 Fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Brook Show. Alright everybody, welcome to Iran Brook Show on this Sunday. I guess it's 4 p.m. here in Lima, Peru. That's where I am right now in Lima. It's quite a beautiful city. My hotel is right on the water. I was going to have this window open and have you watch the sunset. Well, it's far from sunset yet, but the ocean is right behind me. There were guys gliding on these parachutes right outside here going back and forth just next to the window of my hotel. I guess I could look right through the windows right into my room. A very cool location, a nice city, and tomorrow is going to be a busy day. I've got a breakfast, no, not a breakfast, but a morning event, a lunch event, and an evening event. So three different talks. Tomorrow they'll keep me busy, and then on to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. So that's the schedule. Tomorrow will be Lima. Tuesday will be Rio de Janeiro. I hope we'll see how the timing works out, but I'll try to do a show. I probably won't do a show tomorrow. We'll see, maybe in the afternoon if the lunch event ends early. And then I'll try to do a show on Tuesday night from Rio de Janeiro. And again, we'll see how we get there, how early we get there, and what the schedule looks like, and everything. And then we'll see, on and off after that, I'm kind of mostly on vacation in Rio de Janeiro. So we'll see how the show fits in with all of that. All right, yes, and by the way, the reality is that the next, what is it, the next, how many months? The next two months, the next month and a half until really mid to late May, I am going to be on the road, almost nonstop. So we're going to have to figure out how all this works with me being on the road so much, but we will. I remind everybody that we have the Super Chat running. The goal today is $650 for the Super Chat, and hopefully we can make that. We'll need a few more people to join us live in order to get to those numbers. Hopefully that'll happen. All right, today's show is sponsored by David Sussin, and David wrote to me about a book. And actually, I need to bring up his email that he sent because he had specific questions that he wanted me to actually answer. So let me pull that up. I thought I had, but I guess I did not. And he had some particular questions he wanted me to ask, answer. So I have those available now as well. So we will have access to those. But we'll get to that. That's kind of laid that down the road. All right, let's start with basically he approached me and asked me to do a show that answers your questions relating to finance, but primarily focused on the Federal Reserve and primarily kind of my view and my opinion on the book, The Creature from Jekyll Island. And while I read The Creature of Jekyll Island a while ago, you know, so initially I said, you know, I don't know. But then what I did is I basically downloaded it on my Kindle and skimmed it to remind myself of the book. And yeah, my memory was correct about it. And so I figured, yes, I can at least talk about some of the aspect of The Creature of Jekyll Island. It is a major book. I should probably put that in the subtitle or something. I think more people will watch this video if they know I'm talking about The Creature of Jekyll Island. Very, very popular book among many libertarians. Very, very popular book about many kind of teapotty, certain types of teapotty conservatives. Juan Paul supporters abolished the FED, audit the FED tapes. This book was very popular among them. And I think it had a lot of influence around people's attitudes, again, particularly among libertarians and among certain conservatives, around their attitude towards the Federal Reserve. So an important book. It was published. What was it published? Let me, let's take a look. When was it published? It doesn't, yeah, I'm trying to look at why doesn't Amazon carry the book? I know that Amazon does because I've seen it. Okay, maybe somebody can look it up and see when exactly the book was published. But the book tells the story of the creation of the Federal Reserve and then talks about how the Federal Reserve functions and talks about the consequences of having a Federal Reserve. And of course, much of it, much of the book is material that I agree with, but much of it is complete, in my view, complete nonsense. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about the creation of the Federal Reserve. As you know, this is 100 years. This year will be the 100th anniversary of Congress passing the Federal Reserve Act. The Federal Reserve was basically put into place. I think at the end of 1913 or the beginning of 1914 under the administration of Woodward Wilson. So Scott says the book was first published in 1998. That sounds right. It's been around for a while. And maybe the second edition was 2010, but it was originally published in the 1990s. So the Federal Reserve was put into place in 1913 basically to become the Central Bank of the United States. And that's how it positions as the Federal Reserve Act. The argument that the book makes is that it is not indeed a central bank, a classical central bank in the sense that a bank set up by government as other central banks, the Bank of Amsterdam and the Bank of England was set up as government institutions, but really is a private bank in a private cartel. It is owned and run by the big banks. And to justify this, the author tells the story of the creation of the Federal Reserve through really one event. And one event on which he builds what I think is ultimately a conspiracy theory. And that is a meeting that happened in Jackal Island in 1910, three years before the passage of the Federal Reserve Act. So I think this history is interesting. So hopefully bear with me a little bit with the history. I think a lot of you like kind of the history more than it shows. But you can't really understand the Federal Reserve and its creation and the reason it exists without understanding what happened in 1907. 1907 there was a major financial crisis in the United States, a whole series of banks when bankrupt. It was one of many banking crises that happened in our past and continue to happen to this day. We're living through a banking crisis right now. Mostly that have to do with the basic structure of American banking, the way American banks are regulated, the very fact that American banks have no geographic diversification, the fact that from the beginning American banks were in a sense forced through regulation to be small with a very small geographic footprint. That is they could only be in a particular state or they could only be in a particular, sometimes in a particular town or in a particular county. And they weren't allowed to branch out or buy banks outside of that particular area. So the United States its founding had many, many, many small banks. And that made them very, very susceptible to the regional economies in which they were in. And if I remember right, the 1907 financial crisis started with in a sense an agricultural crisis in the Midwest and small banks, agricultural banks failing their failure and started withdrawing money from regional banks, like larger banks and kind of population centers in the Midwest and withdrawing money from them. And then those Midwest larger banks started withdrawing money from the big banks in New York. And what this ultimately revealed was that some of the banks, some of the banks in question were indeed bankrupt and many banks got into trouble and there was a real panic and a recession and real challenges. And the way it in a sense all ended was the JP Morgan at the time, the most powerful banker he ran, JP Morgan, the big bank in New York. Again, a bank that was in New York but wasn't really, didn't have branches, didn't have any kind of locations outside of New York, maybe outside of the country but not in other places around the country. But it was a big bank, it was both an investment bank that is a deal maker, which is an acquisition to help industry, help fund, sell bonds, sell stocks, equity of big businesses, but also a commercial bank giving out loans, taking deposits, it was a combination of both. And JP Morgan was the largest bank at the time in the U.S. and what JP Morgan did is he invited the CEOs of the major banks in New York into his office. The story is that he locked the door behind them and he said, we're not leaving until we figure out how to solve this crisis. And they did, they basically as a consortium of banks, they went out after this meeting, they decided who they would bail out, who they would save, who they would let fail, and how they would handle the whole process. And they did this. Now, let's be clear again that this banking crisis 1907 was created primarily by the way the banking system was regulated by government intervention in the economy in a variety of different ways. It is even 140 years ago, 30 years ago, the government was heavily involved in regulating the economy and controlling the economy and changing the monetary basis for the economy, gold, silver, and they kept messing around with banks, forcing banks to buy government bonds. America has never had, America has never had a true free banking system. As far as I know, the only country that had a true free banking system was Scotland in the mid-19th century, early to mid-19th century, until the Bank of England had enough of the free banks in Scotland and basically forced them under its umbrella, regulatory umbrella. And I think, and I know a lot less about this, that Canada had a relatively free banking system much better than the United States system throughout the 19th century, well into the 20th century. Canada didn't have a central bank until after, well after the Federal Reserve was established. So Canada, the Canadian system was freer than the American system and for longer. And indeed throughout the last 250 years, the United States has had I think now 13 banking crisis, 13 banking crisis. Canada's had zero. So Canada's banking system has historically been dramatically superior to the American banking system. By the way, it has a lot fewer banks, bigger