The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rocks. This is The Iran Brook Show. Alright everybody, welcome to Iran Brook Show on this Wednesday of the week already. Hope everybody's having a fantastic week and we're ready for another new roundup here at the Iran Brook Show. So yes, got a full list of issues to talk about reminding everybody. We fund these shows with, at least partially with the Super Chat. We have a target for the news roundup shows which is $250 so hopefully, hopefully value for value you guys can make that happen. Alright, so let's get started. So one of the challenges Republicans face in the world out there and in legislation and in getting their agenda passed is the fact that Americans, a majority of Americans does not agree with Republicans about abortion. The majority of Americans does not want to see abortion rights restricted and access to abortion dramatically restricted. And this is true across the entire country including in red states, it is a fact that since Dobs there hasn't been a single voter approved abortion restriction policy in any state. Every state where it's being brought up, it has been rejected, increased restrictions on abortion. That's true in Kentucky, in Montana, in Michigan, in Kansas, in Vermont, in California. And you know, several of those states are strongly Republican states and yet in spite of being strongly Republican states, when you give it, when you leave it up to their people to vote, they vote overwhelmingly to not to restrict abortion. Now this is going to happen in Ohio. Ohio, another solidly red state that Trump won in the last election by a pretty significant margin, used to be a state that could go either way, but now has become a solidly red state. In Ohio, it appeared that later this year there was going to be an attempt to, you know, significantly to amend the Constitution, right, to amend the Constitution, in order to make it, in order to restrict abortion significantly. But to do that, Ohio Republicans, oh so sorry, there was a proposal to amend the Constitution to secure abortion rights, to secure the ability of women to have an abortion in Ohio. Americans knew they would lose that. So instead of fighting that battle, they proposed something called issue number one, which was just voted on in Ohio, and that was to change the terms of the game, right? So up until now, in order to change the Ohio Constitution, all you needed was a 50% vote. That the pro-abortion side had more than 50% to be able to change the Ohio Constitution. So what they tried to do is make it so that the constitutional amendment in the future could only go into effect if it had a supermajority of 60%. Thinking or knowing that they could probably, they could probably get 41% of Ohioans to vote against abortion. They couldn't get 51, but they could probably get 41. And this was not hidden. This is not, oh, these are defenders of a real constitution. They want to make it hard to change, so they went for 60%. No, this is clearly about abortion. This is about changing the Constitution to make it more difficult for the pro-abortion side to actually get a change to the Ohio Constitution to allow abortion. And yesterday, they lost big time, a vote for 57 to 43, which is big in politics, particularly given that this is a Republican state, Republicans lost. And this opens it up to a fall ballot where the pro-abortion side will propose to have some kind of guarantee in the Ohio Constitution for abortion rights, therefore going around the legislature, around the courts in Ohio, and basically guaranteeing their right until the federal government or the federal courts do something to overturn that. So this is great news for those of us who believe in a right to abortion. This is just another example of how this is a losing issue for Republicans. And the more they make a big issue out of it, which they do all the time, the more they will lose. And it's the only issue where Republicans seem to have any kind of, call it, integrity in quotes, where they actually go to the mat over an issue. They'll fight tooth and nail. They'll lose. They'll be decimated. They'll lose the presidency. They'll lose the Senate. They'll lose all these things. They don't care. This is the issue they're willing to die on. No other issue do they have like that. But they seem to be dying on this issue. So good for Ohioans. Thumbs up to the Ohio people, as I've often said. A lot of Republican women vote pro-abortion. So just because a state is red, just because they might vote for Republican candidates in any other respect on the issue of abortion, many, many Republican women are pro and will not vote for an anti-abortion agenda. So another small victory in the fight for abortion rights in Ohio yesterday. By the way, according to polls, this issue of abortion is an issue that is across the board on a national level, hurting Republicans. This is an issue that a lot of people, a lot of U.S. voters are making this a litmus test, are choosing their candidates based on this. This is going to hurt Republicans. And again, the more they make a big deal out of it, as they seem to be doing even in the presidential election, the more they make a big deal out of it, the more votes they will lose. And poll after poll shows that Americans support, up to a point, they don't support abortion to the extent that I do, but they support abortion certainly in the first trimester and well into the second trimester. And they generally view like these really, really restrictive laws that many Republican states are passing as abhorrent and do not want to see that on a national level. All right, let's see, oh, X, X. Like I was going to write Twitter and then I realized Twitter, there are a lot of characters. I'm limited in the titles of my YouTube videos to how many characters I can put in. And Twitter has a lot of characters. I can just write X now and it doesn't have to be Twitter, but for all intents and purposes, this is Twitter. Anyway, Elon Musk tweeted or exed, posted, whatever, when was it in August 5th, so four days ago, this is the tweet he put out there. If you are unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill. No limit, please let us know. Wow. So first you go, okay, I mean, all right, that's nice of Elon and, you know, nobody wants to be treated unfairly by the employer. But wait a minute, wait a minute. Even one of the things that makes the United States unique, one of the things that makes the U.S. economy flexible and resilient, isn't it the fact that we have, or at least we nominally have, we pretend we have, employment at will? Isn't that kind of the generally the legal rule? Employment at will? Shouldn't an employer have every right to fire an employee over anything that the employer views as negative, apparent, unacceptable, or dislike? Are we now not going to allow employers to, quote, discriminate about anything, or is it just Twitter's unique?  It's not stupid, it doesn't matter.  What is the rational basis for suing an employer for firing you for any cause if your employment is at will? So this is super anti-free markets, anti-freedom, anti-freedom of employer, anti the freedom to discriminate. I believe people have the right to discriminate. Now it is true that our laws have watered down significantly the idea of employment at will. They've created all kinds of categories by which employers are not allowed to discriminate. Okay? Then maybe in those limited circumstances you can sue, I don't like it that the law has done that. It doesn't matter whether your employer fired you for rational reasons or for completely irrational reasons, or because he got up that morning and decided, I don't like Joe, I'm going to fire him, or whatever. It's called employment at will. The will is gone, therefore your employment is gone. Your employer doesn't owe you an explanation for a fired you unless you have some kind of interesting contract, maybe a union contract or some other contract. I mean, either we believe in freedom or not. When you leave a firm, the employer doesn't ask you, is it rational for you to resign? Or is it irrational for you to resign? If it's irrational, I'm going to force you to stay. The rationality, irrationality has nothing to do with it. It's about freedom. So yes, we have all these legal constraints about discrimination, about race and gender and whatever. And those, I guess, you can sue for. I'm not an advocate for them. I think they're aberration. I think they reduce our freedom. I think they're wrong. But you certainly have a right to sue. But for everything else, including for expressing an opinion that your employer doesn't like, there's no basis for the lawsuit. There's no legal standard in the US on a basis for which you could sue. Elon Musk here is encouraging people to sue their employers. For what? These are going to be frivolous lawsuits that are going to, you know, thrown out a number of legal scholars have already commented on this. There's a good article on this by Walter Olson. There's also on the Volcker conspiracy. Eugene Volick of UCLA has commented on this. Well, by what theory are they going to sue? But imagine, imagine if you tweeted in a tweet and made fun of your CEO, made fun of your company or made fun of your product, who gets to decide what unfairly is, I guess, Twitter does with it. I'll cover your legal bills or not.  