 Alright everybody, welcome to your Unbooked Show. That was a short musical introduction, I'm not sure why, but there you have it, it was. Alright, so I'm in London and I figured I'd do a quick show before I go to bed. It's, what is it, 9 p.m., 9 p.m. here in London, so we'll do a quick show. I'm not sure if to call this a, it's not a news briefing, but it's probably not a regular show in terms of length, though of course the length is always dependent on your participation. The more comments, the more super chat, the longer the show will be. This is also an opportunity for me to test some new equipment, so I am curious, those of you listening live, if you can just give me, in the chat, give me some indication what you think the sound quality is. I'm using, you can see here, a lapel mic. It is a new setup that I got, primarily not so much for the show because I had a previous mic for the show that worked pretty well, but this is a get-up for really recording lectures when I'm on the road. So now I have this wireless lapel mic and you know I have this whole setup that I can take pretty much I think anyway and record my talks with at least good quality audio. I don't know how good video is going to be. This, you know, the camera is, I don't know how it will do if I'm standing at a distance, but hopefully the sound will be good. So sound is okay like a dull sound. Mr. Muffin says, dull sounds. Yeah, I know I'm not quite about the lights right now, lights in the back are not ideal background and all of that. So, but this mic is not nine dollars on Amazon. This is an expensive mic. So I am interested in what you think about the sound. Is it dull? Is it, I'm not worried about the video. The video is a decent camera. It's fine. I've done many shows with this camera so I think that setup is fine. Really the only thing that's changed from previous shows I've done on the road is the audio and the audio, yeah, the life reflects in my glasses. There's nothing much I can do about that. The audio, I'm asking about the audio and everybody's giving me comments about the video. Audio is different than video, video, audio. Anyway, this is going to be boring for those of you who listen on the podcast. But anyway, I'm curious about how much, how you think the audio comes across the quality of it because I plan to use this in some of my talks where the host is not supplying high quality audio, audio and video equipment I intend to take this setup to do it. Audio is fine here, sound is great, Ian says we need to do a spectrum analysis. It's fine though. I'm not doing a spectrum analysis. The question is, is this good enough to listen to the lecture on? All right, cool. I mean these are expensive. This is an expensive mic system, so they should sound great. All right, so I did promise Skyler that I would and Skyler put quite a bit of dollars into this that I would talk about Michael Jordan. So we're going to talk about Michael Jordan a little bit. On Friday, it was Michael Jordan's 60th birthday. I didn't realize he was only about a year and a half younger than me. So it's hard to believe. It really is hard to believe that Michael Jordan is already 60, but even harder to believe is that I'm over 60. I don't know. I don't know how that happened. I don't feel 60. I feel a lot younger than that. So anyway, so let's talk a little bit about Michael Jordan. Now remember, you can use the super chat to ask questions, some e-comments, to disagree with me and so on. I don't know what Hiram is saying on the super chat. All right, I mean for those of you who I don't know how many of you, you know, did not see Michael Jordan in his prime, but many of you were probably born afterwards. I know that a lot of people listening to show in their 20s and 30s probably didn't have the opportunity to see Michael Jordan, but Michael Jordan was I think and many experts think greatest basketball player who ever lived and one of the greatest athletes who ever lived. I mean he was a dominant player and I think that the thing that really made him special, I mean he was unbelievably athletic. He could do everything. He dunked. He could shoot. He could pass. I mean he really had every aspect of the game down. He had what many people call basketball IQ. That is, he could see the quality understood, you know, who was guarding him. He understood the other team. He would watch hours and hours and hours of tape. He was a smart basketball player who just didn't have the physical, the physical capability. He was incredibly, incredibly smart. But you know what made him really spectacular was the fact that in spite of all his natural talent, if you will, that he had an athletic body and he had the skill and he had the height and he had the agility and he had the athleticism, he worked unbelievably hard. I mean he was a guy who could probably be one of the best players in the league just cruising, not doing anything. Could probably make a lot of money for himself. But Michael Jordan worked harder than anybody and he was ruthlessly committed to victory. He was ruthlessly committed to winning, to being the best in the game. The game of basketball is about winning. It is a competition and he wanted his team to be the best. He wanted his team to win championship every time they played and he wanted to be the best. So he individually practiced, practiced, practiced, practiced with non-stop and he, you know, elevated the team to win, win, win, win. So he was a man committed to being the best that he could be and committed to making the people around him be the best that they could be so that together they could win. His selfish motivation was to win and for that he needed teammates. He needed four other players, indeed, and a bench and a coach to put it all together so that they could defeat the opponent and he did. You know he won six championships, three in a row. He then retired, went to play baseball, returned, won three more in a row before retiring again and then when he returned he returned to a different team and this time he did not win but by that point he was pretty late in his career. He played against some of the toughest players ever. He played against the Detroit Pistons who were tough, strong kind of and beat them all, beat them all. But the thing, I think the thing that differentiates him, you know, he worked hard sort of, probably by and sort of a lot of players. I mean any players who are greats, who are greats, it worked hard. You