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


Hello, welcome to Tarot Tuesday, embracing transformation with the Three of Swords and the vibrancy of the number five. The Three of Swords hearts catharsis. The Three of Swords, with its poignant imagery of a heart pierced by swords, often evokes feelings of sorrow, betrayal and emotional turmoil. Yet within its depths lies a profound message of release and healing. This card doesn't merely represent pain, it signifies the transformation power of confronting our deepest emotions, acknowledging them and allowing ourselves the space to heal. It's a testament to the human spirit's resilience and our innate ability to rise above from adversity. Then we look at the dynamic energy of number five, embracing change to today's date, the 8th, 23, when we distill it through numerology, it resonates with the number five, boiling it all down, adding it up, a symbol of change, freedom and adaptability. The energy of five is restless, it's urgent as to break free from constraints and to dance with the unpredictability of life. It's the spirit of the adventurer, it's the seeker, it's the free bird, always emotional, always yearning for new horizons. So the week ahead, a dance of heart and spirit, as we step into the week, the energies of the Three of Swords and the number five converge, painting a picture of transformative change. The changes of emotional upheavals you might face are symbolized by the Three of Swords. They're not anchors though weighing you down. Instead, they're the winds beneath your wings, propelling you towards new adventures and new experiences. This week calls for introspection and courage, it's about recognizing the pain, understanding its source and then using it as a catalyst for growth. The Three of Swords in its essence is a beacon of hope, reminding us that after every storm there's a rainbow and after every night there's a new dawn. With the dynamic energy of the number five by your side, you're being nudged to embrace this change, to take the lessons from the Three of Swords, to heal, to grow and to soar. It's a week to break free from any self-imposed chains, to trust in the journey and the joy in the unknown. In conclusion this week, let the Three of Swords be your guide, not as a symbol of despair, but as a testament to the transformative power of emotions. Combined with the vivacious energy of the number five, you're being called to rise, you're being called to heal, and you're being called to embrace the ever-changing dance of life. It's a journey of heart and spirit, of pain and joy, of endings and new beginnings, but embrace it all, for in this dance lies the true essence of life. Be love and give love, have a wonderful week, take care, bye-bye.


Good afternoon everybody. My name is Brian Perry. I used to be a duery up until about five years ago. When you came in, I think I was off quoted as saying you were a breath of fresh air to me. You were greeted with scattered clusters of successful research, very dispersed, and a negative corporate identity. And you have somehow brought cohesion and turned this round, a mission under the umbrella of pro-bore contributions of livestock. This is called the serate legacy. In one sentence, what do you think the serate legacy is? One sentence. I'm quick. You start to think on your feet. Well, you know I'm very tall, so you take some time. Well, I think certainly the issue of how you use livestock to address the world's problems, we go beyond the livestock sector as what he was saying earlier. I think seeing livestock not just in home value, but as a tool for development. I think that's what I would hope to be ingrained in the culture. But in that, does that match with under your tenure you've been seen as the guardian angel of the struggling smallholder farmer? But as we heard in Mario's talk, ilries emphasise the importance of value change, which by its implication means focus on other players, for whom livestock play a role. And in processes of development, in many developed countries, the smallholders become a dodo. So should ilry not be more involved in poverty reduction through livestock, which brings in different scales of livestock production? Well, obviously this is a very central question. And I think we probably have treated smallholders as a homogeneous crowd. And many of the discussions have sort of treated them as sort of one solution. I think more and more we realise that there is, smallholders can tap into value chains and markets. And I think if you look at the dairy development, it shows that it can be done. And it's done with millions and millions of smallholders. We also see smallholders in many other value chains successfully operating. You think about coffee tea, many other commodities. So smallholders can't do that if the environment is appropriate. And I think in many countries, this has not been the case. And that's a bias against smallholders and it promotes large-scale production in many cases. Because of policy environment, the state has failed to provide the basic services. So large-scale people can't do that internally in the company, while smallholders can't. So I don't think there is a role. But I'm talking about this mixture. I mean in Ethiopia, for example, of looking at various scales of operation and how they link, and the roles of livestock, because