 The radical fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rocks. This is The Iran Book Show. Hey everybody, welcome. Welcome to Iran Book Show. This Friday night, we just got back from a trip. Well, it's the Midwest. Well, New York in the Midwest. So speaking to her, I just got back today, this afternoon. I'm half asleep, so we'll see how we do and how long we can go because where I am half asleep. Ali, on the other hand, is here. Electricity is back, I guess, in Caracas, Venezuela, at least for the time being. So welcome back, Ali. It's good to have you here. And of course, she has her $600 goal, so don't disappoint us. She's been gone for a while, so help her out. Brian has already started herself with a $20 question, so thank you, Brian. We'll get to that in a little while. So I spent a week speaking at a variety of different universities. I'll fill you in on that in a minute. We're going to talk about elections on Tuesday. It would be nice to be able to comment on it immediately, but I was on the road and there was no way to do it. I was speaking three of the nights. I was speaking one night. I was flying, so there was just no chance to get the setup going and actually do it. Oh, Ali's not in Caracas, she's in Barinas, Barinas, Venezuela. Still no electricity, you know, wherever you are in Venezuela. We'll talk about Democrats losing in the elections on Tuesday. We'll talk about Zillow. We'll talk about the Fed starting to tape, at least if we have time. If not, we'll talk about that tomorrow. Zillow lost, I think, 25% of their market cap. Their stock dropped 25% yesterday or today. I can't keep track of days when I travel, so one of these days. Yeah, so that's kind of the program for today. Again, don't forget to use the Super Chat to get us the $600 for today. Today's the first show in November. I have to say, guys, October was superb. You guys did a great job financially on the Super Chat. One of the best months we've ever had. Not quite the best, but one of the best. So thank you and good job. Let's make November equally good, although November might have fewer shows because I'm going to be traveling quite a bit in November. We'll see. I might try to do some shows from Guatemala when I'm there. I'll be even closer to Ali. Well, I'm pretty close to Ali now. I think Puerto Rico is actually closer to Venezuela than it is to Miami. Anyway, Monday I flew into New York State. I flew into Ithaca, New York, and gave a talk that evening at Cornell University kind of a debate. It was a debate between me and one of the professors there about the role of government. He was a standard, I guess. Couldn't really tell if he was a left of center, left of center, right of center, but probably left of center. But generally, yeah, government needs to do what markets can do and help out and markets fail. And we need to assess every policy needs to be assessed independently. And, you know, I had the principal document about the role of government. So I thought that was pretty good. By the way, video of I think all of these events, I think all for maybe five even events, hopefully will be available. So once I get it from the students, we'll load it up and I'll probably release it. Maybe next week when I'm Guatemala, I'll be releasing the videos to you guys if you're interested in watching them. I then flew from there from Cornell. I flew to, and Cornell is, you know, a really good school. So it's great to have exposure to some of the top, at one of the top law schools in the country, some of the smartest kids, some of the smartest legal students in the country. And so, you know, that was cool. Then I flew to Michigan. I spoke at Northwood. I think some of you were there. So that's exciting. Jennifer was there and Robert was there. I know Jennifer and Robert on the chat. And I gave a talk there about, what did I give a talk about there about inequality, I think. Yeah, inequality. We got into a little bit into CRT, but mostly inequality. I thought we'd get a lot more questions about CRT, but we didn't. Students were generally pretty, pretty shy at Northwood. But we had a good turnout, and it was a good event. And I think the video of that will come out really good because it was professionally done. There was a good mic. There was a professional camera. It was a nice auditorium. Generally, Northwood is an interesting university. It's kind of a sister school to Hillsdale. So to the university, Hillsdale is known for the university. The only university in the United States that doesn't get federal funds. Northwood is related to Hillsdale in some way. I guess Northwood is the business school equivalent of Hillsdale. Hillsville is more of a liberal arts university. And so the Young Americans for Liberty at Northwood invited me. They're quite conservative. But both the guy at Cornell, the student who invited me in Cornell, is a regular listener to the show. He is a huge Iron Man fan. He considers himself an objectiveist. So it's great to see an objectiveist at one of the top law schools in the country very active in the federalist society and inviting me to come. So Northwood was great. Had a good talk. Had to hang out with some of the folks from Michigan. Went out to dinner. And then, oh, so here's my story from Michigan. This is a Michigan story. Jennifer's heard this, but I don't think anybody else has. So I'm driving from Northwood, which is in middle of Michigan, to where my next talk is in Michigan State, which is an hour and a half, I think, away. And it's night. It's probably 11. 11.30 at night. The roads, some of the driving was on what I call farm roads, relatively narrow roads, one lane in each direction. Pitch dock, no lights. You know, and I'm driving. It's late at night. There are very few cars on the roads. I'm driving 55, 60 miles an hour maybe on these roads. And suddenly, on one of these roads, one of these one direction on each direction going, suddenly, out of nowhere, right in the middle of the road, there is, there's Bambi's father, right? This big buck with big horns, and he just stands there and he's staring at me. You know, last minute, I swerved to the right, you know, just get off the road just a little bit, swerved back onto the road, just missed him. But as Jennifer pointed out when I told her about this the next day, this is why they say, my first experience, this is why they say, do you in the headlights? He just stared, he stood there. He didn't move out of the way. He just stood there right in the middle of the road. God, it was super scary because he was big. This is not a little deer. This is not a Bambi. This is Bambi's dad, right? Big Antelias, and if I had hit him, I probably wouldn't be here talking to you. I'd probably be in hospital right now. The car would have been, who knows, totaled, because, you know, I was driving fairly fast, and I only saw him, right, the last minute. You see, because he's dark, right? The skin is dark, the eyes are a little glimming, so you see the eyes and the, you know, deer in the headlights. Now I know exactly what that means. I'll always have that image in my mind of a deer in the headlights looking right at you and not moving. Luckily he didn't move into the car's path. That would have been interesting. Anyway, I made it down to East Lansing, Michigan, and I spoke at the law school the next day for the Federal Society, a lunch and talk. Had a good turnout. I can't remember exactly what I talked about there. What did I talk? Maybe Jennifer remembers what my topic was. Oh, it was inflation. So I gave a talk about inflation and government spending, and we got into the role of government, but really it was about the consequence of inflation, the supply chain mess that exists right now, so stuff we've talked about. And so it was good. I said some stuff there. I think it was new. I made it up on the spot, so it was kind of, but they really loved it. They thought it was terrific. So that was good. And then from there, I took a flight that evening to Cincinnati, and in Cincinnati I was invited by a professor at Xavier University, which is a Jesuit University in Cincinnati, to teach two classes. So I got to teach two honors classes, one freshman honors, and one, I think they were juniors. And I gave, I spoke at both those classes about all kinds of stuff. I mean, we covered a lot. We covered capitalism and the role of government. We covered how capitalism has been a success and the popularity of socialism. We talked about philosophy in the second class, and particularly we talked about Locke and Rousseau and a little bit of Hobbes. And then Aristotle versus Plato and the whole kind of arc of history and the role of philosophy plays in it. And it was great and the students loved it and it was really, really, really fun. A lot of questions, a lot of back and forth. And then I got to have lunch with the students, which was great. I continued to have that back and forth and everything. And then in the evening I gave a talk at the university in this auditorium again. I think we'll have really good video because the audio was professional and they filmed it with professional cameras there. And that talk was basically my morality of capitalism talk. And that was great. And actually one of the regular listeners to the Yuan Book Show came down from Louisville, Kentucky and came over and participated. So yeah, if you lived in Ohio, you could have come by. I mentioned it on a number of shows that I was going to be there. So it was a blast. I gave basically six talks, three at Xavier and three at the other universities. I think they were all really well received. There were fans everywhere of the show. Some of them were actual students. I think one of the real positives I saw is subscriptions, even though I did no shows this week, subscriptions to my YouTube channel went up quite a bit. So we added, I don't know, 100 people or just under 100 people to the subscription list. So that is fantastic because these are new people who never heard about Yuan Book Show. Many of them never heard about Yuan Rand. So yeah. So I would say a really, really successful trip. Thank you, Jennifer, for inviting me to Michigan and making that possible. Thanks to the guy, the professor at Xavier who paid me to come to the university. And by the way, if you go to my Twitter feed, not my Twitter, my Facebook page, my Facebook page has a nice photograph of me and Mother Teresa having a chat on a bench outside the auditorium at Xavier and I'm explaining to her what I'm going to say about her in the talk because I, of course, it's a Catholic school. I have to bring up Mother Teresa and I do. And she doesn't seem happy. Anyway, there is indeed a bronze sculpture. There's a bronze, oh, there he is, Jack. Jack is right here on the chat. He was there at the talk in Cincinnati. He came down