, but some of them are just getting help, and they never give themselves the opportunity to learn how. And I think a lot of them don't want to escape it. They've accepted it. They want to live with it. They relish it. There's a certain sense, not a deep sense, but a certain sense they enjoy it. And you see that. I mean, fortunately, I think we're living in a culture of fear and anger, and you know, not necessarily bad or evil people, but it's, and people don't want to treat it because they relish the fact that they're angry. And I think that's true of bad and even people. They at some point relish it. So many of them don't want to change, and the ones who do want to change might not know how to, but they also avoid seeking out the help. And by avoiding seeking out the help, it means it's their responsibility that they're not getting the help. It's their responsibility that they're not indeed changing. Liam says, why can't you contact Lex to try and get on his show to discuss Israel with debate, Darth Finkelstein? Lex clearly really likes and respects you. Were you able to speak with him privately after you're talking to Austin? No, I mean, I didn't even see him there. He kind of snuck in and snuck out. I don't think he wanted to draw attention. He didn't want to draw my attention. You know, I've emailed Lex. I sent him an email about the debate. I haven't heard anything from him. I have no way to reach Lex unless he responds to my connection. So I like Lex. He's great, but he's busy. And I'm small fish in a very, very large lake that he engages in. Maybe he'll still reach out to me. Maybe he will still do a show. Maybe not. I'm not sitting here waiting. And I don't expect it, unfortunately. And he came to my talk. He saw what I have to say. And he decided, for now, at least, at least for this round, that he's not interested in having me on it. There's nothing more I can do about that. And again, if he's not going to respond to my email, there's nothing really I can do more than that. Let's see. We got some stickers. We got Shelly for 20. Thank you, Shelly. We got Mary Aileen for $4.99. We got Adi F for $2. And we got Stephen Harper for $5. Yeah, I mean, yeah. What is it? What should we do? A $2.99 thing? A $1.99 thing? A $5.99 thing? You can just do a stick up, support the show and help us get closer to the goal, which would be fantastic. Michael, when are you doing the rest of the song reviews? I've got two movie reviews, like 20 song reviews. I don't know exactly when I'll start next week. On Saturday, we've got an AMA. So I won't do them during the AMA. On tomorrow, there's only today and tomorrow, there's only a news roundup. I don't do these on the news roundup. So my guess is I'll try to do some Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday next week, or whenever I happen to have shows next week. But that's when I'll start chipping away at these during that period. Mary Aileen, the idea that politicians should do something is the root of many evils. Social media is none of their business. I agree. I mean, almost everything they deal with is none of their business. Almost anything, everything they deal with, is none of their business. So it just drives me nuts when I see it, because it's in your face when they bring them in front of Congress. But really, there's so many things they should do basically getting out of our business. They should unwind their involvement in our business. And it seems that all they do, left and right, is involve themselves more in our business. The country's not heading in the right direction. It doesn't matter who wins the presidency. We're in decline as a nation, as a military power, as a political power, and as a free country. We're in decline. All right, friend Harper did 999. Thank you, friend. Yes, if we do a few 999s, 13 of them, 115 people watching, we will, 10% of you just do 999. We get to our target. That's pretty cool. All right, Christian, you said some days ago the telepathy is amazing. I thought so as well, first, but I heard today all the monkeys died. So it is still not too dangerous for human being to get that implant. I am suspicious about the idea that all the monkeys died. I mean, I'll have to go and research it. But the reality is, I mean, the two things that are reality, the FDA approved this. I'm not a big fan of the FDA. But if really it was that dangerous, I don't think the FDA would have approved it. But with no FDA, this guy volunteered to do it, right? This was a volunteer. They didn't just implant it in some brand of person. They must have told him about the risks. He must have looked at what was going on. And he chose to have this implanted. So I'm assuming because he volunteered, and I'm assuming because the FDA approved it, that they must, they have given some reason, some reason why they think this is safe. So we will see. Spymann 3000, why didn't you completely back Nikki Haley at the outset? She wasn't still as the only candidate. I don't see how being soft on DeSantis when he is as unacceptable as he is makes sense. I was fully supportive of Nikki Haley from in 2016. I've been supportive of Nikki Haley since 2016. I thought Nikki Haley was the best candidate that the Republicans could put out there since the 2016 election. I wanted her to run in 2016. And she didn't, unfortunately. In this election, I backed her completely. The only thing I really said about DeSantis was that I find it absurd that the Republican Party, if they think those thoughts don't elect him rather than Trump. I mean, I didn't want him elected. I don't want him to be president. I've