Does he really want to work with you?  Does he really want to work for you? So there are lots of reasons why you would want to fire somebody for a tweet. So here, Elon Musk is encouraging people to have a view of employment, which is completely un-American, is encouraging people to have a view of lawsuits that is completely counter to the American system. They used to be actually a idea in common law that was basically held you liable for encouraging people to sue frivolously. I guess that does not exist anymore in the law in the United States, unfortunately. But this is just a form of encouraging people to sue for no reason. We have enough lawsuits in America. We try to resolve too many things through the legal system. Elon Musk should just stick to flying rockets into space and doing the other innovative things that he does whenever he gets involved in anything slightly philosophical or legal. Oh, God, it gets completely messed up. Here, he's advocating for something clearly that is anti-freedom, anti-freedom of contract, anti-freedom of employment, anti-freedom, period. Just another status. All right, natural resources. This is a big topic, we'll cover a little bit of it today, but it's I think it's an interesting topic, the whole topic of natural resources and how they control and who controls them. But the reality is that with the advent of new technologies, primarily new technologies that are now being subsidized by governments like clean tech, batteries and things like that, there is a whole new class of materials, natural resources that are now come to the forefront and in a sense that demand for them has gone through the roof. Things like natural, rare material, sorry, rare earth materials or copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, graphite. All of these, you know, are materials that are necessary for the new technologies and are going to be necessary even more in the future as everything becomes electronic tech related. But we're going to require more and more and more of these materials. As it happens, you know, China is it could controls minds and refines many of these materials. It has it has a big percentage of the world supply of rare earths somewhere close to 85 to 90 percent of those both in terms of mining and refining. And now we know that there are reserves in other countries when it comes to graphite, China has almost complete, almost 100 percent. Lithium, it's somewhere closer to 60 percent. So substantial. Cobalt close to 70 percent over 70 percent. Nickel, copper, not quite as much, but still a dominant position. And then, of course, again, that's that's that is China. But then if you look at the top three processes of any one of these materials, they dominate lithium graphite rare earth. It's basically 100 percent in three countries. A lot of countries are now recognizing this and stopping the exploitation of these materials. Not clear why. I mean, the whole point of this is to export them. But fundamentally, you know, China is going to start using this for geopolitical means. These natural resources are not owned and controlled by private companies in China that are governed by supply and demand, global economics, but they are controlled by the Chinese government. Sadly, much of these materials now are being discovered, mindful, extracted in countries that have very, very status governments, whether that is in Africa or Latin America. And even countries like Chile that used to have robust private mining private mining ventures are nationalizing some of the ventures because it's so crucial. We need to nationalize it. If it was so crucial, you need to privatize it. It works exactly the other way around. Latin America is becoming a powerhouse when it comes to natural resources. Chile has Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela. A lot of these companies have significant minerals that they need to exploit. And of course, the more government gets involved, the less ability they will have to exploit them. These exploitation of these minerals in these countries is one of the ways in which we reduce the dependence on Chinese and take away the leverage China is going to try to use over the West. Oh, you won't sell us sophisticated chips. Well, we won't sell you galenium that we control completely, right? But in order to facilitate this, we need a robust market. We need privatization. We need to allow the best, most innovative mining companies and equipment to get into Latin America to go to Africa. Africa is another area where there is a huge amount of minerals and mineral deposits, but where, unfortunately, either you have centralized governments that are trying to dominate this or you have gangs like the Wagner group, the Russian Wagner group, that control these mining operations and exploit people and devastate the human environment in which this mining is happening and don't really care and rather than professional mining operations. That can come in and allow everybody locally to benefit from these things. So the world is becoming more and more and more dependent, if you will, on natural resources that come from Africa, Latin America and China. Now, this is, of course, not new. This is reminiscent of the fact that we've been dependent or we're dependent for decades and decades on natural resources from Saudi Arabia and Iran and Iraq and Kuwait oil. You think we would have learned from that? One is to invest in our own capacity to produce natural resources at home. We'll get to that in a minute. But second, to encourage these countries to try to educate these countries, to try to convince these countries to privatize these markets, to allow for private companies to come in and extract these resources and exploit what's out there, whether again, it's lithium, copper, silver, which is dominant in Latin America. I mean, what we need is not chilly to nationalize these things, but quite the opposite to privatize and privatize and privatize. And that's how we'll get more and more deposits. And we need to encourage Western companies to go out there and find these minerals in the West. I think Sweden, Greenland, other places have vast resources of, for example, rare earth materials. We need to be able to exploit those. Now, what is the biggest barrier for the West to exploit its own natural resources to be able to bring to market some of these some of these resources that are buried deep in the ground? Well, the big part of that is, of course, environmental regulations, environmental controls and so-called environmental sensitivity. This is primarily true in, in the West, in Europe, in the United States. But these kind of concerns have also been exported elsewhere to Latin America and Africa. Environmentalism stands in opposition to bringing to market of new resources, to bringing to market of additional resources.  