just can't be one of the greats if you don't work hard. What made Jordan maybe the best player who ever lived was his ability, his willingness and his competence in taking the game-winning shot. That is, when the game was on the line, when his team was down by a basket, I don't think there's ever been a player who, A, was as eager as he was to take that last shot and as successful as he was at taking that shot. He was, you know, it's uncanny. I mean they are, you know, one remembers the shot, right, which was, you know, the shot which is a Michael Jordan shot. I mean he came to, he came to symbolize the move, right, the last shot and in all of these and moments, critical, critical moments, where his making the basket was what would differentiate between winning and losing the game. So he was an incredibly, incredible talent, unbelievable hard work, but then the, I don't know, the, what would you say, the soul of a champion, the spirit of a champion that is just committed to victory and is able, able to will himself to rise to the challenge. I mean, Michael Jordan played sick, Michael Jordan played in all kinds of circumstances and always rose to greatness and that's something I think that's truly stunning, that ability of human beings, I mean, to excel when they're under the most pressure. Somebody like Jordan to be a better basketball player in the last 30 seconds of a basketball game, to make that shot almost every time if it's in the last minute of the game, you know, the rest of the time he maybe makes it 50% of the time, 40% of the time. And that's truly amazing. Michael Jordan, you know, was, was, had learned from failure in his early career in his early career. He did not win titles. They were not incredibly successful. He learned from other players. He had the opportunity to play against Larry Bird, play against Magic, Magic Johnson. He had the opportunity to watch and to learn farm and both from his lack of success and from their brilliance and genius on the court and then elevated to the next level. And then on top of that, what makes him a seminal figure in basketball is not just his actions on the court, but then his actions as an entrepreneur. The deal he struck with Nike. Now, there's a, there's a movie about this coming out. This is such a big deal. You know, Jordan made the whenever Larry Bird shoes. You know, there was, there was some paraphernalia sold. There was some for what's his name, Dr. J. There was some for Magic. But Michael Jordan turned himself into a business and he turned himself into a very successful business and a business has made a huge amount of money. He is today one of the few athletes in the world who is a billionaire and he's a billionaire not because of what he made in basketball. He's a billionaire because of what he made off the field, selling products he endorsed and particularly the Jordan's that still self a huge valuation still means something in, in the shoe, I guess shoe world. I never understood it, but unbelievably successful and worked hard at it. Again, just like he did on the court with basketball, worked hard at excelling, at selling shoes, at, at turning it into a brand and giving it meaning and, and making it worth as much money as he did. Now, I just want to tell you that Skyler has written an essay called The Diamond Jubilee for Jordan. It's on his website and vocal.media slash trader slash the slash diamond Jubilee for Jordan. Anyway, the link is in, the link is in the, is in the description below. I am also going to post the link in the chat. So you have it right there. Enjoy, you know, read it and enjoy and thank you again. Skyler for yeah, supporting you on book show and encouraging me to do this and, and, and doing some simple chats. To encourage me to do it. So this is profitable for everybody all around. Adam says with regard to this, in addition to being the greatest, Jordan is also a huge proponent of failing in order to succeed and having his mind overcome his emotions. Yes, I think that's the thing. It's, it's that, you know, that elevating your game in the last minute means an elevating your game in the finals of the NBA finals. Or, or in a crucial game, it's that ability to control your emotions, that ability to control the stress, that ability to focus your mind on what needs to be done and to get your body to follow and to execute in spite of the, the, the pressure, the stress, the emotion of the moment and his ability to command that what made him, the superstar that he was. And it's what made it possible for him, ultimately to to be the closer that he was, to be as successful as he was as closing games. But that's, that's here. That's the ability to control your emotions, your ability to control what you do and how you act and how you engage with the world, even under a massive stress. And Jordan never cracked. And I agree with you about failure. I mean, there's this great quote that I really love of, of Jordan's, where he says, and I can't remember the exact numbers, you know, I took, I don't know, I'm just going to make up numbers. I took 10,000 shots, or I missed, I missed 10,000 shots in my career. More than half the shots I ever made, I missed, right? That's how I became a winner or something like that. So he understood that almost every time he, so, so over 50% of the shots he would take at the basket would miss. That's just the nature of the game. He understood that and he embraced that. Every miss was an opportunity to learn on how to take the shot better next time. And you, he also understood that you can't succeed. You can't win. You can't achieve without taking the shot, without taking the risk. And I think that is such a life lesson for everybody. If you're not in the game, if you're not taking shots, you'll never win. You'll never be successful in life. If you don't take, go out there and take a risk knowing that you will often fail. If you don't ask the woman for a date, if you don't ask your boss for a raise, if you don't go out and start a company or join a startup or whatever it is that you want to do or whatever profession you're in, take that big leap, take that big risk, you're never going to be succeed. You're never going to be successful. You're never going to be reach your full potential. That's what it requires. It requires missing shots, lots of shots, thousands and thousands of shots, more than half your shots. And yet the only way to win is to miss lots of shots. So, yes, I agree