of the smaller scale being able to feed off some of the resources and services of larger scale. But should that not be more of a, should we not be more broader looking in the roles of livestock and property reduction? Well, for sure we should be broader looking that understanding in many cases, smallholders will transit out of agriculture, but it's going to take many, many years in many locations. So even if we believe that in the long run they won't be there, there is a social problem there. And the instruments, the smartest instruments to help them may be deficit payments, maybe cash transfers, or they may be in some cases developing a market for a commodity they can produce. I think we need to be much more open in understanding that it's not just technological interventions, it's all sorts of policy institutional interventions which can make it happen. And it's the mix which will be very variable across locations, I guess. Your strengths were arguably in developing a systematic approach for ill-re, but some might say your weaknesses were that few people outside ill-re understood. Is that fair? Yes, yes. Because here you have, and also with relating to your partners, you've been developing, wanting to have impact. And I noticed that Tom Randolph was very impertinent on his video saying that for the first time ill-re through the new CRPs is going to have impact. But it's not the problem that many of your development partners through whom that impact will have, don't understand some of the complexities of the way that ill-re was structured and these different programs. Do you think that was, is that a challenge in making, having impact happen? In other words, your ideas, but people have to pass those through very traditional disciplinary departments and environs. Yeah, I would certainly agree that that is a big challenge. I think the art is to derive the agenda and be ahead of the impact, but not too far ahead so that people get disconnected from what you're doing. And I think we have had that challenge, how you bring along a lot of other partners in understanding that the solutions are not just a new grass or a new breed, but that the solutions imply many cases, institutions. And I think the interesting thing is, if you think about small older data development, which is I think our most successful intervention, we started with a technological approach, we realized it didn't work, we had to move much more towards marketing institutions. And then now, for example, in the EADD program, we see that when you start sorting out those constraints, then there is a real demand for technology and people do need that, but it's in a different context. They move, you overcome a certain number of barriers, and then technology definitely plays a key role. Now, the reality is that there is an enormous number of other players providing that technology at that stage, and we see a lot more interaction with the private sector and others, and thinking through what we do in that context, I think, is a challenge. You've always let and emphasized integration of disciplines and approaches, but a couple of little examples of this, one of this in partnership with FAO. Now, I would sort of, the great international facilitator of delivery of the livestock technologies and the knowledge, but that relationship is embarrassingly weak, almost non-functional in some areas. What is it? What would you say to that? Well, that's a very small deal. He got me up to ask you the question. No, he didn't. He has mentioned, I think, that we as researchers are not the ones developing the normative approaches and trying to distribute them. We, I always say, our challenge is to question FAO. Is this the best way to do this type of solution or address small numbers and so on? And so, by definition, by being a researcher in a nation, we're asking questions, we're challenging the state of school. This is the nature of science, and therefore we will not always be 100% in agreement, but I think that challenge, for example, in terms of Long Shadow, we've had lots of discussions and I think I would play that some thinking in FAO has evolved to look at it in a more comprehensive way than sort of the initial documents were. Okay, let's just take the Long Shadow. That's a good idea. How much damage to Hillary did the Long Shadow report to? Were you caught by surprise? No, I don't think we were caught by surprise. I think we knew what that team was doing and we have discussed it many times. I think the fundamental difference was that our mandate as CJRT is to address poverty, and FAO's mandate is a much broader one of global food supply, of governance of the international food system, etc. My question is, what was the communication? Because after it came out, Hillary then did an awful lot of work to try and say, well, no, of course it's not quite right if we're looking at poverty and so on. So was there not adequate communication on understanding of what they were going to say? Could there have been a more harmonious report that came out if Hillary had been more engaged? Because it did damage Hillary, didn't it? I don't know if it damaged Hillary. I think it raised the relevance of the facts a lot. And in a way, it would be awesome to think a lot more on that. If you look at our 2002 strategy which you were very much involved in developing, we didn't say