Mongolia, for example, has vast resources of both rare earth materials and many of these other natural resources. And the United States is trying to build relationships with Mongolia. Mongolia, of course, sits right smack between China and Russia. It is very, very, very vulnerable, both on its Chinese border and its Russian border. It is a vast country, the size of Europe with a population of three million people. Yet it has huge quantities of natural resources, natural resources that Chinese would love to control, the Russians would love to control. The US needs to invest in Mongolia and relationships with Mongolia and invest in bringing US companies over there to mine these resources and get them out. So there's a lot to be done. Again, you need a strategy, a foreign policy strategy, and to the extent that some of these are required for national security, you need a security strategy you need to build up, inventories of some of these materials so that you don't become dependent on the Chinese. You need a strategy of how to deploy technology, how to build technology, and how to create relationships with those countries that can provide you with those natural resources without selling out to them like we did to the Saudis. Now, the United States, so there's a lot of stories right now about the different superpowers that are rising, not real superpowers, but in terms of natural resources. Indonesia, for example, in Cobalt and in Nicaragua, Chile and Argentina have Lithium and so on, so these countries. And again, the importance of bringing market forces, market technology, marketability to these countries and to these industries so that we can get them cheaply and effectively. The United States is doing its part to increase the availability of natural resources in the world. Biden has just created a new national monument near the Grand Canyon. He's taken about a million acres, one million acres, and basically permanently banned new uranium mining in the area and who knows what else could have been mined in the area. And giving it over to, I don't know, the Hopi tribe, the Hopi tribe, which I'm sure this is, remember this is like desert, there's nothing there, can do many productive things with it instead of like, if you want to give it to the Hopi tribe, great, give it to the Hopi tribe and give them the mining rights so that don't give it to the Hopi tribe, give it to individual Hopis so that they can exploit the land, make money, become rich and get uranium out of the ground. So unbelievable, right? Uranium, an essential material if we're going to move to nuclear power. We have tons of it in the desert. God forbid we go mining for it. Instead we're going to make it into a national monument. This is the, yeah, let's, we face a crisis where we become more and more dependent on other countries, even hostile countries. So instead of building our own ability to mine these things, let's just lock it up, let's just deny ourselves the natural resources. We do it in Alaska, we do it in Arizona, we do it in Wyoming, we do it in Montana, we do it all over the country. We could be far more economically, I'm not even talking about government subsidizing, government doing anything. Just privatize the land, sell it off. But even here, if you're going to do anything with the Hopi people, give it to individual Hopis, not to the tribe. I don't think they've given it to the tribe. They haven't really given it to the tribe. They're just making it into a national monument. So basically we're turning more and more of the country into nature untouched by man. Not a good move if you care about the human environment. All right, the Biden administration is clearly suffering from, you know, Trump administration envy.  These are chords between Israel and a number of Muslim countries, both in the Gulf and in Northern Africa, that established peaceful relationships between Israel and these countries in exchange of technology, even for weapons and tourism and other things.  I want some of that. I want some of that cred that comes from the Abraham Accords. I want to do my own Abraham Accords. As a result, the Biden administration is working frantically to try to wrap up before the 2024 election, try to wrap up a blockbuster deal whereby Israel and the Saudi Arabia normalize relationships. This could involve actual recognition, a peace deal where there would actually be formal ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, embassies and all of that stuff. As a consequence of this, we would secure U.S. defense support. We would sell them even more weapons than we're selling them right now. I remember this is after the Biden administration came into office saying, we're going to get tough on those Saudis.  We're going to be really tough on them. But it looks like now, in order to get them to do this, we're going to send them more weapons. We're going to provide them assistance with their own civil nuclear program. One of the things the Saudis want to do is they're building all these cities, all this new modern infrastructure. They need to power it. They want to be able to power it without far self-heals. But they're smart enough not to be investing too heavily in solar. So they want to build nuclear power. In exchange, I guess Israel will have to make some concessions to the Palestinians. Then Saudi Arabia and Israel will have some kind of bilateral security cooperation in the face of threats of Iran. Although Saudi Arabia has got much closer to Iran and it's also got much closer to Syria, it's not clear exactly who Saudi Arabia needs Israel's help against and why it needs all those weapons, but what the hell, why not get some F-35s to the Saudis? Anyway, this would be huge for the Middle East. This would change the Middle East in a significant way. Saudi Arabia is the leader of the Sunni world. The only other leader would be Egypt. It already has a peace deal with Israel. Saudi Arabia has the two Islam's holiest sites. Having a peace deal with Israel would be incredibly symbolic.  So I mean, put aside believing any of this is long-term actually favorable.  If you think Saudi Arabia is honestly trying to reform, to modernize, to change its both its economy and its culture internally, to westernize in important ways, peace with Israel would be a great step for Saudi Arabia in that direction. Israel would benefit from taking one kind of player off. You know, the Saudis have Saudi Intelligence Corporation with Israel would help with Iran. It would also help with dealing with the Islamists, the terrorists, the various terrorist elements. And it would just take a significant player in the Middle East off as obviously hostile to Israel. And it would be, I guess, a step towards securing Israel, at least in the short run. Again, I don't trust any of these deals. I didn't trust Abraham Accord. I don't really trust this either. But it is interesting that, you know, Biden is really, really pushing for this. He wants this before 2024. And of course, you know, Netanyahu was interviewed over the weekend and he is very excited about establishing a relationship with Saudi Arabia. This would be a huge coup for him as well. He needs some positive news, given all the negativity that's going on with the judicial reform. So he is likely to be willing to even compromise in order to get this done. So this could get done. We could see Saudi Arabia and Israel getting significantly closer. From all my sources in Israel, it seems like Israel and Saudi Arabia pretty close already. There's a lot of intelligence cooperation. There's a lot of military cooperation between the two countries already. So this would be a further step, which is positive, but much of this is already happening. So, you know, yeah, let me just say this. This whole phenomena of these countries establishing peace with Israel and so on, the Trump administration, of course, took full credit of the Bahamik Accords. Biden will take credit for the Saudi Arabia if it happens. The reality is, the US doesn't deserve much credit for this, other than it's bribing the different parties with cash and weapons. This is happening because it's in the self-interest of the, or at least the perceived self-interest, the short-term self-interest of both parties. Would this be happening if Hillary had won in 2016? Absolutely. There's nothing about Trump that made this more likely or less likely. This has much more to do with the dynamics in the Middle East than the politics in the United States. It doesn't matter who's president of the United States with regard to the fact that many of these Arab countries want the technology that Israel has. They want the expertise that Israel has. They want somebody who can help defend them from Iran. Hillary, Trump was tight with Bibi, so could Hillary have been tight with Bibi. She would have condemned certain things that he'd done, Biden's not tight with Bibi, but it doesn't matter. He still wants a Saudi deal. None of this matters. Kushner puts this together. He gave the Saudis all kinds of goodies and got $2 billion in exchange, just like Hunter Biden. There's no difference. I don't think it matters. All these families, American politicians, as I said, have crooks. They would have all cut deals for themselves and they cut deals for the region. At the end of the day, this happened because people locally wanted it to happen. You don't think of the peace with Egypt as resulting from Jimi Carter. You don't think of peace with Jordan as a consequence of, I can't remember, George Boussino or no, maybe it was Bill Clinton. You don't think of it because it wasn't. It had to do with the dynamics locally of the people locally. You don't think of the good relationships between Israel and Morocco as resulting from some American politician. It has nothing to do with any of that. It has everything to do with the fact that the parties locally want this to happen. There's a huge incentive for this to happen. So no, I give Trump almost no credit for this and I don't think if Hillary would have won with regard to the Middle East it would have made exactly zero difference. In other things, it would have made maybe, but in terms of this zero, zero. All right, let's see. By the way, what you say about the State Department is just blatantly untrue. Oh, quickly. Superconductors, God, I've gone over. Superconductors, you know, given that I talked about this yesterday, I had to let you know because the news book this morning basically, right, I mean, basically this LK99 Superconductor claim is most likely completely bogus. That is, it looks like a hoax. It looks like completely made up. Now, the Korean authorities are going to look at it, but a number of labs in the U.S. and in China and in Japan, I think, and a number of different places have looked at this and, you know, forget about it. It looks like you can forget about it, the Maryland's Condensed Matter Theory Center. They've all recreated LK99, this material, and it's not superconductive at all, so forget about it. I don't think Kushner did anything. I think Kushner exploited a circumstances that was already in play and he was very good at doing that. Good for him. I have no problem.  