 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Book Show. Alright everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show on this Thursday, January 12th. Everybody is having a fantastic second week of 2023. Ready for the rest of the year, and ready for the weekend. Weekends just around the corner. Alright, a bunch of news. So we might as well just jump right into it. I do want to remind people, a lot of people who listen to these news updates are not yet subscribers to The Iran Book Show. So please go ahead and subscribe if you're getting any value out of this. That way you'll be notified when I go live. You'll be notified when there's a new show on the channel and when I'm doing live events. But yeah, feel free, just press that subscribe button, press that notification button, and life will improve dramatically, I promise. Alright, let's see inflation. The big news this morning from an economic perspective are the inflation numbers came out. Inflation has, that is, price increases. Let's be very clear about what we mean by inflation, price increases in this context. This is the CPI, the consumer price inflation. This is a particular basket of goods that the Federal Reserve has selected and then adjusts and make all kinds of adjustments that it needs to make in order to come up with a manageable number. And inflation overall, CPI, the total basket actually went down this month by 0.1%. That was primarily driven by the fact that all prices have continued to go down. A barrel of oil has gone down into the low 70s. I remember it was at 100, not that long ago. That decline in prices has a massive impact because a big chunk of what we spend money on as consumers is on gas prices. So gas prices have come down even in California. And as a consequence, the top line inflation numbers come down. Some food items have also declined quite a bit in price over the last month or so. I think bananas are down quite a bit. I don't know if you buy bananas, but if you buy bananas, you're getting a good deal right now relative to a month ago. Anyway, these, of course, numbers for December, not for January. That impacts the top number when food goes down. So that decline of 0.1% gives us an inflation number, I think, of 6.5% for the last 12 months, which is still high. But it's down from 7.1 at the end of November. But that's backward-looking. What we really care about, what we actually care about is forward-looking inflation. What's inflation going to look like into the future? That we don't know, but we do know that it was negative 0.1 in December. Now, if you start peeling some of the information away there and you look at what the Fed calls core inflation, that is the basket of goods that does not include food and gasoline, which are known to be extraordinarily volatile. If you just look at everything else that we buy, that was actually up, and that was up 0.3%. And 0.3% is significant. That is about 4% inflation annually if you project it forward. That's still way above the Fed's 2% goal for CPI inflation to be over the next 12 months. So inflation is still there. It's definitely being reduced from its height in the spring. I think partially because of slowing economic activity, which probably is mostly resulted from the Fed increasing interest rates. It is resulted from, I think, inflation expectations coming down because the God. What was I saying? Anyway, inflation is coming down because expectations are down. That's what I was trying to say. Because the Republicans won the House and the expectation is that they would put a somewhat of a break on the Biden administration's excessive spending and on deficit spending at that. So I think that combination is driving inflation down a little bit, whether it's down enough, it's hard to tell. But the real issue is not at this point so much what the actual inflation number is. The real issue is what do the brilliant central planners at the Federal Reserve think it all means? That's the only thing that matters. How do they interpret it all? And at the end that will determine how much they raise interest rates and that will determine how, you know, the value of our assets. That will determine how stocks will do. That will determine whether we head into recession or not. That will determine how many companies go bankrupt or not. At the end of the day, what really matters to the real economy, inflation matters. But what matters more urgently, if you will, is the response of the Fed, response of central planners to the inflation number. And that is yet to be seen. So we have to wait another, I think another week, week or two, in order to find out what the Fed actually does, given these inflation numbers and whether they continue to increase rates. There under a lot of pressure from the left not to increase interest rates. And from the right, I think the significant people on the right and on the left are putting pressure on them saying, no, no, inflation is already cooling. You don't have to do anything. And then there are others who say, no, no, no, unless you increase interest rates to about 5%, inflation is just going to come back or inflation is already too high and it hasn't gone down anywhere near what you want. And there is no right answer, of course, because it is central planning and nobody has the data and nobody actually knows what's going on. It's impossible to tell. So we'll see what they do and we'll see how bad it becomes. But a recession, I think we will have what is yet to be determined, I guess, is how deep it is. Okay, here's a phenomena about which you will not hear anywhere else in the news, anywhere else. Oh, just before we get to that quickly. You remember yesterday I talked about the fact that the environmentalists wouldn't let go of the drought stuff, of the drought in California and it doesn't matter how much rain falls, they won't let go of the drought stuff. Well, here's a headline from this morning's Reuters. 