 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Brookshow. I hope everybody is having a great week. And, you know, we are continuing to give you, bring you the news as it happens here on The Iran Brookshow on a regular basis. Oh, thank you, Robert. Thank you, Jonathan. And thank you, Remo. We'll get to Remo's question in a little bit. Let's see. Oh, I haven't pressed the start button on this. Let's press that. I'm a little behind. Sorry about that. All right. We will have a show tonight. Not sure yet about the topic, but 8 p.m. East Coast time. There will be show tonight, and then we should be set. I'm not sure exactly what time the show is going to be tomorrow. It might be a little late. I'm looking right now at 3 p.m., but maybe I'll try to do it earlier. Let me see how things evolve during the morning, during the early afternoon. Post-alquan, starting in July, we will establish a much more firm schedule, a much more regular schedule, sort of traveling, but I'm clearing my calendar and trying to establish something more rigorous, hopefully, as part of simplifying things. But anyway, so right now, we will have these shows every day, but they change in time, depending on other meetings that are coming up and down. Hopefully, that'll all settle down soon. All right. Let's jump into the news. This kind of headline intrigued me. JP Morgan to pay 290 million in sediment with Epstein's victims. And this is Jeffrey Epstein, the horrible human being who molested young girls, raped, abused, teenage girls, just truly horrible. And had a whole network of people who were his friends, who partied with him. We don't really know the full extent of what went on there. We don't know the full extent of who participated under what circumstances. There's a lot we don't know, unfortunately. Clearly, what Jeffrey was not doing this alone, he had help. I forget her name, but the woman who helped him out is now in jail for a long, long time. Unfortunately, as far as we know, she's not talking. So I don't know that we'll ever know the full extent of everything, and I don't know that we'll ever know all the names associated. We know some very big names that have been thrown around and clearly have some links to Epstein, but not clear. The extent of those links, not clear. If those were just links to get as much money out of Epstein, because he was throwing out a lot of money, or were they links where there was partying going on and there was what you could say is a facilitation of the molestation and the trafficking and all of that. So anyway, the speakable man, the speakable story, it would be Giselle something, Gislaine something is her name, yes. It would be good if we have kind of the investigative reporting or that really brought us the full story and name names. It would be good to name names. I think there are more people that need to be humiliated. A number of people have been. A number of his friends have been kind of forced into the shadows or forced into kind of early retirement and things like that. People who've associated with him, people who had money to count with him and again people who traveled to the island with him. But I was wondering, what does J.P. Morgan have to do? Why is J.P. Morgan as a bank, as an institution? Why are they paying $290 million to Epstein's victims? And this is, I think, where it gets interesting and this is not in any way to diminish the evil of what Epstein did, but to what extent does one hold a bank, J.P. Morgan, responsible for it? J.P. Morgan, you know, J.P. Epstein had accounts with it, maybe investment accounts, they helped him move money. They did what a bank does for a client. And yes, this was a despicable client. And yes, if they dug deep, they would have found that he was a despicable client. And maybe they knew about his prosecution in Florida in the late 2000, in 2008, 2009 or something, 2008, for soliciting prostitution from a teenage girl. And, you know, maybe, I assume they knew all that. And they still did business with him. Now, I'm not justifying them continuing to do business with him, but how is that a civil liability? How, you know, is it legitimate to go after people who deal with criminals, you know, who bank the criminal, who, you know, make it possible, even when they know something is maybe a little shady, but they probably don't know the details. Is it legitimate for them to have, you know, a liability here? And it strikes me, it strikes me as wrong. It strikes me as you're now making a bank law enforcement. You're now making a bank responsible for figuring out who is who. I mean, supposedly the legal department of J.P. Morgan flagged Epstein as a high-risk client in 2006, but kept him on despite the media reports. But is it really J.P. Morgan's responsibility to figure out who's a criminal and who's not, who's really, really, you know, beyond evil? Now, again, I think a moral responsible business does that, but if it doesn't do it, is it, you know, it does it when it's obvious, right? But if it doesn't do it, is it liable? You know, Epstein was not caught, was not put in jail. I have a lot of, we have a lot of complaints about the justice system and how he was treated and how he was treated in Florida and then how he's not investigating despite the fact that they knew stuff was going on and the kind of plea agreement he got in Florida, which is filled with corruption and it would be great if somebody followed up on that and maybe some people went to jail because of that. But is really the fact that, is everybody who does business with somebody who turns out to be evil, bad, criminal, liable for the damage that person did? I don't see how that is possible. I don't see how that is right. And there is a lot in the law today, a lot in the law that basically is making business responsible for law enforcement. So banks have to, and by the way, there's no indication that they did anything criminal as far as we know. There's also, by the way, another settlement with Deutsche Bank for 75 million. But there's no, you know, the law today requires banks to let the government know if they see suspicious activity, to let the government know if