He got all these weapons deals for the Saudis and the Saudis gave him $2 billion to invest for them. He got, you know, let's say, he cut them a fee deal, 1% of $2 billion. What's 1% of $2 billion? $20 million? Not a bad deal. Not a bad deal. $20 million a year is what Kushner gets from the $2 billion, at least, of the $2 billion that the Saudis invested with him and then he gets a percentage of the profits. Kushner basically will make hundreds of millions of dollars. He makes Hunter Biden look like a pop-up in comparison to how much Kushner is going to make off of the sums that the Saudis completely irrationally from an investment perspective put into his fund. You know, what was it last year or the year before that? All right, let's see. We're way behind on the fundraising. I just want to remind everybody, $3 of sticker, $3 of everybody listening right now gets us there, but I'm just going to remind everybody once. I'm going to try not to bug you too often about this, but we do need to make our $250, try to make it every day, so please consider doing it. $3 sticker, $5 sticker, $10 sticker, $20 sticker from the 60 people watching right now gets us the way we need it. All right, Andrew, a lesson to be learned from Rand's atom bomb script experience is to not allow failure to overwhelm oneself. I must have been massively disappointed. She must have been massively disappointed that script shelved, but she always met failure with more writing. Yeah, I mean, she handled it brilliantly. She basically quit. She didn't want to work with Wallace again.  I want you to basically void my contract, which she did. She then went on. She went back home and basically moved to New York and started to write Atlas Shrugged. So, you know, absolutely, you know, she was, life needs to be kind of a focused on the constant pursuit of values. And if you're constantly in pursuit of the next value, if you're constantly moving forward, then once in a while, not achieving your goal, once in a while, not getting your way is not going to hurt you because you know there's other things you could be doing. There are other great amounts to be climbing and great achievements to be had. So, yeah, I'm Mirkat. Don't forget that by fighting for fetuses, the GOP won't be able to own the Libs, which is the most important thing in the universe. Yeah, I mean, by every measure, the GOP, by fighting for fetuses, is just, it's preventing it from achieving its political goals, it appears, and it also intellectually just makes them look kind of like the backward, the backward, backward orientation that they really are, right? The left has environmentalism, which puts us in the caves, and the right has abortion and social conservatism which puts us back in 1220. Fendt Hopper, really listening to Iron Man answers, valuable insight, I figured I would bump it here to spread awareness of the collection. Can you comment on its value? I don't have enough characters in the $20 to do so myself. Have a great day. Yeah, it would be great to get some more $20 questions. I only have one more question, and then we're done for today. You know, we're still, I'm still looking for those $5 stickers or $10 stickers. Doron, thank you. Colin, thank you. I really appreciate the support from you guys. Yes, Iron Man answers is a fantastic collection. It's basically a collection of Iron Man's Q&A's edited by Robin Mayhew, so basically it's all of her Q&A's and she covers, of course, a wide array of topics because you can imagine, how can people ask her lots of different things on a radio show? People ask her lots of different things. It's amazing. It's great to see Iron Man kind of on her feet, just answering questions quickly. You can get the book. I've got the book behind me. It is really amazing the scope and the extent of the topic she covers and how brilliant she is, whether it's an essay she's writing, a speech she's giving, she's just answering Q&A's. Her answers were always original, somewhat unexpected and fascinating. Interesting, always interesting. All right, last question. Wesley says, thoughts on the index of economic freedom. Also, if you had to pick a place to move, would you prefer Georgia the state or Georgia the country? So, I like the index of economic freedom. It's good. I think it's good that we have it. I think we actually have two. We have one produced by Heritage and one more produced by Cato. But they're very similar. There's some changes in rankings. You could quibble with the weighting, the different indexes, give to different aspects of the economy. You could quibble with the different focus that each one of them has in terms of, you know, you could quibble about what's more important to liberty, what's more important to freedom and how you would aggregate this and how you would calculate it. And this is why we have two indexes. There's a slightly different one another. I don't think it's that meaningful in terms of place number 10 or place number seven. I think it's valuable in seeing a direction of a country. For example, under Trump and Obama, under Bush, Obama and Trump and Biden, the United States mostly has lost from the perspective of economic freedom. It used to be number three. It's now depending on exactly what year and it's somewhere in the teens. And there's an absolute number, like an 80% of 100% absolute economic freedom. It has deteriorated over the last 20 years. Sadly. So it's interesting in looking at directions. It's also interesting in comparing like the top 20 with the middle 20 with the low 20, rather than comparing position by position because again, the weighting and everything. But you can clearly see that rich countries at the top and poor countries at the bottom. So it's good to show that. So generally I think it's very good. Would I rather live in Georgia the state or Georgia the country? Georgia the state, there's no question. I mean, look, living in America is fantastic. I mean, it's not just about economic freedom. It's about political freedom. It's about freedom of speech. It's about freedom from a lot of respect. It's also about scale and it's about possibilities and about opportunities. And you still can't compare the United States to any other country when you take everything into account, all the different things into account. All right, let's see. So, yeah, definitely Georgia the state. All right, everybody. We are way off from our target today. So I'm wagging a finger at you guys. You can still do something about it if you want to put in a sticker. And of course those of you who watched later on YouTube can do an applause. There's a button under there where you can contribute after the fact through the same through YouTube. You can also of course become members. You can press that joint button underneath there. And to really support the show and to keep it going kind of and stable over the long run. What is best is to become a monthly supporter of the show. You can do that on Patreon or patreon.com or on PayPal through the Iran book show.com. All right, everybody, I'll be back tomorrow morning. We will also have a show tomorrow night. I don't think I have anybody to interview tomorrow. So it'll just be me. I am looking for topics. If you have any ideas, email me. If you're willing to put $1,000 behind those ideas, even better. And I will see you guys all tomorrow. Have a great rest of your week. And don't forget to support the Iran book show one way or the other. Value for Value. Bye, everybody.