8am this morning Reuters has explained why weeks of rain in California will not end historic drought. Anyway, they want you to panic, they want to be afraid, facts don't want to get in the way. Now it's true, the only way to actually deal, droughts are manmade because we as a being of reason can deal with droughts. So to the extent that droughts persist, it's because we are not dealing with them, we're not dealing with the infrastructure, we're not dealing with the reservoirs, we're not dealing with the desalination plants, we're not doing the things necessary to rid us of droughts. So droughts are manmade. So there's always going to be a drought in California, there always has been a drought in California every few years, there's a drought, that's just reality. And the rain right now will relieve some of the drought, will fill some of the reservoirs, will increase the snow pack somewhat, and generally will flood the state. But they won't let go, they're panicked because so many of their policies are not to build the infrastructure, but to just punish us. A built on catastrophizing, that they can't stop catastrophizing. And their instinct is always to catastrophize, no matter whether we get good news or bad news, catastrophe is the name of the game. So I predicted this yesterday and here it is, headline this morning, why weeks of rain in California will not end a historic drought? All right, so here's the story, you will not hear anywhere else. Now you're going to have to be patient with me, because this requires some explain. But it turns out that there has been a scheme that has been promoted by certain environmentalists in alliance with certain investment banks, to find ways to restructure the debt of developing countries, of what used to be called third world countries, in a way that commits those countries to environmental protection while reducing their debt load. It's called, and I didn't make this up, this is a headline in Bloomberg, it's called the debt for nature swap, debt for nature swap. And this is a new ESG qualifying, this is important, new ESG qualifying money maker for the investment banks. It's a way for these third world governments to get reduced debt burden. And it's a way for the natural, for a lot of the environmentalist groups to score a win. And I was reading this and I was going, wait a minute, I get a win, win, win, but there's no way win, win, win can work here. Somebody has to be held with a bag. You can't restructure this debt and then commit, the government committing a significant amount to conservation and nobody pay the price. There's a price to be paid here. All right, so I'm going to run through an example for you and we can together figure out who's paying the price and why they're willing to pay the price. And this is really, really important. Why are they willing to pay the price? And this has to do a lot with moral high ground. It has to do a lot with feeling good about yourself. It has a lot to do with ESG qualifications, right? So here's how to work with Belize. Belize is the small country on the Caribbean in Central America, right? So the Nature Conservatives set up a Delaware-based subsidiary. So let's start off, Belize has this debt, $364 million. They're having real problems paying interest on it. They have people hold these bonds. So the bond, they actually have 553 million bond that the government holds, that it owes to investors. And it's struggling to pay this back. And Belize is a relatively poor country. But Belize is also an important country because it sits on beautiful coral reefs. It's got a lot of, I guess, tropical forests. It's considered environmentally, quote, important. All right, so here's what we do. The Nature Conservatory sets up a Delaware-based subsidiary called Belize Blue Investment Company and raised $364 million from Credit Suisse. So the Investment Bank, Credit Suisse, gives this new entity, Belize Blue Investment Company, $364 million. This entity, we'll call it BBIC, the Belize Blue Investment Company. And Blue, by the way, is signifying green, but blue is green in the ocean, green in the sea, right? So BBIC takes this money and loans this to Belize. And Belize uses this money to pay back 553 million in debt at a 45% discount from the bondholders. Now, here's the first thing that you have to ask yourself. Why are bondholders willing to take a 45% discount? That's a big discount. That's a big discount. I mean, basically, these bondholders bought the bonds for $100 and now they're expected to sell them back for $55. Is Belize on the verge of bankruptcy? Is this really, you know, there's so much risk of bankruptcy and maybe in bankruptcy they'd get $10 on the 100 that they're willing to sell for $55? What's going on here? Why are they willing to write it down by so much? Now, you could argue part of it is that, yes, Belize is probably not the safest people to lend money to. And these bondholders are maybe happy to get some of their money rather than none of their money. But that's not the whole thing because the probability of Belize actually going bankrupt is not that high. Not that high, I don't think. So what else is going on here? Well, the government has promised to use the savings that they got. So they're going to have to spend a lot less money on debt repayment, all those interest payments that they would have to spend. And they have saved 45% of the bond issuance that they will now not have to pay back. That's being written off. So they've committed to put that money away for environmental concerns. They're going to, let me just see, they are going to use it for conservation of the coral reef. They're going