banks as a percentage of the economy, bigger banks than the American banks, healthier banks than the American banks, less regulated historically banks than the American banks. And the banking system has done fantastically well. So again, in 1907, there was a banking crisis, an economic crisis more broadly. That was solved, solved by JP Morgan bringing everybody into a room and basically cutting a deal, making a deal and bailing out not only the banking system but the US economy in the process. Now, initially he was hailed as a hero. Initially he was perceived as somebody who saved the US economy. Excuse me, somebody who saved the US economy and a benefactor of America. But that faded pretty quickly. At the end of the day, as we all know, we don't trust. The culture doesn't trust or like bankers. Bankers are always viewed with suspicion. And people who most suspected JP Morgan, who most distrusted the bankers were politicians. And from the politician's perspective, JP Morgan was doing what they really wanted to be doing. JP Morgan bailed out the US economy when it is they, the politicians who they believed should have the tools to bail out the US economy. They were the real leaders. How dare a man of industry have this much power over the US economy and be in a position to bail out the US economy? Shouldn't it be the politicians? And really there was a lot of energy starting in 1908, 1909. A lot of energy in Congress to do something about the bankers and to do something about the power that these private bankers had. And the consequence of that was that there was talk about establishing a central bank in the United States. The United States really had not had a traditional central bank. It came close in the early part of the republic with the first bank of the United States. But that had the populists under Andrew Jackson had eliminated that bank. And it would never really a true central bank in the same sense as Bank of England and the Bank of Amsterdam were that both regulated the banks, controlled and controlled the money supply, actually issued currency and had control over the money supply and issued bonds and everything else. I mean not issued bonds, bought and sold government bonds and financed the government and basically controlled to a large extent the monetary side, the financial side of the economy. The United States had never had really such an institution. So Congress started talking about this and in 2010 there was a meeting, a meeting that was done in secret and a meeting that was never really formally acknowledged. And in a meeting of in on Jekyll Island in South Carolina, a meeting of several of the world's largest bankers, a representative of JP Morgan, a representative of Warburg, the big European bank, a representative of the Rothschilds, another big European bank and representatives of Citibank and other New York based banks. With Senator Aldrich, maybe the most powerful at the time senator in the United States. And basically that meeting was convened because the bankers saw the writing on the wall. What they could see was that the United States was going to establish a central bank. Congress was going to bring monetary policy and kind of the role JP Morgan had served in 1907. They were going to bring it in-house. They were going to make it part of a government. And the bankers wanted to say in how that was going to be done. They wanted to protect their interests. They wanted to be part of the process and they wanted to make sure that whatever was done was created as an independent entity and wasn't completely and utterly controlled by Congress and the executive branch. That it was had some semblance of independence. So they convened in Jekyll Island and they discussed and actually drafted a version of what later became the Federal Reserve Act. It's hard to tell exactly to what extent what was drafted in Jekyll Island actually landed up being the final legislation. But over the next three years this legislation was heavily debated in Congress. There were hearings, famous hearings during this period in which JP Morgan and many other bankers were bought in front of Congress and lambasted and ridiculed and yelled at. Like what Bernie Sanders is doing to the CEO of Starbucks and what Republicans and Democrats do to the CEOs of Big Tech. That's what Congress and Senators and House did to bankers particularly JP Morgan again during this period leading up to the passage of the Federal Reserve Act. The creature of Jekyll Island makes the argument that the entire act was basically crafted by the bankers. That the way they crafted the bill created not equivalent of a central bank, not a political entity but basically what was created was a hybrid of a business cartel, a banking cartel, owned and operated and dictated by a number of the big banks in New York. While granting this cartel the kind of political, the kind of the government, the power of the gun, the power of coercion, the power of government. So the Federal Reserve, according to the book, is this combination of business cartel, benefit the bankers, do the bankers bidding. The Federal Reserve is just there to help and to manipulate banks and money and credit and economic activity all to benefit bankers. The bankers are the ones who benefit directly but more than benefit they're the ones who actually control the Federal Reserve. They're the actually ones who behind the scenes pulling all the strings. And it's not really in any kind of respect a government institution. The government has no control over it, the government has no say in it that it really is this cartel. And not only is it a cartel to benefit bankers but then the book goes on to say, well what do bankers want? The bankers want governments to spend a lot of money. The bankers want wars. The bankers want totalitarian regimes to exist. And it portrays the kind of usual kind of seedy and horrific perspective on bankers that really we've seen since the birth of Christianity, certainly since the dark ages. A bank is scheming in the background to manipulate all of you and destroy all of your lives and send you off to war just so that they can make a bigger profit. And of course these were always accusations lobbed at bankers and particularly at the Rothschilds. The Rothschilds are basically blamed for every major European war. You know, since I don't know the 16th, 17th century when the Rothschilds gained some power, the Warburgs as well. And there's a bunch of conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds, of course, Jews. So there's a bunch of conspiracy theories linking them to the Jewish cabal that controls the world and the Warburgs. And it's an ugly, ugly history of blaming bankers, particularly Jewish bankers, for every bad thing that has happened in the world since then. And the reality is that it's all false. The reality is that the Federal Reserve is not a cartel. The reality is that the Federal Reserve is now one for the benefit of banks. If it is, then they've done a pretty lousy job at it. The Federal Reserve is one for the benefit of the government. It is one for the benefit of political interest. The Federal Reserve is a political entity. This idea that banks control the Fed is ludicrous. If one looks at how the Federal Chairman is appointed by the President with Congress voting, it is, you know, most of the Board of Directors of the Fed, the Board of Directors of the Fed, the Vice Chairman, other members of the Fed are all appointed ultimately by our politicians. The profits of the Fed, the Fed mostly makes profits. Interestingly enough, last year and this year, the Fed is losing huge amounts of money. Indeed, the balance sheet of the Fed is going to be negative soon. That is, they're going to have a negative net worth. It doesn't matter because, again, the Fed can print money. But the Fed, when it makes money, doesn't send it to the banks. That money doesn't go to the banks that supposedly control it. The money goes to the Treasury. It goes to the government. The Federal Reserve Chairman doesn't come and testify in front of a group of bankers who decide whether he's doing good or bad job. Bankers can't fire him. He goes and testifies in front of Congress and Congress could theoretically impeach him. But the President could also ask him to resign and we've had Federal Reserve Chairman resign over time. The Fed is a government institution. The banks nominally have representatives at the board. The Federal Reserve has 12 different regional bank centers. The idea was to have the Fed not just be in Washington, D.C. but be located in different parts of the country so that they would have a hand on the pulse of what is going on in the different regions of the country in terms of the economic economy, what's going on. For example, if there is an agricultural crisis in the Midwest that the Fed is there to assess the damage, the Fed is there to propose remedies that then the Federal Reserve itself could help and assist. The banks locally in those areas. So the Federal Reserve was decentralized although really all the power lies with the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C. with the main board of governors of the Federal Reserve. And in its main committees the interest rates determine the amount of bond buying or bond selling. The determined in these days QEs, quantitative easing, the buying and selling of bonds. Ultimately that all lies in Washington, D.C. But the banks do have representatives on the various boards of the Federal Reserve all over the country. That's probably a good thing because banks, you want input from bankers in terms of what is actually going on in the area that the Federal Reserve is responsible for, banking. But they are far from controlling of what happens at the Fed. The Fed today is the largest employer, PhDs in economics. It is a massive research economic research facility. They churn out research papers like no university out there. They are a dominant economic research institution. And basically they are assigned their responsibilities by the U.S. governments. For example, when the Fed was established its primary responsibility, its only responsibility