 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Brookshow. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Brookshow on this Monday Memorial Day. We still commemorate Memorial Day. We'll talk about that another time. We're going to do a news roundup as usual on weekdays. And we're going to jump in in a second. Remind everybody that you can use the Super Chat feature to ask questions pretty much about anything, news related or not. I also want to mention that yesterday we did a members-only show. Those of you who are members who didn't catch it live, you have a link to it. You should be able to find it, and you should be able to watch it if you're interested. I thought it was fun and interesting, so hopefully some of you will enjoy it. And we'll see. At some point we'll play the members-only show for everybody, but it'll probably be a while before we do that. Okay, so let's jump in. I mean, the big news on the weekend was the fact that the Republicans in Biden have reached an agreement with regard to the debt ceiling deal. You know, it's an agreement in principle, and of course the details still have to be worked out, and of course legislation has to pass, and you have to get enough Republicans and enough Democrats to vote for this. With this deal, clearly some Republicans are not going to vote for it, and some Democrats are not going to vote for it. So you're going to get the people on the right and the people on the left are not voting for it. It's going to be interesting to see how all of this plays out and how McCarthy manages to get this through. It is his responsibility, after all, as Speaker of the House. So let's talk a little bit about what the details are within this agreement. So basically the Republicans have agreed to vote to increase the debt ceiling and to increase it by enough to carry it through past January 2025. January 2025 is when, and you or maybe the existing president will be voted in, sworn in. So 2025 kind of covers the next election cycle. So neither party wants to have to deal with raising the debt ceiling again before the election. So that kind of deals with that issue, that problem by extending it all the way to 2025. So it raises it enough to cover that. On the spending side, basically discretionary spending, which is a small part of the budget, small. Discretionary spending is going to be what do you call it? It's kept level at in 2024 2023 levels and will only be allowed to go up 1% in 2025. Now we'll see some of that is going to be achieved by just moving around money so that certain programs won't see cuts. Other programs will see deeper cuts or some money. For example, they're going to claw back some COVID emergency money and COVID emergency funds that have not been used yet. They're going to claw back and they're not going to cut the spending by that amount. God forbid you can't cut spending, but they're going to use that to backfill programs that are not going to grow as much as they would have expected to fill it in. What else? You remember the $80 billion that Congress approved to increase the IRS budget by $80 billion? As I told you at the time, it was kind of meaningless. It's a big number. It seems like a lot. They were going to hire all these agents, but the reality was most of those hires were to replace existing agents. They're having a hard time finding agents anyway because there's a massive shortage in accountants out there in the workforce. So the whole IRS is going to grow by $80 billion. It was always kind of a charade and unreal. Anyway, they're cutting that. And hard to tell by how much. One story I read said they're cutting it by $10 billion instead of $80. So $70 instead of $80. And another story I read is cutting it by $20 something billion. I don't think they know yet exactly what the numbers are, but the bottom line is the IRS thing. I guess that's a win for Republicans. They will consider it a win. They will play it a win even though I think in the big picture thing it's kind of meaningless. Let's see. If all 12 appropriation bills are not passed by the end of the year, so these budgetary bills, the 12 budgetary bills, then there's another 1% cut across the board in discretionary spending. That I think is to incentivize Republicans not to hold up budgets and to incentivize Biden not to veto budgets that pass the House of Representative, which is controlled by Democrats. A lot of this is gimmickry to get everybody aligned over the same incentives. Military spending in physical 2024 will increase by about 3%, which is what Biden has always wanted. So that will increase to about $886 billion. And let's see. There will be $121 billion for veterans program. And non-defense discretionary will be capped at $637 billion for 2024. What else do we have? We talked about IRS funding. We talked about COVID clawbacks. Yeah, Republicans got some minor increases in work requirements in order to receive food stamps, basically food aid. You're going to have to work in order to receive it. But it's limited right now, I think. So the tentative deal would largely require, I'm reading from the Wall Street Journal, able-bodied, low-income adults without dependence between the ages of 18 and 54 to work to receive food aid up from the current top age of 49. So the real differences, they've increased it from 49 to 54. No change other than that. And anyway, they're tinkering at the margins with some welfare programs so that they can go and pretend that they've done something major here that increases the requirement for work. Let's see what else. Yeah, finally, maybe the most significant thing, but