to use it for something about mangrove plants, whatever. They're going to invest, they're going to use that money to beef up environmental protection and fragile mangroves and coral reefs in the Belize area. Now, why would investors care about this? Well, investors care because they get to say they're the good guys. They get to pat themselves on the shoulder. They get to declare to the world that they have been good citizens, that they have been moral, that they are willing, they've invested in green stuff. They probably get some ESG credits. Some of these investors, I guess most of these investors are institutions, they're not individuals. And they get to put some kind of ESG gold star next to their name in the future. They get a lot of this good stuff attributed to them. And for that, instead of making a charitable contribution to some institution, they actually got to write down some debt instead, which some risk was associated with it. So they get, in a sense, a charitable contribution, which they write off in taxes. They get gold star for being good environmentalists. And they get a little bit of cash from selling the bonds that might have been worth less than the cash that they raised. But probably not, they're probably worth more. So that's one half of the transaction. But now, Credit Suisse has $364 million. What's Credit Suisse going to do with this loan, right? Credit Suisse then creates a special purpose vehicle in the Cayman Islands. And it issues $364 million in blue bonds to finance the deal. Remember, every time the bond has a blue next to it, it gets that gold star, and it probably gets that ESG stuff, and it gets all kind of social environmental credit for what it's doing. Because blue is green, it just applies to oceans, something like that. So then the special purpose operation then sells these loans, right? Now the loan is smaller. So Belize only has to pay now back a loan of $364 million instead of $553 million because the investors had to write off. Now Credit Suisse, who owns this loan, now has to sell bonds to make up the $364 million on its book. So it then basically then, once that happens, Belize now has new bond holders that bought the bonds from Credit Suisse, from the special purpose entity in Credit Suisse, in order to finance all of this. So Belize now has to pay back a new smaller loan from BBIC, remember this Belize Blue Investment Company, over 19 years with an interest rate starting at 3%, rising to 6% in 2026. It must set up a $24 million conservation endowment, so this is what Belize has to do, it sets up this conservation endowment, and it commits the spending $84 million on conservation and to protect 30% of the oceans. Now here's an important part of it. It turns out that Credit Suisse is having trouble selling this new debt to investors because hey, what's behind this debt and how do they know it's going to pay back? Is Belize really behind it? Is Belize capable of paying back? Nobody really wants to buy this debt even though it's blue. There's a real challenge. So guess who steps in here? So in order to facilitate this final piece of selling the bonds to other investors in order to fund this whole chain, this whole transaction and free up all this money for conservation, what is required is that the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, I don't even know that you knew that such an entity existed, but the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, it's not the IMF and not the World Bank, this is a U.S. entity directly U.S., insured the BBIC loan. So it sold insurance, it basically didn't sell insurance, provided insurance, over the BBIC loan basically putting the U.S. government on the hook if Belize can pay. So if Belize can pay, the bondholders who sit at the end of this, like Belize now owns $364 million really to this credit suites entity which owes this money to the people who bought its bonds, if that chain is broken, you, most of you, not all of you, the U.S. taxpayer are now on the hook for it. So this is beautiful, right? Belize cures a $553 million deficit with a plan that saves its oceans. And this is amazing. It cut the government, it cut the country's debt by 12% of GDP, it reopened the country's access to financial markets, redirected money from destined for fund creditors into the local economy, primarily into local environmental protection. Belize then promised to fund $180 million over two decades to protect its oceans. And investors were glad to have backed a worthy cause. They got the goldstone. This is beautiful. A combination of public funds, you know, public private enterprise, private funding, public initiatives, win, win, win, win, win, win, win, everybody wins. Except the initial bondholders lost, they took a big right off after that without going into bankruptcy, without seeing maybe they could get a much higher amount. They might have been able to get 80% of their money back instead. They only got 55%. We, the taxpayers, got hit with insuring something, probably is going to be okay. But imagine this on scale. We're talking about now taking this model from Belize and going out there and offering this scheme to countries in Africa, to countries in South America, to countries in Asia, all over the world. Sri Lanka wants to do this on billions worth of debt. Is the United States taxpayer going to be behind all of this? And if not the US taxpayers, the IMF is the, which is the US taxpayer in the end of the World Bank, which is the US taxpayer in the end. And it's not, this is not global, this is not global sovereignty, governance. This is US governance. This is the US doing all of this. This is ultimately the US government providing insurance. There's no governance here. This is a multinational deal involving many countries, but there's no, the