really was price stability to maintain the value of the dollar. We'll get to how well they did that in a minute but basically it was to not allow for inflation and to manage the business cycle to not allow for recessions that are too deep. But in the 1970s their mandate was changed. The mandate was changed to not only maintain price stability, that is prevent inflation. But the mandate was also increased to include not allowing for high unemployment. Not allowing for, you know, so the Fed is supposed to preserve employment and preserve price stability or price level. So Congress decides this. Congress tomorrow can change its mind. Congress tomorrow can determine that the Federal Reserve should be responsible for something else. And every one of those determinations is basically political. Basically political. Let me just see. Again, you know, every period you see laws passed that actually these laws actually determine how the Fed is going to act, what the Fed's goals are. That is not a cartel, a private institution that does whatever the hell it wants. This is a public government institution where the government dictates how and what it should actually do. And it is constantly where the Fed Reserve Act in 1913 was the first act to kind of set the Fed Reserve. But it's changed its mandate. It's changed the way it's acted over and over again, not because not to help the big banks, but not to achieve particular political goals. So for example, during the 1920s, the Fed Reserve was supposed to only issue currency based on the amount of gold that it had held in reserve. So the United States was nominally on a gold standard. And it didn't. It cheated. And it basically put in more money than it had on reserve. It cheated at the behest of government because government wanted to spend more. As a consequence of that, ultimately you got a monetary bubble. You got a monetary collapse, which was the 1929 stock market collapse that led to a recession that ultimately through actions of the government, but also through actions of the Federal Reserve itself led to a great depression. Not because the banks wanted a great depression, not because the cartel wanted a great depression, but because central planning doesn't work and the Federal Reserve is a central planner. And as such, they made major mistakes in the amount of money they allowed into the economy during the Great Depression, which basically resulted in a great depression. And the Great Depression lasted until the 1940s. And we didn't end the World War II, and World War II was not an action. There was a consequence of bankers. World War I was not something that bankers created. I mean, and this is where the book goes off the rails in my view. The Korean War, the Vietnam War, were things that our politicians desired for a variety of reasons, mostly incompetence and collectivism and fear. Nothing to do with the banking system. During those years, some years banks, big banks, the so-called cartel did well. Some years they did poorly. Over the last 50 years, some of the big banks in New York have survived. Some of the big banks in New York have disappeared. Some of them had been merged. Some of them continue to exist to the extent that many banks were bailed out. They were bailed out not because some banking cartel decided they wanted to bail them out, but because the political interests of the time were such that determined that it was good to bail them out. Many of the so-called cartel members, many of the banks that were bailed out were competitors to those banks. You'd think that they'd want the banks to go under so that the so-called cartel would benefit even greater. So while the Federal Reserve, I believe, has been a disaster to the American economy, while the Federal Reserve has done just horrible things to the dollar and to our business cycle. I think the business cycle has gotten worse and better since the founding of the Fed. I've seen some academic studies that show this, that have measured this. But more than that, the Federal Reserve has created real moral hazard within banking. It's created the ability and the willingness of banks to take on far more risk than they should. It has contributed to the fact that our banks have a lot less reserves than they should. Nothing in the banking system today is determined by markets. The banking system today functions based on the incentives created by the unbelievable mountain of regulations from deposit insurance to reserve requirements and onward. If you wanted to be a super conservative bank, you could not be given the kind of regulations, given the kind of controls that you have today. You would be basically driven out of business by banks that are willing to take risk and who benefit from the Federal Reserve and the FDSE and the rest of the government's ability to bail you out. By the way, deposit insurance, just to be clear, is not insurance. It's not an insurance scheme. It's not rated based on risk. There's some risk rating since the SNL crisis. They rate some by risk, but not based on any kind of insurance principles. Indeed, no insurance company would guarantee deposits in the way that FDIC guarantees deposits. It is bound to lose a huge amount of money just as FDIC does periodically lose an enormous amount of money. Let's see. What else do we want to say about the Federal Reserve? Again, it's not a cartel. There's no conspiracy here. There's just another government entity that is badly run or, as I often say when I talk about the Fed, cannot be run well. There cannot be a good Federal Reserve because it's very nature by its very nature. It is centrally planned and therefore is going to be mostly wrong. It's going to be mostly do things that are wrong. Now let's talk a little bit about fiat money. The Federal Reserve originally was based on dollar reserves. It's always constrained on the amount of money it could issue in theory. Although, as I said, it cheated. As a consequence, you got the Great Depression. During the Great Depression, FDR basically took us off the gold standard and made, I don't know how many people know this, but basically made gold illegal for Americans to own. It was illegal for Americans to own gold. Gold in private hands could be confiscated by the government. Again, that wasn't something the Federal Reserve did. That was something the U.S. government did. That was something the President and Congress did. So from 1933 until 1945, I think, the United States was off a gold standard. The Federal Reserve could print as much money as it wanted to. It was unconstrained. It was not constrained by gold. It was constrained by politics. They tried to manipulate the economy to get us out of the Great Depression. They failed at that. Again, central planners are not good at what they do. So they failed at it. And in 1945, a new scheme came about. Again, not decided unilaterally by the Federal Reserve, but decided by a number of, by basically the winners of World War II, by the Western governments of the winners of World War II, the United States, Britain, France. And that was the establishment of the Bretton Woods system. I'm actually going to Bretton Woods because it is, what is it? So 1943, I apologize, 1943 was the year in which Bretton Woods was determined. And I'm going to Bretton Woods in November for a conference to celebrate. What is it? 43, so it's 80 years since Bretton Woods. 43 to 23. So we'll be at a conference to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Bretton Woods. And anyway, Bretton Woods was the scheme basically to again try to control the Federal Reserve in terms of the money it issued. And it basically said on an international basis, other countries, other countries, central banks, could redeem their dollars into gold at the Federal Reserve. And there was an attempt to tie the amount of money that the United States printed, in a sense the amount of money that the Federal Reserve printed, the Federal Reserve prints our money, in essence. I'll tell you afterwards how we get the money that it prints, but it prints our money. And the idea was to try to constrain the ability of the Federal Reserve in terms of how much money it printed. They didn't want to go to a gold standard. It implies a true gold standard where banks can take deposits in gold and issue currency, or even a gold standard where the Fed has gold that issues currency and we, the citizens, can go to the Fed and redeem our dollars for gold. They didn't want to give us as individuals the power to be able to redeem our dollars into gold. They didn't want to tie the value of our dollars to gold. But they wanted some way in which to control the Fed. They wanted some way that the Fed and our politicians didn't print up huge quantities of money. So what they did was they said, while individuals cannot redeem their dollars at the Fed, other countries can redeem their dollars at the Fed. So the Bank of England, the Central Bank of France, the central banks around the world could indeed exchange their dollars for gold. But the Fed was supposed to be constrained in how much money dollars it printed by the amount of gold that it had. And indeed, if it didn't, then the theory was foreign central banks would redeem all their dollars into gold and the amount of gold at the US central bank would be shipped overseas. And basically the United States would suffer from a contraction of gold and therefore of money. So that was supposed to be an incentive for the Federal Reserve to watch how much money it printed. But the reality is that the politics of the time were that the United States was the dominant power in the world. No other country wanted to piss off the United States. Therefore no other country really wanted to go out and redeem its dollars into gold. At least that was the assumption. And during particularly the later 1950s and into the 1960s, the government started spending more and more money. Ultimately, the government was spending money on the beginnings of a welfare state starting in the mid-1960s under the Johnson administration and on a war in Vietnam. And the federal government needed more and more money. More and more money that the Federal