completely, and Adam finishes and says, no surprise, Kobe Bryant modeled himself after Mike. Yes, very much so. I mean, Kobe, if you look at his work ethic, if you look at the seriousness with which he took the game, the other thing that both Kobe and Michael Jordan did, every great player does in any sport is they studied the game. Team sports are not only physical. There is a massive dimension, massive dimension here of mental, not just mental, but intellectual, of understanding the game, understanding what your opponents are capable of, understanding the layout, understanding who can shoot from where, understanding what can be achieved, when to pass, when to shoot, when to dribble, all of that. And you learn that, you study that. And the amount of tape, as they say, they watch film, right? They watch film of previous games, they watch film of the opponents. They keep going and going and going to try to become better and better and better. And Michael Jordan was definitely a student of film, as was Kobe, as was all of them. My favorite player is Larry Boode, again, a real student of basketball and a master of it and a real, he didn't have the physical skills that Kobe and Jordan had, but he had the intellectual skills galore. One other aspect I want to mention is that Jordan, I think, like Kobe, came from a very difficult background, very difficult upbringing. And that only, I think, increased his determination to be the best that he could be. And it's really, he really is a role model, not in a sense of becoming a great basketball player, but a role model in a sense that you are not a product of your environment. You are not just a product of whatever. You can achieve great things. It's up to you. It's what you make of your life. It's what you choose. It's the choices you make. So, you know, don't use your background. Don't use your upbringing as an excuse. Look at people like Michael Jordan and see how, you know, what they made of their lives and how much. All right. Again, thank you, Skyler, thank you, Adam. Let's see, Hiram says, actually, Iran, the audio is great, but the video never seemed to do you justice compared to your still photos. And that's nothing as compared to me in person. I don't even know. I don't know what to say, Hiram. I don't know why the video doesn't do me justice because the video, I'm more alive in the videos. Let's see. Andrew says, hi, Iran. I appreciate your work spreading Iran's philosophy. But yeah, but if you want to ask a question, guys, you can ask it in the super chat. Don't ask it in the chat. Put it in the super chat. You can use $2 like Daniel here. Just say, Viva, Iran. Thank you, Daniel. Or Robert to say aloha, YBS fans, another adventure begins. Thank you, Robert. Oh, Hiram. Not much, but please don't stop the show. $2. So yeah, keep those dollars coming. And if you want to ask a question, ask it here. I will answer it. I can't answer the questions in the chat. If I start doing that, there's no way into it. And I'll constantly be distracted. Whoops. All right. Camera's off. One second. Why is that doing that? Sometimes this happens. Okay. Let's see if the camera will hold this now. It wasn't charging for some reason. Should have been charging. Let's plug it in. But yeah, it looks like it's charging. Okay. Let's know. God, what the hell is going on? Okay. Sorry, guys. Give me a second. The whole thing is not. All right. Camera's back on. Yeah. And off. On and off. On and off. On and off. Because of Huram's comments on the video. Give it a second. Nope. One second. One second. All right. One more try. Must be the Russians. The Russians. It says it's charging. Let's see if it'll hold the charge this time now. It's not holding the charge. Why is it not holding the charge? It was fully charged. The battery screwed up. Maybe the camera screwed up. If I need to learn how to use my iPhone as a camera. All right. Let me try one more thing. Okay. Stay with that. Why is it doing this? Getting power. It's getting power. All right. Let's run this a little bit. Let's let it charge a little bit. We'll run this audio only. Sorry, guys. Run this audio only. I do have a BSC in engineering, but not in camera engineering and not in battery engineering or whatever the hell is going on here. Equal to reality says, what are my thoughts on Apple retiring the iPhone? I don't think Apple is retiring the iPhone. I think that's a myth. I don't think it'll happen. And if they retire the iPhone, then they will replace it with something I assume even better. So I'm cool with that. I'm cool with improvement. I'm cool with getting things that are even better than an iPhone. All right. Let's see what we're going to talk about Ben and Jerry. So Ben and Jerry Ice Cream. I assume you all know the reference to Ben and Jerry Ice Cream. Ben and Jerry Ice Cream is an interesting corporate experiment, an interesting social corporate experiment in the sense that Ben and Jerry was basically founded by a couple of hippies, a couple of guys, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, who were friends. And they had completed a correspondence course on ice cream making from the Pennsylvania State University Creamery. And they opened an ice cream parlor in a renovated gas station in Dalton, Burlington, Vermont in 1978, May 1978 with $12,000 at the time, I guess the equivalent of something like $50,000, $60,000 today. And these guys turned this little ice cream store into what ultimately became a, you know, a nationwide successful chain of ice cream stores. And then of course in 1980 they started packing them into those containers and selling them in different places. In 1981 they opened another store in 1983. They built the world's largest ice cream sundae as a prop. In other words they expanded and grew and became this real dominant in what was then a new field, which is high quality ice cream, ice cream that was made of all natural, I'm not sure this is going to work, all natural ingredients and ice cream that was particularly delicious and crazy flavors, and they very much appealed I think through the flavors and through the, we'll get to how they ran the business in a minute. They appealed to this idea, to the hippies, the grown-up hippies, the yuppies now, the hippies that would become yuppies. It was a direct appeal to them and the brand was an incredible success. I think what's happening is for some reason the camera is not recognizing the, is not working off of the