governance is all going to be local governance. There'll be, you know, the bonds are going to be under the laws of the Cayman Islands. The insurance is going to be provided by the US. That's not global governance. There's no global entity here. Indeed, the World Bank and IMF are global governance. The IMF and the World Bank do what the United States tells them to do. It's the number one shareholder. It is the dominant player. It provides them with all the funding. I mean, there's this fallacy that there's some kind of global governance going on in the world. There is no global governance. It's whatever the US wants, and you know, in some cases what the Chinese want. Nobody cares what most other countries want. They can vote on it all they want in the United Nations. Nobody pays attention to the United Nations. It doesn't actually do anything. World economic forum is not global governance. It's a gathering. It's a think tank. They advocate for global governance. They would like to see global governance, but there is no global governance. They have no direct, legally enforceable in any kind of sense. All they can do is advocate for ideas and try to influence people through ideas. They have no power. Zero, zilch power. I know. Catastrophizing. Keep at it, guys. Keep catastrophizing the world. It really helps. This is a scary scheme, not so much because it believes, but because of the potential of this to escalate and to grow and to become huge. By the way, guess who makes money off of this? Guess who does very well in a scheme like this? They make money no matter what happens. No matter what happens, they make money. Credit Suisse. Yes, the investment banks. The investment banks are facilitating this. The investment banks are taking commissions left and right. Now, the investment banks might be buying some of these bonds or selling some of these bonds. They might not be making a lot of money on that, but they are making huge amounts of money off of the consultants and the lawyers and the people who say, all the people in the Cayman Islands who set up these entities, who monitor these entities, the people, and of course, believes it well. A lot of people make a lot of money here. Indeed, this is very, very, very expensive to set up. One of the complaints against this is how expensive it is. And some environmentalist groups hate it because they hate the fact that the investment banks are making money off of this and benefiting off of this. They view this as a sellout, a way to, yes, maybe it protects the environment, but it's a way of selling out. They're much easier, better, more direct ways to do this. Maybe Belize could just default on the bonds and then take the savings and invest directly in it. Why give a bunch of third parties profits over all this? But I also want to emphasize here the power of this idea of getting a gold star. ESG is not without real implications to help people invest, but this idea that it's moral to sacrifice for the environment has a real impact on people and the way they invest and the way they allocate capital has a disastrous impact on allocation of capital. And this is an example where they feel good, they're willing to take a huge hit cut, they're willing to take a huge loss in order to pretend that they're better off. And there you have the power of moral persuasion. It's really quite amazing that this goes through and it's big and it's getting bigger. So this is a story I think from Tereo, yesterday. No, actually late 2022, debt for nature swaps gained traction among developing countries. Green ESG, this is all under the Green ESG title, 58 of the world's developing countries. 58, most vulnerable to climate change, have almost 500 billion of debt servicing payment due in the next four years. 500 billion, imagine doing this at $500 billion and imagine if the United States actually got guaranteed all this. 500 billion. Now that's the kind of news you're not going to hear anyway and not going to get critiqued. By the way, the subheading of this story, which was yesterday, this is the story. Wall Street New HD Money Making Promises Nature Conservation Without a Catch, or With a Catch. The subtitle is Belize's Home to a Threatened Car-A-Reef in Mountains of Sovereign Debt. It became a test case for a new kind of finance that mixes debt relief and environmental protection. The world is insane, people. It's crazy. And this is just another headline. I don't have time to talk about this. This is another headline. Why Fund Managers Started Worrying About Biodiversity? If I must realize that if they really want to get an impact, have an impact on the world, they need to get the financial community behind them. That's the whole basis of ESG. And here you get biodiversity, what's that got to do with finance? And it goes on and on and on. These things get entrenched. You get whole institutions dedicated to these causes because they make money off of them. And it's almost impossible to fight at that point. All right, quickly. I don't have a lot to say about these two stories. I'll just mention them quickly. They're in the news. They're big. I guess they're big in the news right now. We'll see what kind of impact they have at the two big stories. One is the classified docs. As you know, there was a raid on Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago. They discovered quantities of top secret and secret documents there. They had already transferred to the National Archives to compound requests and upon subpoena documents. But then he had said he had given everything, but obviously he was lying because there was a bunch of secret and top secret documents in his home. Clearly he knew about it. So clearly it was visible and evident and people around him knew about it. And he was lying. So the FBI raided