this was bipartisan. So you think they could have gotten this without this deal. They could have gotten it outside of it, but maybe this will spur them. The permitting, environmental permitting for energy projects is going to be limited to two years. So to get environmental permitting, you have to do it within two years. If not, the developers can start suing the government agencies to force them to do it within two years. Currently, reviews take an average of four and a half years. So this is a major cut from four and a half years to two years for environmental reviews for major energy projects. Also, in addition to that, the agreement will require a single federal agency to take charge of the environmental review so that you don't have five agencies each doing their own review, each on a different schedule. There'll be one major agency that then has responsibility and can be sued if it doesn't meet that responsibility of getting all the reviews and the whole process done within two years. There's also a carve-out in the whole agreement, a carve-out to accelerate even further the permitting for the Mountain Valley pipeline, the 300-mile natural gas pipeline in West Virginia and Virginia, which Senator Joe Manchin has really been pushing for. And this is both parties want to please Manchin because he is kind of a swing vote in the Senate or can be a swing vote in the Senate. So they threw him this little bone. Anyway, so there is a deal. As I told you, there would be a deal. There is a deal and the deal basically is blah. There's nothing much there. It doesn't change much of the status quo. Remember that most government spending is not discretionary. Most government spending is Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. That has not been touched. That will not be touched. That will grow. Nobody wants to reform any of that under discretionary stuff instead of really cutting instead of really making fundamental structural changes to the budget. All we've got is a capping and a slow increase of 1%. Now inflation adjusted. Maybe that is substantial. But at the end of the day, very little impact on the overall economy. Defense spending will increase at 3%. Again, 3% might be given inflation at over 4%, might be perceived as a cut toward Biden wanted 3%. That's what he asked for. So it's meaningless. So the whole thing basically, the bottom line on the whole debt-silly thing was Republicans got enough to be able to go to their constituency. See, we fought for you. We fought to reduce inflation. We went after the evil Democrats in order to cap their evil spending. And Republicans will cheer them and Democrats will go and say, yeah, Republicans want to gut the budget. We basically saved the budget. Nothing much has happened here. Look elsewhere. No big deal. So win-win, in a political sense. Who loses? The American people. We all lose. The economy loses. Government is spending continues to be out of control. Government deficits from here until eternity. There's no plan to start reducing deficits. The permitting stuff is good. But again, what is really needed is restructuring the whole environmental permitting thing. I would get rid of it completely. You know, at the very least, not just put a two-year cap on it, but actually streamline it, get rid of some of the agencies that are responsible for it, and set some clear rules. This two-year thing is just going to get bogged down in its own bureaucracy. But we will see. Maybe something good will turn out of that. Of all the things I've read about the debt ceiling, that is probably the best thing to come out of it. Again, look, without a fundamental change in the views of the American people about the role of government, you're not going to see a significant change in the budget. You're not going to see a significant cost cutting, and you're not going to see any attempt to reform or to rein in or to ultimately privatize and do away with the entitlement state. And it is entitlements that are the bulk of spending, and it's the entitlements that are the bulk of future deficits, future debt, unfunded liabilities of $100 to $200 trillion, but nobody will touch it because the American people don't want politicians to touch them. So until we get a leader who's willing to challenge the American people, or until we get a cultural change among the American people, who want to ultimately limit the scope of government, we won't get any significant budgetary reform. It doesn't matter who is in the White House. It doesn't matter who is in the House and Senate. They will spend, spend, spend, spend. Maybe when the House is Republican and the presidency is Democratic, they spend less than otherwise. That, by the way, is the best combination for government spending, is a Democratic president in a Republican House or Senate. So a Republican veto on a Democrat spending. Anything else, Republicans controlling everything, Democrats controlling anything, is an unmitigated disaster when it comes to the size of government, when it comes to government spending, and included the scope of government, the kind of things that government does. If you don't believe me about a Republican spending and Democrat spending, look it up online. You can find government spending by political party, and you can see that the best combination, the best combination since World War II has been Democratic president, Republican House or Senate. All right. So debt ceiling, the best thing about it is it takes uncertainty away. It takes a talking point away. People stop worrying and fretting and talking about default and all this stuff. It