charge, right? So it is only working off of its battery and I, you know, it's worked in the past perfectly and I just don't know why it's refusing to accept the charge. Now there's probably a setting here, somebody who knows anything about, somebody who knows something about Sony cameras might know what the setting is, but there is a setting that allows it to take a charge and to accept the charge, but in the middle of a show I don't think I can make the change to the setting and get it right. So we're just going to have to go with audio and I'm going to have to figure this out before the next show. In a few minutes I might put on the video, but I think that I'll eat up the battery again very quickly so it'll fade again. Anyway, Ben and Jerry became one of the most well-known brands in the world in the United States and very successful. In the beginning, you know, Ben and Jerry, the founders who are super leftists and very, were very politically active and very active in what you call today social justice causes. And they became kind of spokesmen for the business of social justice, so I remember in the 90s seeing them on television regularly pitching anti-capitalist messages, attacking, you know, attacking the idea of profit maximization, attacking the idea of maximizing profits or shareholder wealth or anything like that. One of the things they bitterly complained about was that CEOs made, supposedly, too much money. The gap between the pay of the CEOs and the gap of the lowest paid employee was too high in America, it was wrong, it was immoral and they made a big, big deal out of this. And they became known as a socially responsible business and they got a lot of press from the left, you know, what do you call it, praising them for their social responsibility and how wonderful they were. And, you know, again, they built this business on this idea of social responsibility. By the way, you know, shows what is asking if it's the right charge and everything. I've used this camera with this charger, with this setup, with the exact same setup in the UK. This is why I use this camera, right, because I use it on the road. I don't use it at home many, many, many times and it's worked perfectly. So something's going on. I'll figure it out once the show is over. You know, there's maybe one thing I can still do and try something before. So we'll try one more thing, give it one more shot and then we'll accept the feat by the hands of the charger. And then, but we'll keep on going with the show because I don't want to stop the show because of this. Let's see. Give me one second. Almost there. This goes over here. And that's all connected. And that's all good. And there's a light. We'll turn on the camera and we'll see if it'll hold the charger this time. All right. Thanks. Thanks for being concerned, everybody. Anyway, Ben and Jerry were the successful company and were post-the-childs. I mean, I remember they ran a competition to try to find a CEO. But the problem was that they wouldn't pay the CEO enough because they had this ratio between the lowest paid employee and the CEO. So they couldn't find a CEO. And then they landed up hiring somebody and the sky had formerly worked in a gun manufacturer and people freaked out. The customers, the hippie customers freaked out when they heard about this and they forced them to resign. There were demonstrations, literally demonstrations of San Francisco over the choice of CEO that Ben and Jerry had picked. So Ben and Jerry has always been this symbol of leftism and of corporate social responsibility and of this kind of attitude and this kind of gig. I stopped buying Ben and Jerry sometime in the 90s, well over 20 years ago. I've not had a Ben and Jerry since then because I did not want to support them because I thought that they were harmful to the country. They were destroying, they were actively advocating against capitalism. They were actively distorting the record of capitalism and promoting what I thought was anti-capitalist ideas. And every dollar that they got out of every ice cream that you buy there, a certain percentage of the money goes to this kind of activism. Anyway, Ben and Jerry sold themselves in April 2000 to Unilever, a British conglomerate, big company, massive food giant. And what's interesting is that Unilever, when they bought Ben and Jerry, and I think the reason Ben and Jerry were willing to sell to Unilever, is that Unilever committed to carry out the company's tradition of engaging in these kind of socially responsible ideas and they actually created a board at Ben and Jerry. And this, I don't know of any other company in the world that has this, a board, an independent board separate from the board of Unilever, just to oversee Ben and Jerry. And that board was given kind of authority over the whole social responsibility issues involved. Unilever believed that a big part of the selling point of Ben and Jerry was its political and social activism. And therefore they encouraged that and they supported that and they continued that as the Ben and Jerry brand under this Unilever brand. Unilever by the time they bought Ben and Jerry was already the largest sell of ice cream in the world. But they didn't have a high quality ice cream. Ben and Jerry was the first kind of high quality ice cream that they could get. Anyway, so since then Ben and Jerry have continued in spite of having this corporate overload. And by the way when they sold to Unilever there were demonstrations in the streets of San Francisco again. That is the left hated the idea that Ben and Jerry would sell out and Ben and Jerry made, they sold the company for $360 million. Most of that was theirs. So they became centi millionaires, these two hippies. And they both stayed involved with the company. They both stayed connected to it. The board has been run by a particularly in the last few years by a woman who is well known as a social activist, as a committed leftist and super involved in social causes and left wing agenda and the whole woke thing. Anyway, where is this thing? I had this interesting article about this. Anyway, always chugging along nicely, Ben and Jerry never made a huge amount of money for Unilever, but Unilever was committed to social responsibility. It had a CEO committed himself to social responsibility in spite of that. The stock did well for a while. More recently they replaced the CEO. This CEO was even more committed to social responsibility. And