Reserve throughout the 1950s and 1960s was quite happy to provide them. And the way the Federal Reserve provides money to the government is basically the government issues bonds. So the government sells bonds, bonds that the Federal Reserve buys. And when the Federal Reserve buys these government bonds, it basically gives the banks that the government issues bonds through a bank. And the Federal Reserve buys the bonds from the bank and the money flows to the government and then the government spends the money on whatever they want. So the Fed puts money into the economy, whether into the hands of the central government or into the hands of bankers, by buying government bonds. And when it wants to shrink the amount of money in the economy, it sells bonds. It sells the bank's bonds and it takes money from the banks and therefore there's less money cash in the economy because it got money from the banks when they bought the bonds. So the banks have bonds instead of money. But most of the time the Fed is buying bonds. And it's buying bonds from the banks or from the government and thus funding government activity and keeping interest rates low. The more the Federal Reserve is willing to buy bonds, the lower they push interest rates. The higher they push prices, the lower they push interest rates. And indeed the way they control interest rates is by buying and selling bonds. If interest rates are too high and they want to lower interest rates, they buy more bonds and drive the price up and the interest rates down. If interest rates are too low and they want to raise interest rates, they sell bonds. So this is the mechanism by which the Fed acts and this is the way they fund the government. And indeed in the 1960s the Federal Reserve was spending a lot more money than they had gold. The consequence of that was there was one country in the world that was actually willing to call the Federal Reserve's bluff. And that was France under Charles de Gaulle, who if you're a member, well maybe not an issue of member, I don't know if you've learnt this at all. But during the 1960s the French was not part of NATO. They were independent. They developed nuclear weapons themselves. They viewed themselves as an independent power, independent of the United States. And they wanted to stand up to the United States. They were the French after all. And so they started sending boatloads of dollars to Washington D.C. and well actually to New York where the Fed holds its gold. And demanding that the Federal Reserve send gold in its place in the United States did. And what you saw during the very late 1960s and early 1970s is a significant outflow of gold out of the country. And the government got really worried. Again, the Federal Reserve is a government entity. The government got really worried. And as a consequence, in 1971, and I think I'm getting my dates right, in 1971 Richard Nixon basically took, basically, dismantled Bretton Woods. Basically said no more any form of gold standard. Basically from now on the Federal Reserve can print however much money it wants. We're completely delinking gold from the dollar. And by the way he said, by the way he said, the gold I think flows through the New York Fed, the New York branch of the Federal Reserve. It's held in Fort Knox. The gold is held in Fort Knox. Yes, the gold is held in Fort Knox but it flows out of the, basically out of the New York Fed is responsible for the keeping of all, you know, for the maintenance of all that gold. Even though Fort Knox itself is in Kentucky. Right. So, starting in 1971, the government is, the Federal Reserve is completely untied to gold. Again, not a decision a cartel of bankers made, but a decision Richard Nixon and his economic advisors made. Once untethered from gold and, you know, in order to fund an ever-growing, a fast-growing federal government. So this is a period in which the, again the welfare state grows, the regulatory state is growing. This is a period in which we're still fighting a war in Vietnam and even when that ends, we're still building up a military to combat the Soviets. And government is running huge deficits and those deficits being funded by the Federal Reserve. And this is also, you know, as a consequence of that, a massive period of inflation. The Federal Reserve is printing money. That is creating inflation. You also get the oil shocks, which create supply constraints, which also help that inflationary boost. But, you know, inflation is massive during the 1970s. And employment is very high in the 1970s, in a sense that dual mandate that the Fed today has of inflation and unemployment, they failed at both. And what you got was this hype inflation, which ultimately gets stopped by Paul Volcker by raising interest rates and driving the U.S. into deep recession, but also by the election of Ronald Reagan and a belief in the marketplace that Ronald Reagan would indeed be more responsible in terms of government spending, a belief that I don't think actually panned out in the end, but a revival of the supply side of the American economy. You know, the 1960s and 1970s, particularly the 70s, were not a good period for American industry and American business. They were a period of decline for the American economy. And the belief was that Ronald Reagan would revive the American economy. He really did, to some extent, the credit belongs to Jimmy Carter. But Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan together revived the U.S. economy. And through the 80s and 90s, inflation came down, ultimately, because of a variety of different, you know, different financial crises and actions of the Fed and action of the government. Ultimately, interest rates went, inflation, you know, went way down and interest rates went to zero, as you know, through the 2000s or the 20 teens and certainly during the period of COVID. Throughout this period, the Federal Reserve's actions have created booms and busts. They've helped stimulate bubbles in particular asset classes, whether it was the Internet bubble in the 1990s or whether it was a housing bubble in the 2000s. They have also helped create busts, whether it is the dot-com bust or whether it is, ultimately, the 2007-2008 financial crisis, all caused, in my view, and I've documented this extensively by the Federal Reserve and by the Bawai government and the policies of the government. And you can't separate the Federal Reserve from the government. I mean, they are intertwined in so many different ways. And of course, over this period, over the 100 years that the Federal Reserve has existed, or the 110 years that the Federal Reserve has existed this year will be the 110th year, we have seen the value of the dollar declined by, you know, what is it, 99% or something like that? A dollar today is worth, you know, 99% less than a dollar was worth 110 years ago. So the Federal Reserve has managed to reduce the purchasing power of the dollar dramatically. It has managed to inflate. It has managed to create busts. It has managed to create a great depression. It has managed to create recessions. It has managed to create a great financial crisis. It, I think, ultimately, it and the other regulations created the inflation that we're living through right now, created the inflation we live through the 1970s, drove into states to zero. It created massive distortions in the U.S. economy, raising rates now to 45%, which are creating massive distortions in the economy. But again, they can't get it right. You cannot get it right. So what do I think should be done with the Federal Reserve? It should be abolished. There should be no Federal Reserve. We should go back. We should go to a new system, not back, because America has never had a true free banking system. We should go to a system of private banks that issue money privately. The United States government should accept as in payment for taxes. It should accept, I think, you know, something like gold, and that would set gold as at least one of the monetary standards in the economy. Bitcoin and other monetary standards could compete with gold. I think they would lose in the end, but they could compete with gold. But ultimately, what we need is banks issuing currency, banks issuing money based on some kind of standard, some kind of reserve. And that reserve again could be gold. It could be silver. It could be platinum. It could be Bitcoin. It could be some other, you know, innovation that we have not even thought about. And that's the beauty of private banks doing this. The beauty of it is that they get to compete, that the best standard, the best model wins, right? You actually get competition for money, so what we really need is a competitive monetary system. Just like anything else, when you have competition, you drive down the cost, you drive up the efficiency. You don't have one central bank trying to manage the entire economy. You have local banks, so you have large banks that are trying to manage their balance sheet, but they're doing this by competing with other banks. They can't take on too much risk because then they will fail during a certain period of time. Nobody can bail them out. Nobody has the resources to bail them out. The U.S. government isn't allowed or doesn't have the capacity to bail them out. Maybe other banks could bail them out, but only at a cost of them. There's no free lunch in a marketplace. And what you get is a dynamic, exciting, innovative and freedom-oriented financial and monetary system that actually enhances capitalism, enhances business, enhances the stability of the system, and is motivated by the stability of the system. And it's motivated, you know, if you issue currency and your currency is inflated, then your dollars, JP Morgan dollars versus Chase dollars, well, Chase is JP Morgan, Chase dollars versus a city bank of dollars versus other dollars, if you issue too much of that currency, it will be inflated. It will, you know, reduce its value versus the other currencies. And that's not a good thing for you, right? And you will have trouble redeeming those pieces of paper. And you will lose money as a consequence. You'll have to maintain more liquidity, issue