was never going to happen, but people were talking about it. It created uncertainty, markets were wobbly. This should, you know, else hold constant, which it never is. This should allow markets to at least regain some stability and some confidence that at least that problem will not happen. Of course, the big issue is are we heading towards a recession or not? Okay. Let's see. Bad news out of Turkey, but not unexpected. We talked about this already. Erdogan has won reelection. He won by 52 to 48 reelection in the presidential campaign. This is in spite of the fact that the Turkish economy has been devastated. Inflation is through the roof. It is well over 40%. By some estimate, it might be over 100%. Stand of living quality of life in Turkey is declining. I mean, this is, it's just, it's suggestive of how authoritarians get away with this stuff, right? That in, you know, this is Donald Trump shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue and still getting elected on steroids, right? I mean, here is a Turkish president who has destroyed Turkish culture, has, you know, placed Turkish in a, Turkey in a very difficult international scenario where they're members of NATO but kind of support Russia and supporting Iran. But, you know, and neither here nor there, overall, and it's really her, Turkey, is farm policy. They will never become a part of the EU as long as Erdogan is president. And of course, the Turkish economy is being shredded. It's a disaster. The Turkish lira, the currency, has devalued vis-a-vis the dollar by 90%, 90% over the last decade, 6% since the start of the year and probably more just in the next few minutes. This is in spite of the fact that the Turkish central bank is clearly manipulating the currency, that is holding it as high as they can. In spite of this manipulation over the last 10 years, the Turkish lira has devalued by 10%. Imagine inputs raising in costs by, you know, raising in costs by, I don't know what that would be, by an enormous percentage, right? So it's the quality of life, standard of living, purchasing power. By every measure, life in Turkey has become harder. There was a bad response to the earthquake, an ineffectual response to the earthquake. The nationalism of Erdogan pretty much across the board on pretty much everything he does, and yet he still wins. And that is, call it charisma, call it attraction to authoritarians, call it nationalism, call it religion. Hard to tell exactly, you know, if it's any one source. I think it's all of those. It's, Turkey turns out to be a much more religious culture than one would have expected and a very nationalistic culture. So the nationalists, the religionists, and then the personality worshipers go on as dominated Turkish politics for 20 years. He has built up a personality worship during the first 10 years of his administration. Turkish economy did very well. He liberalized, he opened up, he did good things. Over the last 10 years he has been awful. Doesn't matter. He has now developed this personality worship and he gets the votes no matter what. Ertan, I assume from Turkey, because he just gave me 110 Turkish lira, which is worth five bucks. Right now it could be with a little less in a minute, says Turkish lira is so depreciated that this five minute super chat only makes five and a half dollars. Good news. There are people supporting you from Turkey. Yes, that is good news. Thank you, Ertan. And sorry for your loss. I mean, I'm sure the opposition guy was not that great, right? Was not that great. But really, really, really important to when somebody, I mean, this is my case about Trump. It's really, really, really important to penalize bad behavior. It's really, really, really important to penalize failure, to penalize doing bad stuff, even if the alternative is bad in and of itself. So, Erdogan was bad. The opposition, yes, the opposition was bad too. But you'll never learn. You'll never advance. You'll never get better unless you penalize the people who are in power who are really bad. And that's why you had a vote against, I think, Erdogan in this election. Just like in my view, you had a vote against Trump two and a half years ago. Even if you didn't vote for Biden, you had a vote against Trump. So, because they need to pay for the bad stuff that they do. Otherwise, if politicians don't pay when they do bad stuff under the assumption that the opposition is worse, then you're stuck in a cycle of things getting ever, ever worse and nobody ever learning anything. Nobody ever getting penalized for the bad stuff they do. So no incentive, no motivation to improve. All right, just a reminder. We've still got $200 to raise on the $250 goal. These shows are paid for, among other things, by the Super Chat. I devote a lot of time to doing these new shows. If we can't raise on a regular basis the $250 for the new shows, it's not clear that they're worth it. I might go back to the old format and not do the new shows. It is important that we reach these goals on a regular basis, not every time, but on a regular basis. So just a reminder of that because we are pretty short. And despite the fact that we have a significant, a decent number of people watching right now, if those people just came in with three bucks each, we'd be easily above our goal. So, Erdogan, president of Turkey for another five years, tragic for the people of Turkey who now have rewarded his bad behavior with another five-year presidency. And given his speech, once he won, it is clear that he's not going to change his ways. It is clear that he's learned nothing. It's clear that