very much about the facts in those days. So in other days, when you do look at the facts a lot more and a lot shall be up to the student. That was a long time ago. That was when you first started. Okay, now you placed the science leadership, this was an issue in your early tenure, in the hands of the program directors, and you called them directors instead of scientists, who then were then hands-off. In retrospect, was that correct? Because the issue is still on the table. I understand. Well, I'm not sure this is afternoon. Well, the issue is on the table or not. But let me tell you the thinking, how we decided, it was a very controversial discussion. Are these people program leaders or directors? We argued at the time the partnerships were going to be critical. We needed to engage the development partners. The fact that there was a director coming to talk to World Food Program or FAO or Heifer International, that it opened a lot of doors in the partnerships if people had director on the business card. And so really, I think it was much more a marketing tool than necessarily that the job of a director is significantly different from the job of a leader. We expected them to lead the science. What I did always argue was that we were expecting people to be in those positions, who would have done their academic research and would have their spurs hurry, would not be trying to publish and compete with their own scientists, but who would mentor other scientists. And I think that still is the right decision. We clearly felt that you needed a lot of effort to manage scientists in this new way. You couldn't do that and at the same time have your own pet area where you're doing your own research. So I stand to that. I think if it was wrong, but I certainly believe that that was a way to manage in a very complex time where people needed to take a lot of other jobs. If they had a particular pet area, they would sort of bias the allocation of resources across the areas. Okay, so you've got that one right, you say. So looking back over this period, is there one thing that you could pick out that you say, my goodness, I really got that wrong? I lost. I'm not sure I want to share with you. Okay, just pick out one that you really feel that you would like to share. Well, I think if you ask me, internal communications. I think we should have invested a lot more in internal communications. I think we wanted to have quite a dramatic change and we were so busy with a number of the partnership and other issues around that that the effort was very much towards the outside into raising resources, et cetera. And in a way, we may have lost the troops at times by not communicating enough. I should say probably the mistake was to think that ICTs and intranet, et cetera, were going to do the trick and probably would have taken a lot more face to face. But there were competition for time. That's why we didn't do it. But I do feel that that is something, if I had a chance, I would have done differently.


Hi, I'm José de Lisai Jr., people call me Butch, and I teach English and great of writing here at the University of the Philippines, but at the end of the day I'm really a writer. I write all kinds of things, and I've brought some samples with me here today. I write stories, short stories. I write novels, poems, plays in Filipino, and biographies of famous people. I show these to you because I like to think of myself as a kind of a Swiss army knife of writing. I'm largely self-taught. I began writing for a living in my mid-teens. I began writing television plays when I was 16 and dropped out of school to become a journalist at 18. I'm telling you these things because one of the first things you have to know about writing is that actually you don't have to go to school to write. What do you need to do to become a writer? You need to have a love of language very early on. You need to want to read. You need to know how language works in different ways, and you need to want to do it yourself. I started writing at a very young age because before I was a writer, I was a reader. It just so happened that I was a very poor student in a rich man's school. The only thing I could do was to go to the library to amuse myself. I began reading The Hardy Boys. When I was done with The Hardy Boys, I went on to Nancy Drew. I read all kinds of books, history books, science books, adventure stories. I told myself, I remember at the age of about 10 years old, that when I grew up, there was nothing I wanted to be than to write. I began writing by putting pieces of paper together, stitching their spines, and grabbing a pen to write my own stories. Especially my own version of The Hardy Boys, set in Mandeluyong, where we grew up. And later on, I began writing my own stories. I entered the Philippine Science Science School when I was 12 years old, thinking for a minute that perhaps I could be a scientist too. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. As I often tell people, my grade in English was 1.0. My grade in math was 5.0. And I think that was the long and short of it. I entered UP as an industrial engineering major. And again, my grade in English was 1. My grade in math was 5, and that made a decision for me. I realized that there was nothing I could reasonably do well or actually do better than write. And I've been writing ever since. I dropped out of UP at 17, found a job as a newspaper reporter, and worked as a writer for the next 10 years or so until I decided that writing alone wasn't that satisfying. There's a point in the writer's life where you want to learn more and able to write better. And at that point, I said, let's go back to school. So I went back to UP, finished my degree, and I've been here ever since. Writing and teaching for the past 30 years or so. And as I approach retirement, there's still nothing more I'd like to do than to write and to teach young people like you to become writers like me. A lot of people ask, even within the university itself, if writing can really be taught and learn. And I had to ask them, well, why not? I mean, you have schools for music, you have schools for art, so why shouldn't there be courses for writing? Writing is something that is learned in life. People also ask me if writers are born or a writer's made. But I almost tell them geniuses might be found in other disciplines. For example, like mathematics and music, where you have a Ramanujam or a Mozart who produces a symphony at around age eight. That just doesn't happen in writing because to write, you need to have lived. You need to have had life experiences, both the funny and the tragic. And you need to have stepped back and looked at these experiences and made sense of them and put that sense on paper or on a computer screen. You can't rush writing. Writing makes use of words loaded with emotional and social meaning that makes sense only when you've undergone those same experiences, only when you've felt those same emotions and only when you've acquired the kind of maturity that allows you to understand how these words work not only in society but also within yourself. Of all the things that, the kinds of things that I write, what is it that gives me the most pleasure? And I always say it's fiction. It's the art of making and telling stories. I've written three collections of short fiction, a couple of novels. And again of all the books that I've done, nothing gives me quite the same satisfaction as a good book of stories which might take me anywhere from about five to seven years to put together.  Why fiction? Of all the possible literary genres that anybody can choose. Fiction is essentially, shall we say, the art of lying. But this is lying with a high purpose. This is lying to get to the truth of things, to the truth of human life. Why do we need to lie? Why not just do what journalists do and go straight for the facts? Why do we have to make believe that things happen to make people understand the truth of human life? I'll give you one of the many wonderful definitions of art that I've come across in my own reading. And I think this came from another UP professor and a poet, Ricardo Demetilio, who once said that art is the mirror of Perseus. Now you remember Perseus from the Greek myth of the Medusa, the Gorgons, these women with a really bad hair day. And Perseus was the hero who went out to slay them. A problem of course was that you couldn't kill Medusa just by lunging at her with a sword because one look from Medusa would turn you to stone. How did Perseus, our hero, solve this problem? You remember from the myth that Perseus had a shield, a burnished shield, a brilliant shield that he used as a mirror and he looked into that shield to find out where Medusa was and used it to guide his sword to kill Medusa. Now let's get back to our definition of art. Art is the mirror of Perseus. Why do we need a mirror to confront reality, to confront everyday life? Because reality can often be too difficult to look at face to face like Medusa herself. Confronting reality on its own terms will sometimes paralyze us and fiction on the other hand allows us a means by which to deal with reality without having to surrender to its most terrifying aspects. We can handle reality if we look at it through a mirror from the side and that's what fiction does. By making believe, by playing a game of pretense like this happened to somebody else although that somebody else may sound a lot like you and your life, by reading stories like that we are able to deal with what we might otherwise resist or even worse be in a sense killed by. Fiction gives us a handle on real life in a way that makes and you'll see this in tragedy. You'll see this in the saddest stories, the saddest novels that you've read. You'll see that in fiction even the worst things in life not only become bearable but in some very very strange way pleasurable. We find relief in reading the most terrible things about human life and about ourselves because it's happening to somebody else and we can relate and we can sympathize and we can cry with that person and that's the magic of fiction. It makes us weep but within us it makes us laugh at the same time. That aesthetic pleasure that we derive from fiction is what the Greeks call the catharsis. It's a purgation. It's a cleansing of the soul again thinking that the worst things happen to other people although they could very well happen to us. There's one more thing about fiction that I'd like to take up with you and this is one of my favorite quotes from the writer Mark Twain who said and I'm paraphrasing Twain here. He said, of course fact is stranger than fiction. Fiction after all has to make sense. What does this mean? When