it and took those documents and there's a question of whether to indict him or not. Now it turns out that a cache of similar documents, we don't know exactly how similar, but again classified documents, was found in a non-profit that Biden had set up when he left the White House after he was VP. And that had been turned over to the National Archives. And now it turns out that there's a second batch of classified documents found somewhere in Biden's office or former office. And this is just, I mean, who knows if we go to the Social Obama's house and we say, I mean this just shows many things. But obviously Trump's stupidity, this is something that everybody does, it turns out. And all Trump needed to do was when asked for these documents just turn them over and because he had taken a large amount and this became evident. And he just needed to turn them over when he was asked to by legal authorities. But he was playing a game. So it just showed how stupid he was. Second, I think this clearly shows that just too many frigging classified documents. How about we declassify 80% of all the government documents that are termed classified? I think, I've said this in the past, I said this when Trump's home was visited by the FBI. Two-minute stuff in government is classified. They work for us. They are our servants, they are our representatives. How dare they keep secret from us? So I understand there's some secrets you have to keep. I don't know military strategy, names of spies, ways in which we accumulate information about our enemies. Yeah, there's some things that should not be secret. But almost everything else should not be, should be public. There should be no, America still has these courts that are secret courts. That's absurd. So open it up, declassify in mass. Do you know they still haven't released all the documents, they've released almost all the documents, but not all the documents from the assassination of JFK. There's still some documents that are redacted out of, I don't know, national security grounds. 60 years later, the spies are either dead or retired. The means by which we accumulate intelligence are not the same as they were back then. This is insane. And it's not because there's some conspiracy around JFK's death, it's just bureaucratic inertia. Oh my God, if we release this information, now want that information, let's not give them this, and they'll expect more. It's just inertia. It's easier not to release than to release. But they forget the bureaucrats, the politicians. They forget. They work for us. You don't keep secrets from your employer. Let me say it again. You don't keep secrets from your employer. All the information the United States government has belongs to us. To stop having so many classified documents, and you won't catch them in politicians' offices. And finally, Hunter Biden is back in the headlines. He's going to be a lot in the headlines because Republicans are going to make sure that he's in the headlines. He's going to be dragged in front of Congress. Other people will investigate their research. I hope that when Democrats take the House of Representatives next, they will engage in, or maybe they can do this in the Senate. They will engage in researching the activities of the children of maybe George Bush and the children of Donald Trump. I'm really, really curious in particular about the huge hedge funds that both former Treasury Secretary has launched with a lot of money from people who he got to know while being Treasury Secretary and might have provided favors for. And it would be really, really interesting to see the justification for Kushner's hedge fund and the billions of dollars that the Saudi world family invested in it. Given the number of times Kushner traveled to Saudi Arabia as part of the Trump administration, it would be great if we investigate all the corruption of politicians, former politicians and their children. But Hunter Biden is corrupt, so sure, let's investigate him as well. Absolutely, he's absolutely corrupt. I think there's very little doubt about that. He was making $500,000 a year by sitting on a board of a Ukrainian company that he had no knowledge or understanding of. He clearly tried to raise money and raised money around China and tried to leverage his name to do that. To what extent was Biden himself involved? We still don't really know. We will find out. Maybe from these investigations, maybe not. It's going to be impossible to say. It was interesting that already the New York Times ran a defense, a cover story today, long, long story about Hunter Biden basically saying, look, he's probably corrupt. He's a bad guy. Yeah, there's probably a lot of stuff against him. But no, no, we're convinced that Joe Biden had nothing to do with this. How we convinced that Joe Biden had nothing to do with this? Because the Biden family told us Joe Biden had nothing to do with this. I mean, that's real reporting. That's real journalism from the New York Times as usual. So the New York Times is already running interference for Hunter Biden. People are concerned about politics with Twitter, political influence on Twitter. We've had political influence in places like the New York Times and other places forever. Why is anybody shocked about Twitter? I don't get it. But yes, the New York Times is clearly running interference right now for the Biden family. The nice thing about the world in which we live is that there is alternative media. And in this case, pretty big time alternative media. And in this case, it's the Washington Post, sorry, the New York Post. The New York Post ran a story on the same day as the New York Times story. Basically, the New York Post story basically is debunking or raising a lot of questions, not debunking really, raising a lot of questions about the