always preferred Nikki Haley over DeSantis from the beginning, right? And supported her as such, not that my support makes any difference. The only thing is in a choice between DeSantis and Trump, the reality that the Republican Party chooses Trump tells you that the Republican Party is basically now become this cult that worships an individual. And it's not about the ideas. It's not about getting stuff done. DeSantis was much more effective about getting stuff done than Trump was, even though he didn't like what he got done in many cases. So it's, you know, it is, no, but I've always supported Nikki Haley above DeSantis. Always. You'll be shocked. But even, you know, last time I saw Lenny Pekov, I told him why I thought Nikki Haley should be the nominee and, you know, we discussed that. So yeah, I mean, I'm all in on Nikki. I still think she should be. Again, I have some caveats, but I have caveats about everybody. But given who's out there, I would take her in a heartbeat over everybody else. All right, string about 100 bucks. Hello, Iran. Please do a review of Loris Almatidema's painting The Discourse. Wow. We have somebody who's put in a review of a painting. Didn't even ask how much money to put in. We've never done a review of a painting, I don't think, at a request of anybody, but we can slowly do that. I'm a huge Almatidema fan. So this is great. I think I know which one is The Discourse, but I will look it up and absolutely for 100 bucks, I will do that. So thank you, Stringer Bell. Again, there's a line in terms of my reviews. I've got a lot of songs and two movies still to get through. But yes, I will do this. So thank you, Stringer. Thank you for the support. Really, really appreciate it. Thanks all the support over the months. And this is great. Thanks for orienting us towards reviewing paintings. That's going to be fun. Richard, why does American culture obsess over the drama and conflict of politics rather than governance that affects their lives? Because I think they view it as sport. I think in America in particular, maybe because it's a two-party system, so it's clear and you belong to one tribe.  Tribal alliances, tribal relationships. And it's suspenseful and it's exciting and election-like. I mean, we treat it as a sport. We have semifinals and quarterfinals and right now it's semifinals of the Republican Party. And then that's a semi-fight. Then you have two finalists and they go at it. And we love competition. We love sport. We love stuff like that, though. Now Republicans turns out don't like football. I talked about that last night. They don't like football.  That's what they claim. I think that's... I don't know why they like the drama. America used to not care about politics. The bigger government becomes, in other words, the more intrusive government becomes, the more people care about it because the more it affects their lives. And then the more it becomes theatrical. And now it's just theater. Now it's just theater. I mean, what's going on with the border and the bill in Congress? It's just theater. It has nothing to do with principles, ideas, solutions, zero, zilch, nada. It's just about the tribalism and the theater of it. All right, guys, we're just five dollars away from meeting our goal. We want to start February off by meeting our goal. So five bucks away. Somebody can do $4.99 and get us there. Andrew asked, what do you infer about Trump from John Bolton's remark that he is susceptible to deciding policy based on whoever is the last person to talk to him? I mean, I said that the other day in analyzing Trump. I said he has no ideas. There is no content. And therefore he is completely manipulative, can be manipulated easily by the last person to talk to him. So Bolton talks to him. He has a particular opinion. Then he gets on a phone call with Erdogan, the president of Turkey and the president of Turkey says something that contradicts Bolton and Trump says, yeah, all right. Yeah, I'm with Erdogan. I love Erdogan. Erdogan is America first, mega fantastic. Let's go with Erdogan. And even if that means selling out, you can't think. You've got a human being. And this is part of why politics has become like a sport is we have people running for president who have been president, who cannot think. They can't contemplate an abstract thought. They're completely and utterly manipulable. They are completely utter pragmatists. Do you think Biden can think? I mean, the guys, you know, can barely speak, never mind think. We've got at the head of both political parties now, people who cannot form a thought. And Trump in particular never has been able to.  That's it. And if you throw something interesting at him, oh, oh, that's interesting. I'm, yeah, I think I'm for that. And then somebody else steps in and said, oh, but what about this? Oh, I'm for that too. I really like that. I mean, I know that kind of person and he's, he can't. Again, you have to read the missing link, Ein Rans essay, the missing link, and you'll see Trump all over the missing link. He is, it's a, you know, the conceptual faculty is a great achievement. And she when many of our politicians have not achieved certainly, and Trump is certainly one of the people who have not achieved it. So that, that it's to me. I think, I think John Bolton's criticism of Trump is, is very, very interesting. It's, it's, it's, it's strike, you know, it sounds completely true. Trump is like a modern Plato. No, Plato is like a gazillion times smarter, more interesting, more principled.  