with his mom from Louisville. So thanks, Jack. It was a really pleasure to meet you. That was exciting and good to meet your mom. And yeah, so there's a sculpture there of Mother Teresa on the bench in kind of bronze, all shiny. And yeah, that was, so I sat down and got a photo taken with Mother Teresa. That was fun. Did the interview with Mark Moss go live? Todd says the interview with Mark Moss went live. Did that go live? That's great if it went live. That was a good interview. So I didn't know it went live. I haven't seen it. So Mark, if you can tell, Ted, if you can confirm that that went live, maybe, maybe you're right. Maybe the rise and subscriptions are response to the Mark Moss interview, not to my campus trips. Either way, it's new people. But in that case, I'm disappointed because I would have expected even double, double the subscriptions. But the interview with Mark Moss was really good. I did it in, he's running a condo out in Rincón in, here in Puerto Rico. And yeah, I went up two days ago. Okay, where do I find it? I guess it's on video. Oh, he didn't tell me. So I'll go find it. That is, that is excellent. Excellent. Yeah, Mark Moss was a really nice guy. And I think the interview went really well. I don't know what you guys thought, Ian and, and I guess Ian and Todd saw the interview. I hope, I assume you liked it. So cool. So, all right. So let's talk about the elections on Tuesday. And you know, I don't say this often enough. I really should say this more often. But I told you so. I told you that the social agenda of the Democrats doesn't sell. I told you that the extent that the Democrats run on critical race theory on defund the police, they will lose. That the American people are not interested in those things and they will vote for pretty much anybody who is opposed to the social agenda of the left. That cannot win to the extent that it stands by the fall left's actual positions. And that's exactly what happened on Tuesday. In Virginia, it's clear that what happened was that parents, particularly, you know, parents, and you can see it by the age groups, there was a big increase in support for the Republican candidate from people aged 40 to 60, 65, 40 to 65. Parents whose kids are in school voted overwhelmingly, not overwhelmingly, but increased. The increased share that the Republicans got was overwhelmingly higher than in previous elections. Why? Because CRT was on the ballot. Because the Democrat basically says, I don't believe that parents should ever say into what their kids study in school. That killed him. That single sentence basically disqualified him. And what the Republican did pretty smartly was distance himself from Trump without alienating Trump supporters. So he kind of did this balancing act of not alienating the core, the hardcore, but attracting a lot of new voters, a lot of voters that typically wouldn't vote Republican and haven't voted Republican since 2009 over the last 12 years. And they voted Republican up because they liked him because he was not offensive and because they disliked the position the Democrats were advocating for. They disliked the idea of their kids being infused with guilt over the color of their skin. Although it's interesting that it's not just whites. Hispanics shifted more towards Republicans in significant numbers. Hispanics don't buy. Hispanics are typically quite conservative. This is the big mistake Republicans make in giving up on the Hispanic population and handing it over to the Democrats. But if Republicans had a better view of immigration and if Republicans have just a better view of immigrants and Hispanics in particular, I think they could easily grab the Hispanic vote on a national scale. But it wasn't just in Virginia. It was in New Jersey of all places. New Jersey that went to Biden double digits. The Republican almost won. And Republicans did gain significantly. I think significantly in the House, you know, in the New Jersey House and Senate. Indeed, the longtime Democratic Speaker of the House, I think, was defeated in his district. And again, it's a combination of we don't buy all this social stuff. We don't buy. We won't accept the social agenda and now add to that the fact that Biden so far on his own terms is a failure. The economy while seemingly growing, it's not clear that once you take into account the inflation, it's actually growing. In spite of the fact that wages are up in spite of the fact that there are more job openings than there are people. People don't feel like the economy is doing well. They're going to grocery stores and they are empty shelves. The shelves that are full, prices are up. McDonald's just announced that they'll be raising their prices across the board by up to 10%. And you're seeing this company after company after company announcing price increases. Inflation is here. Transitory probably means for the next few years. We'll talk about that when we talk about the Fed. Housing prices are up. There are barely any houses to buy. People don't feel like the economy is doing particularly well and Biden, the Democrats in power, the Democrats get the blame for it. Whether it's their fault or not is not even the issue because much of the economy we have right now is a consequence of what Trump did. The economy we have a year from now is a consequence of what Biden did. By the way, the only part of the economy that's doing fantastic is the stock market. I remember in the first year of the Trump administration, I have to say I told you so again and I'll keep saying it because you guys have no appreciation. Anyway, in the first year of the Trump administration, the number of people who told me what a great president he was because the stock market was up a lot. And the stock market's up a lot and over and over and over again. How high the stock market is and that is because of what a great president Donald Trump was in that first year. Well, under Biden, the stock market is actually up a little bit more than it was under Trump. And under Obama, it was up a little bit more than under Trump, at least to this point, all pretty much about the same. So does that mean Biden is a great president? I said then, I'll say now, I'll say it in the future because it won't change, that the stock market is not a measure of good presidents. It's not correlated with good presidency. It has a lot more to do with how much money the Fed is flooding into the market than it has to do with how good the president is. Anyway, the economy is not doing well. And every day we hear in the press, in the mainstream press, how the Democrats can't get their act together. And now they can't pass these bills. Now nothing's getting through. And now Biden's agenda is failing. It's not going anywhere. That it's a losing campaign. And the mainstream media has chipped away at whatever support I think the Democrats had in suburbia, in places that Biden got a lot of votes, not because anybody liked Biden. I told you this after the election. Biden won because people voted against Trump. And people voted against Trump in record numbers. People came out to vote last year in record numbers, not because they loved Biden, but because they despised Trump. And when you get an even slightly, moderately better candidate than Trump, the Republicans can actually win in this country. But it's not just New Jersey and Virginia. Look at what happened in Minneapolis, where there was a proposition on the ballot to do away with the police force. And to replace it with some community security, some mumbo-jumbo, right? And that was defeated soundly. Wasn't close. Defeated soundly. Even in Minneapolis, where the riots began last summer, even in Minneapolis, they don't want to get rid of the police. They've learned their lesson. Yeah, it sounded like a cool slogan in the heat of the moment. But no, nobody really wants to get rid of the police. That's not a winning strategy. You can see that, again, in the city of New York, where the mayor of New York was just elected, is a former police officer and a former Republican. Considered a moderate Democrat, the progressives in the New York primary against him were defeated soundly. He won, then he went on to beat a nondescript Republican, who nobody ever heard of. And the next mayor of New York is going to be far, far more centrist than the Blythe was. People had enough of the left. They don't like it. And then even in the city of Buffalo, New York, I don't know if you read about the story of Buffalo, New York. In Buffalo, New York, there was, in the Democratic primary, a radical leftist who called herself a Democratic Socialist won. So she was running as the Democratic candidate. The former mayor, who is a centrist Democrat, launched a right-in campaign against her. He beat her. She was defeated. Even in Buffalo, New York, where the Democrats chose a Socialist, the people, I guess they're non-Democrats, were not happy with that. They chose a centrist Democrat instead of her. The only two elections, so Taylor says, Seattle had a big election, two were city attorney running as a Republican, one. Yeah, and the new mayor is a moderate. You remember the mayor and the police chief in Seattle? You remember Caz, you remember the anarchy in the streets of Seattle? Last summer, well, the people in Seattle didn't like that. They don't want a bunch of Socialists running their city. So Seattle, one of the most leftist cities in the country, moved a little bit to the right. Yeah, Scott says, you know, you're so frigging negative. It's unbelievable. They won the primary in the first place, though. Yes, in Buffalo, she won the primary because the Democratic, the enthusiasts, the activists in the Democratic Party are nutty leftists. But the rest of the country doesn't like nutty leftism, which is what I've been saying for years and years and years, that that nihilism, that egalitarianism is not something the American people want. That racism is not something the American people want. And they showed that on Tuesday. So in city after city after city, you saw this, they were defeated. All right, you can continue to argue with me. It will make you right. So now the question is, the question is going to be, what lessons do Republicans learn from this? What will they learn? And who are they nominate? Well, they run the kind of campaign that was run in Virginia, which was a, you know, policy wise, not very good, but not wacky, not crazy and not embracing of Trumpism. Will they run kind of a moderate Republican campaign, mainly highlighting the left's social issue problems? And when they be able to take the house back in 2022 next year, I think it's likely that they will. They might even take the Senate back. I think that'll be good. I've always said my ideal is a Democratic president and a House and Senate that are Republican. So