less loans, be able to only get lower interest rates on those loans. I mean, there are consequences in a marketplace for bad behavior. There's no consequence for bad behavior in the Fed. Does anybody penalize the Fed when things go bad? Mike, Mike just did $200, really appreciated. Mike, thank you. Mike says, hi, Mr. Book. Don't often get to listen live. You may, well, have mentioned this before, but do you have good recommendations for a book explaining the causes of depression? I haven't mentioned this in the past. Unfortunately, I'm so bad about book recommendations. I mean, one of the classics is Milton Friedman's history of interest rates in the United States, which is a big, thick, very academic book. M.T. Schlays has a book called The Forgotten Man, which is very good on many of the aspects of the Great Depression. I really like the work of Folsom. What's his first name? Burton Folsom. Burton Folsom wrote a book about the Fed. He also, in his book about the Robber Barons, The Myth of the Robber Barons, talks about G.P. Morgan, and it's a wonderful little book. That's an excellent book. His book about the Great Depression is really, really good. It explains kind of the causes of the Great Depression. So if you want a quick overview, I would get Burton Folsom's book and then look at what he recommends in terms of other books to read. But there's a lot of good economic books on the Great Depression. This is not one of those things that, I mean, most economists, most serious economists agree about that the Fed completely messed up and completely screwed up over the Great Depression. And made it worse if not caused it outright. All right. Let me get to some specific questions David asks that relate to basically the Fed's inflationary ability and the manipulation it does. And let me just say this as a broad category. There's no way to get away from the Fed. There's nothing you can do to protect yourself because it's not like the Fed only inflates. And there's a variety of different ways you can protect yourself against kind of price inflation. But the Fed's action don't only affect price inflation. They affect interest rates. They affect the business cycle, booms and busts. They affect the allocation of capital. They affect which industries do well and which industries do poorly. And they affect the kind of investment that happens. What Austrian economists called malinvestment, investment in businesses, that one should not invest in based on purely economic factors, but invested in because interest rates and different interest rates are being manipulated to make a certain type of investment more attractive than other types of investment. They have an impact on every aspect of the economy. They are the most important economic agent in the world. And you can't escape that. You can't escape them. You can't escape the damage that they do. So there's no one place you can put your money in. You're free of the Fed. But they are better and worse things. So we'll talk about that. So one thing he asked is investment in money markets. A kind of throwing real assets into fiat assets. The devalue faster than gains they produce. No, not really. I mean, an investment in money markets is you're taking a fiat asset. You're taking money, right? And you're investing it in securities. And what are money market securities? Money market securities are short-term loans, often business-type loans or other short-term securities that are relatively safe that money markets are some of the government securities that money markets buy. It's a way of generating interest on your cash, on your fiat money. And it's a way of, instead of the money just sitting, you're going to get more, a higher interest rate on a money market account than you are on a checking account at a bank. So you're actually increasing the value of that money by getting a higher interest rate. Now, it's not always the case that you can get in a money market enough to compensate you for inflation. Certainly right now, money market rates are lower than inflation. Again, this is how the Federal Reserve manipulates these things. But it's better than you can get in your checking account. It's better than you can get in some saving accounts. So putting money in a money market account is not devaluing faster. Now, if you could find other investments in the real economy that generate a return higher than a money market account, then that's great. But remember that even those investments are being devalued by inflation and when there is inflation, when there's price inflation, and not all inflation is price inflation, some inflation is malinvestment, is distorting the price signals in the market, which makes any kind of investment, including an investment in a real venture, riskier than it needs to be and susceptible to changes in Fed policy. But the return on a real investment is higher risk than a return on a money market. So yes, you're getting a higher return, let's say, on an investment in a business, but you're also taking on higher risk. That might be worth it. But one of the advantages of money markets is that they're relatively low risk. Although I will note that during the financial crisis, some money market funds broke. And money markets, people maybe don't remember this or don't know this, but money markets during the financial crisis, 2008 financial crisis, were actually bailed out by the Fed. So the Fed doesn't only bail out banks, it also bails out money market funds, Fidelity, Vanguard, money market funds. I mean, it's just outrageous and unbelievable. The unlimited mandate and unlimited scope of the power of the Federal Reserve to do whatever the hell they want, to bail out whoever the hell they want. They were bailing out non-financial enterprises during the financial crisis. They were bailing out European banks and they likely are bailing out helping fund European banks today. They were bailing out G capital, which is not a bank. So the Federal Reserve is the most powerful financial entity in the world and it is a U.S. government entity and basically it has the mandate of preserving stability in markets. I think it creates the instability and then it tries to cover that up by pretending to create stability, but in its actions of themselves. It is a partner with the Treasury Department and it has helped bail out banks, institutions. But remember the big top, which was kind of a bailout of the banking system, although the government made money on top. They got more money in than they pulled out. The top was a Treasury thing. Congress approved it. It wasn't a Federal Reserve thing. It wasn't the Federal Reserve bailing out the banks. It was Congress bailing out the banks. So, yeah, I mean, investment is very hard when you have a Federal Reserve and when you have a Federal Reserve acting in ways that are capricious and very hard to understand and very, very hard to understand the rationale of. By the way, we are way behind in our goals. So Mike put in $200, which helped a lot, which helped us get closer to our goals. But really, we're $360 short of our $650 goal. To keep going with the Iran Book Show, we really do need to get to our goals. Otherwise, we'll have to rethink what we do with the show. I don't think yesterday we made the goal of $250. We were short on that. Today is a long show. We need to make the $650 goal. We've raised $290, but we still have $360 to go. So hopefully, there's some listeners out there who are willing to contribute to seeing this show continue. And don't forget, if you are not watching this live, if you're not listening live and you would like to support the show, you can do so on a monthly basis by going to Patreon or Subscribestar or uranbookshow.com slash support. David also asked, are precious metals still useful as long-term stores of value? I doubt it. I really don't think they are. If you look at Gold's behavior over the last 15 years, have Gold prices kept up with inflation and purchasing power consumer inflation? I don't think so. It strikes me Gold has become primarily a hedge against catastrophe. Gold prices go up when things get really, really bad everywhere else, but then they come down. If Gold was just a hedge against monetary inflation or a hedge against price inflation, then Gold would basically keep going up steadily because consumer prices keep going up and would keep up with price inflation and I don't think it actually has. So Gold is unconnected, unhinged from the real economy. It's a speculative asset at this point. People buy and sell it based on all kinds of reasons. It keeps somewhat up with measures of consumer prices, but there's no reason it has to reflect consumer prices other than people's preference to hold Gold over cash and the price of Gold gets determined by supply and demand for Gold and that supply and demand doesn't necessarily correspond with inflation. It could correspond with fear of catastrophe, for example, and wanting to hold Gold because Gold is money. If the civilization ends, Gold becomes money. If we have a major economic collapse, Gold becomes money and as such people want to store it for safety more than for purchasing power. So I think the connection between Gold and purchasing power has been separated. David says, I have a business. Am I better off investing in bonds and mutual fund portfolios as opposed to investing in more and more inventory for my business? It gets to the point where more inventory dramatically reduces returning investment. I don't know, you have to make this calculation, but it strikes me that holding inventory is probably a bad investment strategy. You should have an optimal amount of inventory to run your business efficiently and to maximize returning investment. So I think if you have extra cash, what you want to do is invest it and then the question is what kind of investment should you do and that depends on a lot of different things. It primarily depends on your risk tolerance and how much risk you're willing to take. The more risk you're willing to take, the more the risk in the investments you invest in. So should you invest in bonds? Bonds are low risk. So if you don't want to take any risk