He's a complete pragmatist. And in that sense intellectually, he's a nothing. No, I'm not caricaturing him. He is, he is a, he is everything I've said he is. He is an empty vessel. And I said this a few days ago before Bolton said it, he is, he believes in literally nothing, except what will give him the appearance of being liked. He is a absolute psychologically and in every respect, a narcissist. He is the kind of mentality that should never be present of the United States and have access to a button that could destroy the entire globe. And I think John Bolton was skeptical about Trump before, but then when he hung out with him for as much time as he did, and with as much knowledge as John Bolton has in foreign policy, he knows.  And Scott has the same kind of perceptual level mentality. I mean, it's so concrete bound.  So his response is he didn't need to move the embassy to Jerusalem. That was a thought. A thought implanted in him by somebody, not an original thought to him and not he didn't. And that's the concrete that that's the argument against. God, concrete bound mentality. Scott, you should read the missing link. I think it describes you. All right. I find it astounding. I really find it astounding. It's not that I'm picking a Scott. It's because Scott represents a lot of people, a lot of people. And it's astounding that this is the level that they are at. Right? Yeah. Nobody said, nobody said they don't decide stuff. They don't do stuff. It's a question of what the process they go through in order to do it. A pragmatic process of listening and being manipulated by the people around them. Sometimes the people around them manipulate them in a good direction. Sometimes they're manipulated in a bad direction, but they have no content of their own. All right. How can you say Trump is dumb? He is a brute and he's no intellect, but you can't get to where he is in the world without, with, by having a low IQ. I do not think he has a high IQ. I do not. I don't know. You know, I don't, I don't know my IQ. I certainly don't know Trump's IQ. I do not think he has a high IQ. And certainly not his mental capability right now. I don't think you'd be happy if he did an IQ test. I don't think where he's gotten in life necessitated high IQ and necessitated the, what they call emotional intelligence. It necessitated the ability to manipulate people and to get a sense from them what they wanted and, and, and, and basically pleasing them in those kind of ways. It's a, it's a, it's a manipulative kind of attitude, which I don't think requires a high IQ. I don't think so. Now maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he does have a high IQ, but he doesn't strike me as somebody who has. And I, and ever, I've never thought highly, I've always thought pretty lowly of Trump. Never impressed me in anything he did. Have you tried Joe Rogan lately? No, no. The worst thing you do is for me to bug him. You guys should try Joe Rogan.  He'll listen to you. He won't listen to me. Spiderman 3000. I guess I was seeing a soft equivalence being drawn. You were less adamant in your support of her than opposing Trump. And I don't think DS is meaningfully different, borrowing and auxiliary party implications. No, I, I think DS is significantly different in many respects might be worse than Trump because he, because I think, I think, I think he's smart. I mean, that's a big difference. I think the Santas is smart. I think the Santas is effective, efficacious. I think also the Santas is, has ideas. I think he thinks himself. It all makes him dangerous, but I think he's completely different than Trump. My focus is anti-Trump. Yeah, my focus is not Trump. That is my focus. And I've always said of all the candidates I support, Nikki Haley, but my focus is anti-Trump because I don't want it just to be in the primary. I want Trump to lose in every thing that he can lose. You know, I think he's a bad human being. He's a bad human being. He's a brute. He's a horrible human being. And I want him to lose. I think that is what justice demands. The world is not just, unfortunately, so he might ultimately win. Rafael, I'm an object, I'm an object of this world. In an object of this world. God, I can't read. In an object of this world, let's say I get someone pregnant, but I don't want to have the child. I'm willing to cover the abortion cost. If she declines, am I obligated to support the child? I think so. I mean, I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but I think so. You know, if you're really, well, maybe not, if you're really willing to cover the cost of the abortion and you encourage that, and then no, I don't think you are. I don't think you are. I think if she chooses to have the child and you do not want to have the child, I think you can walk away. You're not obligated. And you should, you know, that should be part of the exchange, right? It's her choice. It's not your choice. And whether to have an abortion or not, you can't force her. But if she chooses to keep the child, that's her choice, not yours. And you are not obligated. You're not obligated. So, change my mind there in the middle. But no, I don't think you're responsible. Morally or legally. I mean, morally or legally. The quality is that I don't think men should be burdened with the idea that I have sex with a woman. She might, by the way, deceive me about using contraception. Who knows? She gets pregnant, she won't have an abortion, and I'm stuck paying the bills forever. Or we just had one night stand and consensual and everything, and whatever happened, and she got pregnant, and now I'm stuck with it. You know, I don't buy it. Again, that's why I'm so poor abortion is so that you have it out. You don't have to have a child if you don't want one. And if she chooses and you don't want it, and you will need to pay for the abortion or all of that, then you should be able to walk away from it. All right. Thank you guys. I appreciate it. I appreciate the support. I appreciate that we made our target. I will see you all tomorrow. I think tomorrow is early. Tomorrow might be 11am East Coast time because I've got a dentist appointment at like one o'clock. So we'll do it early tomorrow. And then on Saturday, we've got the AMA that asked me anything with the panel, $25 supporters and above. Make sure you got the email if you didn't let Angelo and me know and we can update you with the Zoom link. I will see you all tomorrow. Bye, everybody. Have a great rest of your week.