we'll get that for at least two years and we'll see what that looks like. And then the question, of course, is, will the Republicans, who are the Republicans nominate for president in in two years? And that'll, to a larger extent, I think, ultimately determine the future of the party and to the extent that it can actually serve as an opposition party to the Democrats and whether it can win the presidency. Let's hope, let's hope it's not the Santas. Let's hope it's not the Santas. The more I hear of him, the more I listen to him, the more, the more cookie he comes across, the more Nazi is, the more populist, the more authoritarian. He seems. So I really hope it's not Trump or the Santas. We'll see who it will be. All right. I still have hope. Still have hope for Nikki Haley. Nikki Haley gave a talk at Heritage the other day. I saw bits of the video of it. She was quite good. I mean, she's not afraid to actually say capitalism, to actually say capitalism is good. She doesn't have a complete understanding of what it is. She can't really defend it morally. But she says the words and she's pro. So I'm still a fan. And I think she's a fighter. I think it would be cool if there were Republicans, if a woman, the first woman president is a Republican rather than Democrat. And, you know, she said something like, in her talk, she said something like, capitalism was good for South Carolina and capitalism would be good for America. Now, again, I wish she understood what capitalism is, but I'll take it. I'll take somebody who uses the term positively and means by broadly generally more free markets, which is what I think she means. All right. So overall, I'd say from my perspective, as much as I hate politics and I hate both parties and I'm not a Republican and I don't particularly like Republicans. I would say this was a good vote, I think partially because it's sent a warning signal to the Democrats. I think this will force them to moderate. I think a lot of senators on the Democratic side are thinking right now, do I really want to vote for $1.75 trillion in another big social program? I think everybody's enjoying the fact that Manchin is taking the heat and cinema are taking the heat for this. But I think there's probably half a dozen Democratic senators who'd rather just not vote on this. The House of Representatives tonight is probably going to vote on a $1.75 billion, I wish, trillion dollar package. I don't yet know what's in it exactly. In particular, I don't know what they are using for the taxes. So we'll see. We'll see what it is. One of my favorite little scenes from today was Manchin being harassed by these demonstrators and he gets into the car. You know what Manchin, the Democratic senator, the senator of the people for the people is driving. You know what he drives? Anybody know what he drives? Like he's driving the car I want. I should go into politics. That's how you make money. I didn't realize. If I'd known, I would have not gone into finance, I would have gone into politics. So Manchin is driving a Maserati. I love that. All these climate change, far left, crazy leftists, going crazy over Manchin and he gets into Maserati. Not a Tesla. No, God forbid. A Tesla that he would have kissed the tires, the activists. No, this is a gas guzzling, I don't know, 450, 500 horsepower maybe. Maserati, the kind of car that I should be driving. If I wasn't living in Puerto Rico, I might be driving. It's, yeah, it's good. It's good. So DC has been the richest metropolitan area for a long time. For a long time. All right. Maseratis. That's your reward for being a good, dedicated politician. All right, let's do some of the $20 super chats. And we'll go from there. Naruto asks, I'll just do this because it's on the topic. Have you looked into the scope of the Build Back Better? Yes. I mean, I have. It's very broad. It initiates a lot of new social programs. It kind of puts a toe in on a lot of things, thus allowing them to grow in the future. It's a very bad bill. It would be a disaster long term. It's going to raise government spending forever. It's one of these bills where the programs are never taken away because these are benefits and they're not benefits for the poor. They're benefits primarily for the middle class. Social security, Medicare, these are things that never go away, that people keep voting for because they benefit from them at the expense of the poor and the rich, I guess. So it's a very bad bill. I have not seen what the latest tax proposals are. Last I saw it was going to be a 3% tax on anybody earning more than, I think, $1 million or something like that of income, maybe $10 million, I'm not sure. But I don't know what made it into the final proposal that they're voting on tonight, if they vote on it tonight. I don't think Pelosi has the votes. So they might not vote on it tonight because she doesn't have the votes. It's getting late already in D.C. So if they haven't voted yet, and I don't think they have, last time I looked at the news, they hadn't. Yeah, it's still, I see nothing new in terms of the votes. So who knows if they'll get to vote on it tonight. Maybe, oh, it looks like they'll vote on the infrastructure bill, but they won't vote on the other bill. So the infrastructure bill is not as bad and much smaller. But it looks like even that's going to collapse. You won't even get that. No, Democrats are complete disarray. They can't get anything passed. Manchin and Sinema put complete, you know, destroyed their agenda. As much as Trump tried, did his best effort to hand over the Senate to the Democrats, the Democrats are so splintered that they can't even take advantage of the fact that they want it, that they basically control the Senate. They're not taking advantage of it. All right, let's do some $20 questions. Brian says, and by the way, I think, whoa, we're only $132. How can we only be at $132? Yeah, because all the superchats are pretty low-dollar amounts. To get to $600, we're going to have to have some of the whales come in with like $100 or $50 or $500 or whatever to get us the $600 target. We're at $132. Last month, we made the $600 target every single show. Every single show. So Ali's got to work cut out for her if she's going to get the $600 in the next hour or so, or less than an hour, depending on how long the show is going to be. It would be great if you guys stepped up and supported the show and supported its expansion. Okay, I won't say more about money for a little while. All right, Brian says, I recently applied for an entry-level job in finance. Are there any particular financial institutions you think are run well and anywhere you would stay away from? I know you have mentioned BlackRock being bad. Yeah, I mean, BlackRock is bad from the perspective of ESG, social responsibility, anti-capitalist, anti-fossile fuels. I don't know what it's like to work there. I don't know what it's like as a financial institution. I'd say of the banks, I think Chase is probably, Chase and maybe Bank of America, probably the best banks to work for. You know, BB&T, of course, is a great bank, even though John Allison is no longer the CEO, hasn't been the CEO for a long time. But certainly I would look at BB&T as another bank. Goldman Sachs always manages to somehow make money and it's an incredibly professional, incredibly aggressive. You'll learn a lot if you go to work for Goldman Sachs. It's an institution with a grand tradition and an investment banking may be unmatched and you'll learn a lot. So it's an entry-level position. I don't think you can do much better than Goldman. All right, let's see. Ali asks, Hayran, today I was thinking that even Emirates has low tax rates near zero and they are not much successful. Even they don't have much regulation. Yeah, so it's not true that all you need to do is lower taxes and lower regulations and you get massive economic growth and innovation and entrepreneurship. It's just not true. That is a very libertarian approach to economics and to understanding the world and it's just not true. To get a culture, to get innovation, to get growth, to get entrepreneurship, you need a certain kind of culture and the core of a culture like that, the core of the culture has to be a certain respect for reason, a certain respect for the individual and ambition kind of is built into the culture. And if you have a culture like in the Emirates, it's not very individualistic at all, quite collectivist. Religious, and even if it's not, even if the people involved are not particularly religious, they have to play up their religion and if they have to play up tradition and innovation, entrepreneurship, other things that shatter tradition, then you're not going to get a lot of entrepreneurship and economic growth and innovation and technology until you allow people to think independently, to explore, to try different things, to fail, not to, you know, stigmatize failure, to view success as a positive, economic success, wealth as a positive, not inherited wealth but made wealth. You know, the Emirates is an emirate. You basically have kings and queens, it's basically still an aristocracy. You don't have a sense of, and businessmen are typically sons of the sheiks. It's very hierarchical and it's very rigid. So it's not enough just to lower taxes. You have to create a culture of innovation, a culture of entrepreneurship, a culture of respect for reason and hard work and entrepreneurship and innovation. And that's hard in a, in a country dominated by Islam and dominated by tradition and dominated by tribalism. So first you'd have to get rid of the tribalism. All right. Michael asked, is objective to epistemology ethics necessary for most people to rally behind capitalism? Yes. I know a lot of libertarians who get less of fear but mark the idea of values and existence as something objective and normal. Yeah. And they will never win. They will never convince anybody. They're always going to stay a small fringe. And they, even if they get capitalism, they will not be able to hold on to it. I mean, we got very close to capitalism to Lez Faire in the 19th century. We couldn't hold on to it. Why? Because they mark the idea of values and existence as something objective and normal. So absolutely the objectives of epistemology and ethics are necessary. And it's not that most people have to have an understanding of the epistemology and the ethics. They have to embrace the epistemology and the ethics implicitly. What does it mean? It means that they have to live to some extent by an epistemology of reason, of objectivity. And it means that they have to accept the ethic of it's good to be successful. And reason is the way we achieve success. And we admire people who are successful because it's ethical to be successful. As long as they hold an altruistic view or a skeptical view of all ethics, they cannot win. They cannot be successful. They cannot maintain it even if they get it. It will fold. And many of them, once they get it, will change their minds. Oh, but what about the poor? Oh, but what about this or that? Don't we have to regulate those greedy bastards? Okay, Dave asks, Dave Goodman. Are American gun laws too loose? For what I've seen, Kyle's actions seem justified. But the police letting the 17-year-old Yahoo walk around with an assault rifle on night during such a high level of civic unrest seems screwy. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it's screwy that he went there. It's screwy that he had access to an AK-47 or whatever it was, not an AK-47, it was an MR-15. It's screwy that the police didn't do anything about the fact that a young kid is walking around with a gun. This is exactly what I said at the time. He is untrained in how to use it. He's untrained in how to diffuse a conflict without having to shoot somebody. It was a high probability that he would land up killing somebody because you put somebody in a conflict situation with a gun who is young, inexperienced, hasn't gone through the training, doesn't know what he's doing. He's not a soldier. He's not trained. He's not put in stress situations with a gun like soldiers are. He shot some people. I bet you most of you could have gotten out of those situations without having shot those people. But he's a kid. So yeah, you know, as we learn more, it's probably the case that he won't be convicted of anything or if he's convicted of something minor. But he should have never been there. And the cops should have never allowed him to be in that situation. Of course, the cops should have been tougher with the rioters. They should have arrested them. They should have stopped the rioting nights before that. They should have done a lot of things. But one of the real problems that we have is allowing 17-year-olds to walk around with similar automatic guns. Somebody says an AK would have been Kino. I don't even know what Kino means. What does Kino mean? Well, you know, special forces in the old days used to use AK-47s because they didn't trust the M-16s and the American rifles. The American rifles, generally, I found, if you put a little bit of sand in them and stopped working, you could take the AK-47 and run it through mud and it would still fire. It was a gun that you trusted. I don't know that I've ever told you the story of me driving up to Beirut, I drove up to Beirut in 1982 in a jeep with one of my commanding officer. The two of us basically threw two AK-47s into the back and drove from Tel Aviv to Beirut in a jeep by ourselves. An AK-47 was the gun you took. That's what you would take to any situation where you were afraid you would get into a gunfight. Okay, we are way behind on the Super Chat. I'm not sure what's going on tonight. We've got a good number of listeners, but if you want to support the Iran Book Show, thank you. I just said that and $20 question came in, but it would be great if more of you ask $20 questions, no more $5 or $10 questions. More of you ask $20 questions and $50 questions and so on so that we can get our goal, at least get close to our goal at this point, we're not even going to be close. Let's say, okay, JS Sobe 424. I make enough money to support myself and more, but is it immoral that I use every government assistance program I can to make up for the taxes that get taken away from me? No, I think you're fine. If you qualify, take them. Don't spend too much time on it. It's kind of a waste of time at some point, but no, taxes are taken away from you. If you qualify to get some of them back, get some of them back. So I don't consider it immoral to do so. I mean, again, I don't think you should go out of your way every program, right? And I wouldn't lie to get the money. But yeah, you want to minimize your taxes and maximize the return of your tax money to you. You want me to talk about stuff so you can think of questions. You can also support the show without asking a question. I've been asked how many kills that I get while serving. It's hard to tell because my main responsibility during the war was identifying buildings, locations in which the enemy was hiding, locations in which ammunition was being stored. And I would mark those locations, mark the window that I wanted to go through and hand it off to the Air Force, and then the next day I would check to see if they destroyed the right building. And I don't know how many people were inside. So in that sense, I have no idea. But as military intelligence, my main goal was to identify enemy positions and particularly if they were built up positions and help destroy them and get them destroyed, provide the intelligence and provide the information to get them destroyed. How many kills that resulted in, I have no idea and I don't really care. That's not relevant. And of course, the other goal I had was to find enemy locations so that as our troops are moving into an area, they would not be ambushed. And tragically, at least on one time where we identified such an ambush and knew it was going to happen and knew this column of tanks was going to be ambushed, we provided all the info to the relevant people within the northern command which was responsible for the movement of the tank corps and they ignored us. And as a consequence of them ignoring us, I don't know how many Israelis died. Israeli soldiers died from the Syrian special forces ambush. Anyway, that's a long, long, long time ago. That was a long time ago. It's going to be 40 years next year. It'll be 40 years since the Lebanon war and my involvement in it. It was a Hamas. It was a Hamas in those days. It was a Hezbollah in those days. It was actually the PLO. It was Yasar Aflat in the PLO. Yeah, but we had drones in those days. Ken says, why are you on that's impressive, sort of like a drone pilot. We had drones those days, but they didn't have missiles. So in those days, Yasar was the first one to use drones in combat. And the drones were used to take pictures. They were used to gather intelligence. And part of the intelligence I was using was intelligence we gleaned from the drones. But in order to actually execute the attacks, you used F-15s. I'm pretty sure it was F-15s. Or depending on the circumstances, you might use phantoms. Can't remember the designation as phantoms. It's the planes that the US flew in Vietnam. So we were closely with the Air Force and with the Air Force Intelligence and with the Air Force, but that's much of what we did. We were the experts on the buildup that the enemy committed itself to. The strategic choke points and the buildups and so on. All right. Paulo says, I can't think of a question. First person to ask in the chat, please answer. Can you like post it because I can't follow the chat enough? I mean, I've been commenting on some of the comments in the chat, but I can't follow the chat enough to catch all the questions. Okay. Thessia asked a $20 question. Pop culture question. And then I'm going to do Zillow no matter what you ask. Pop culture question. Thoughts on Alec Baldwin's situation. Did cutting corners on the set lead to tragic death? And what are your thoughts on people blaming lower paid crew, etc. on the tragedy rather than in competency? You know, I don't know. I mean, these are the kind of things where it's all about what are the facts? And without really, I mean, everybody has an opinion about these things. But I don't believe in having opinions about things where I don't have the facts. And I don't think many people have the facts yet. I mean, I'm hoping this goes to trial or that somebody does a good investigative reports and we get the facts. But why anybody would get shot on a set? Why anybody was using live bullets on a set is beyond me. It's bizarre. And somebody made a mistake. Somebody made an error. I don't think it was done on purpose. I don't think Alec Baldwin did it on purpose. I don't think he knew there was a live bullet day. I don't think. But somebody put a live bullet in a gun, which shouldn't have been. And you don't use live bullets on a set like that. So until we know exactly who did it, who put the live bullet in, why they did it. Assume it was an accident. Why were they even live bullets too? Why was it even the possibility of a mistake? Why isn't a complete separation between what is live and what are not? I just don't know. It's bewildering to me. And it's strange to me that it happened and how it happened and everything. So it's one of those freaky, weird things that I don't think you can learn anything from. It doesn't say anything about our culture, anything like that. It's just a freaky, crazy, ridiculous saying. And maybe somebody was negligent. If they are, they should pay the consequences. And maybe they were not. I don't really know. All right. Let's see. So we want to talk about Zillow. So let's see if I can explain it. So Zillow is, of course, the company that lists real estate for sale. It is very popular. It is massively used. Most listings of homes to sale are listed on Zillow. So you could argue that Zillow has maybe the best or among the best databases of houses listed for sale and sales that were executed. And it makes most of its money off of these listings and it's done very well. It's all online. It's massively used. I think it's the most popular of all the listing sites for real estate. And what it's done over the last few years is it started a new business using the data that they have accumulated from listings and sales and sale trends and so on. And that business meant that they would go in and they would actually buy homes. I remember I actually thought of using them to buy my home in California because they didn't want to go through the whole process and real estate agents and the whole thing. But because it was COVID, they weren't buying at that point in time. They later started buying again. But what they would do is they would buy homes at a discount over what they were listed at. So it would be homeowners who didn't want the hassle of spending a lot of time selling the house or hadn't been able to sell the house and Zillow would offer them a price and they'd accept the price and maybe Zillow would go in and maybe clean it up a little bit, maybe polish it up a little bit. Not big things, just little things, cosmetic things. And then they would sell it for a premium. Now, the reason they believed they could always buy cheap, sell expensive is because they developed these algorithms that could basically tell you where home prices supposedly were going and what you could pay for because this is what you could sell it at and you would arbitrage the price. You would buy a house for 100 and you would sell for 110. You wouldn't make a lot, maybe even sell