with your money, invest in bonds. Now, of course, it depends on which bonds. Are you investing in government bonds, which have almost zero risk of default, but then which government bonds? Are you investing in short-term bonds or long-term bonds? If you invest in long-term bonds, there is a risk that interest rates go up and therefore the value of the bonds go down. So you are taking some interest rate risk if you invest long-term. In the short run, you're taking a different type of interest rate risk. If you invest in short-term bonds and interest rates go down, when you refinance and you invest in those bonds again and those short-run interest rates, you'll be investing at a lower interest rate. So it depends on the kind of risk you want to take on and it depends on how long you're making the investment for and it depends on what you're putting the money aside for, what you're investing for. So mutual funds, diversified equity mutual funds are what I like to invest in if you're investing long-term and you're willing to take on some risk and you're willing to take on some pain short run. So the stock markets were down last year. So you lost some money, but over periods of 10 years or longer, stock markets are almost always up. Does that mean they will always be up in the future if they were always up in the past? Nobody can tell you that. But again, it's a question of your risk tolerance. What you want, what you're constantly playing with is the amount of risk you're willing to bear versus how much reward is being provided for that risk. The riskier the investment, the more return you should expect to get from it. But I don't think you should ever hold inventory for the sake of holding inventory as a form of investment. Maybe as a form of protection against inflation. But even there, there's a limit to how much. I think you should be investing in bonds and the right combination of bonds is the government bonds, the corporate bonds. Again, corporate bonds riskier than government bonds. And the stock market, and you should, a combination of all of that, again, depending on how much risk you're willing to take on. And if you're not willing to take on any risk, then maybe the best way to do it is to invest in a money market account. What are the shortcomings of the book? Well, as I said, I think the book is way too, tilts on the side of conspiracy theory. It gets the structure of the Federal Reserve basically wrong. The motivations for the Federal Reserve basically wrong. It doesn't understand the relationship between the Federal Reserve and the government. It basically demonizes bankers for no reason. And it attributes evils to the Federal Reserve that are just not true. Wars, when are caused by the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve has no incentive to go to war and things like that. For that matter, the Federal Reserve doesn't have any incentive to have the government spend more money. The chairman of the Federal Reserve, for example, does not get a bonus if the Federal Reserve makes more money. Again, it's not a private enterprise. The chairman of the Federal Reserve gets a bureaucrat salary. That's another indication that's run by the government. Alan Greenspan was chairman of the Federal Reserve. We know exactly what he did. We know exactly who employed him. We know exactly who he was reported to. And that's the President of the United States and Congress. So I would hold much of the book in very, very skeptical light. And then he says, and then he asks, what choice does one have if the banking system is ultimately untrustworthy? You don't have a choice. I mean, look, it might be untrustworthy, but if you have your money in a big bank, you're probably not going to lose your money. The government is guaranteeing those money. Money is going to be inflated away because the Federal Reserve inflates money away. We know that. Your money will lose value. The best way is to make productive investments, whether productive investments in your business or whether productive investments through the stock market and the bond market. You need banking relationships. You need some money in the bank. And you have no choice but to use the banking system. So I don't think there's an alternative. I don't think that Bitcoin or crypto is yet, maybe one day it will become, but it doesn't really look like it as an alternative to any of these things. So I don't expect that to happen. So you're stuck with the existing banking system. There's no way to escape it. This is the world we live in. This is the world we've inherited. By supporting the Iran Book Show, you help fight that a little bit and move us maybe a little bit inch by inch towards a world in which the Federal Reserve won't exist. But what are you going to do with crypto? Crypto, depending on when you bought it, you could have lost, you know, at some point Bitcoin was at 60,000 and they went to close to 15,000. I mean, you lost 75% of your money. That's not a currency. That's not money. That's not safe. There's nothing safe about that. That's a disaster. So Bitcoin is far too volatile to be money. It's far too volatile to be anything but a speculative asset. You're speculating on Bitcoin. So you're not getting any kind of stability. You're not getting any kind of real return on your investment when you invest in Bitcoin or you invest in crypto. And Bitcoin's value is completely determined by sentiment of the people who like to buy and sell Bitcoin. They're completely speculative assets. That's all they are. And if you look at other cryptos, well, stable coins have turned out to be not so stable and some other cryptos have turned out to be scams and other cryptos have turned out to be just nothing. Again, very, very volatile. Money has to have stable value. It has to have stable purchasing power and Bitcoin's purchasing power is going like this. Sometimes it's really good, right? This year, Bitcoin has gone up more than 50%. But that's not good as a money. I can't plan anything. I can't do anything. I don't know. Money should be stable. It's only speculative assets that go like this and Bitcoin is a speculative asset. It's an asset that is not income producing. It's an asset that is not productive. It's not creating anything. It's purely speculation. Maybe one day it'll be money. I doubt it. But maybe one day it'll be money. It's certainly not money today. It can't have money that fluctuates in value as much as Bitcoin does. All right, we've made a little bit of progress to get to our goal, but we're still about $290 short of our goal. So if there are people out there who can and are willing to contribute $100 or so to get us closer to our goal, I would greatly appreciate that. Otherwise, if you want to ask a question, why don't we make the questions $20 or more so that at least we get closer to the goal. I've got a few questions of 10 and 5 that I will get to in a minute, but let's try to make all the new questions $20 or more so we can inch our way closer to actually achieving our goal. Let's see how many people are watching right now. We've got 90 people watching. So $3, $4 for every person watching, we could get our goal if I could get everyone who's watching to do $5 right now or if I get a certain high percentage of those watching to do $5. We would easily get our goal, but I fear that that really happens. All right, happy to take any other questions that you guys might have on the Federal Reserve on investing and so on. David is not listening live, but I'm sure we'll listen to this later. Let me know if you have any other questions. I'm happy to do another show on the Federal Reserve. This is a big topic. We've only skimmed what we can talk about. We can go into much more depth in terms of how the Federal Reserve functions, what it's doing right now, what does quantitative easing mean, what is the quantitative easing going on right now? Supposedly the Federal Reserve before this latest financial banking crisis was sucking money out of the economy by selling bonds. Is that going? Maybe that's partially what caused the banking crisis. There's a lot we could talk about, so feel free to ask more questions if you have anything more specific to talk about. But that gives us an overview of the Fed and we'll keep returning to this topic because there's plenty to say and plenty to talk about the topic. Jupiter Manas just did $5, so he responded to my call for everybody on there to do $5. JPS1776 did $5. Thank you. Roosevelt super did $5. Thank you. So we're getting quite a few people doing $5, so I appreciate that. Martin did a bunch of different Swedish Kronas adding up to probably close to $5. So I really appreciate those of you who do that. By the way, you can also join and become a member of the show by clicking the join button underneath and contributing like $5 a month to the Iran Book Show through YouTube. All right. I have one $20 question. It's not really a question. It's a comment. So Charlottesville says, quote, people like what I have to say. They believe in it. They just don't like the word Nazi. That's all. That's from Stonefront from the TV show The Boys. Huh. I haven't seen the TV show The Boys. I started... I don't like superheroes but I keep hearing good things about it. So maybe I'll try it again. Maybe I'll try it again. And I am... I expect that this week I will do a review of Princess Monaco or whatever and MASH because I have now watched them. Linda, thank you. Linda did $5. So we could chip away with this at $5 a piece but a few 50s or hundreds or $20 questions would get us there a little faster. Apollo asks, what makes a good actor-actress and what do you think is the best objectivist-thezbian? Well, God, first of all there is no such thing as an objectivist-thezbian. You're a good actor, a bad actor. Objectivism, you can't be an objectivist actor. You can be an objectivist and an actor but objectivism doesn't have anything to say about acting. Now, the objectivist aesthetics might have something to say about the theory of acting but, you know, it's just like there are no objectives-painters even though the objectives theory has something to say about painting, about