he doesn't care about the future of Turkey and the Turkish economy. He is going to stick to his failed agenda no matter what. Whoops, I didn't mean to close that file. All right, one of the big stories coming out of the UK. Let me see if I can find this file that I just closed by accident. Okay, there it is. One of the big stories coming out of the UK the last few days has been the official net migration numbers. So this is net people going into the UK and people leaving the UK, what the net number is. Well, that net number has hit an all-time record high. Last year, there were net 600,000 people, 600,000 people who entered the UK. Actually, the number of people who entered the UK is well over a million. And then you had about, I think it's 1.1, 1.2 million. But you had about 557,000 people leaving the UK, which is an interesting phenomenon which we'll talk about in a second. So right now, the number of people coming into the United States, into the UK is at record highs. A record in all of history supposedly, although not adjusted for the population, but record, the number of people leaving is relatively high. And the net is at all-time high. And this is an exact opposition to the Conservative Party's pledge as of 2019 to bring down immigration rates. Immigration rates are increasing in the UK. They're going through the roof. It's interesting to talk about the people leaving the UK. First of all, a lot of people from the EU, Poles and others are leaving. They're going back home. They're going back home to their countries. Partially because of the struggles of the UK economy. Partially because they feel less welcome, because of once Brexit happened, it's harder for them to renew visas. It's harder for them to become UK citizens. It's harder for them to exit and enter, go in and out. So a lot of the EU migrants who came in in the past are actually going home now. But in addition, you've got a lot of non-EU people leaving the UK. So actually more non-EU migrants left the UK than ever in the past. At least in the last 14 years. And then you've got UK nationals leaving as well. That number is pretty stable. You probably got a number of quite a few Ukrainians who came to the UK during the war and who are now going back to Ukraine as things a little bit more stable over there. So that is general. Alright, in terms of migration in, record highs, well over a million people. The numbers here, some of the reason for this is just what you'd call a post-COVID bump. That is people who would have come in 2020 and 2021, couldn't come in 2021, so they got delayed into 2022-2023. So that's why you get this delay, so they're coming in now. But also the number of work visas that the UK government is issued is at an all-time high. And that is a consequence of the fact that there's a massive labour shortage. In spite of the struggles of the UK economy, there is still an ongoing labour shortage in the UK. Maybe that has to do with the aging population, but the reality is, also has to do with the fact that because of socialized medicine, for example, wages of doctors and nurses and dentists in the UK have been low for a long, long time. They get paid by the government basically. So they're unappealing for Brits to become a doctor. It's very unappealing for somebody of British or UK origin because the salaries are low. But it's very appealing for an Indian or Pakistani or Nigerian or somebody from outside the UK to come in because they're higher than what they would make in their home country. So a big part of the work visas on nurses and medical staff and doctors and dentists, it's hard to find a dentist a doctor in the UK who are not migrants, who are not immigrants. So that's a big part of the immigrant and the driver immigration is that there's just a lot of work. Also, the UK has become one of the main attractions for studying for student visas, particularly as few and few people have come to the US, particularly from Asia, who felt feel whether justified or not feel less welcome in the United States. They have gravitated towards the UK, which has excellent universities. So you've got a huge number of study visas. It looks like from here it's like well over half a million study visas coming in. And then there's this program that allows students to bring in their family for their family to come with. That has increased, but it's still a tiny fraction of the overall. The overall big numbers are basically work and study. The kind of work that migrants have are care workers, nurses, senior care workers. So the kind of jobs that I think Brits don't want. Beyond that it's programmers, doctors, IT analysts, business analysts, chefs, accountants, finance analysts. Yeah, chefs. I mean, you don't really want a British chef. So restaurants are eager to take in fond chefs who actually cook delicious food. So these numbers are really, really high. They expect that they will come down because they expect this kind of a one-off because of COVID, but they're going to remain high, even if not this high for the foreseeable future. Countries that are sending a lot of migrants over. Well, one is Hong Kong, the UK to its credit. The UK provided expedited visas for anybody from Hong Kong who wants to come and work in the UK. And so I think well over 100,000 Hong Kongers have moved to Britain as a consequence of that. Quite a few Ukrainians. Again, there were special visas because of the Ukraine war that allowed them to come into the UK relatively easy. So you get a lot of Ukrainians coming in. And beyond that you get Indians from India, Filipinos, Nigerians and Indians are the