yet now the stock was not doing as well as before. Now, one of the things, I think the first expansion of Ben and Jerry overseas was in, what do you call it, in 2000, no, it wasn't 2004. When did this happen? Yeah, anyway, the first expansion was an expansion into Israel. And there was an Israeli entrepreneur who lived in the United States who liked Ben and Jerry, liked the ice cream, thought the concept would work really well in Israel and he brought the ice cream to Israel and it's been a huge success. And Ben and Jerry has made a lot of money off of the ice cream in Israel. The Israeli entrepreneur got the list of all the recipes. He then got all the suppliers. He got the original ingredients. Well, not originally green, so a lot of the ingredients are Israeli made. Anyway, he grew it in Israel and it's been very successful in Israel including, it turns out, in the West Bank, including among Arabs in the West Bank. Now this has become a real problem for Ben and Jerry, right, because on the one hand they are committed to leftist causes. And one of the most popular leftist causes these days is divestment from Israel because Israel is, quote, an apartheid state and Israel is an evil state. It's an oppress of the Palestinians. And it is wrong, according to the left, to have anything to do with Israel and it's suddenly wrong to have anything to do with the West Bank, with that area which is where the Palestinians live, which is not technically a part of Israel. Israel is never next to it. And there's a huge movement in the United States to divest from Israel, to not have anything to do with Israel. And in 2016, a local Palestinian who had moved to the United States and who lived in Billington, Vermont, where Ben and Jerry had lived. Anyway, he approached, I think it was Ben, and said, hey Ben, they were working out at the gym together. Why are you selling ice cream in the West Bank? This is an evil, the Israelis are evil, the whole thing is evil. You need to stop doing this. Ben took this seriously because he's a good leftist. And he went to the board of Ben and Jerry, which has independence, and they started debating this. And early on, what they tried to do was they started buying products from Palestinian farmers. They bought almonds from Palestinian farmers. They tried to actually have the stores in the West Bank and even in Gaza run by local Palestinians. So they were making money and then they started buying milk and they started buying other products from Palestinians, but none of this satisfied. The American left, and particularly after Black Lives Matter, when the left became more engaged and as Ben and Jerry fully supported Black Lives Matter and went completely behind them. There was a big demonstration, for example, in May 2021, a year after Black Lives Matter in downtown Billington and against Israel. And the demonstration was focused on the Ben and Jerry store at the place and yelling at them and, you know, arguing that Ben and Jerry should have no business there. And indeed, you know, what happened was the board realized that all this attempt to appease had not worked, but more than that, they realized that they were not acting based on their announced principles. So that in July 2021, Ben and Jerry announced that they would cease. They would not renew the contract with the Israeli entrepreneur, that they would cease selling all Ben and Jerry products in what's called the Occupied Territories in the West Bank and even in Gaza. And that they would find a new licensee who would only sell the ice cream in Israel proper and what they consider Israel proper. This of course created a huge uproar within supporters of Israel in the United States. Israel itself was very unhappy with this. It created a little bit of a diplomatic crisis. You know, the Israeli ambassador talked to the Unilever CEO, put a lot of pressure on Unilever. And indeed, this is all at a time when the Unilever CEO is relatively new and he's even more committed to social justice. And yet the stock price is coming down and there's activists buying into the Unilever board and they're trying to shift. So Unilever then tells, you know, so there's all this uproar and there's all this agitation. And then in Israel, Israelis start boycotting Ben and Jerry so the business of Ben and Jerry collapses. So then the entrepreneur had the rights to sell Ben and Jerry in Israel sues Unilever. So then Unilever, in this amazing kind of, Unilever basically says, okay, we reject what Ben and Jerry did. We are going to sell Ben and Jerry to the Israeli entrepreneur. We're going to let him run the whole thing. The only thing he's not allowed to do, he can use the logo. He can use the background with the cows and what do you call it, the clouds and all that crap. The only thing he can't do is have Ben and Jerry's in English. You can have it in Hebrew, you can have it in Arabic, you can't have it in English and he can do what he wants with it, whatever he wants with it. And Unilever basically caved. And the Ben and Jerry both said, wait a minute, we've got a deal. And you had committed at the time of the purchase to giving us independence and giving us the authority to make these kind of decisions. And Unilever said, well, not when it comes, not an important decision and this is creating an international conflict and this is creating huge losses and this is going nowhere and there are lawsuits and everything. No, we're overriding you. So the Ben and Jerry board sued the Unilever board, which again is unprecedented. They all filed in court and they did all the stuff and the thing was in front of a judge. And I think what was happening was it got very, very close to the point where Unilever was basically saying, and remember this board that Ben and Jerry has is the two members from the Unilever board, the CEO and one of the member. But everybody else, I think there are nine members, everybody else is basically a leftist committed social justice warrior, right? And Unilever was basically, even though they were committed to social justice, bottom line, shareholder and activists were starting to put pressure on Unilever. Ultimately, the CEO has been fired, he's going to be replaced in July. But Unilever, I think, told Ben and Jerry, look, if you insist on this, we're basically going to do away with this board concept, we're basically going to get rid of the board. So what happened was Ben and Jerry and Unilever settled. It's not exactly