good painting and about romantic painting. The actual being an actor is either you're good or bad at it and you could be a naturalistic actor or a romantic actor but what makes a good actor-actress, you know, is very-you know, I don't know I'd say your ability to to, you know, project to the audience the character that you are playing the ability of you to transform the written script into something believable and emotionally that resonates emotionally with the people watching. There are all kinds of schools of acting, you know, I have a particular fondness for the acting that was done in the 1920s and 30s coming out of the silent era actors who conveyed a certain romanticism in their acting that really got you emoting, you know, feeling something about the character, not just that they were believable but they were they were instilling something in you that really impacted you emotionally in a meaningful way. So I'm a huge fan of Greta Garbo and her acting. Queen Christina is a wonderful movie if you want to see her style of acting but I like a lot of the actors today I mean a lot, I particularly like British actors I think for whatever reason the Shakespearean training that they get but I think many of them stage actors that then go on to the movies and they're particularly good but there are a lot of good actors and I don't have a particular you know a particularly informed view of who's a good actor and who's not I just have my personal views. Ok, PBS, thank you we just got three $20 questions just down to like $200 left, $217 left so another $11, $20 questions and we're done so we've reached our goal. That's why I said much easier if we get some $50 or $100 Could there be we did get a $50, somebody did do $50 see if I can find it I should say thank you I think Wes did $50 not with a question, just contributed $50 but Wes, who often does $50 so thank you Wes, really really appreciate that appreciate the support that really helps. There's Nicholas with $5 so we can chip away at $5 that's good, let's get all 90 people doing $5 and we're there PB says could there be a way to abolish the Federal Reserve while keeping the dollar not sure public will accept private banks making money due to distrust well you're not going to abolish the Fed until you gain that distrust no, I mean if you abolish the Fed but you still want to keep the dollar as a national currency being controlled by the Federal Government then you just have to establish another Fed or you have the Treasury Department act as a central bank but there's just no way to decentralize and abolish the functions of the Fed which is what's important without banks private companies issuing currency and you know the public the public trusts I mean of course you're not going to abolish the Fed until the public starts trusting banks not trusting banks as they are today but trusting banks as they would be in a free market I wouldn't trust banks as they are today to issue because they're too too much government involvement and they're not private as I said banks are government private institutions where the government dictates much of what they do and how they do it and provides things like bailouts and provides things like deposit insurance and regulations upon regulations upon regulations so what you have to get is to a point where the people trust markets real markets free markets and until they trust free markets then abolishing the Fed will do nothing because you'll just replace it with something exactly the same and that's the whole point with Ron Paul abolish the Fed and what we should be is not for abolishing the Fed what we should be is a positive message the positive message is we're for free banking we're for government out of banking banking being a marketplace money is just a product that banks produce Kurt says please figure out how to live forever thanks I'm working on it, thank you or scientists are working on it I'm keeping track of what they're doing and hope to benefit as they as they get good results alright let's see where are we yes, James says you aren't so your clip on Howard Schultz Starbucks hearing how would you summarize the moral intellectual era in some way accepting a code opposed to their own perhaps that business unlike this make well it's sanction of the victim it's driven by altruism and a lack of confidence now how Schultz did say something really good in the hearing somebody sent me the quote where he said I made this money, I'm a billionaire because I made it, I started with nothing and I made it good for him for saying that so at least he understands it to some extent but what they've accepted is a code of altruism a code that says that they should not be the beneficiaries of their own action that even if they are beneficiaries ultimately they are responsible for the well-being of society, for the well-being of the poor, for the well-being of those who are not as successful as they are they are bought into to some extent to their idea I see this in Bill Gates and in Warren Buffett that they are not, you know, they're just lucky, they got lucky because they got the right genes and they were born in the right century and they had the right parents Bill Gates and Warren Buffett talk about that but what they all really lack is a proper understanding of self-interest and a proper understanding a proper understanding of their own self-esteem, these are all men of self-esteem they couldn't have created what they created without self-esteem but they limit how far they're willing to take that self-esteem and how explicit they're willing to make it and instead of saying, and how it should did say this much I created the next step is to say, I did it for me I did it out of the love I did it out of the desire to be successful I did it out of the desire to bring about change in the world and I did it out of the desire for profit and that profit is mine because I created it there is no Starbucks without me so it's that willingness to be an egoist explicitly an egoist you know, look at Warwick's speech an explicit declaration about I did it this is mine I get to decide what happens to it I get to decide if unions are going to be at Starbucks it's my property, it's not theirs so I don't care what you Congress think about unions but the reality is that in my business I'll decide whether it gets unionized or not and your laws your laws are violations of my property rights so you demand by law that I accept a union that's immoral, irrational and a violation of my right to live by my standards but you see there's a lot of my there my rights, my property my standards and that's what they're not willing to do fully you know, embrace self-esteem as egoistic as self-interested as their right to their own life fully and be explicit about it, they might live it but be explicit about it they struggle with that for whatever reason alright guys, still $200 short I hate bugging you alright, let's do these questions quickly Frederick Sebastian love the show, but it's midnight and I need to sleep thanks, Frederick really appreciate it oh, don't forget to like the show give it a thumbs up on YouTube it really helps the algorithm it helps us get more visibility for the show thank you Ryan for reminding me did you learn Krav Maga while in the Israeli army no, the only people who love Krav Maga in the Israeli army are special forces and I was not in special forces but they didn't take me for a variety of reasons Apollo Zeus if you were in a bar fight and had to choose three people to be at your side who would they be I don't know God I don't know real people, fictional people I have no idea people who know Jiu Jitsu, like Alex Epstein knows Jiu Jitsu I don't know, I have no idea something I've ever thought about Frank asks Brad Meltzer did a show on History Channel that Fort Knox possibly has no gold in it at all or at least not a lot if true then what's backing our dollars oh, nothing's backing our dollars nothing I mean what's really backing our dollars is the size of the U.S. economy and the military force that we can exert to protect the country but there is no backing of the dollars I mean you can't take your dollar bill and go to the Fed and say give me something your dollar is unredeemable what's backing the dollar is the law that says that a business has to accept your dollar in exchange in repayment of debt or in repayment of full goods and services that's it legal tender laws there never was in 1971 but even before that as long as there's been a Federal Reserve there's been no backing for the dollar so that is a myth if you ever think there's backing for the dollar there is not Brad Spanigan says is crypto dead as an investment idea no I don't think so I mean the government is trying to kill it the government is investing a lot of resources and trying to kill crypto but I don't know that they're going to be fully successful because they're crypto markets investments that can be made overseas and it is also the case that in spite of the government's efforts there's still venture capital going into crypto there's less and the government is certainly trying to kill it but I don't think it's going to end partially because the crypto market is an international market and if it doesn't exist in the United States maybe it'll flourish somewhere else so I wouldn't give up on the technology on the technology the other thing is that a lot of the technology by crypto, the blockchain is being implemented by a lot of big companies and that the government is backing what the government is not backing is crypto as a speculative asset and crypto as an alternative to the dollar that the government is trying to shut down but it is it's trying to destroy our capacity to really exchange crypto and engage in crypto transactions we'll see how successful they are but there are other countries in the world America is not the only one Robert says scarcity commodities seem flat and a far poorer investment than scalable assets, businesses, technology gold seems a fallback fallback commodity that's it gold is never an investment what gold is being portrayed as in the past is two things as a preserve the value