So, yes, it is Thursday. We get our natural gas inventory numbers. I'm going to jump in here, jump into our natural gas contract. Let's see where we're trading. We'll start it off with maybe our new ones. We're looking at the April contract. You get natural gas, trade at 286.  Yeah, up to 286. Some cold hit in the country right now, maybe. Some cold hit in the little Florida in context of everything. Okay, so 286. I jumped to the new ones first. We tend to like taking a look at the new ones. It gives us an hour and a half. We have 285 as a price point. Well, that's good. Not bad, right? So, we'd have about a penny of intrinsic value to the bullish side. Here's your bullish spread. That's going to be the expensive one because you have some value plus premium. So, you're looking at $19 to the bullish side. Of that 19, about 10 of that dollars is intrinsic value because you're trading at 286. And then on the bearish side, it's going to be all premium, no intrinsic. So, you're just paying the nine in premium. So, you're looking at about $28. Call it 30 bucks you need to make with commissions, a buck on each side. And you need about three pennies away from 285 before noon to get to kind of your breakeven on either side. Jumping around real quick, let's see where the 230s line up. Not really going to be a great option. We have 280. If you want really volatility on both sides and the dailies, pretty similar 280. Now, just checking the 11 amps, because we saw what the noons were going to cost us, right? Here's your bullish spread. About 14, your bearish spread, about 8, so 22, 23. So, you'd have to ask yourself, do I want to pay two pennies, maybe a little bit more than two pennies to have exposure to 11? Or do I want to pay maybe three pennies in total to have exposure just to kind of generalize? And that's where you just pick up your market buys. So, you know what? I don't let this thing ride between 10 and 11, maybe. Let's see what happens. It's quite a number for oil yesterday, right? Seven million barrel build, and the market shakes it off and trades higher. And then it ended up in a negative. Did it? Okay. Okay, so look at this. This is quite a move, man. Look at this chart, you know? What's amazing too, this chart, this doesn't even include the craziness that happened going up to 410 and whatnot. Yeah, so this is not a bad-looking chart. Let's go here. Can you bring that back? Yes. Yeah, too late. That's saying to me that it wants to go higher. Higher, huh? Okay.  You do have the penny of intrinsic value on your side, right? So, that's nice. You have a head start to the bullish side, really to break even. You only got to trade up, if you do the noon, three pennies. You got a penny head start. Okay. But we always look at just some of the directional. So, you know, that's just a street volatility, but what if you just want to go directionally? Number one, you always have, you know, some of the noons, whereas you don't need to cover yourself on the bearish side if that's what you're doing. You can just lock in the 18, right? Then you're basically buying it at 286.8. The market's trading at 285.8. So, you're paying one penny for a risk reward of basically risking one to make 10. Yeah. Now, you need a 20-cent run. You're not going to get a 20-cent run before noon to 305. All right?  But you could get a run up to 290 or 295, for sure, depending on what happens. But the other side too, if you want the dailies, and this is where it's not bad, we kind of dismiss them if it's a volatility trade. Excuse me, those are the noons. But if you're just entering it for a directional trade, this is a great example. Now, you have risk all the way down to 280, which is a lot of risk. That's a lot of risk. It is. Right. But you can always trade out of this too. No, no, I know. And you're getting in at 286.3. I like the penny risk. And the market's at 286. I just want to illustrate you're paying four tenths of a penny here. Yeah. Three tenths of a penny here in premium. And you can trade out of it. So, we'll see. 286, we get those numbers when we come back. Stay right there, folks. That phone number is<PHONE_NUMBER>. Dow Industries right now down 276. And as I've got 75, S&P's down 24. Come right back. Welcome back, folks. Natural gas stock piles fell 149 BCF. Yeah. It's going to be interesting to see what happened here, because that's what they were thinking, right? Pretty close, right? You had a Bloomberg survey, minus 150 median estimate, minus 145. Jumping back to the charts. And no real reaction. We're sitting at 285.5. We're sitting at just about 286, coming into that number. That is a tiny bar in terms of, well, that number usually breaks. We usually see a knee jerk one way or the other, no matter what happens in terms of a penny, maybe two pennies, people sometimes, not that you pull your bid in your offer, right? But you make sure you know what news is going on before you just have your offer sitting out there. So, you can see that market jump around as those bids and offers right next to the market dry up, just as they wait for that number as we do. 285.7. We'll check back in, but no real movement just yet. And that's why, you know, when you lock in some of these defined risks, you know, if you're not paying a lot of premium, that's the benefit that, you know, you get no movement, you're not really losing any money, right? Right. That's what you have to examine as these. But as we say that, ticking down, we're down about a penny, 285. We'll see what happens.


We have the chance now to hear from Brent Alsop on ushering in the millennium. Brent has always been a transhumanist, I guess from the moment he was born, and has been active in the Extropian and Transhumanist movement since 1994. He received a BS in computer science at the minor in psychology from the University of Utah, and is currently working as a senior software engineer for 3M health information systems. Brent is the founder of Canonizer.com. He was raised in the LDS church and served a mission to Sendai, Japan, and was married in the Jordan River Temple in 1985 to Malia Fairbanks. They have three adult children and currently live in Sandy, Utah. Welcome Brent. I must say it's pretty humbling to come after so many of the talks that I've enjoyed so much today. But basically, when you think of expanding technological powers, there's more and more moral issues facing us every day. In the past, the animals were just concerned with survivability and they didn't have much effect on the world as a whole, but now one of these previous speakers talked about how's the universe going to end? Is it going to be a big collapse, a big crunch, or is it going to expand forever? And he pointed out what's probably going to be a decision that we're going to make. And so everything is becoming immoral. What should we do? What do we want it to do? And when you think about how do we manage that, how do we know how do we make these good decisions? Can we pick? If one of us picks one of these areas or any of the infinitely many more areas and says, well, I better focus on that one. That's the most important. To the degree that any individual focuses on that one issue, you tend to ignore the others and become less of an expert than the others. So it seems like to me, we have to collaborate and work together and be able to communicate so that we can find out what all of the experts together agree on any particular issue and better communicate concisely and quantitatively around our moral decisions. But today, whenever you bring up a controversial issue, like in the Deseret News today, there was a paper, an article on the front page talking about politics. If you bring up religion and politics, is that too polarizing? But the gist of the article basically was, so don't even bring up religion. If it's controversial, just don't bring it up because we don't want to talk about it. It's too painful. And so we become almost afraid to talk about it. We don't want to talk about it. So morally, it's almost like we stop talking about it because we're afraid of controversy. So is there a better way to find out what everyone's working on or believes in? And a lot of times, if you talk about something like global warming, people will approach the idea, well, there's an expert consensus here that global warming is a problem. But if someone makes that claim, how many people in the world can believe that? And how much of a consensus is it? Is it 99.9%? Is it 65%? Does that really matter? But anyway, I think that all of that kind of stuff and be able to communicate in that way so you can know what all who, first off, who are the experts and allow, and one person's experts, of course, is another person, spiritually blind person. And so each individual has its own sets of experts. But imagine if one person, you as an individual, could find out on every single moral issue out there, you could spend your time hand-picking a couple of hundred of the top experts in the world, and then you could survey for all of them what they thought was the most moral way to behave. Then wouldn't that be good advice to you? Even if you weren't as expert as them, then it seems like that would elevate the level of all of us to be the level of the smartest experts if we had that ability to communicate concisely and quantitatively what do all of my chosen experts believe? And so that's basically the whole idea around canonizer. It's the consensus building system. It's a way for experts to communicate together and find out what they agree on and to come up with the different moral theories. We should do X. We should do Y. 69% of the people think we should do this. 20% of the people, according to 69% of my selected experts think we should do this behavior. 