I teach writing the short story for example in my classes very often I'll find students who send me drafts of stories whose plots seem to be not quite believable. I mean things happen to people seemingly without a reason and of course in real life they do. And when I ask my students why did this thing happen in your story they'll tell me, yes sir, it happened to me, of course it happened to me. And this is where I bring out Mark Twain's quotation. Fact is stranger than fiction. Fiction after all has to make sense. What happens to us in real life quite often doesn't make sense. Incredible things happen to us without a reason. Fiction doesn't work that way. Fiction tries to bring meaning to human experience. Fiction puts all these things together and tries to find the thread of sense in them. Fiction believes that there is a logic to human life and it is the writer's job to find that thread of logic that yields meaning. And so in fiction, remember this, it really happened is not an excuse. It really happened is just the beginning, the possible beginning of good fiction. In fact in fiction nothing needs to have happened in real life. The important thing in fiction is that it's happening on the page and it's believable. And that's the hallmark of a great work of fiction, that it can move you, that it can make you think that oh my goodness how could this have happened to so and so. You know in fiction, in great fiction, when authors like José Rizal create characters like Christos de Mibara or Maria Clara, they seem even more real. I mean Maria Clara, Dona Victorina, these characters from the nollie and the fili, they seem even more real than many of our true historical personages because Rizal as a very skillful writer has made us believe that these people really live, even if we know that they didn't.  People also ask me, where do story ideas come from? How do you start a story? Do you start with a theme? Do you draw on your own life? Let me take the first question first.  And you might be surprised but I advise my students that theme is probably the worst place to start in fiction. And you know why? Because writing with a theme in mind like the kind of theme that you used to write for freshman English, remember those five paragraphs where you had to prove a point? Fiction doesn't work that way. Let me step backwards a bit and for example, I'll put on my other hat as a writer of essays. I used to write editorials for a newspaper and four or five times a week I would have to write a fairly long essay about lofty subjects like national sovereignty, social justice, rising criminality and the kinds of things that you would find on the opinion page. Writing essays as opposed to writing fiction are two very different things. When I write an essay, a formal essay like an editorial, I will deal largely in abstractions. I will use indeed words like justice and freedom. In a good story, you hardly ever find words like that because fiction works with concrete objects with very, very specific situations whereas essays deal in generalizations, in abstractions. The whole point of writing fiction, let's say even a story that deals with justice with the same topic as an essay or an editorial might, a story that deals with justice will prove the need for justice, again, employing human characters engaged in a very human conflict. In other words, you need drama. You need people in trouble in a situation that shows them in a very tight spot to reveal the kinds of positions and the kinds of considerations that would lead the characters to demand justice. So the point of the story will still be we need justice, however, you need to point that out without ever, ever using that word. So in other words, fiction in a sense is the art of saying the unsayable. And you can do that by employing, again, human characters in very compelling situations that move the emotions and move the mind to come to its own conclusions. The reader has to be part of the process of understanding, unlike the essay which yields its meaning, which raises its point. Several times, very often in the last paragraph, a good story will not give you that kind of very clear conclusion. Many of the best stories will leave you with a big question mark in your head. What happened here? And that's a mystery for you, the reader, to figure out. And when you've done that figuring out, you, the reader, will feel tremendously happy because you have been rewarded with the meaning of the story. This is the kind of aesthetic pleasure that the reader gets from reading good fiction. You make sense of life yourself.  Nobody will tell you what life means but you. And that is the pleasure of reading the story. I'll give you a concrete example of how I write typically my stories. Again I don't begin with a theme. Again don't worry, the theme will emerge. Every story will have its theme. But actually that will be for somebody else to point out, not use the author. Instead of themes, what I begin with is actually a theme, an object, or maybe even a place. As a writer, I would typically put myself in a rather normal situation. Let us say, oh this is something I often tell my students. You know, you don't need to go to a galaxy far, far away for story material. All you need to do is say to go to a hamburger joint in a place like Kubao, the kind of place where a lot of ordinary people will be passing through.  