for 105. You wouldn't make a lot, but you would do this over and over and over again on hundreds of thousands of homes and it was significant amounts of money. That was the idea and they did this for a long time and it was very successful for them for a long time and because it was successful they kept increasing the number of homes that they bought and the number of homes that they sold until recently when suddenly the algorithm was telling them to buy they were buying lots of homes but they couldn't sell them. They couldn't sell them. Home prices were going up slower than what the algorithm had predicted and in some cases home prices were flat. As a consequence of this Zillow took a few days ago, I think two days ago, three days ago maybe, announced that it was suspending its program and taking a significant accounting hit for all the losses that they had lost from this attempt to arbitrage between the prices that they thought they could sell them. It's not really an arbitrage because it's risky. Arbitrage typically is riskless. What they thought they could sell it and what they bought it at and now they were going to have to sell it below what they bought it at and thus lose money. So they had a big write-off and took a major accounting hit and then, I think it's yesterday or today, they then came back and announced actually we're getting out of this business completely. We're not buying or selling homes anymore. We're not just suspending the business. We're doing away with it completely. We're never doing it again. And when they said that, the market really paid attention and basically Zillow lost 25% of its value, I think in the last couple of days. And the reason for that is simple. This is a major source of profits in the past. When they announced they were going to do this, the stock went up a lot because anticipation was they would make a lot of money doing it. Now they're saying not only are we not, we haven't made money at it. We don't think we'll ever make money at it. And the price of Zillow is to some extent reflecting that information. I haven't studied Zillow as an investment, but I suspect that even at current prices, Zillow is expensive relative to its revenue and its profitability. I suspect that there's still a lot more that Zillow could lose if another part of its business doesn't perform or if there's any other bad news that comes out. I would not be buying on the dip. The dip just brought it back to kind of reality in terms of this whole business line is now nonexistent. That's massive amounts of future cash flows that just disappeared and therefore the price should have gone down a lot. So it makes complete sense what happened to Zillow. It's partially hubris and it's partially they benefited from inflation. They're playing the inflation game and it's partially the bubble in tech stocks that I still think we're in a bubble that valued Zillow and Tesla and all these companies at unbelievable levels that are just hard to understand. Ford announced that they were buying 100,000 Teslas and the stock went up more than the value of 100,000 Teslas. So the revenue they would receive. So you can understand that the stock would go up to reflect the new profit, the new profitability. And maybe more than that because it's one more step towards electric cars and Tesla becoming kind of mainstream. But it went up several times that reflecting what? What reality is being reflected? So I still think I know I've been wrong so far but there will be a day. There will be a day. I don't know when if I knew when I'd make a lot of money. There will be a day where I will tell you I told you so. I was right. Maybe I'll have to do a mea culpa. We'll see. We'll see. We'll talk in a couple of years and we'll see who is right on the stocks. But Zillow is an example of it's kind of crazy if you really think about what Zillow is trying to do. They believe they had an algorithm that knew the value of homes better than the market did and basically was encouraging them to buy homes that sellers couldn't sell at the prices they wanted and then trying to sell it at those prices. So and thinking the little cosmetic would change that. And of course the buyers, the sellers who could sell their homes at the prices they were asking for or above weren't going to sell to Zillow. So there's a clear kind of selection bias here. They were getting the worst houses, the less attractive houses. And to think that they could build an algorithm to beat the market in residential real estate where it's so local. It's so heterogeneous. It's not like stocks, even stocks, it's super hard. But I think residential real estate is even harder. Anyway, might take on Zillow. Let's do some super chat. We'll do the $20 questions. Again, we are getting close to $300, but that's less than halfway to the $600. So hopefully somebody will step in with two $300 to get us to where we need to be so we can. So Ali on her return, this is her first show back after being having no electricity for a week. Hopefully Ali can celebrate reaching her goal. So we're getting, we'll continue to get lower dollar questions. That's good, but it would be good if you could make them instead of $1020. And some of you who have money, because most of you don't, I know it would be great if you could do even more. All right, let's do Daniel. Do you have an opinion on US Bank? I may have an opportunity at a lucrative mortgage position. But part of me is wary of working in industries that is heavily regulated and consequently fluctuating. I mean, look, US Bank is a good bank. It's a relatively large bank, so it's going to be relatively stable. It's probably going to be a buyer, not a seller. I haven't looked closely at US Bank. It's bigger than what we typically look at. And I wouldn't give you an analysis on here, a fear of the SEC. But I wouldn't have, you know, it's definitely a bank. Banks are conservative, banks are regulated, banks only do things in a certain way. I don't know where you work now, so I don't know what you're comparing it to. But it's definitely somewhat square or rigid in terms of there's not a lot of gung-ho innovation and excitement around these things, I don't think. But on the other hand, it's just good solid bank. You know, you're going to be able to make a good living there. You'll learn a lot of skills. And yeah, so I wouldn't turn it down automatically. I wouldn't jump on it, depends on what your opportunity set is. Right now is a great time to be looking for work because of this worker shortage. It's a great time to do some interviews and check things out. Any ideas in guests anytime soon? The parenting episode with two guests was really good. Episode plus one vote for Gene Moroni, talk about psychopistemology emotions. You know, I know I should do more guests. It's just, it's work. I have to find a guest, organize it, you know, and get a series of guests. I don't want to just have one guest out of no way. So we'll have more guests. I need a little bit of things to slow down a little bit and get organized around it and make a list of people. Gene Moroni will certainly be on the list of people that I'll consider interviewing. And so I'm, you know, it's going to happen. It's just I need a little bit of, a little bit of stability at time and everything. So we go. Jennifer asks if I, Jennifer, 50 bucks. Thank you, Jennifer. That's very, very generous. You've already been generous this week. So Jennifer wants me to tell the Wasp story. I told the story in Michigan, in Michigan when I was there on Wednesday, on Wednesday. Somebody, Jennifer was telling a story about a big Wasp nest somewhere. And I said, you know, once I was bitten by, by over a dozen Wasps, I literally got bitten by a dozen Wasps. She asked how that happened. And I told the story. So there was, there's a, there's a, what do you call that? Canyon on the Golan Heights in Israel called Wasp Canyon. And I had no idea why it was called Wasp Canyon. I liked hiking it. It was a great place to hike. It had beautiful water holes that you could swim in with these little waterfalls. And it was really pretty. It was a nice hike and you could hike it up or you could hike it down. You could do it either way. I'd done it many times and, and never knew why it was called Wasp Canyon until the one time when I learned. And so I was out with a group. I was 17 and I was out with a group. I was part of the Scouts in Israel. It wasn't Boy Scouts. It was boys and girls and they were mixed. And I was a troop leader. There were the kids under me were 14 years old. I was, I was like, so I took them on a hike with a couple of other 17 year olds, but I was kind of the leader of the group. And we had rifles because in those days you went hiking. You took rifles because there were terrorists and terrorists that kidnapped kids. And the idea was, so the idea was that you would at least be some deterrent. So we had simple bolt rifles, not, not semi-automatic or anything. So we hiked with the rifles. Anyway, we took the kids to Wasp Canyon and we hiked up the canyon, up from the, from the Sea of Galilee up into the Golan Heights. And we're hiking up and we stopped in the early afternoon at a pool at the top, at the kind of top of the canyon. And the buses were supposed to come. There was a road above it and buses were going to come and take us home. And we stopped in, kids were eating a little bit before we got to drive home, which is about an hour and a half, two hours home. And, you know, I had, I had to go back to the previous stop because somebody had forgotten something and I went back to get her stuff. And when I came back, all the kids are up on the cliff above the pool. And I'm going, what the hell is going on? And as I get closer, what I discover is that while they were sitting there, the sun was kind of going down and the whole pool area became shaded. And as soon as it became shaded and got a little cooler, thousands of wasps came out of all the crevices of the rocks. And, you know, and the kids all ran away. And they all were up on the cliffs and the wasps were over everything. And they had left their backpacks where the wasps were. And basically the backpacks were all covered with wasps. I mean, the whole thing was like a carpet of wasps on the backpacks. And the kids were up there without their stuff. And the buses were coming and we had to go. And night was going to fall in a couple of, a couple of hours. And we had to, had to get the stuff. So I basically wrapped myself up. I wrapped my hands. I wrapped my face with clothes and went in among the wasps, picked up the backpack, threw them towards the people. You know, the wasps flew away and they caught the bags and they ran off. The first time I do this, I do one, I do two. The third one, they sting me through the clothes in my hands. Like, I