12 and 10 in the long tail think we should do that. So I think it would be much more moral people if we could communicate in that way and know what our selected experts believed was the right way to behave.  There's new medications coming out to amplify our mind and stuff like that, using some of the psychic drugs to enhance our cognitive abilities and stuff like that. And right now, I'm sure there's some experts out there that are starting to know this information, but how do you tell the experts out there that know this information from all the quack stuff that's out there? And it's no way to filter and distinguish between those various different things. And so let's see. So yeah, and so basically that's what we're moving towards with the survey project is right now there's a few topics that are getting out there that we can measure. Let's see. But yeah, that's the whole idea is to be able to give people the ability to select a canonizing algorithm according to how they want to use, how they select their experts, what they want to use to have their moral advice, and what they want to use to canonize, what they'll accept as morally acceptable doctrine. And as things become more broad, and right now, there's a lot of Mormon transhumanists that are participating in it. And so you can say, well, the Mormon transhumanists say this is the way to behave. But if we broaden that and expand it out more and got more than just Mormon transhumanists to be part of that, then people would say, well, what do Mormon transhumanists think? But what do traditional Mormons think? Or what do Catholics think? And what do people like me, whoever that me happens to be? What do they think? And I think that all of that will help every group of people become more intelligent than they are standing alone by themselves and eventually that helps us all improve. And the Consciousness Survey Project is the one that we've had. That's the one I'm personally most interested in, so I'm focusing on that. So that's the most developed. And I've spent many years now attending conferences. Next week, we're going to TSC. And I've talked to a lot of experts trying to survey everyone what are the best theories of consciousness, what do you believe, and trying to get a, is there any consensus out there, trying to measure that and get a hold of that? Are there any theories emerging or other theories being falsified and accepted as incorrect and stuff like that? But let's see where we, and it seems like to me, there is a clear set of doctrines emerging around consciousness and what consciousness is and how it works and everything. And the name that we've coined, the set of experts that have given the theory, the set of doctrines that is the most agreed and beyond level theory is called representational qualia theory. And the thing that's surprising to me is if you took that set of doctrines that's emerging, that seems to be well more than half of the experts agree that representational qualia theory is the experts. And if you understand that, and if you took all that's described in there and tried to describe that in the language that Joseph Smith had access to, I would challenge anyone to get any closer to that than what Joseph Smith said. And in some of there's both that statement there from Joseph Smith history, and then this one here that's in the DNC. But to me, it's surprising how similar those are to the expert consensus theory of what consciousness is and the way Joseph Smith described it. But anyway, the bottom line is there's been, let's see. So yeah, and then we talk about immortality trying to seek immortality. And that seems pretty mind blowing if I achieved eternal life. But when you talk about religions, there's a material world and a spiritual world. And a lot of people believe in some ethereal world that there's some kind of magical interface. But if you think about the theories of consciousness and the study of consciousness, I mean, it's more than just achieving immortality. It's piercing that spiritual veil. And it's breaking into the spirit world. And it's learning how it all works and being able to scientifically manipulate it and understand it and amplify it and make it better. And in general, there's been a lot of talk today about love and about helping other humans become friends and everyone working together. And if you think about what is all of that, what's the fundamental bottom?  But that just seems to turn it around and people I think are missing the big picture. Because what drives everything is what do we want? What does each individual want? And those machines aren't to take our jobs away. The whole goal of everything is to find out what you want and to get you what you want. And so to me, the most important thing is to find out what everyone wants concisely and quantitatively. And once we can do that, getting all of it for everyone is going to be the easy part. So that's all I have to say. Can't remember your name? Sorry. Hi, so consensus seems to be really important to you. But canonizer also opens up a path for contention. You get in there and contend until we get consensus. But do we necessarily always have to land in consensus? Because I'm having a problem here between unity and conformity, the Babel problem, that the Tower of Babel, that we're not going to be unified. We're going to all have to conform. And God doesn't want that, because diversity is still going to be important. So the big long question is, where does contention lie in the canonizer? And where do we get usefulness out of that? Because I think contention is very useful. Yeah, I would completely agree. Diversity is the most important thing. And anything that anyone could want has value. And we should seek after all of that. And the unity comes in in expanding all that infinite amount of diversity and seeking after all of it. And the consensus needs to come back what's true and what's false. Like, if you have a false belief, or you think you want something, but you're mistaken, then someone needs to discover that. And so building a consensus over what's true or what works and what doesn't is sort of along those lines. But yeah, by all means, diversity is a good thing. And you need to track it. So you need as much as you can. But where there's consensus, that needs to be measured and tracked, too.


Sunday morning October 4th, ready to watch my regency life. She's cleaning and reorganizing her craft room, so I like to watch videos like that. I started my Christmas list last night and on it I put a table that I found that's the right size, I think, in height for a new sewing table, art room table upstairs. I'd like one that's just slightly bigger and a new cutting mat, so I doubt I'll get it, but you know, one can only help. Anyway, my face is looking a bit better. I'm going to keep putting vitamin E oil on it every day while it heals, so but I didn't get black and blue. By now, if I was going to get black and blue, I would. And the swelling, there's little to no swelling, so a little bit right here, I think. I'm just lucky I didn't knock a tooth out, to be honest. We both woke up late. I woke up later than Bob. We both ended up unintentionally sleeping in. I woke up like an hour ago. He woke up slightly before me and he's already had his coffee and breakfast and off to the gym. Being safe, of course, and wearing a mask and all the things. So I got another zombie doll done. Pestilence is finished, so we're going to go walking now. First time I've been really seen out in public without a mask with the scrapes on my face. It's about 2.30 p.m. on Monday, October 5th, I think. I think. I spent the morning working on some business changes, actually. Logos and branding are changing, and you will notice that on some things already. Some social media things are going away or have already, or will be in the future. I've discontinued any further subscription to certain services. I will still be on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, FYI. Etsy stores staying open. But anyway, we are streamlining and making things look better. And my daughter who's in graphic design and marketing, she's helping. So we spent the morning doing that and just changing the YouTube banners, like so fiddly. It took like 40 minutes just to do that and get it formatted great. Like it's just such a big deal. Anyway, I'm also working on the vlog and I've been watching Mike Deacon's October 7 days of Halloween videos. I'll link his channel below while I was doing all that. I was playing in the background and yeah, I sound like crappy again. I know. Anyway, I'm going to go check the mail and see if that's in a couple of questionable pieces of mail coming. I don't understand. So I'm going to go check them. I'll be back. Hey guys. So it's like 2 30 ish on Tuesday afternoon. I think it's after 2 30 to be my face is recovering from the fall. You can't tell in the picture. This is no longer scabby. So that's good. This is a little bit so this I don't know what that is and just showed up. So you know, yeah. Anyway, I'm going to go check the mail. We spent the morning. I spent the morning doing the live broadcast. We made a dam a doll. I'll insert a picture here and talked about some upcoming videos and some thoughts and ideas. I'll include a link to the live broadcast down below because that was really interesting conversation. I'll be at semi one sided because you can only hear my voice and be reading the comments from the people. Anyway. Hey guys, we are out for our evening walk.  