New York Times story. They must have got an early version of the article, a pre-press version of the article, managed to write it. So we're going to get a back and forth between the New York Times and the New York Post around the Hunter Biden story. If you remember, it is the New York Post that broke the Hunter Biden story, a laptop story, that piece of the story before the elections in 2020. And this back and forth is going to continue. We're going to see this in Congress. We're going to hear a lot about Hunter Biden. We're going to discover to a shock, surprise, disappointment, and just bewilderment that politicians and their families benefit from their name, benefit from their influence, benefit from the fact that they were in politics, benefit from all kinds of ways, and all kinds of ways from foreign governments, from investment banks, from, yeah, isn't that shocking? It's super surprising. Just like I was shocked when a senior Republican who was, he wasn't Speaker, he was the number one in the Republican Party when there was a minority in the House at some point in history, and he lost, he lost, I'm not going to reveal his name, but he lost his seat and within weeks he was hired by an investment bank for a million dollars a year. Guess why? Because he's super smart, because he knows finance? No, because he gives them political connections, which they want. So they're all, they're all doing this. All right, let's see. All right, don't forget if you're new to the Iran Book Show, don't forget to subscribe. We are, we've got about 100 people watching live, $1.50 from each of them would actually get us to our targets. We're quite a bit behind, but, you know, we've been behind before. So, you know, $1.50 from everybody listening right now would get us to where we need to go. Mike, thank you, Eric, thank you, Adam, thank you, Vladimir, thank you, Danny, thank you for becoming a member. And let's see, Wes, thank you, Marilyn, thank you, Shazba, Shazba, we'll get to, he's got a question. All right, those other people didn't ask questions, but contributed something. Thank you all. All right, let's just jump in with Shazba. He says, what environmentalists say is the solution to drought? Well, the solution to drought is primarily to reduce the amount of water we consume. So it's about stop having lawns, stop having grass, stop having plants in public areas or in private property in Southern California. So stop having stuff that needs watering. It's Southern California's desert, in a sense, return most of the land to desert. So if you want to have a nice backyard with grass, don't just let it be shrubbery like it should be in nature. It means recycling more water, it means for them, it means fewer people living in California. I mean, environmentalists love the idea of getting people to leave, particularly the cities, and get people to leave California. It means using less water in any way that we can, right? That's their solution to drought, but primarily it means ultimately, if you push them, fewer people because, you know, but imagine not being able to grow grass, not being able to have trees, certainly in public spaces they want to force local governments to stop watering, just to stop watering. And remember, if you stop watering in Southern California, it's basically all desert. It's basically all desert, and that's what they want it to return it to. I mean, it's not desert like Las Vegas, but it's very close. Apollo, thank you, Maryland, thank you, John, thank you, Colleen, thank you, TZ, thank you. So, yeah, we're getting close, but it's still going to be about 50, let's say about 50 for the remaining people to get us to where we need to go, even though some of the people did more than about 50, so anyway, that's where we are. All right, Alex, what is your opinion on the risk taking strategies of big banks? Should you blame them for chasing after easy money, and to which extent government regulations are to blame? I mean, it's all government regulations. It's 100% government regulations. This is not easy money, is not typically what bankers do, and there is no easy money in an unregulated environment. In an unregulated environment, all risk is borne by the banks, it's shareholders, it's bondholders, it's all internalized. But given regulations, given deposit insurance, given to big to fail, given the extent to which the government is involved in the banking system to the extent that I think, that I think, to the extent that government is involved, I think banks are not even private. They're basically government subsidies. You know, Dodd-Frank, I mean, even before Dodd-Frank, but the banks have been nationalized to some extent. I think I've told the story before. But every day, before the financial crisis, every day at the offices of J.P. Morgan Chase, 150 regulators went to work in the offices of J.P. Morgan Chase, at the headquarters, where the COSIS, 150 regulators went to work in the offices of the bank. That is true in all our big banks. Regulators have offices. They have to give a stamp of approval to almost every decision being made. But they also guarantee the losses, deposit insurance. They guarantee losses on a much broader extent at the big banks that's called too big to fail. And therefore, what we've done is we privatize the gains of the banks and socialize their losses. So banks can't lose. There's no way for a bank to lose. If they lose money, then they get bailed out. Shareholders don't lose. Not in the long run. And bondholders don't lose. They get bailed out immediately. Look at the financial crisis. Banks did crazy things except for Lehman Brothers. Nobody actually went on it. It was complete insanity. And that's the lesson learned. So I blame regulations through and through. Banks, given the set of incentives that