Let's start. Hello everyone again. This is the session for open source education track and it's my pleasure to welcome here our speakers who will share the insights into how sessions are being selected for a conference and what are the common mistakes that people usually make when submitting the talks. So if you want to know some tips on how to increase the chance that your next session will be accepted you are at the right place. So before I will hand it over to Tomas in case you will have any questions during the session feel free to use the Q&A section but also I would like to encourage you to fill the polls you can see two polls so if you can fill them we will be more than happy and then I will be sharing the results. So now Tomas it's yours. Okay thank you Nera for a very nice introduction you said it very well so welcome all and thank you for joining us and sorry that you had to leave the coffee tasting so we really appreciate it it was an awesome session so I really hope that at the end of this presentation you'll know like how to write our titles and especially abstract for conferences so that your talks will be accepted. So my name is Tomas and I'm a speaker of many conferences such as Defcon for Red Hat Summit Ansible Fest and I also will review talks for Defcon CZ for past few years and today Slanka with me which I'm really excited that we are two were able to do this presentation so Lenny please tell us something about yourself. Thanks Tomas and hello everybody my name is Lenka Bocinsova and I'm more on the organizer side of the events I'm also Red Hatter where I organize many internal events and where I need to review many different talks and sometimes we need to reject them and so I hope that during this presentation we will give you some tips so we will not need to reject so many talks so let's see what we can do about it but before we start as Nera mentioned we have some questions for you because we were checking the attendees list and we could see some really experienced speakers on the list but we would like to see if we have also some people who never submitted talk for the conference or you know like you are planning to do so and the second question would be maybe curiosity for you like what percentage of talk do you think that get accepted for Defcon we will get back to this post during the presentation and now I will hand it over to Tomas to tell us some behind the scenes of the reviewing talks. Okay I'll do that so actually this session I actually submitted this session for this year's Defcon as like aftermath of reviewing many talks so to give you guys a little bit of insight how it's being done so as you know conferences are driven around deadlines there's a deadline for CFP there is deadline for announcing results and what will happen and there's even more deadlines internally for us reviewers or even organizers to prepare the venue or or have the first round of like reviews so that we know like what's like what and where and given these deadlines we need to go through like hundreds of sessions so for example if you are staring at your monitor for a few hours you are at your hundredth session like the fatigue is kicking in so it's getting like really tiring at some point to read so many abstracts and get reading yet another talk about guide ops or open shift so it's like it can be really stressful but thankfully we have a group of people who review each track so this is specifically for Defcon CZ I know that other conferences do it probably differently but we usually have a track captain who works with the organizer and the track committee which is a group of people and we review the track or the sessions for a track together and then we have a prioritized list of talks you'd like to see on the conference and I would say this is a very nice process where we discuss we talk together we usually see like groups of talks which are similar so we try to pick one or two but at the end of the day we always think about like what talks will be like best fit for the conference what talks will get most audience or like best most questions so this is like always on our mind thinking about like what would be the best talk for this track for this session so if you have like talk which is very specific or or only like targets small amount of people it might not be accepted because we think that it's like it wouldn't get many attendance so those are some insights we'll speak more as the talk continues and I'll hand it over to Leica yeah thank you so much and before we jump to the next slide just one question come to my mind you as a reviewer do somehow interact with people who are submitting talks for the conference and maybe the people in the audience can give us also some experience that you have with submitting the talk