of your money that is keep up with inflation and gold as currency in an emergency in an end of civilization scenario, end of the world scenario and I think it doesn't really preserve the value of your money but it is true that in the end of the world people will use gold rather than butter to exchange goods and services so having a little bit of gold and I wouldn't have it in a bank I would have the gold I would actually have the gold as gold coins in a bag so that you can coins are better than bars because coins are just smaller denominations so you can use those for the end of the world if you are afraid of that Robert goes on money under your mattress it's more solid than paper money but under your mattress or sitting in your safe it's dead weight I agree Richard says isn't gold essentially a commodity for example if mining companies found many tons of gold they could easily mine wouldn't the price of gold fall yes absolutely but it's a commodity that typically when it was used as money you only find so much gold once in a while you find a lot of gold comes in the value of the gold goes down so you have inflation in a sense but it's a one time shock and then usually the amount of gold increases based on mining technology and that mining technology is correlated with productivity and therefore the amount of money grows with productivity most of the time and given that we still have all the gold that has ever been mined however much more gold you produce is going to be a small fraction of the total amount of gold that exists in the world today so inflation is always the inflation of the money is always going to be moderated by the small amount of new gold that is being produced so that's why gold is good because it grows only with productivity and if the money grows with productivity prices stay stable if the amount of money grows slower than productivity prices decline if the money grows faster than productivity prices go up in general Valdrin says my father, brother and sister are doctors yet they doubt and deny evolution if you can't change one's mind after they turn 30 isn't all education and declination depending who taught them young now look I don't really understand the question I mean your father, brother and sister are doctors and they doubt evolution which is bizarre and crazy I don't understand that but that means they put their faith about their reason when it comes to this issue and I would be worried about going to your father and brother and sister as doctors because who knows what else they would put their faith about their reason so if you can't change one's mind after they turn 30 isn't all education and declination if you do the education right when they're young then they know how to learn they know how to differentiate truth and falsehood they know how to figure out what right is what truth is so education when done right is not a declination it is the pursuit of truth it is the tools that allow you to pursue truth Tasey says I just think people panic when a mob is doing when stock markets are going nuts they should just stand with their principles and their investments you never know what will happen I mean there's a lot of truth to that trying to play the sentiment is very difficult whoops um Mike, thank you Mike that's another $50 you've already done so much I appreciate it Mike says another $50 for calling you Mista instead of doctor earlier I appreciate your show, thank you you can call me Iran you don't have to call me Mista or doctor thank you Mike, really appreciate the support um Stefan asks thoughts on the movie Ben Hur I mean I love the movie Ben Hur it's a movie about heroes I mean it's got a religious aspect to it but so be it it's big, it's a big scale it's got big actors and it's fun and it's about values the wrong values but it's about values it's way too religious for my liking but it's about people valuing and committing themselves to those values so I like the movie um alright Mark asks how about a show devoted to topics of monetary economics Iran's rules for money so many professional economists believe the wrong ideas are the most dangerous ones and how to debunk well everything from from the fact that you have to have government involvement in money is probably one of the most dangerous ideas you know to the idea that you can centrally plan it you can centrally plan money and you can centrally plan interest rates also very very dangerous ideas but there are lots of them there are lots of bad ideas when it comes to finance and money and rather than you know rather than me having a show devoted to that I'm not a monetary economist I'm not an extra to monetary economics I'm certainly happy to answer questions about investment and about economics but you know I'm limited I'm not a technically a monetary economist I read a little bit in the field but there's only so much there's only so much I can read in the field given given how much I do and given how many other things I need to read as well so but I'm happy to take questions on monetary economics and if somebody wants to sponsor a show on investment or on economics or on anything like that and focused on taking questions on investment or just my views on how to invest, different ages how to invest at different ages, what kind of before you should have things like that if you'd like to sponsor a show like that you know as usual a thousand dollars you'll get to choose the topic of the show and we can do anything so Mark you can consider doing that if you're interested Raphael says we got freedom through reason but we didn't challenge ethics in the 19th century so people are altruistic on a personal level in that century if not why not if we ever changed our ethics not trying to understand the question but yes we got reason in the 18th century the problem was even with reason is that the whole idea of reason was challenged in the 19th century it was challenged by Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer and Marx and Nietzsche and all of them, all the philosophers post Kant challenged reason so even that foundation of reason doesn't really exist today and there's mysticism and faith even if it's not in religion there's mysticism and faith applied all over the place in the world today in the way people don't think in the way people reject thought but yes we never challenged ethics the challenge to ethics was very shallow the Declaration of Independence saying you have an enable right to pursue happiness is in a sense a challenge to the ethics of altruism the ethics of Christianity but not explicit enough and without foundation but that's what needs to be challenged so the challenge we have today is we have to resurrect reason we have to bring reason back we have to firmly establish reason as the standard of knowledge as the standard for all knowledge and that work still has to be done and secondly we have to challenge the ethic of altruism or pragmatism or you know the nihilism and hedonism that exist out there with a positive and the positive is an ethic of egoism and until we do that we can't be successful and we can't win Daniel says Sanders says it's the intent and will of the policy that matters not the outcome we shouldn't focus on economics of an evil but there's a sense that he's right you don't do policy based on economics you do policy based on what's right so I don't think governments should intervene in the economy so no policy should think from the perspective of economics it should think of political theory or morality it should think of the perspective of individual rights he's absolutely right and if you believe in altruism and you believe there should be unions because people are too stupid to protect themselves and you need a union to protect people then to whole economics economics don't matter and he's right this is the sense in which absolutely ethics and political theory always trump economics and if you believe in freedom if you believe in individual's ability to determine their own fate and to determine their own lives and they write to their own property then it doesn't matter what the economics of it are you know let's say if we end the Fed there'll be a recession for a while as the market adjusts to free banking okay so we can avoid a recession it's not about the economics it's about the morality of it now the moral is the practical and therefore we know that the economics will work themselves out the economics will result in a better outcome so intention and outcome and objectiveism there's no difference ultimately because the moral is the practical but I understand what Sanders is saying and he's right morality always trumps economics his morality sucks that's the problem the problem is the fact that the morality is wrong morality is no good and that's the challenge alright I think we're done for the day I'm going to dinner and thank you everybody thanks for all the support thanks to all the superchatters we're about $100 short but sometimes we're short, sometimes we go over thanks to all the supporters hopefully you enjoyed the show please like the show before you leave please share my material if you like it if you watch a short video or you watch one of these long videos and you like them, please share them on your social media platforms that's how we get the word out there that's how we grow this channel that's how we grow our influence that's how we ultimately change the world so don't be passive about that you can be active, you can help you can help this show grow and you can help this show grow by sharing it, sharing it on Facebook, sharing it on Twitter sharing it on whatever short videos on Instagram share share share alright everybody, I will see you maybe tomorrow maybe Tuesday hard to tell we'll play it as we go I'm sorry we don't have a regular schedule while I travel and I know that hood's the number of people who watch it live, we don't get as many people watching it live it makes it more difficult to raise the money but that part of what I do in life is travel so we have to succeed in spite of that alright, I will see you all sometime this coming week, probably tomorrow but we'll see, bye everybody