largest group beyond those two. So significant migrant flow in. In terms of who they work for, their employer, the largest employer of immigrants is the NHS, the National Health Service. Again, because they keep wages low, they rely completely on migrants who are willing to accept low wages. And of course, it's the migrants and then their families. That's their NHS. Let's see. Students, most of the students are from India, Nigeria and China. Those three countries and Pakistan is fourth. Those are the big ones. Nigeria, remember was a British colony in Africa. So they are part of the crown and they know they have good English. So it's relatively easy for them to come in. So large migration, large, large net migration into the UK creating a lot of angst, a lot of political concern. You know how the world generally is anti-migration while they have no option but to take it particularly the rich world. The rich world, generally the wealthy world is seeing record levels of net migration in to a large extent because the rich world is getting old. And it needs young workers in order to keep the economies working, going. So you're seeing record levels of migration into Europe in spite of what you remember for 2015, which was the big Muslim migration into Europe. There's more migrants coming into Europe now than back then. Large migrations into America, we know that. Just in America it's completely haphazard and not organized and not thought out. UK seems to have a much better thought out system. While the UK has had 40,000 asylum seekers relative to total migration of 1.3 million, that's not that big of a number. Most of the people coming in to the UK as migrants are legal migrants that are coming in to work. People coming to work are families of people who are coming to work. And again, a big chunk of those were from Hong Kong and from Ukraine and from other countries. And a big chunk of it were actually, I can't remember what I was going to say. But let's see. Yeah, I mean, almost everything is for work, right? Work and work dependence. And then, of course, study. Study. And then the nice thing about UK is it makes it relatively easy for people who come to study to stay. So you get a lot of Indians, Chinese, Nigerians, Pakistanis who come in with student visas and stay in the UK. All right, that's a quick story about migration to the UK. It's a big political issue right now because, of course, the Conservative government is opposed to immigration, or they say they are, they're not really, and they make a big deal out of this. And they promise to cut immigration. And, of course, a lot of the people who voted for Brexit voted for Brexit under the assumption that there'd be less immigration. And what they're getting is more immigration. And to some extent, more immigration of the kind they don't like, the kind with brown skin. So they used to get immigration from the EU. Now they're getting immigration from Nigeria and from India and from Pakistan, which is a lot less appealing to a lot of the people who voted for Brexit. So UK is in the thrust of this pull, push, kind of trying to decide what its future is going to be. And immigration is a big part of that. It's time to decide whether Brexit was a good idea or a bad idea, and I think immigration is always a big part of that. Right. Finally, a quick word about NVIDIA. NVIDIA has been the talk over the last few days, both as a stock and as a technology company. It is probably the first chip company to become a trillion-dollar company to enter the realm of a Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, kind of trillion-dollar club. The interesting thing about NVIDIA, which you won't hear much, is they don't actually manufacture any chip. They are a fabulous company. That is, they don't actually make the chips that carry their name. The chips themselves are made in Taiwan and in South Korea. They're open to having Intel, which has been a competitive theirs in the past. Having Intel in the future make their chips. We'll see if Intel can get to the level of making these chips. NVIDIA has been a chip design company, and that has been its strength. They have designed a variety of different chips, but they are known for designing chips for graphic intensive applications. They are the company that made video games as popular and as successful and as powerful as they are today. They manage all the graphics that the video game industry requires. NVIDIA has been in many, many other companies' computers. They are in video cards. They have done phenomenally well. They have done phenomenally well in that industry, but that industry at the end of the day is capped somewhat. You can have a great business. You can do very, very well. But at the end of the day, it's a graphics card. How big of a deal is that? But that's being what they've really focused on since they were founded in 1993. I think it was 1993, and they brought out graphic cards throughout the late 90s in the 2000s. They really rode the wave of the gaming industry. They were a big part of the gaming industry. But what has really allowed them to take off recently is the fact that over the last few years, five, six, seven, I'm not sure exactly how many years, people have realized that these graphic chips, the GPUs, the chips that are used in the GPUs are actually perfectly designed for artificial intelligence, for AI. And what has happened is people working in AI have started loading these chips up into servers that do AI, the AI kind of work. So as AI has exploded over the last few months, the demand for NVIDIA chips, the demand for NVIDIA