But you know, hello asthma. Evidently from some of the news reports I've seen online since we've had all these wildfire fires on the west coast. A lot of us with lung issues, even if we didn't go outside or having problems. And I'm not the only one. So anyway, we're going to get some steps in and then go home and have leftovers. And I really need to catch my health app up food tracking app because I think I'm a couple days behind again. Hello. Yeah. I'm blaming it on coat Corona brain. But you know, anyway, I think that's it for the moment. I'll be back. Good morning everybody. It is I almost said Friday. It's Wednesday morning, October 7th, I think. It's 9 59 a.m. According to the car clock. Is that right? I have no idea. I do think it's a couple minutes off. So I don't know. Obviously in the car, I've got it. I've got some Etsy orders that have to go out and they're too big for the drop box here by the house. So I've got to go to the PO box. I'm going to check it while I'm there. Besides drop off the orders. And while I'm out, I'm going to pop into Michael's really quickly and get some floss. I'm out of another color again. So I'm going to pick up a couple of skeins of 3348 DMC 3348 light yellow green, I think is the name of it is, but it's 3348 that I know for sure. Okay, I got the last of the four horsemen of the apocalypse done. So here's a picture. There is a video coming. I did make this last one on camera and hopefully I got enough footage to make sense of a video. So we'll see. Watch my YouTube channel. I don't know when I'm going to get it edited or aired, but hopefully we'll get it edited tomorrow, but we'll see. I have a typo in the four horsemen labels that I gave the patrons of our Patreon, which I need to edit, but I already turned the computer off and forgot to do it. So I don't know if I can do it on the iPad or not, but I guess we'll find out in a minute. First, I'm going to go take this other Etsy order over to the mailbox and check the mail. Yeah, you know, see apocalypse. It's another weird day. I don't know what to say. I have to figure out dinner and do the dishes now. So first I'm going to see if I can edit that document. Then we'll take it from there. All right, I'll be back. Everybody, it is, what time is it? 10.54 a.m. Thursday, October 8th. So I've spent the morning rehanging all the paintings and artwork around the downstairs of the house. We're going to be doing the whole house, or at least most of the house. When we moved in, we put everything up with command strips in the old house in California. That worked great. We never had an issue with them here in Oregon. We seem to periodically have an issue with a painting falling off the wall. I'm not sure if it's because of the humidity is so much higher here in Oregon that the command strips just don't want to stick. I'm kind of guessing that might be what it is. But anyway, this morning my husband went up the stairs to go to work, to his office, and one of the stairwell paintings had fallen off and was laying on the stairs. So rather than taking the chance of number one, somebody getting hurt, number two, a piece of artwork getting ruined because it falls off the wall and gets a hole in it or something, we're going to be spending the next couple of days rehanging things with putting hangers on the back and actual nails in the wall and all the things. I'm pretty sure I know for the most part that those paintings are going to stay there permanently, so I don't have a problem with actually putting an ale on the wall. In some places like the art room, I do occasionally move things around. So I don't know if I'm going to do that in here. I might leave some of these up either with command strips in here. I might leave them that way, but we'll see. But I want to do the stairwell. I did the whole kitchen entryway living room area. We have to do the game room, the master bedroom, the stairwell, and then whatever upstairs that we're going to do, which over the next couple of days, we're going to take care of that. Okay, so I got today's art apocalypse drawing done. The word today was skull. So that's what I did. I did a skull. There you go. Still playing with those pencils that I found and trying to see if I like them enough to keep them or not. I went through them, did an initial sort, and perched some duplicates, basically. I have the sneaking suspicion that most of what I kept and I put over here, I would probably keep more than likely. But we'll see. I'm not going to jump ahead at the game too much. Kind of getting ready for the next round of slow stitching, cleaning off the table a bit. It's decently clean. I have a couple of mission inspiration challenges to work on. So they're all cut out and ready to go. I think my next slow stitch might be a Frida Kahlo slow stitch. So I've got a couple of inspiration images that I've pulled off of Pinterest.  So I'm going to use them for inspiration to create a Frida slow stitch. I might print a couple of photographs of her too. We'll see. But I think I'm decently ready to go for that. I just need to start picking a couple of fabrics. I also think I have a decent amount of doll making patterns now, zombie doll making patterns, the charity bear pattern, which I started now before the pandemic. And now I don't even know if I can donate the charity bears because of germs and the pandemic. And yeah, I'm going to keep making them. But yeah, that's going to be a thing. Anyway, I also have some pin cushion patterns over there. But I think they need their all sort of mini binder. I do have some pockets for the pieces, but I ordered a little mini binder to store everything in today. Hey, guys, I would say good morning, but it's after lunch already. It is 9pm Friday, October 9th. I've spent the morning video editing, which is something I've been putting off for a couple of days because although I filmed a zombie, I filmed a video for the four horsemen of the apocalypse zombie dolls, a sort of a part two of making zombie dolls. Part one went live today, as did Mike Deacon's video using my pattern. And I love the way his dolls turned out and I love the dolls he came up with once he figured out how to make them. He came up with his own patterns. I love what he came up with. If you haven't seen his video, I'll link it below. Go watch it. It was great. Anyway, he was so cute. He said he made a comment about me doing this magic thing with my fingers to tie a knot and he didn't want to say anything to me because he didn't want to offend Mike, you're so funny. I learned how to do that from my grandmother, bless her, she's not with us anymore, but I am surprised by the people that don't know how to do it. I am going to use some sort of big, this is just some jute twine that I had. It's been laying on my desk. It's really not, I didn't think it was a big deal, but evidently, well, I've watched a few sewing videos. There's a lot of people that don't know how to do this. I don't know. So literally you just take, I'm right handed, so I have control of the string or thread with my right hand. I have the string or thread between my thumb and my finger here, wrap it around until you have this, like that, right? So you still have it between your two fingers and then roll as you roll.  I didn't really think it was magic, but we'll do it again. Hold on. I'm going to cut the knot we just made off so I can do it again. So wrap it around, bring it in between.  