oh yeah so I actually really liked it on this year's devcom before the CFP started we did an event where we did a Q&A for people who would like to speak and there were a few people who joined and asked questions and had ideas for their sessions so that was really great and we were able to like tailor their ideas towards devcom so that it would be a good fit for the conference so I strongly encourage everyone to do this like when you have an idea for a talk before you submit it like reach out to the organizers and also usually like after the CFP is done people are curious if their talk will be accepted or not so they are like asking questions perfect thanks so much yeah so so now you know something about the reviewing process and I would say that it's it's similar when we are going to the conference and right like picking the talks that we want to attend right we have here the devcom schedule in front of us we have many titles many tracks and there is so many talks but the main difference from the reviewer perspective is that the reviewer will really need to go through many more submissions that actually ended up on the on the schedule and now I'm checking the poll of the results and we have people who think that most of the people think that 35 percent of talks get accepted for the devcom then there are seven votes for 45 percent get accepted and it's a little bit changing and then one vote for 55 and you are actually right because for this year devcom and I would say it might be also for a previous one it's only 35 percent talks that usually get accepted we receive this year around 400 submissions which is which only 140 talks get accepted but when we have in-person events so usually there is much more the numbers of submissions is doubled I would say even and so there is one simple thing that I guess like when you are thinking about the title or about the abstract then you're tall so there are these you can help the reviewers to do so and improve the process of writing really good title and the abstract because this is how you sell yourself not just to the reviewers but also to the attendees and this simple question can help you to lead through the submissions right so really mention don't forget about what is the talk about the most really important thing then really mention for whom you are going to talk right for for whom it can be beneficial and the third thing the outcome so what those people who will be attending your talk will learn from from you right so what you are promising them to learn so if you if you keep this into your in your mind when you are thinking about the submission I think it will really improve the process but we will give you many more tips but before we jump to it I'm looking if we have any questions in the Q&A section yeah I was checking it and we have none seems like we have very experienced crowd here okay yeah I can I can see that many people have also experienced already with submitting talks to the conferences which is really good but we have some people also who who've never never submitted talk for the conference so so we are great we are glad to see that and now we can move to the next slide so Tomás, I hand it over to you okay thank you so if you have any ideas or tips please share that with us in chat so we can discuss and at the end of the presentation we should have a short Q&A okay so let's talk about five common mistakes we saw in this year's Defconv CZ submissions and before I start talking about them or we actually you can see that the example talk here is about growing bananas and it was actually kind of a joke or like a placeholder I put in the slides but like I found it really funny so we stick to it but originally we wanted to do like a real talk we would actually do so let's grow some bananas and I guess the mistake number one is the length of the abstract and here we can see both extremes on the left side the abstract is just one sentence and as a reviewer to be honest I like to see these ones because they're like instant decline like there is nothing to review we have no idea what the talk is about so we can't judge it in any way so that's clear and that side it's the exact opposite is that when someone writes like a small novel about the talk and it takes a lot of time to read it process it and trying to figure out what the talk is about so I guess it's good because it means that the person who submitted really cares but at the same time it feels like overwhelming so if the talk is meant to be overwhelming as well I'm not sure if want to have overwhelming talks so it's really questionable so the advice here is please write the abstract with the length which is just right like not too short but also not too long but I think Lenka has an idea here about long abstracts as well yes sometimes sometimes it happened that people just put the link to the abstract and you know they they expect that we will read their blog post which is like pretty long as well so avoid doing this like replacing the abstract field with your blog post because imagine 400 submissions from the past so we don't have that much time to to go through this so yeah that's that's my advice here okay thank you Lenny okay next bucket here we are jumping about like quality of the submission and the first part is about passwords and acronyms so if you think that your abstract is not catchy enough so like you put some buzzwords in it and maybe even acronyms so that looks pro yeah it doesn't look pro it's like it actually has the exact opposite effect it just means that you are either lazy or we are not sure if the talk