servers has exploded, and NVIDIA now stock is reflecting that and its valuation is reflecting that. NVIDIA has bought dozens of companies since it was founded. It has built up its capabilities, and today is the go-to chip for anybody working in AI. One of its chips is so sophisticated and advanced, used both in AI but also in defense systems, that the U.S. Commerce Department has placed it on the list of chips that you cannot sell to China that the Biden administration put together. In response to that, partially, NVIDIA is going to design a chip that's not quite as advanced as this and can be used quite for the applications this chip is designed for, but is advanced enough to still be interesting to the Chinese, and it is designing a new advanced chip in China called the A800 GPU that meets the export control rules and will be sold into China. So NVIDIA designs chips, but it doesn't make the chips themselves again. The chips themselves are made by ASML and by Samsung, primarily ASML in Taiwan and Samsung in South Korea. But yet, without manufacturing, NVIDIA is a service company. Designing chips is a service business. In spite of that, this service company that manufactures nothing, you could argue, is going to be worth a trillion dollars. It's fascinating that the United States, all the landmark stocks that reached landmark levels like a trillion dollar company have all been America. America still produces the most innovative, the largest, the most substantive, substantial companies in the world. In spite of the fact that supposedly, did I say ASML? I meant TSMC, sorry, I meant Taiwan Semiconductor. So thank you most of all. TSMC is the Taiwan company that makes their chips. So for example, US Steel became the world's first billion dollar company in 1901. General Motors became the first 10 billion company in 1955. This is market cap. General Electric became the world's first 100 billion dollar company in 1995. And of course, Apple became the first trillion dollar company in the world in 2018. The US leads, it leads in innovation still. And even though we supposedly don't manufacture anything in the United States, we obviously produce something to generate these kind of valuations and to generate the kind of companies that we have. So the US is still doing something right in this economy. All right, that is what I had prepared for the news today. Let me just see those. What is this? All right, let's see. What else do we have? Yeah, we've got a few questions. I will remind you again. I hate doing this, but it seems like if I remind you, it's more likely I get to my goal than if I don't remind you. We're about $170 short of a goal, which is substantial. The goal is $250 for these shows. We've got 90 people watching the show live right now. So again, basically two bucks from everybody watching gets us there. And you can do that without asking a question. You can do it with a sticker. And $2, I don't think it's that big of a deal. And obviously you're watching, so you will see some value from what I do. So I would definitely appreciate it if you could do a $2 sticker superchat to help us get to our target of $250 for these shows. We no longer have people who come in and just do $200 all in one bang and get us there. So I'm dependent on some of you just chipping in $2 at a time. Robert did that. $2 Gail, $5 Luke, $20. Thank you guys. We really, really appreciate it. And let's jump into Jeff's question. Could you talk about what about how AI is going to affect investing in Silicon Valley specifically since I live here? Will it make investing in broad index funds obsolete? No, I don't think so. I don't see why. What AI is going to do is it basically is it's going to enhance business across the board. It's going to enhance every business out there. It's going to create new winners and losers. There are going to be some companies that are going to lose because of the IEI boom because they haven't adjusted to it. They haven't prepared themselves. They're not ready. Their products are not up to speed or whatever it happens to be. And then there are going to be winners. There are going to be companies that take AI and they dominate. So you're still going to have a value in having a diversified portfolio if you can't tell the difference between those who are going to win and those who are going to lose. So I don't think it changes anything about investing. I don't think it changes anything about saving. I think what it really does is it just creates new opportunities for massive wealth creation. This will be potentially the most disruptive innovation in a long, long time and could change how business is done, change how we do our professions, change much of how the world moves, how business moves, and all of that could happen in the next 20 years. So there's going to be a lot of money to be made in that. A lot of money to be made in that. Adam says, always great to have a YB show to listen to heading home for a beach weekend. Thanks, Adam. And I'll be in touch about the topics. I don't really have any new topics beyond that initial list. So we should decide on which one you want to sponsor from that list. By the way, if anybody wants to propose a topic to be sponsored by Adam, you can do so on the super chat with $20. And I will add it to the list and Adam will choose which one he sponsors. And that's a $1,000 sponsorship for shows. So you get the opportunity to propose a topic that might get selected without having to put together $1,000. You can do it for $20. So please consider doing that in the remainder of the show today. Shaspat, if Michelangelo