Where is the drama? What is that woman saying to her mother? What is that couple arguing about? How do you turn what seems to be an ordinary situation into something truly different, something possibly even marvelous? I always ask my students, bring me somewhere I've never been before. That's the challenge the writer faces at the beginning of writing the story. Some years ago, I was fortunate enough to have been given a fellowship in Scotland, in Edinburgh. And while there, some of you might know that my hobby is collecting vintage fountain pens. So I went around and found a shop full of fountain pens. And I went up to this woman and asked her, would you happen to have a 1930s Parker vacuumatic oversize in burgundy red? And she said, well, sir, as a matter of fact, we do. And I nearly gasped for breath because this was my holy grail. And I said, how much? And she said, 150 pounds. That was like a one month salary at that time as an assistant professor at UP. But knowing that I would never see that pen again, I gave her my credit card and went back to my writing place, a shivering with both delight and remorse. I said, oh my God, what did I just do? How would I explain this to my wife? And so I actually brought that pen here, right here. And so I went back to my cubicle and said, OK, you better write a story about a pen. And so I put that pen in front of me and began writing a story about a pen. About a fellow who owned a pen when it was no longer fashionable, and this poor fellow whom I modeled after someone I knew found himself having to write a love letter for a blind woman that he had a terrific crush on. And the love letter, of course, was for somebody else. That story became penmanship. And here's the book and the pen. And guess what, the story won first prize in a writing competition. And I got back the cost of my pen. That's just a little story about how stories get written. You don't think of big things. You just write about what am I going to do with this material right in front of me? How will I make a story out of a coffee cup, a bottle of soft drink? How can this possibly be dramatic? How can this bring people into trouble? And how will they wriggle out of that situation? That's what fascinates me about writing stories. You'll never know when and how they'll happen, which leads me again to another approach that I use in writing stories. Now there is no single way of writing stories. Every writer will have his or her own methodology. For myself, I like to write stories without really knowing what they will be about or where they will lead to. You can think of this as the Bahalana method. And it works this way. Like I said, I might find an object, start there, find a character, add another character, give them a problem, and let's see where that goes. Again, you see the option is to start with a very well-defined plot. And by plot, we mean the story of the story. It's technically speaking a causal sequence of events that moves the narrative forward and leads to a resolution in the very end of the story. If you think very logically, you can do that. A leads to B, B leads to C, C leads to D, and so on. However, I find that when I do that, if I know in advance where the story will lead, then there's no longer any suspense for me. And if there's no suspense for me, then there's no pleasure in constructing the narrative. It's just like building a house with an architect's plans, which is actually a good idea if you're building a house. But writing fiction isn't quite like that. When you begin writing fiction, you don't know if this is going to be a bungalow, or if this is going to be a 10-story building. You just never know. I think, and of course, you can only develop this over time, you need to go by your instinct. You need to get to a point, you yourself as an author have never been before.  And typically this might happen around three in the morning where you're all tingly, and I think every artist in every medium reaches this point.  And it both terrifies you and at the same time you feel absolutely exultant.  And in this case, it's a terrific story that you have brought into the world. I say that it's really better to trust your instincts than to work based on a strictly plotted storyline because as one of my, I didn't bring it today, but as one of my books says in its title, the knowing is in the writing. What do I mean by that? When you begin a story, you think you know your characters. You might even take notes down and say, oh, Tony is a 28-year-old lawyer who's thinking of migrating to the states, but is also engaged to be married to so and so. In other words, you begin by jotting down these notes about characters based on people, you know, maybe based on yourself. You think you know them, but the fact is you don't. You don't know your characters. You don't know what they'll do until you put them in this pressure cooker that you've created around them, a pressure cooker that is really the conflict, the situation that you put them into so that they reveal their inner selves. The whole point of fiction, and this is important to remember, the whole point of fiction and even of the plot itself is character revelation. What do I mean by that? It means revealing our innermost selves, the truth about ourselves, the truth about our lives, and that truth will only emerge if we find ourselves under extreme pressure. On most days, we are under no such pressure. We just act our normal selves. We pretend to be happy. We pretend to be complete. For me, I actually think we are happy and complete until a problem suddenly appears. Our happiness is suddenly at stake and that's when we respond. That's when we start stepping out of our everyday selves to show something in us that sometimes even we ourselves don't realize was always there. Is it possible, for example, for a mother to kill her child?  