is like practical because here in Defconn we are looking for very practical talks we usually want sessions which are either about technology or some topic and then people can really have some outcome from the session and start using the technology or the project right away so if you have abstract full of buzzwords it probably means it's not very practical so we really don't like to see such talks here and for acronyms I mean it's fine to use them in your abstract but please explain them like if they are at least like not very common like if you think at least one person in the crowd wouldn't know them please explain them like what they stand for okay more speaking more about quality is about like unclear titles or even abstracts so the title is the most important thing of your talk as Lenka showed earlier when people are like browsing the schedule they only see the title and if the title is not catchy or like not clear they would just like skip over and go to next one so please take the extra time to think about the title so it's like catchy but very clear and like it's like few words about your session and when when people open your submission and start reading about the abstract like if you have grammar errors there or the structure is chaotic or unclear yeah it doesn't like sell very well your session especially for us for reviewers it just means that someone like wrote it very quickly and clicked send so they probably didn't think about it much like advice here is like you can use some tools to check the abstract like for grammar errors or for like improve the grammar overall and then maybe share it with your friends because that's what you end up doing anyway you just write it down and send it to somewhere you don't even know who is going to judge it review it but even though you're friends you know that they care about you so if you share your their session or title and abstract with them they can give you like very good advices so that it's more clear more understandable and Lenka would like I hope that Lenka would like to share some more tips next sure thing yeah so we are moving a little bit from the bananas we have the kitty everybody likes kitties right so and this is important point of when you are thinking about your submissions so really keep in mind what is the conference about and do some research when you are submitting the talk and what what different tracks people have or the conference have because sometimes it happens that we see the the abstract which is not really related to the conferences or we can see that people are putting it into the wrong track and what happened when you put it into the wrong track is that as Tomas mentioned at the beginning different people are assigned to the different tracks based on their knowledge and for example if you put it to the wrong track that can mean that this person doesn't have that knowledge and they will automatically somehow skip this talk or you know can be rejected because of this so try to keep this in your mind and when you are not sure so really contact the organizers and they are happy to help you and the the last common mistake that we have here is that really you compete with others we many times see the submissions on the same topic and we have like you know like 10 10 similar topics for for the same topic so so really keep in mind that you can group with some colleagues for example or friends right ask them hey i'm going to talk about this this topic please maybe you can join me or maybe they are already planning to submit the similar topics so you can group with them and the other thing is also to research the other conferences what people are talking about is there already some presentation on this topic so maybe you can put different point of view on that so really really focus on doing some research before the submitting and i think we are running out of the time but we would like to just summarize some of the talks and show it on one abstract that we can see so really the length as we mentioned is really important and try to try to be as short as possible but answering all the important questions then invite the colleagues to present with you right as here in the example there is robert and chain i am with tomash today presenting it's much easier for me to even present when i'm the new speaker and the the third thing match the abstract with the title uh that is really something that's uh it's important and tomash the the last three things okay some more outcomes uh so yeah as lenka said please make sure that you are submitting your session for the right track uh this happened for this year they've gone for plenty of talk that they were misplaced so we had to put them in the correct track but we might actually forgot some or did not understand the submission so before you click submit please read about the tracks so that you understand like what exactly is meant to be in them if you are not clear like you can always contact the organizers of the conference also as i said if you are using some ax acronyms and then none they are not very common please explain them and the most important thing as lenka said earlier but i'd like to repeat it so in your abstract please make sure to describe what your talk is about who is the target audience meaning like who is supposed to attend it and finally like what will that they get out of the talk meaning what will what will be their takeaway so when they finish uh with your talk like how will their life be better after seeing you speaking and that's it uh this is our session we are right on time i mean you couldn't even