don't know, ten of them all at once, through the clothes. And I just yell and scream and run because, you know, the pain is excruciating. And I've got a towel and wasps, not like bees. Wasps will chase you. So they chased me and I'm fighting them off with the towel. But there's still a lot of backpacks down there. So I go back and now we wrap it up much better, right? We really wrap the arms up and we wrap everything up really, really good. And I basically went in and threw the backpacks out and I got stung above the, around the eyes. So anywhere where they could fight skin, these bastards, these little horrible waspy bastards stung me. So around the eyes, so I had, I don't know, 12, 15 swabs, you know. And as I'm going down the first time, one of the other, like, semi-adults, 17-year-olds goes, I hope you're not allergic. I was like, if I'm allergic, I'm going to die. There's no way I would come up with this. But I had no idea if I was allergic or not. Luckily I wasn't. But I basically got every last piece of equipment out of there. And I was the hero of the troop or whatever. But I got home, my hands were like super swollen, right? Everything was massively swollen. My face was swollen. They had to give me medication and stuff. I mean, I didn't have to go to the hospital because I'm not allergic. But it was not pleasant. It was not pleasant. But that is why Wasp Canyon is called Wasp Canyon. And, you know, when something's called something, you should pay attention to it. You should pay attention to names. Names have meaning. Names have meaning. All right. Let's see. Any $20 questions? Yes, Stefan. Stephen, can you elaborate on why Rand disagreed with a priori or subjective theory of value? This is like a whole session we'd have to do this. Basically, she, subjective for Rand, means based on whim. Subjective for her means, you know, based on emotion. In other words, not based on fact. Not based on fact. So she looked at the markets and she said, prices are not determined based on people's whims. And they're not determined based on just emotion. Prices are based because rational people interact. Or at least rational within the scope of their knowledge and the scope of their values. And their values are not subjective necessarily. Some people have subjective values. But their values are personal based on their lives. So her idea was people use facts to determine what their values are. They might not be all as knowledgeable, but they use facts. And people who don't are washed out because the market is an interplay between many people. And she called values socially objective values. Which means that the trading in a social context of multiple people based on their personal values, the price reflects the socially objective value. The consensus of the market, or not even a consensus. It's like the marginal biocellar, supply and demand. All of that is basically a reflection of how much buyers and sellers value this particular thing based on facts, not based on whim. So Fran wanted to differentiate between this subjective, which is whim based. It's completely whatever I feel like. And intrinsic, it's in the thing. It's clearly the values not in the thing. With objective. It's my evaluation based on facts of the thing in the context of my life. That's personal. But it's objective. It's not subjective. It's not just based on whatever I want it to be. It's based on facts. Facts both about me and my value hierarchy. And about the thing and its characteristics. And how it fits into my value hierarchy. All right, let's see. No other $20 questions. Yes. All right. Yeah, thank you. Let's see. Thank you. Jacob, business leadership guest. Yes, I'm contemplating that as well. And thank you to the rest of you. And I will get to the other questions in a little bit. Let me say something about the Fed study to taper and what that means. And we won't get a lot into this because we'll be talking about this a lot over the next few months. Unfortunately, we'll probably be talking about this over the next few years. What we're experiencing right now economically is clearly inflation. Price inflation. So what we're seeing is the consequence of. And I talked about this, I think, last week. What we're seeing is the consequence of the fact that the government has been throwing money at us. Loading us with money in our bank accounts. But all kinds of means, whether through direct checks through stimulus, whether through PPP loans, whether through enhanced unemployment insurance or just unemployment insurance and so many people are employed. They've also locked us down. So we didn't have many places to spend that money. It accumulated in our banks. No vacations, no expensive vacations, no travel. And then on top of that, all right, somebody wants a mac and cheese. We can take care of this. All right, there we go. That didn't work. What happened? Oh, there it is. Okay, it worked. God, all right, we're being, we are being spammed by anti-Semites now. Another one. All right, wow, three of them all at once. They organized to do this. I'm impressed. But you know, here we go. They're using the N-word in their name. They're trying to get me banned from hide use on this board. We'll see how long they sustain this. God, wow. I guess it's a sign that we're getting to people. Anyway, at the same time, we were locked down. So we weren't spending, we weren't traveling. We accumulated, in a sense, we saved. We saved primarily. If we saved in the stock market, we made a lot of money. If you invested in meme stocks, you made a lot of money. If you invested in Bitcoin, you made a lot of money. So people have a lot of money. And yet at the same time, we have constrained supply. We've constrained supply through a variety of different regulations. We've constrained supply through tariffs. We've constrained supply by not sending people to work. Identifying people as, wow, this must be an automated bot thing. I don't know what this is. And they're all anti-Semites. People tell me they're no anti-Semites in America. I'm sorry, guys, I'm distracted by having to mute all these people, hide them from my channel. But they keep creating new channels. So it's a constant battle that I'm not sure who's going to win. Action Jackson, do you have access to hide them from the channel to combat them? Do you have any hackers here who can go and hack these bastards? See, the problem is that when I do this, I sometimes do it on some of the good guys. And accidentally, I ban somebody from my channel who's a good guy. Right, this is insane. It's not stopping. Can one of you do it is the question? Or do I have to do it? Action Jackson, can you take care of it? See if you can take care of it. So what's happening is we've got inflation. Price is going up. We've talked about this. We've talked about the shortage of employees. We've talked about the fact that all these constraints created by government and all the money created by government, we've talked about the fact that the Fed has basically been bailing everybody out. The Fed has been bailing out zombie companies, bailing out everybody in the financial markets. And as a consequence of the Fed doing that, that is a way, again, in which to stream money in, to misallocate capital, and to keep streaming money in to the economy. And all of this is resulting now in prices going up. And we haven't seen prices going up like they are right now since the 1980s. I mean, this is not some blimp. This is not small. This is not an accident. This is, this is the biggest move, inflationary move since the 1980s, and it could get a lot worse. We will see. It's hard to tell. It's hard to predict these things, but it could get a lot worse. And what the Fed announced is that they are going to start reducing the amount of bond buying they are doing in the market. So the way the Fed brings liquidity into the market, the way the Fed kind of manipulates interest rates, the way the Fed bails out certain companies is by buying bonds. They could be buying government bonds or they could be buying corporate bonds. They are primarily buying government bonds and mortgage-backed securities. And by doing that, they are keeping interest rates low. Now, as long as interest rates are low, people are incentivized to spend their money, particularly if inflation is higher than interest rates are low. There's no point in keeping any cash. You don't know what's going to happen to, you can't invest safely because the interest rates are so low, they're being kept artificially low, below the rate of inflation. So indeed, most of the interest rates right now are negative real rates. That is the interest you're getting on your money is less than inflation, which means you're losing money on most investments in real terms. So the Fed is for the first time indicating that it will start slowing down the buying of bonds. Thus, slow down their attempt to manipulate interest rates. Thus, slow down the pressure to keep interest rates low. If the feds don't buy these bonds, other people, private sector is not going to want to buy them a negative interest rate, so slowly interest rates are going to rise. Now, the government doesn't want them to rise because if they rise, the cost of paying off the debt increases dramatically because the interest rate on the debt increases dramatically and refinancing the debt increases dramatically. So we really are in a pretty bad situation right now from an economic perspective in terms of the options that our policy makers have in dealing with the economy as it is today. I don't see how there's a positive outcome from what's going on right now. And it could very well be that we get either significant inflation or we get a deep recession. It'll be on Joe Biden's watch so he will get blamed for it, which is, I guess, fine as long as it's on Donald Trump who runs against him in 2014. It could get very ugly. I don't know when. I don't know the timing. I don't know exactly how it plays out. I don't have the kind of certainty that Peter Schiff has in terms of how it all plays out. But I can tell you that what is going on right now is impossible to keep up. The Fed needs to keep interest rates low because the government needs to refinance its debt and debt is only growing if Biden passes his bills it's going to grow by more than $2 trillion and that has to be financed somehow and the only way to finance is by issuing bonds and if you issue bonds, you know, who's going to buy them? Nobody's going to buy them at low interest rates and if interest rates start going up then the government can't afford to issue those bonds. They can't afford to pay the interest. That makes the deficit even bigger and it just escalates from there. And at some point, and I don't know when that happens, but at some point the market starts questioning whether the feds can