they have, have every incentive to the world to take on huge risks, make as much money as quickly as possible, and move on. Thanks, Alex. Appreciate the question. All right. I have only two questions left, which is not a lot of questions. So we're almost done. Which is fine. 45 minutes is fine. But we are $130 short. So if somebody wants to help us out and make the $250 goal, so we don't, I think this, I think we've made it every single day this year. So maybe I think that's true. That'd be great. If not, all right. Michael, how do you deal with stress? Has it never really hampered you? You've always been good at repressing it. Well, you don't repress it. Repressing is never good. You want to control it. You want to manage it. You want to be able to function with it. See, I don't think stress is a bad thing. Stress, for the most part, is a good thing. It's a motivator. Stress tells you the things that need to get done. I don't know what it means to have no stress. It means you're not pushing yourself. It means you're not working hard. It would be like having no, what was my app? My fitness app calls it, I think it calls it stress, actually. My fitness app says we have recovery and we have strain. And to advance, to get better, you have to have strain. You have to put strain on your muscles to get stronger. Stress is the manifestation of the fact that you're pushing yourself. You're pushing yourself at work. You're pushing yourself in the things that you're doing, in your plans. Now, sometimes you push too much. Stress can become a detriment. And certainly it happens to me. And it can become a challenge under those circumstances. And then you have to manage it. And sometimes you have to slow down and say, okay, just like with physical activity, sometimes in order to push yourself, you strain your muscles too much, your body sends you signals, slow down, you need to recover better and you slow down for a while, you rest for a while and you pick it up again. Stress is a signal that says, okay, you're pushing yourself, you're pushing yourself. But then if you can't cope, if the stress is so, it becomes so debilitating that you can cope, you have to, that's a signal to slow down, to take a breath, to clear your desk, to take a little bit of rest from the planning, the activities that you're doing. And that's how I manage it. I let it provide the signals for how and what I'm doing. I tend to generally in life, you know, generally over commit. I think yesterday I posted these numbers. I don't know if you guys saw them. I posted it on Twitter. Numbers from 2022, I finally got a chance to get those, to get the aggregate numbers of kind of what I did last year. And I don't remember them, so I'm looking up. There it is. Okay, so I did last year, I did 87 live events. Almost all of them, you know, 87 live events in 24 different countries. Now they include, one of the countries in the United States, I did, I probably did more events in the United States than any other country, but I did a lot of 24 different countries. 87 live events. I did 186 live episodes of the Iran Book Show. 186, that's on average one every two days. I did an episode of the Iran Book Show throughout the year. And then I published, you know, Christian of course, published 679 videos on YouTube that includes the live episode, it includes, you know, posting my talks, it includes all the short videos, it includes everything else, right? But that's just one of my jobs of the three or four different things that I do in life, right? So, you know, you manage stress. You know when it's signifying yes, that you're pushing yourself and that's a good thing, and when it's signifying, you're going over, slow down. All right, Marilyn, and I'm in my 60s. I'm early, very early 60s. Still, I'm in my 60s. I got a lot done last year. And this year looks like it's going to be, you know, as big if not more, I'm doing more shows. I think I'm going to average a show a day this year. So, you will have 300 live shows this year, or something like that if we continue. So, yeah, I mean, it's, life is about growing, and it's about pushing yourself. Armin, thank you, Armin got us within $10 of our goal. So, thank you, Armin, $100. You've been fantastic, really fantastic. Okay, Marilyn says, how does one protect an ocean? Well, here are the ideas to protect the coral reefs in the ocean. You can protect the ocean by all kinds of ways. Again, protect the ocean. I don't know what that even means, but what they mean by it is you can keep pollution out of it. You can keep plastic out of it. You can prevent people from diving and taking coral reef. You can dive and prevent people from killing some of the fish at the coral reef. You can prevent people from, again, polluting the coral reef, things like that. Now, it's super amazing how resilient these natural things are. And, you know, my view is the best way to deal with coral reef is to privatize it. It's relatively easy to privatize coral reef as compared to the rest of the ocean. And that'll provide incentives to people to sell the right for people to dive, but they'll sell it under particular restrictions. You can't do certain things because there'll be a direct incentive to take care of the coral reef because that's how you make your money. Okay, PB, re-Nikas conversation on looking sharp. I think it would increase the appeal of your brand. A good tailor will make big difference. Many don't know fitted formal menswear actually extremely comfortable. It ain't happening. PB, stop even promoting it. You know, I don't like formal wear. I've no interest in formal wear. I don't like the way it makes me look, feel. I don't find it comfortable even when it's tailored. Again, to be on video in formal wear I think is absurd and ridiculous. I am in short sleeves. I