rehearse this so thank you so much for all the comments in the chat i wasn't even able to keep up reading them and we can answer some questions now thanks so we have three questions so far in the q and a section so let me mention the first one you mentioned that only 35 percentage of submitted tools get get accepted for def conf this year is this number common for other conferences or is it specific for def conf and what does this number depend on uh when do like to answer it or should i i can i can go uh so i would say um it's pretty common for the conferences to have this number uh like 35 this is specific for def conf we have it in internal events as well but this really depends on the structure of the event and how many uh numbers of slot people have uh on the schedule or organizers have so so it can really vary and also it depends on the um uh number of submissions i can see that during the virtual events there is some virtual fatigue so we can see like less uh submissions um but i would say the percentage is pretty stable so tomas do you have something to add um maybe just to reiterate that uh for popular topics they receive so many talks that we cannot accept all of them only a handful for a specific uh topic so for example open shift there are so many open shift talks being submitted for def conf and this is not open shift con this is def conf so we only accept a like a dozen or a few dozens so the rest needs to be declined uh that's another reason mm-hmm thank you both very much another question if we work on a very specific topic how can we make a talk that is accepted bearing in mind that the audience is likely to be small i guess i can take that one uh well you can make it more introductory so like if it's very specific and you know the audience will be small also the question is like is it worth for the small audience to like hear talking or would it be better to write a blog post or maybe write some documentation and share it with the folks but if you would like to speak about it maybe make it more introductory so that you can attach bigger crowd and maybe introduce the technique or the project to a bigger audience okay thank you another question are the quality of the presentation or present their skills taken taken into the consideration to choose between similar submissions well yeah i guess it's yeah plenty please start okay uh so i would say that um so usually for example for def conf we are really uh encourage the new speakers to to submit the talks for the conferences and we are taking it uh into the consideration during the during the reviewing process but it doesn't mean that that's the only thing that we are looking at right if uh if your submission your title and your abstract is really not selling as much so um you know your skill level uh is not something that will convince us but if we have for example a really experienced speaker there and last experienced speaker and we see that the submissions are really nicely written both of them so i would say that we can prioritize the the one uh that is with the like the new speaker but maybe tamash you can add something yeah i agree i would say something similar that we actually also try to do blind review for def conf that for the first week of reviewing we don't even see the names of the speakers so that we really go for the quality of the submission and not for yeah this is from this person we know uh she's very good so we are accepting her immediately thank you another question can you share your views on blind versus non-blind cfps and would you have different recommendations for submissions depending on whether the cfps is blind or not that's a good question right yeah i don't personally have an easy answer like i personally like blind cfps uh that we don't know who the speaker is so that we really go for the quality of the submission uh yeah i would say yeah most of the conferences we have the similar approaches so like we have a blind blind one first and then uh we go to the like check the speakers so um but there are no like preferences because i guess each of these options have some pros and cons right so because sometimes it can say that hey i know the speaker from that conference uh and he like from last year for example but and talking about the same topic so so we want to avoid this so the name can help but yeah i would say i don't have preferences uh unfortunately we're running out of the time but we have another four three uh questions so let me just put the last one and the others please just move to the work adventure platform where you can discuss and continue discussion so the last question are there any uh anti patterns that you find typical or frequent uh submitters well actually uh when we were doing the blind reviews for dev conf uh the first week i would always be able to recognize submission from dan walsh because he writes very short and straight to the point very clear speaking about containers so i immediately knew like yeah this is dan walsh but i wouldn't say it's anti pattern it's just like everyone has their own style of writing or like everyone is specific and if you see someone submitting every year for a few years you can already recognize the writing style or or the way the talk is submitted or or the topic okay i'm so sorry to interrupt you unfortunately the time is over so please uh move to the work adventure uh to continue the discussion and lenny thomas thank you very much for your presentation it was great thank you yeah thank you nori and thank you all for joining thank you so much see you in the work and yeah see you there