I don't usually do it this slow. As you roll, your finger pulls that little cut end into that loop and then just do that and it creates a knot. I don't know. I don't know here. It'd probably be easier if I do it this way. So then it to see, can you see that when you roll it? Oops, I lost it. And when you roll it, do you see what happens to the little cut end? It pulls it through. That's all it is and then just pull. That's how I always do my knots. I've been doing them that way for a long time since I first learned how to sew for my grandmother. So I don't know, practice. There's lots of ways to do a knot of course, but yeah, just practice. It's easy. Once you get the hang of it, it's easy. Anyway, Mike you're so cute. It's not magic, I swear. I don't have lots of manual dexterity, but I guess I have enough to make knots that way, which I didn't think required dexterity, but I'm guessing it does. Anyway, I would say good morning, but it's after lunch. It's just after 12 o'clock on Saturday, October 10th, I think. As I was saying a few days ago, I've discovered since living in Oregon that command strips to hang things up on the wall are not always the best idea because they don't stick. It's too humid. So we just got the last of the big paintings attached to the wall with old fashion nails and brackets. There you go. So they're all done today. So we got that done this morning and I just finished lunch. I got today's Art Pocalypse 2020 drawing, which the word for today was drink. Oops, drink. So there you go. My favorite flavored water. And the paper is curly because they are pencil drawings. And I don't, I think I said already in the blog, but I'm not sure. But I put some deli paper in between all the pages to keep the drawings from Schmeering. Schmeering is my husband's from New York. We say Schmeering on to the other opposite page. But I also have taken the first couple of pages I took outside and I used Kryolan matte finish spray, which is a great archival quality spray. But for this, I'm not too concerned about that. And I can't spray Kryolan in the house, plus it's not so great for my asthma. So we switched to the old fashioned DIY Aquanit hairspray, which I can do in the house and doesn't bother me. So I got all the papers sprayed, which is why it's like curly right now. So that's just sitting and chilling. And the kids are going to come over later. We're doing October Fest today. So we're cooking up a bunch of different German foods. And we are going to turn on some German music, I guess later. Yeah, so it ought to be a thing. We've got sausages and sourbrot and Schmetzl. And I think my daughter's bringing apple strudel and beer and some German wine. And yeah, we can't do October Fest in person, which we do like to do at Mount Angel. Even if they were having the event, I wouldn't be okay going. But they're not really having an event. They're having virtual October Fest. Yeah, it's not going to be the same. So we'll wait until COVID's over. Anyway, I think that's it for the minute. I know I have other things I should be doing today. I can't think of what they are right now. But you know, hello, Corona Brain. Anyway, that's it. I'll be back. Now to get the sourbrot and started, which is basically the German version of pot roast, only marinated in vinegar and things. Rather than I don't know when I make pot roast and marinate. I don't really marinate it for three days, but I cook it in like beef stock and stuff like that. And I have sourbrot and you actually marinate it in vinegar and red wine and onions and stuff for three days before you cook it. So anyway, that's kind of a basic difference. I've got the red cabbage out. I've got the Schmetzl out. Like, I think I'm ready to go. Rebecca's bringing the sauerkraut. Oh, the sausages are out. She's bringing the pretzels and the strudel. We've got the beer. I think we're good. So yeah, it's all good, I think.  All right, I'll be back. So yeah, as I was saying before, we had a really nice dinner of sourbrot and Schmetzl, red cabbage, sauerkraut. The guys had some spotten. Rebecca had some German wine. We ate gingerbread cookies. We were supposed to save them for dessert. We ate the whole bag. So we're out going to out get some steps in. I'm going to stay well in the back, because yeah, I don't want to fall again. So that's a thing. All right, I'll be back. Let's see if I can do this so y'all don't have like the worst lighting imaginable. Trying to hide the ceiling fan light behind my head. Anyway, good evening, everybody. It is, it's not too awfully late. Let's see. 9 30 p.m. on Saturday the 10th. It's been another weird week. It's just, it's been a strange week. But on to the next, right? What are we going to do? Y'all have been great with the Etsy orders. I did have to make a correction to one order. My mistake, not theirs. I took care of it today and sent a few little extra goodies and I'm sorry. So I took care of that. I got some vinyl sticker paper in today. So I'm going to try seeing how that prints on my inkjet printer versus regular sticker paper to do some more sticker flakes with. I've got a bunch more of the new style botanically inspired doodles to transfer into digital images to then make flakes out of another stuff. So I need to work on that. So there's always stuff to do. I am going to start working on the Frida Kahlo slow stitch maybe tomorrow. I might film some of it or all of it, but I might film it for Patreon. I'm not sure what I'm going to do regarding that yet. I might do it all off camera. I don't know. I guess I better find out tomorrow though, right? Anyway, it's crazy. I came upstairs because I've got to close my computer. It hasn't been on all day and it needs, it needs to go. I don't like to leave my computer on all the time. I like to turn it off. I guess since I'm here though, I should check YouTube comments while I'm upstairs. Yeah. Anyway, it's been a good week, but it's been a weird week. We had the Oktoberfest dinner celebration here at the house tonight. That was a lot of fun. Of course, it's not the same as going to an Oktoberfest festival, which is a lot of fun and I can't wait until it's safe enough to go to another one. But in the meantime, we had a fun time making sauerbrotten and spetzl and we had some strudel from a really great local bakery. My daughter pictured up on her way over some red cabbage, sauerkraut, really great German sausages like the whole nine yards. It was really good. And we went for a nice family walk. I stayed well in the back away from Lily so she wouldn't knock me over again because this is just starting to heal. So yeah. Anyway, I hope you've all had a good one. Even if it's been a weird one like me, it seems like every day this week it's been Monday. But you know, seven days of Monday, I think I'm done with that now. Anyway, I hope you've all had a great week. If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please leave them down below. If you're in a one of my Facebook art groups, you can put something in a post over there and tag me in the post so that I see it. Any relevant links will always be in the video description along with a link tree list of links that include ways to support the free content here on YouTube or over in the Facebook art groups. That includes shopping at my Etsy shop or Patreon. There's a PayPal tip jar. There's a bunch of stuff. So check it out. And the Etsy shop has a sale up until the 15th of the month. All the stencils and stamps in the shop, 40% off. That's below cost on some of that stuff, just FYI. So if there's anything in my Etsy shop regarding stamps and stencils that you've always wanted, now is the time because I don't think I'm going to do this sale again. Anyway, I think that's it for the minute. Yeah. All right. I hope you all are doing well and that you're staying safe, staying healthy, staying creative, doing what you need to to do all of those things. And join me in the next video. Don't forget to go out and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it. Like, share and subscribe. And I will see you next week. Bye, guys.


I'm PFC Reagan Lowe. I'm the 21st Military Police Company, airborne on Fort Bragg, and I'm from Sterling, Massachusetts. I feel like a contribution that I bring to my squad is trying to keep everyone positive and light in the mood, even when you're four or five hours into land navigation and you're sweating and you want to stop, but you're almost there. My goal for the next competition at Fort Stewart is probably to continue to learn where my strengths and weaknesses are in the competition. For example, the last one I learned where my weakness was in weapons qualifications, and I improved on that this time by going to ranges, practicing harder on assembly and assembly, and learning my weapon with functions checks, clearing it, all the parts of it, how it works. I feel like our squad won in the best squad competition because we're able to adapt to new situations and compensate for other people's weaknesses with other people's strengths. I just think we work well as a team because when you come together as a team it just turns around to an all-around strong team.