what they settled, but the lawsuits were dismissed. The Israeli entrepreneur has the franchise and since December 15, 2022, Ben and Jerry is functioning in Israel, functioning in all of Israel, everywhere. It's selling ice cream, it's owned outright by the Israeli entrepreneur, Unilever washed their hands of Israel on the one hand of this part of Israel, just ice cream. They sell other stuff in Israel. But they've also kind of put the Ben and Jerry board in its place. Now, why do I tell you this story? Because I want to tell you the story because it's another illustration, as if we need more, but it's another illustration of the principle that the moral is the practical and the practical is the moral. And that when you do really, really dumb things, when you do things that don't make sense, when you do things like so-called social corporate responsibility, when you real function and you real, everything is dedicated to, is built around the principle of making money of profit and maximizing shareholder wealth. You can for a while get around it. And obviously Ben and Jerry themselves did. I mean, they prospered financially while running a socially responsible place because they catered to a particular crowd and a particular audience. But even they struggled to find a CEO, even they had relatively low profit margins for a high quality ice cream place. In spite of the fact that the ice cream was expensive, profit margins were very low. And then once you deliver botna, and once you deliver, which is a corporation listed and has multiple shareholders, even in a system that's semi free like our system, you can't get away with just ignoring your shareholders. You can't get away with just ignoring the marketplace. I think BlackRock these days is discovering that as funds are being pulled from BlackRock because BlackRock is more committed to ESG than they are to maximizing their investors' money, their investors' wealth. And as a consequence, people are pulling out a BlackRock. Well, the same thing is happening in Unilever. The commitment to social responsibility is ultimately undermined. Their ability to be successful as a business and as a consequence of that, they are losing that business. And Ben and Jerry will not be able to function. You know, they'll be allowed to do their social responsibility up to a point. As long as it's deemed as to be real here, as long as it's deemed to be smart marketing. As long as it's deemed to be satisfying their basic customers. Many of whom I think have now moved on to all kinds of other speciality ice cream. There's so much speciality ice cream today. I'm not sure that the buyers of Ben and Jerry anymore are attuned to social responsibility message anymore. I think those people have moved on to something else. So Ben and Jerry are another illustration of the ultimate failure of the attempt to try to bring about social responsibility in the context of a business that has shareholders and is committed to legally to have fiduciary responsibility to them. To try to have it both ways, to try to somehow figure this out, to somehow balance all these quotas. It also shows how decision making, stupid decision making, not selling in the West Bank is not achieving anything. It's denying Palestinians of a delicious ice cream. And it's denying Palestinians of a market for their milk and a market for their almonds and a market for other products that Ben and Jerry is buying in Israel. And so you can see that inconsistency ultimately results in bad performance. Unilever is suffering. It's replacing its CEO. The new CEO coming in is a lot less committed to social responsibility, a lot less committed. ESG, by the way, is starting to fade. It's starting to fade for a number of reasons. One is BlackRock is suffering. A lot of state pensions, a lot of 401Ks are leaving BlackRock because of its commitment to ESG. But in addition, ESG is now being regulated by the SEC in a way that it wasn't in the past. The SEC now wants, up until a few months ago, basically anybody could say they're ESG. You just put it as a marketing ploy. You put it on your thing. We're ESG. And if you looked at portfolios of ESG investments versus a portfolio of non-ESG investments, they were almost the same. It was just a marketing gimmick to get people to invest. What is interesting is that the SEC has come in and said, you can't just claim to be ESG unless you're really ESG. And if you're really ESG, we want to see the standards by which you're ESG. We want to see what makes you qualified as an ESG. And the SEC is really restricting the ability of hedge funds and mutual funds and other types of funds to market themselves as ESG funds. They really have to go through the hoops to try to prove themselves and to prove that they are ESG. Okay, let's take some questions. I hope you enjoyed the story about Ben and Jerry. I think I thought it was interesting. We could talk about the whole Israel-Palestinian thing sometime, but... We are 370 short of our $650 goal. I don't know if the show will go long enough to justify $650 goal, but maybe if we got to 450, that would be good, which used to be our goal or something around there. So anybody who wants to support the show, this is a great opportunity to do it. Super Chat is a great way to do it. I'm going to try to do as many of these shows as I can. I don't expect one to do tomorrow because I'm going to Exeter, which is a three-hour train ride, and a three-hour train ride back, so I won't be back in my hotel until very late. The following day I'm in Prague, and the day after that I'm in Bratislava. The day after Bratislava, I will definitely do a show, but it will be during the day, so it will be morning for you guys. But I'm not sure if I'll be able to do anything in Prague or in the first day in Bratislava. So Thursday might be the next available time for me to do a show. We will see. Jennifer, thank you. Really appreciate the support. Thank you, and thank you for the good wishes. All right, let's see. Ori says, VCs and PEs, VCs venture capitalists, PEs, private equity. Well, I have record amount of dry powder, I'm assuming, that's left over from pandemic stimulus. Will they deploy before recession? Could that lead to spike in inflation and or push recession further in the future? I think ultimately no, no, no. I don't think they're going to deploy before the recession. If you're a venture capitalist or private equity fund, you do not want to be taking a lot of risks before recession, and you also know that once a recession happens, valuations will come down and you'll be able to get much better deals during a recession and in the short aftermath of a recession. So I think a lot of funds right now are sitting in capital. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if artificial intelligence companies are getting some of that capital. But also I don't like to think of it as dry powder in the inflationary sense. The money's not sitting in a vault somewhere. The money is in a bank. That bank is basically lending it out. The money is circulating in the economy. All that stimulus money is in the economy has already had its impact on inflation. I actually think that inflation is not going to be as high as something, but you know, I still think the Fed is going to increase interest rates and we're going to see a recession. But I don't think inflation is going to be as high because I'm not convinced that the Fed post stimulus and the government post stimulus have continued to massively expand the money supply to justify inflation of 6%, 7%, 8%, 9%, 10%, maybe to justify 3%, 4%, which is again too high for the Fed. The Fed wants 2% and too high for our lives and for the cost we pay, for the price we pay for inflation. So I don't see a spike in inflation caused by VCs and PEs. I don't think they're going to deploy their dry powder before a recession. I think they're going to wait for a recession, particularly PE funds. These are running companies. They're going to wait for a recession first of all. They might need the dry powder for existing portfolio companies to help them through a dry period, to help them through a recession. That's also true of VCs to a large extent. It's going to be very difficult to raise money in months, years to come, in a couple of years to come. A lot of VCs are sitting on dry powder to support the companies they've already invested in, rather new investments. But again, they'll wait to see what happens in a recession. They'll wait to see what happens in new rounds and some of these companies' inability to raise money. So no, I don't think the VCs and PEs at the end of the day are big enough to have that big of an influence on something like inflation. Remember, inflation is primarily the result of money in the hands of the way we measure inflation, CPI consumption index, is in the hands of consumers and their demand. I don't think that the fact that the P funds are sitting on this money is going to reduce that. What will reduce demand is things like the wealth effect, people feeling that they're less wealthy than they are, and they'll reduce their buying. I think you've already seen that a little bit, or actually you didn't see it in the fourth quarter, fourth quarter consumption went up, but I expect you'll start seeing that. And I think the stimulus money is gone. So I'm not expecting inflation to get out of control here. I'm expecting a recession. Thank you, Ori. Friend Harper says, define hippie. What factor of reality does that word refer to genus differentiate? Primarily giving support on this one. Take the question as seriously as you would like, haha, just being silly. I think a hippie, you know a hippie when you see one. Okay, so what is a hippie? A hippie is a person, and this is the genus of people. It's a person with long hair, doesn't shower, and who has placed his emotions before his mind and before his reason, who holds dominantly leftist ideas in policy, has a tendency towards a combination of hedonism and nihilism. How about that? That's my best kind of off the cuff definition of hippie. Adam, I think friend Harper's worried that I might consider him a hippie. I don't think so. I don't think your hair is long enough. Adam Campbell says, before capitalism, the difference in productive and nonproductive wasn't just a wealth gap. It was often the difference between life and death. Capitalism benefits even those that despise it. I mean, you could argue that it benefits those that despise it more, that those people who are not that productive, who lived in the worst kind of poverty, who could never be successful in life, they in a sense get this amazing, comfortable, phenomenal life. They get to be productive in spite of themselves because of the benefits of capital and the benefits of technology and industrialization. You know, there's a sense in which Bill Gates's of the world, they thrive pretty much in any world, or any world where they can produce anything, whereas a lot of people don't. Think about the world population. What population would be a tenth of what it is today? 90% of the world owes its existence. 90% of human beings on planet Earth owe their existence to a little bit of capitalism, which has made it possible to feed and to clothe and to provide technology to billions of people. So a lot of it is, you know, so the benefits accrue to often, you know, the detractors of capitalism to some extent more than it is to the beneficiaries of capitalism. By the way, I think Schausbach was right because I actually replaced my international charger. I replaced it to a different one, and the camera works with this charger, and it doesn't work with the other charger. And the other charger is indeed a new one, which I think I used last time, but I'm not sure I did. And, you know, so it works with the old one, and it doesn't work with the new one. I'll have to further experiment with this, but that is a pretty amazing thing. Maybe it has to do with the 5060, but I'm pretty sure that any charger, you know, any charger that sells itself as an international charger, has to be able to deal with both 50hz and 60hz. Yeah, I don't know. Robert Naseer has long hair, so I don't know. I don't think that long hair was enough to define oneself as a hippie, but he has a guitar as well. So Robert is in suspicious territory for hippiness. Luckily he's not a leftist and he doesn't combine nihilism with hedonism. He likes to have his hedonism completely free of any nihilism. I'm kidding. Apollo Zeus says, men with facial hair are hippies, huh? Nikos, Don, it is problematic once we start defining it in terms of non-essential ideas. All right, everybody. I hope you enjoyed this shortened show. I will return with as many shows as I can over the next couple of weeks as I travel. I will also give you, as I travel, updates on how the talks are going. Tomorrow I'll be at Exeter University. I think Exeter University is the