 Anyway, there's, all right. All right, back to the principles for a minute. Bezos started Amazon at a time when basically all the bookstores were brick and mortar and did things that no one else has ever done. Later pivoted the company to sell a whole lot more than books online and created one of the greatest companies in the world, the world's ever seen. And obviously there's a lot of virtue of independence and doing that. But now in an FCC filing, Amazon is taking aim at Musk. And there's a lot of bad things you can say about Musk, but the specific things that are said here is, quote, whether it is launching satellites with unlicensed antennas, launching rockets without approval, building an unapproved launch tower or reopening a factory in violation of a shelter in place order. The conduct of SpaceX and other Musk related companies makes their view plain. Rules are for other people and those who insist upon or even simply request compliance are deserving of derision and ad hominem attacks. And leaving aside the ad hominem attacks, how does someone build a company like Amazon and think that independence is something that's good when we have it. But if someone else acts a little bit independent, well, that's bad. They're a tall poppin should be cut down. You know, it really is hard to figure out, why and how people hold what they hold in the way that they hold it. Why don't people live by principle? Why do they feel it's okay to use government as a competitive edge? Now you could make the argument that Elon Musk does the same thing. And I think that I've seen some defenders of Amazon make that argument that Elon Musk uses government all the time to defend himself and promote his business and undermine a competition in the sense of getting deals from the government in an illegitimate way. But look, Microsoft did the same thing. If you remember, Microsoft was attacked for antitrust violations. And it was horrified by the attack. This is in the mid to late nineties. And it tried to defend itself. And there were even moments in which Bill Gates almost came close to rejecting the whole idea of antitrust. And then as soon as they settled and everything was finished, they turned around and started attacking everybody else on antitrust and suing everybody else on the basis of antitrust. And it's as if it's part of the pragmatic businessman's view that if others are doing it, it should be okay for me to do it. That is everything's legit in its pure pragmatism, right? It's short termism. It's unprincipled thinking. I don't know if to blame Jeff Bezos for this or not. He is retired after all, he's not the CEO anymore. But I don't know, maybe he supports this completely or maybe he doesn't, it's hard to tell. I think some of this is coming out of Blue Origin and Blue Origin clearly is his company. So one suspects that, yes, he is partially behind this. But this is the pragmatic streak that we're talking about. This is the pragmatic streak. I also think that this is what the mixed economy does to the better people. It grinds them down, it exhausts them. It penalizes them for being principled. It rewards the pragmatists. It rewards the people who abuse. It rewards the cronies. So if you're not a crony, you're penalized. So there's a temptation to become a crony. The whole system is rigged against the independent thinker. It's rigged against the man of principle. And it wears them down and I think ultimately, most of them, very few don't succumb to this. So there are very few who can stand on principle and not turn to pragmatism. And to a large extent, it's because they don't have a philosophy. They don't have a basis on which to stand on principle. So yeah, it's tremendously sad, but it seems to happen over and over and over again. It really does. And like I said, it's baffling to me. And the best spin I can put on it sometimes with Musk, for instance, is that he will start a project that he's going to do anyway, Starship. And he gets NASA involved. And then when the FAA says, no, you can't have a license, he runs to NASA and say, hey, these are US taxpayer dollars. The FAA is basically stealing US taxpayer dollars seeing them misspent. Will you help me get this license? And NASA does. And so he's kind of playing this regulatory arbitrage or something like that. Well, he definitely does that. There's no question he's doing stuff like that. He also clearly articulates, the case that he doesn't really care about regulators, although he seems to. So he's a very mixed character. I love the one where somebody asked him about the satellite, well, what about national regulations? Regulators, and he said, well, they'll shake their fists at the satellite because that's all they'll be able to do. I mean, I wish he lived up to that spirit, but why Bezos would do it, I think it's this almost impossibility of sticking to principle in the face of constant, not nonstop barrage against them. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbookshow.com slash support, by going to Patreon, subscribe star, locals, and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.