was alive today, who would he make a sculpture of? You know, I don't know. You know, the question would be is, I mean, I don't know that artists, great artists are that interested in making art of particular people. The whole point is to make art that represents a real abstraction. And you can do that with a mythological figures because they represent so much. Certainly with something like David or even Jesus or the pita, they represent real abstract values, you know, substantial and real abstract values. But if you just make a sculpture of Steve Jobs, you know, it's Steve Jobs and you have to do Steve Jobs justice. So creating a sculpture of a real living human being, I don't think it's that interesting for the real geniuses of art. The real genius of art are really mostly interested in doing something that has some kind of, you know, metaphysical value that goes beyond the personality of the life of a particular individual and a less interested probably in doing portraits. Although they would do great portraits. I don't know that if he could, if Michelangelo was alive today, I don't think he would be interested in doing portraits. I think he would be interested in doing magnificent sculptures. And I can't imagine what that would be if I could. Maybe I'd hide somebody to do it, but I'm not an artist. I don't have that kind of ability, even that kind of imagination. All right, thanks guys. Let's see, a number of you have stepped up. I really, really appreciate it. We've got Gail, Luke, Fendt Hopper, Leirin, Iron Mirkat, Linda and AI. AI. So we've got all of those. But we're still about $90 short. So maybe $5, $20 questions will do it. Or you can just make a contribution. Again, a buck now from each person online right now would get us there. Michael says, is it possible Iron Mirkat's ideas can change the culture absent any academic credibility? Seems like they have to some extent, they have to some extent already. Yeah, I mean, they have already changed the culture to some extent without any academic credibility. But I think academic credibility can accelerate the process. There's no question about that. Academia has leverage. They have to leverage because it interacts with students, thousands and thousands of young people, young people who are potentially open to new ideas. It also is where people go if they want expertise. If I want to know what's going on in the world, I go find an academic who can comment on it. One of those academics were, you know, were objectivist and that objectivism will start getting into the commentary about all kinds of other things. So I think it accelerates the process significantly. Can it happen without it? Probably given that I think overall academia is in decline. But it is a significant accelerated tour of cultural change. Alex, thank you Alex for 80 second. What is your stance on Adlerian therapy as a tool for getting control of one's life? You know, I don't have a stance on it, right? Because I'm not a psychologist. You know, I really, really think that you should stick to commenting on things you know and I don't know psychology. And this is not philosophy, it's psychology. So I would, when I have Gina Golan on next, when I have a psychologist next, I would encourage you to ask her about what her view is on Adlerian therapy. And so I'm going to pass, unfortunately. Okay, so anonymous user says, do you think the global economy will recover? Well, I mean, that's in a sense, it's your question. What does, what does recovery mean? You know, what does it mean to say the global economy will recover? Recover from what? We're not in a recession yet. We haven't hit, certainly haven't hit bottom of what I consider recession. You know, above and beyond that. Oh God, I have to initially initiate this once again. Click that. Recover to what? Recover, you know, to what level of, let's say, growth, economic growth. Inflation clearly is too high. I think inflation will come down. But when, how much and what will be the other economic cost of it? I look generally, I think the global economy screwed. That is generally, I think we're in for a low growth stagnation on a global scale. So, you know, if, if you're expecting high growth, if that's what a recovery looks like, then I don't think it's happening anytime soon. I think the global economy is not going to return to high growth anytime soon because of the statism, because of the controls, because of the regulations, because of the perverse taxes, because China has regressed. China was the engine of economic growth globally for a long time and China's not going to be able to do that anymore because its economic growth is slowed. But primarily because of controls and regulations that are limiting the potential of the economic growth in most countries. Thanks, Anand Moshiza. Okay, Adam, why isn't there a better organized boycott of companies that finance Putin's invasion of Ukraine? Operating in Russia and paying taxes to Putin. Lists exist, but Google, YouTube won't let us post the URLs of the boycott lists. Huh, interesting. I didn't know that. I don't know why there's not a beta organized. Partially, I think because, yeah, because we all know that Russia is getting around the boycotts significantly, partially, because there's just no energy behind it. There's just not enough people energized and excited enough about the issue of Ukraine. I mean, as I said in other shows, the issue, for example, of trans is much more top of mind for Americans, particularly on the right, and that's why you get very effective boycotts of Bud Light and you get very effective boycotts