I will never do that.  Why? Because this is a wartime story. They are being hunted down. They're hiding from the enemy and the baby suddenly starts crying. If the mother lets her child cry as she normally would, that whole community of people will be at risk. So whether she do, she puts her own hand around her daughter's mouth until the daughter struggles no more. That's fiction. At the same time, we know that that's also real life. It will very likely have happened many, many times in many, many wars. But that's to show you that there is always something in us that an extreme situation will bring out that we never ever thought possible. And this is the writer's task, to look as deep into you, into the character as he or she possibly can, and to bring out that innermost part of you, that darkest secret in you. To bring that into broad daylight so that you can confront yourself and you can understand what it is that makes you, that makes all of us truly and perhaps tragically human. When I'm dealing with young or new writers of fiction, I know that I can expect them to write reasonably good stories, probably based on their own lives. But that's not a problem as long as we deal with stories not as biographies, but as fabrications. In other words, as things made up. And many of those stories will be passively good. However, when you want to push yourself to the limit, when you want to do something beyond your present capabilities, what do you do? One of my mantras, one of the things I keep telling my students in class is that when you write stories, when you want to write better stories, the thing for you to do is to raise the stakes. And what does that mean? I mean making things more difficult for yourself and maybe even for your own, for your reader. And that means complicating things further. This doesn't necessarily mean a more complicated plot. It doesn't mean a longer story. But it means making things more difficult for your characters to decide upon. Giving them the tighter situations, heavier problems, not giving them the easy way out. As one of the hallmarks of bad fiction, and I'm sure all of us have seen examples of this, is when the author, like if you're reading a 200 page novel and you're on page 197 and you find that the hero is still being pursued by the villain and there seems to be no solution in sight, you know what's going to happen. On page 198, as the villain chases the hero and they cross the street, you see a big truck coming at the two of them and the hero jumps out of the picture and the truck smashes into the villain. End of story. That is the easy way out. The technical term for that is Deus ex machina or the God out of the machine, which actually goes all the way back to Greek drama. But the thing to keep in mind is that as a writer of fiction, as a writer of good fiction, you cannot take easy options. You cannot give your characters easy solutions. When I'm in a writing situation and I'm thinking what should the character do next or what will the characters say at this point? And something comes to mind. When you're in situations like that, very often the obvious answer, the easy answer is very likely not the best one. Mistrust the easy option because that is probably what 90% of other writers out there will also be thinking. That is what your reader will be thinking. And when your reader can predict your story several pages ahead of you, then you're in trouble. So keep things lively, keep things fresh, keep things unpredictable. Of course what will happen, and it's happened to me many, many times, is that you will find yourself at a dead end. You will find yourself with a whole bunch of unfinished stories. In this computer in front of me, I have a special folder optimistically titled ongoing. And this is where I put all the unfinished stories that I've been working on all the way back since I think my earliest entry here is 1991. I still have computer files going back that far of dead end stories. But the good news is that in fiction writing, nothing is ever wasted. All of those scenes, all of those wonderful lines of dialogue that went nowhere. You can keep them and I keep them as a kind of junkyard, think of an automotive junkyard where you can later on go back and scavenge for parts. You can cannibalize these half stories for scenes, for characters, for alliance that you can use for your present project. And I've done a lot of that. And sometimes miraculously, after not looking at a half finished story for five years, I go back to it and suddenly Eureka, I can see the way out. I can see the way forward. So what I'm telling you is, again, in fiction, drafts are necessary, revision is absolutely necessary. And nothing is ever wasted, not even that precious draft which you thought could have been the best story of all time. That will come into