even pay back the debt. And once that happens, it's kind of game over and the economy could really spiral out of control. So we are in very, very precarious waters and it's fascinating to me that in spite of all this, stock markets at record highs, nobody seems to be worried, you know, people are debating how much higher Tesla and all these stocks can go when we're sitting really on a time bomb in terms of economic policy, it just cannot sustain itself. It cannot keep going like this. So it's going to be an interesting decade. It's going to be an interesting decade. And if you get inflation, the dollar will go down unless the fed jacks up interest rates and then the dollar will go up. But if the fed jacks up interest rates, then now you have to worry about the federal government financing all its debt. So then you worry about default and that could cause the dollar to go down. So the direction of the dollar is not obvious. And relative to what? Relative to gold, maybe you can predict that, but can you predict what the dollar does relative to Euro, which has its own problems, Europe has its own problems, relative to the yuan in China, which has horrible problems, China's in worse shape than we are, and you could go on and on and on. But what this country is going to need in 2024, desperately need, is a president who wants to deregulate and cut government spending, a president who wants to enforce government austerity, real government austerity, like we've never seen in a hundred years. So I don't know if there's a candidate out there who's willing to do that. Is Nikki Haley? Can she get elected? Can anybody on such a platform get elected? So it's going to be interesting to be interesting to see if Biden reappoints power to the fed. And if he doesn't, who he appoints, those are all signals the market will be taking, watching. But we, the US government has put itself into a position where I don't see a positive outcome. I don't see how things work out positively. What happened to Ali? She's gone again? Catherine has stepped in. Catherine Mendes has stepped in. Thank you, Catherine. Is Ali electricity out again? All right. Action Jackson is now the moderator. So behave yourselves, guys. You don't want to piss off action. And as soon as he became moderator, the spammers disappeared. He has such a reputation that they fear to upset him and they all went away. All right. Let's see. All right, we're at 451. So thank you, guys. Thank you, Jennifer. That was very generous and thank you for the rest of you. We got to 451. We're still 150 short. I don't know. We're already an hour and a half. So I don't want to go much longer here, but I do have a bunch of questions. So first, no more questions under $20. I'm not going to answer questions under $20. I'll answer them tomorrow or something because I just don't have time. I said I was tired. I wanted to make this show short and it's not going to be short. This is going to go a while because we still have a lot of questions. So if you're going to ask a question, make it count financially. All right, Jacob asks, my girlfriend is getting her master's in architecture. She's heavily influenced emotionally and mentally by her professor's critiques of her work. Is the second-handed rational based on the impact on her career or mix? I mean, it's probably a mix. Look, we all have baggage. We all have challenges to our self-esteem. We all a challenge to deal with negative feedback. I don't think she's unique at all. It's raised to feel that way. I don't know if it's second-handed as much as it might not be second-handed. It might just be a self-esteem issue, right? Lack of confidence. It's hard to tell, right? But I wouldn't judge it too harshly. These are things we all have to some extent or another. And she has to fight through it in a sense. She has to gain perspective on it. She has to work on her emotions, not letting her emotions sidetrack her, not letting her emotions distract her from the goal from what she wants to achieve. But yeah, it's something to work on. It's something to work on and something that can be fixed. Certainly, they have an impact on her career. To an extent. But if she's confident and she's sure and she knows what she's doing, she'll be successful even in this world. It might be a little harder. Think about how to work. I don't think even though they had an impact on his career, I don't think he cared. But none of us have to work. It's hard. So don't take it for granted. Don't take it for granted. Don't take it. Let me put it this way. It's hard to get out of it. She needs to work on it. It's part of the work we all need to do in life to get better at taking criticism and handling criticism and putting the right proportion on criticism and controlling our emotions and ultimately aligning our emotions with everything else. It's not easy. So don't get down on her is my point, I guess. Let me see where it was that. All right, we got a $50 question. Although I don't like the question, but we got a $50 question. The Iron Man Senate Israel is doing great work and is being maligned by Internet scum. Yes. The Atlas of Wood Sculptor is a great visionary. Why did you try to distance yourself from men's? He is a great man. You know, I don't know. I'm trying to figure out who's asking this question. I have a feeling that this is an attempt to set me up, right? So I don't know Ragnar's razor which side, but you have put $50 on it, so you want an answer. You know, I like Richard Menz. I've met Richard Menz. I like him. But you know, there are these stories about him that raised questions about what he did in his past. I haven't had the time, the effort to sit down with Richard and figure out and see his arguments counter it to figure out what's true, what's not. He is in his 80s now. Sorry, he's in his 90s. He's well into his 90s now, right? You know, I'm not involved with the Atlas of Wood anymore. The Ironman Institute has not evolved with the Atlas of Wood anymore, not because of Richard Menz for other reasons, which I won't get into. And I still support Boaz, and Boaz is a good friend of mine, and I still support the Ironman Center of Israel. But the Atlas of Wood is now separate from the Ironman Center of Israel. It's going to be separate from it. And I just don't want to confuse people because these stories are circulating, because these stories are coming not just from the scum, the internet scum that are presenting it, but it's also coming from news reports, documentaries that malign Richard. I just don't have the energy, the time, the motivation to dig through it all and figure it all out. I mean, if I sat down with Richard at some point, here in the next few years I would do it, but he's in the UK, I'm here. I find it interesting that he was never extradited, he was never accused of anything, so I don't know exactly what the story is all the way through. But there's a lot of stuff there that raises a lot of questions, and I'd rather that not distract from the amazing success of the Atlas of Wood. I'd rather that not distract from the great work that Ironman Israel is doing. And I think that's where the focus should be, is on the great work that they're doing. And therefore, if that means distancing from Richard somewhat in order to allow the focus to be on the award and allow the focus to be on the work that Ironman Center Israel is doing, then I'd prefer that that be the focus. And I think Richard does as well. So I don't think there's any conflict over here. All right, we got another $50 question. Cool. So thank you for the $50 Ragnarisa, which I knew why you asked it. I'm a little suspicious right now because of everything going on around this issue. Okay, friend of Aristotle, another $50 question. The current liquidity ratio is about 9 to 1, and the government's debt to GDP is about 125%. Do you use any standards such as these that we can watch to warn us of impeding sovereign default? No, because I don't think we have enough empirical evidence to generalize firm. So we don't have enough past situations that you can learn from and extrapolate with regard to the United States. The United States is unique in the sense that the dollar is the reserve currency of the world. The United States is unique in the sense that it has a massive economy that is still relatively flexible as compared to Greece or as compared to other countries that might have approached default. It also, the meaning of default for the dollar would have outsized consequences as compared to, let's say, the default of any other currency in the world. So there's a lot of moving parts here. Of course, Japan has a debt to GDP well over 200. I think it's 250 or a little bit above 250. So it's hard to come to conclusions based on the numbers. I do think the fact that the federal government uses short-term debt to finance itself is absurd, nutty, crazy, stupid, ignorant and puts them in a precarious position because if interest rates go up they will have to raise money at higher interest rates when they could have funded most of the debt with 30-year bonds and then known exactly what their liabilities were in the future because they're funding it with one-year treasuries or even three months or six months, interest rates are changing constantly and as a consequence, you can't plan into the future. Jeff, thank you. Wow, that's great. We're well over $600 now. That's terrific. I didn't think we'd make it this time, but you guys stepped up. Good for you. So I don't have hard and fast rules, if you will, for when you're going to get solved in default. It's not clear to me that we'll get default. You could just get inflation. It's not clear to me how it all plays out. I don't think anybody knows exactly how it all plays out. Action's action reminds me to remind you that we're having a front row event. I think it's on December 4th where it's the 4th or 11th, I can't remember, where we are going to, I'm obviously not prepared, where we're going to be discussing a small group. There'll be 14 of us on Zoom and we'll be discussing how to combat socialism. So how to combat the rise of socialism. So that's exciting. There'll be 14. I think it's $100 a person to attend and we'll be doing that. We did one on capitalism and I think the people who went to that or attended that really, really enjoyed it and got a lot out of it, we'll do one on socialism, we'll do others. So that's going to happen in, I think, the first Saturday of December. Alright, Naruto 1341, another $50. I listened to your Rules for Life episode about making life more beautiful and decided to apply that to my Twitter feed. By following artists I really enjoy. Now, scrolling brings me joy. More often than bad news brings me any negative emotions. Excellent. That's exactly what we want. That's exactly what we want art to do. It's