university I've given the most talks at of any university in the world. In the world, which is interesting, out of nowhere. All started because a girl who was an intern at the Ironman Institute who was a student at Exeter, she was not an objectivist and I don't think ever became an objectivist, but she was an intern at the Ironman Institute one summer. She invited me to come and speak and she ran the student newspaper at Exeter. And the student newspaper organized an event for me. That was my morality of capitalism event. And they did a phenomenal job in those 300 people in the audience. It was a great event. It was filmed by the University Film Club. So we got fantastic, really high quality video. You can watch it. It's on YouTube. And it's gotten, I think, hundreds of thousands of views on the Exeter. I think it's the most watched video. Maybe the second one I did was the most watched video ever in Exeter. Anyway, then the year after, she had left, I think, the university, but the student newspaper again invited me. And this time I did my inequality talk and again it was brilliantly attended. The video did phenomenally well. But then the student newspaper, I don't know if it went out of business or they didn't want me anymore because they had taken a shift to the left. But then other people started inviting me, right? Like there's a conservative club and there's a Liberty Club. And now it's a conservative club and the Liberty Club, the Liberty Club, I think, is run by objectivists or people very sympathetic to objectivism. They combine to invite me. Last year I gave my first talk right after, it must have been in the beginning of March last year, right after Russia invaded Ukraine. I gave a talk on the roots of war and the causes of war at Exeter University. That was the first time I'd ever given that talk. Tomorrow I'll be talking about the glories of capitalism and the evils of socialism at Exeter University sponsored by the two clubs. Armin, thank you, really appreciated. Armin's here again and getting us closer to our goal. And then, so that's going to be tomorrow. Then on Tuesday I fly to Prague to do a program giving two talks. One at Severo, Severo is an interesting place that actually has a program in objectivism where the students read, at least it's a class, it's kind of a sub-minor program. And they have a professor there who teaches it. She's a huge fan of Iron Ranch. She translated the virtue of selfishness into Hungarian. She's originally Hungarian. And she teaches this program in objectivism at Severo. She's a graduate university, run by libertarians. All the big-time libertarian economists go there and teach there and they have local faculty and they've spoken there many times. And I will speak there like in the afternoon, like at three o'clock. I can't show what I'm speaking. Oh, I'm speaking on free speech. I have to resurrect that talk. I don't exactly remember what I say in that talk. But I'll figure it out by the time I give the speech. And then in the evening I'm talking to students for liberty at a different university in Prague. So two talks, the same day in Prague. Then on Wednesday, I have to get up really early in the morning and I've got somebody driving me. I thought I had to rent a car, but somebody's actually going to drive me. One of the students is going to drive me. And we're going to go to Bruno, B-R-N-O, which is a city in the Czech Republic. And I'm going to speak at 10 a.m. at a university in Bruno, I think on capitalism. Then he's going to take me to the train station. Then I'm going to catch a train to Bratislava in Slovakia. Czechoslovakia, Czech Republic, Slovakia. This will be my third talk in Slovakia. So I'm going to talk in Slovakia. So I'll be doing two talks on Tuesday, two talks on Wednesday. Thursday is kind of an off day because I have to catch a flight Thursday to Tbilisi. And I fly from Vienna to Tbilisi. Vienna is just really close to Bratislava. So it's easy to get to. And in Tbilisi on Friday, I'm giving in one day. In one day I'm giving three talks on three different topics to three different audiences, completely different audiences at three different institutions. So three days, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, I'll be given seven talks. Again, different audiences, different audiences, different institutions. Georgia is one of my favorite places to go. As many of you know, Tbilisi is one of my favorite places to be. And I have now friends there and people who host me and to care me. And it's going to be a lot of fun. But that is seven events in three days. That's a lot even for me. And I will just mention that your support right here, the super chat support helps that happen. By the way, that's not all I'll do in Georgia. On Saturday, I'm doing two seminars. And on Sunday, I'm doing one or two seminars or one or two talks. So over the weekend, I'm doing talks as well in Tbilisi to a different, it's like they're doing a conference called ASA. Literally, they're calling a conference ASA. And it's all about Ayn Rant. And I'll be the featured speaker for that one, including some Georgian, local Georgian objectives. They're also going to be talking about it. And then Monday, I fly to Poland. And I'm giving a talk in Poland about the war in Ukraine. That'll be a very motivated audience. I'm looking forward to that. And then in Zurich, I'm doing a talk on capitalism and war. So also about the war in Ukraine. But Zurich, that'll be a very libertarian, probably anti-war group. And then that's on Tuesday. And then on Wednesday, I've got a free day in Zurich, which I hope to dedicate to some business. And then on Thursday, I fly to Budapest, the home of Orban. And I've been invited by a very, very pro-Orban university to give a talk at the Milton Friedman University. I don't think Milton Friedman would be happy to be associated with a pro-Orban university. Anyway, I'm going to lay into Orban at the Milton Friedman University. And then from there, I fly to Uppsala, Sweden, where I'm speaking at the university on Friday. And then I fly to London. And I've got talks on Saturday and on Sunday in London. And then I finally fly home on Monday. So thank you for the support. You guys helped make this happen. And I will try to livestream some of the talks. We'll see what I'm able to livestream. And now I know what combination of equipment works. We are all ready to go. Thanks, everybody. I will see you all whenever. Bye.