in our target. They're losing massive market share and market value. But something that is much more existential, much more important, much more dramatic, I think, like a war in Ukraine, people don't care enough about. There's not enough passion, there's not enough interest, there's not enough energy around anything like that. Thanks, Adam. Ian. With movies like Air, Tetris, Blackberry and The Founder, and upcoming movies like Madden about the creation of the video game, the flaming and flaming heart about the creator of the chip, why are we seeing a pro-business movie trend now? Good question. Maybe this is one of those really, really positive cultural trends under the surface that we haven't noticed. But you're right, there's certainly a certain nostalgia to kind of the start-up ages of the past, Blackberry, Tetris, I'm not sure what the founder, who was the founder about? Was that McDonald's? And that American can-do attitude that is reflected, I think, also in Air, which I haven't watched yet. I think, look, America is still fundamentally pro-entrepreneur, pro-start-up, pro-innovator, pro-technology, pro-business. And yeah, I mean, I think it is interesting, the trend. Let me think about it. That could be worth commenting. I still have to watch Tetris and Air, and then I don't know if Blackberry's out yet. I've seen The Founder, and I'm looking forward to watching Madden and Flaming Heart, and maybe let's see if we can find some threads there and some indications there. But America still has that, and it's interesting that it's arrived in Hollywood, but Hollywood at the end of the day needs to sell movie tickets. Hollywood at the end of the day is influenced by the general culture. Not everybody in Hollywood is a flaming, radical, crazy leftist. And maybe what we're seeing is all these streaming platforms allowing other voices, maybe voices that couldn't have been heard in the past, to express themselves. And maybe there really is something interesting, something worthwhile here going on that is indicative of some cultural change in some segments of our economy. That would be phenomenal if that were true. Robin, oh, a suggestion. Excellent. A suggestion for Adam's show. I'd like to hear about three to five business leaders who appear to have objective principles and how that influenced their business, i.e. business model, management style, and so on. I mean, let me, there's a list. I'll add that. The challenge with that is that would be filtered through me. I would be telling you what they did. I don't know that I can get them on, although I'll try to get John Allison on the show. But yeah, that would be a good show. Okay, good. I posted it and adding it to Adam's list. Shazbot, should a great artist do a sculpture of Jewel No. 8 in 12 Angry Men, or some similar heroic figure from the movies? I don't, I just don't think so. I mean, I think what's most effective in sculpture is, you know, and is to, in a sense, to create a sculpture that tells a story in and of itself. Not a sculpture that is a subsidiary. For example, I believe that sculpture, mostly, sculpture should be nude. Clothing in sculpture, I find, is ridiculous and offensive and weird and very rarely appropriate. And, you know, sculpture should be some kind of reflection of heroism and perfection of the human body and man in action and man in certain situations. And yeah, you could be inspired by a movie or movie game or something like that. But I don't know that what you want is a direct sample from something like that. Again, other than, unless something like 12 Angry Men became mythology. And so that by identifying as Jewel No. 8, you bring the viewer a whole context that it triggers. But today, naming Jewel No. 8, most people don't, haven't seen 12 Angry Men, and it wouldn't mean anything. But yeah, you could imagine to the extent that a movie creates a certain mythology, just like David in the Old Testament creates a mythology, or just like Greek mythology creates a mythology, that you make a sculpture based on a character like that. Michael asked, it does not take a majority to prevail, but rather any rate tireless minority. Keep on setting bushfires of freedom in minds of men. That is what we're doing. We are trying. Frank says, do you think Andre from We The Living was stoic? You know, I don't know exactly what that means. That is, what do we mean by stoic? Like, does that mean living a stoic philosophy? No, I don't think he was. Do I think that he repressed some of his emotions? Yes. Do I think that he, you know, that he was good at detaching himself from the cruelty of what he was doing? Yes. But I don't know if to call it stoic. I'm not sure exactly what stoic means, even though we just had a thing with, I think it's overused. I think it's a term that's overused. It doesn't refer in people's minds to the stoic philosophy because they don't know the stoic philosophy. So I would just be careful on overusing the terminology. Alright, thanks guys. We met our goal. So I appreciate all the superchatters, all the people who asked questions, all the people who did the stickers. Those of you who watched the show afterwards can cheer. And I think there's a button there for cheering and adding a little bit of financial contribution. Of course, you can also support your On Book Show monthly on Patreon and on my website, youronbookshow.com, so I support through PayPal. Thanks everybody. I will see you all probably tonight. I probably have a show tonight at 8 p.m. I hope to see you guys there, but certainly tomorrow morning for another one of these news roundups. Bye everybody.