am in shorts and barefoot right now. And I intend to be that way. And going on stage, I mean, the most formal I could imagine doing, you know, is what I do today, which is a jacket and a nice shirt. It's a Hugo Boss jacket. It's a nice jacket that looks good on me. I usually take the jacket off because it's uncomfortable and it gets warm. So I am in a shirt and slacks. You know, the only other look I would consider is the Steve Jobs look of some kind of, not a total neck, but some kind of comfortable type of T-shirt and slacks. But you're not going to catch me in a tie. It ain't happening. I really care what you guys think. I really don't. I don't care what my, and even if it increased my brand, my brand is comfort and my brand is informality. I love Silicon Valley partially because of the informality of the place. I hate going to meetings in New York where everybody dresses up. I think it's fake. I think it's false. I think it's, I think it's pretentious. And they hate it and they do it anyway. I've only worn a tuxedo once in my life because I was best man in a wedding. I don't expect to wear a tuxedo ever again in my life unless, you know, it's a wedding and I'm kind of required. That's, that's it. That's my, you know, my last statement on it's who I am. It's how I grew up. It's ingrained in me and that is not going to change. That is the Iran book. You take it or leave it. And at least that's part of Iran book and you can take it or leave it. That's it. It's, it's, this has been my view since I was a kid and it hasn't changed. I've, I've given in to the formality. I've worn suits and ties for years. I wore a suit and tie for years and enough. I, you know, I did it because I thought it made me more presentable, more credible, older, more mature. I'm already old and mature. I don't need all that. I wore Chanel. Good for Rand. I don't object to you dressing up. You want to wear a three-piece suit? Fine. You do. I don't have philosophical objection. I don't do it. Won't do it. Even if I went on television. Won't wear a tie anymore. That's it. And, and you know, the funny thing is if I said I'm going to wear a tie because I'm wearing Chanel, then Ken on the chat would say, you know, he's just a cult member. He's just doing whatever I'm wearing says when I say I'm going to wear whatever I want. He says, but I'm in worship Chanel. I mean, you can't win with with some of the people on my chat. It's, it's quite funny. J.J. Jigby says, would you consider doing a complimentary review of the menu since it's new and on topic you know about? I saw it. It seems to be saying that penteciousness is all its forms is bad for art. I mean that in and of itself is good. The question is how horrible is the movie itself? That is, is it worth my time going to watch it? So I might watch it, but I just, you know, if it's going to be creepy and if it's just going to be about pateciousness, fine, but if it's going to be turned into a real creepy, disgusting, horrible thing, then I just, I just, I just don't, don't want to do it. $10 guys to make the goal. $10. That's it. Thank you, everybody. Arufeels says, you want to deserve many more followers. I guess not, because I don't wear a tie. So maybe if I wore a tie, I'd have $100,000 by now. Who knows? Who knows? But you know a big reason that I like Texas, I liked California and I like Puerto Rico is the informality of all three places and I love and I, and I like growing up in Israel. I like the informal. I'm an informal guy, if you've ever met me, I think you know that I'm pretty informal. All right, thank you guys. Armin came in. I didn't expect he wasn't supposed to be you, Armin. It was supposed to be somebody else with the $10. But thank you. I appreciate the support, guys. And I will see. Oh, tonight. Quick plug for tonight. Tonight, I'm interviewing Adam Marsoff. Adam Marsoff is a professor of law at George Mason University in Virginia. He is a world authority on intellectual property rights. We're going to talk intellectual property rights. Patents, good time for you guys to chime in on the whole patent issue, particularly you libertarians out there. We will talk about property rights more broadly. I know some of you had questions about property rights. We'll talk about the law and constitution more broadly, how to protect property rights, a state of property rights protection in America today. What he thinks of the current Supreme Court? What he thinks of the prospects of this Supreme Court upholding property rights in the future? So what in the years to come? So this is a wide ranging all over the place. But a lot of this, a lot of where we go and what questions we ask and what kind of topics we cover, will depend on the questions you want to ask. So Rafael, yes, Rafael is from Brazil. And he's a big fan. I have a lot of fans in Brazil, which I like. I will be in Brazil, by the way. For those of you who don't know, I will be in Brazil. I will be at Forum Libertad in Porta Alegre in April. So please, if you're anywhere in Brazil, if you're a fan, come to Porta Alegre, come say hello. Maybe we'll do an event for your unbooked show followers. We can organize something. But come and visit. I'll also probably be vacationing in Rio de Janeiro for a little bit and maybe do an event in São Paulo. We'll see. But certainly, I'm definitely booked now to be in Porta Alegre at Forum Libertad in April, April 13th, I think. OK. Oh, so don't forget to come tonight. 7 p.m. East Coast time. 7 p.m. East Coast time. Armin, thank you. Really, really appreciate the support. Your monthly support, which you just initiated, is incredible. And all the super chats are thank you. And don't forget to come and ask Adam Masaf really, really, really hard questions. All right, everyone, I will see you all tonight and tomorrow.