its own fruition, maybe a few months, a few years down the road. But if not the story itself, if not the fragment itself, then the experience of writing it will not be wasted because you will learn from that the next time you write another story. Writing is probably the loneliest profession in the world because literally at the end of the day, there's nobody there but you. To do the writing, to push the writing forward, you'll find yourself again at maybe two or three in the morning with nothing but a cup of coffee to keep you awake. And you're looking at that blank page or these days, of course, at that blinking cursor asking for the next word. Writing can be tremendously lonely. It can also be, because of its loneliness, tremendously self-obsessive. In other words, sometimes you think there's nobody else on earth but you. And therefore, there's no one more important in the whole writing process than you. And of course, to some extent, that's true.  You are your first audience. If you cannot please yourself, honestly, with what you've written, you cannot expect to please others. But let's remember, and this is very important for every writer to consider. Writing is not just about you. Writing also involves and inevitably engages other people. The other party in this process is the reader, the reader beyond you, the massive people out there who will pick up your work, who will pay good money, perhaps, to read it and to make their own judgments of it. It's very often asked of writers, when you write stories, who is the reader that you have in mind? Of course, aside from yourself, must you have a reader in mind? What kind of reader will that person be? And my answer to that is this. I think that your ideal reader should be someone who is at least as smart as you think you are. And why do I say that? It's because there's always the temptation, when you write stories, to write down, to think that your reader isn't quite as smart as you, and that your reader will never get it without a little extra help from you. So this is what happens with bad stories. You write a draft of, say, nine, ten pages. By the time you get a page nine, and you've worked on the story for so many weeks, you expended so much time and energy on it, and when you get to the end of the story, you start thinking, oh my goodness, I'm so clever in the story, but my poor reader might not get it. So what do you do? You spill the beans. You spend the last paragraph explaining just what you did in the past nine pages. And that's what in the old days was called an epiphany, a terminal explanation of the sense or the meaning of the story. And in some ways, that's okay. People might appreciate that, but it really cheats your intelligent reader of the pleasure of coming to his or her own conclusion. In other words, you have to think of the reader out there as someone who can understand what you've put together, who can have the capability of seeing what you saw and experiencing what you experienced in the same way that you have told it in the story. The important thing is trust. Trust the reader to get what you've written. As long as you've written the story with adequate skill and with enough sensibility and intelligence, your reader will get it. And finding that reader, even if it's only one out of a hundred possible readers, finding that reader will be your ultimate reward as an author. I'll add a couple more points here as far as audiences are concerned. Chief Filipinos, unfortunately, are by and large not a book-buying, book-reading community. Compared for example to the Indians and the Japanese, these are societies where you find people reading books on the bus, on the train, and there are many reasons for that. Of course, chiefly among them, it's the fact that books cost a lot of money in this country and people have understandably other priorities. And so for an author like me, even with these many books, if I come out with a new novel tomorrow, I'll probably be published, I'll have a publication, a print run of about 3,000 copies at most. New authors will be lucky to get 1,000 copies. In a country of over 100 million people, that's in a sense, that's criminal. And that's very sad that we do not have the kind of reading public that we think we deserve. But at the same time, I'm also always surprised that every year, literally hundreds of new books are published by Filipino authors. And that's a good sign that we've kept the faith. It's a sign that this in it expressiveness in the Filipino is alive and well. Our desire to tell stories, our desire to impart the experience of our generation to succeeding ones remains alive and well. Writing is almost, in that sense, a missionary task. It's the task of, really, of heritage. It's the task of preserving and perpetuating and developing what has been important to us as a people for centuries. And few things do that better than writing. Writing stories, writing novels. In keeping alive novels and stories that keep alive the imagination of our people. The creative spirit of our people that not just other generations of Filipinos will benefit from but the world at large. The world can and should discover the best of the Filipino imagination through these books, through these stories, through the products of your mind, your experience that you can put into words on a page, on a screen, in a book.