to provide you with joy and pleasure and satisfaction and just a positive sense about the world. And if you can do that on Twitter, all the power to you. That's a double whammy. You're getting great art over Twitter, over the enemy of happiness. Alright, let's see. We've got three more, four more, four more $20 question. Let me just take this. Travis writes, apart from the spammers, at least for me, your Twitter keeps going back and forth between having followers and doesn't have any followers. Really? That's weird. I mean, thank you for the contribution of $20. That's weird. And my Twitter, I didn't think had any spammers and has been stable, so I'm not sure what's going on. I'll check Twitter out after the show. Alright, Ian, can you steal man? What people like Paul Krugman or Noah Smith would say will happen with the inflation debt that they claim they're not worried? What are their arguments? Well, basically, and I'm sympathetic to their argument because the fact is that so many free marketers have been crying wolf over and over and over again over the last 40 years and nothing bad has happened. Nothing bad dramatic has happened that it's kind of people are skeptical about it, and usually there's a real misunderstanding about the complexity of the market and what actually happens. So what I think they would say is, look, all this money being sent to people, yes, it's created this one-time increasing demand and a mismatch of supply and demand, but over time, supply chains will improve and catch up, production will accelerate because people are buying stuff, there's money in the system. As supply chains accelerate, supply will match demand, prices will stabilize, and inflation will be under control. In addition to that, yes, debt has increased a lot, but that's fine because debt, we've shown over and over again that debt doesn't have to be repaid, we continue to refinance it, and if indeed many of the infrastructure bill and these other bills are truly investments in the US economy, they are creating productive activity, they're creating productive resources, they will ultimately generate enough funds to be able to pay off the debt over the very, very long term, but if it takes us 100 years to pay off the debt, so what, that's fine. The main thing is to create a kind of circumstances where the economy grows a lot and there's a lot of surplus and that surplus can start paying down the debt. That, I think, is the steelman, and it's not ridiculous, it's not ridiculous. That is, it could very well play out something like that, where things don't get super bad anytime soon, at some point they have to because everything they're predicting that will happen with the economy is not going to happen. The economy is not going to get super bad, and they're spending much more than productive activity could increase. But for a while, we could still be faked out by it. At some point there has to be a reckoning. All right, I'm going to have to give shorter answers because it's getting late, I'm getting tired, and there's still a lot of questions. Okay, Stephen asks, can you explain a priori? A priori means the beginning that is inherent in, it's like the starting point of something. Now, that's not a great answer, but any philosophical questions or things like that, let's leave for next time because I'm going to leave the question up because I'm too tired to get into anything more sophisticated. Robert says, no question, outstanding talks in Michigan, thank you Robert. Seems inefficient to fly out when you can zoom until I see you in action in person. The internet's great, but nothing like seeing those kids listening to you in person. I agree. I'm much better in person, much better than this, I am in person. And getting the feedback from the kids live is so much more fun and so much better and so much more impactful on their lives. Yeah, that's much, much, much better. All right. All right, here we go. Michael asks, have you been following the call? Well, written house trial said to see he's the first teenager to get in trouble for simply taking out the trash. I don't consider him simply taking out the trash. I don't think that's right. I don't think it's right to shoot people. I don't think a kid should be in the street with a gun. I don't think a 17-year-old should be roaming around the streets with, I don't care who's rioting unless they're attacking his house and they weren't. He had to drive to a different town to do this. This is the job of the police. This is not a job of kids. This is a job for adults. This is a job for adults who are trained. So, no, I'm not a fan of written houses. I'm not a support of his. You know, he'll probably turn out that he did it in self-defense, but he should never have been there and there should be some penalty, some way to express the fact that he should have never, ever been there. Do we suffer more in imagination than in reality? Well, it depends. Some people, yes, some people, no. Some people suffer more in reality than in imagination. It depends how much you're suffering and from what? Intellectuals so envious of businessmen they're willing to pulverize our standard of living just to ensure businessmen don't rank them in the dominance hierarchy. In a sense, yes, but it's more than that. It's moral angst that they have and then they build whole rationalization how businessmen are destroying the economy, how businessmen are bad and evil and that they are the good guys for destroying them. So they don't hold it as they want to destroy, eviscerate the economy, pulverize the economy. They hold it as they're doing a good thing. More Michael, while World War II was taking place, did the Allies really know what was happening in New Guards to find a solution and choose to ignore it? Yes, there's plenty of evidence that Roosevelt at least knew. People smuggling out information, photographs, evidence. He knew he chose not to bomb the concentration camps, even though he could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives if he'd done it. He could have bombed the gas chambers. He would have killed a lot of people, but he would have also saved a lot of people. Anyway, yes, they did know about it. Frank asked, our New York election had a proposition for the right to clean air, clean water, et cetera, past. What does that really mean? Is that bad for New York State? It depends. What did it actually say? But having a right to clean air and clean water is devastating because now every proposition to clean up the air and clean up the water has to be passed because you have a right to it. So it emboldens the environmentalists and it gives them more legislative and judicial tools to get their agenda across. Ryan says, just started keeping the light. Do you think of some modern day examples of Plato's view of the realm of forms? I think this is a connection with evading reality, longing for different reality. Yes, I think the socialists commit this. There's a form of the ideal, this fantasy that they have and they're willing to evade all the previous trials of socialism and everything else in order to live by some detached from reality ideals. You see it all over the place and the light deals with that and it brings it up all the way up to modern times. But I think Jordan Peterson has it, right? The truth is out there. It's in things. He's got this intrinsic view of the world. Meaning is outside. It's in another dimension. You have to somehow, through revelation, discover your meaning through revelation. That's all Plato. Jordan Peterson is very platonic. Jacob writes, thoughts on the lawn moths calling the UN's bluffing world hunger background. Yes, I mean they asked for 6 billion of his US dollars to fix world hunger. They said they could fix it with the 6 billion and he said, okay, give me a plan. Show me a plan. I'll give you 6 billion. A plan that works. A plan that will really solve world hunger. I will happily sell enough Tesla stock to give you 6 billion. Is Nancy Pelosi evil? Yeah, no question. She's an evader. She's a manipulator. She's a destroyer. She's absolutely evil. Evasion is the essence of evil. How much money would you want to do a lecture teaching CFC valuation of companies? Free cash flow valuation of companies. Oh, God. Really? I don't know. I used to teach that in executive MBA program. I don't know how many hours it would take. I don't know. I charge, look, for a live lecture, I charge, you know, $5,000, $45,000 to $5,000. For a Zoom lecture, I would probably charge $2,000. Something like that. Free cash flow valuation of companies, I could do that. We'd have to talk about what exactly you'd want. For in-person, depending on where, generally around five, for Zoom around two. Noodle1341 asks, I decided to have objective value on a whim because someone who knew more than me told me that he's an expert. All right. I think you're kidding, right? Daniel also asks, how do you navigate high inflation as an individual investor? Stocks don't do great, but they don't do bad. They don't do horrible. You want to stay away from bonds. Real estate often does well because you can adjust rents and value of real estate goes up with inflation. And of course, commodities do very well. So gold, silver, oil, a lot of other commodities are usually linked to inflation. You could also look for companies if you're investing in stocks. Companies that have pricing power. Companies that can easily raise prices with inflation and therefore shouldn't be taking too big of a hit in terms of net income. Noodle, PSA on good news. I read today that a bill was passed to remove sales tax on tampons. Tampons. Yay! The regulation helps people. I'm good with that. You know, remove all. Yes. Tampons are important. Stephen Travis. I am referring to the spammers on the Super Chat. Okay, I'm not sure what that refers to. Robert, thank you for the $3. Thanks guys. What did we make? We made it to 700 bucks. Wow. Excellent. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Don't forget. Those of you who don't do Super Chat, those of you who listen to the show after the fact, I should actually say all this at the beginning of the show because you guys probably don't listen all the way to end. Please consider supporting the show on a monthly basis. Since you're not here to participate in the Super Chat, you can do that on uranbookshow.com. You can do it on Patreon, on Subscribestar, on Locals. I'm looking for 500 additional supporters on a monthly basis. 500 people. We should be able to get another 500 people to support the Iran Book Show on uranbookshow.com. Support Patreon, Locals, on Subscribestar. All right, everybody. Hope you enjoyed the show. I will see you all tomorrow. Not sure what time, but definitely tomorrow and Sunday. We'll do two more shows. Then I'm not sure about next week. We'll see.