somebody deposits more than $10,000 worth of cash, let the government know all this stuff and yet the government also tells the bank, oh, you have to preserve the privacy of your clients. I mean, the government is basically outsourcing law enforcement to businesses. You know, maybe one of the best examples of this is the e-verify system that Republicans are so excited about and the e-verify system basically requires the employers to check the immigration status of the people who are the employee. I mean, why? Why is it any of the employer's business whether the employee is, quote, legally here or not? That's a government's business. You know, the government should enforce the laws. Not their, you know, I also think the whole idea of withholding taxes and everything, you know, making businesses do all their accounting for the government and actually have to take the money away so that it doesn't even feel like you're paying the government. It just feels like it's some deduction from your salary. It's not, it's not actually, you haven't written a check to the guy. It would be much better if we actually only wrote checks to the government when we paid our taxes. It would feel a lot more offensive. It would feel a lot more like a violation than it just disappearing in our play check. You know, in the government using basically businesses. So I worry that we make businesses more and more not responsible for the stuff they do, but not responsible for what their clients do. You know, unless JPMorgan directly facilitated and knowingly facilitated sex trafficking operations or anything like that or sent their executives to parties where, you know, with young girls. And maybe that was going on, but there's nothing to indicate that that was. I don't see how they can be liable for something. But of course, this is a settlement part of what I think JPMorgan wants to devoid is going to court, not only spending the money on court, which is massively expensive, you know, how much lawyers charge, but also, you know, might reveal stuff that maybe JPMorgan doesn't want to reveal. But it is unfortunate because every time one of these cases go to court, we actually learn about what actually happened. And maybe we get closer to actual justice towards the real criminals and towards the people who really participated in the crime, rather than, in a sense, a redistribution of wealth here. Yeah, I mean, I'm fine with the victims getting money, but I'm not sure the shareholders of JPMorgan are the one who should be providing it. I'm curious if there's any counter-argument to that. If there's a world in which you can see, if anybody can see corporations being liable, civilly liable for the evils, the crimes, the abuses of their clients. It would be interesting to hear what those arguments were. I'm not saying that they're legitimate, I just can't think of any right now. All right, now remember we talked about the demonstrations in the Netherlands and indeed by farmers who were being required to reduce the amount of nitrate they produced, which not only was going to involve a significant reduction in the amount of fertilizer they could use, but also in the number of cows they could have, which would result in the killing, in the destruction of lots and lots and lots of cows. And in the Netherlands, they actually organized as a political party and I think they got the highest, the most votes in the latest parliamentary election. I haven't followed that to find out what the consequences of that are because I think that the actual mandate to reduce the number of cows was actually from the courts just upholding EU kind of mandates. So we'll follow up on the Netherlands story and try to figure out now that they have political power what are the farmers actually going to do, what can they do and what will they do to get around these ridiculous draconian insane requirements. Anyway, this is spreading because as you know, or maybe you don't know, but one of the biggest creators of CO2, or maybe it's not CO2, but certainly of greenhouse gases of cows. They fought, you know, a big part, methane, right, big part of greenhouse gases and this is why a lot of the climate change nuts, the real extremists want us all to be on a vegan diet to stop eating meat. This is why, so we don't cultivate cows, so we shrink the cow population, this is why they're big into artificial meat, big into trying to genetically build, create something that tastes exactly like beef even though it's not beef, so there's a big push to try to get us off beef consumption. Of course, good luck with that. We are all beef eaters, we love beef, we eat a lot of beef, pork, you know, we just eat a lot of meat, a lot of red meat. And I don't think climate change is going to stop that. I don't think anybody takes climate change quite seriously enough. I mean, some people do but it's small numbers of individuals, most of us don't take it seriously enough to stop eating beef. So one of the things that is happening is that governments are imposing mandates on ranchers and farmers to reduce the amount of cows that they have. And the one following up on the Netherlands is the Irish government, Irish farmers are rebelling against a proposal. The proposal by the government is to cull tens of thousands of cattle a year. And to kill, cull is a nice word instead of to kill, kill tens of thousands of cows every year for three years. This is going to cost a huge amount of money, hundreds of millions, potentially 200 million euros. It costs a huge amount of money but it will reduce climate change numbers. That is, the amount of greenhouse gases that the country of Ireland emits will be reduced significantly. One question I think one should ask is, you're going to kill tens of thousands of cows so that Ireland can meet some what I would consider arbitrary target. But what impact? Let's buy into the story of climate change. Let's pretend that this is all real. Not just climate change but the catastrophizing and the horror of it and the emergency and the need to do it right now and the lack of technologies to suck in carbon so we have to just stop producing it. Let's pretend we buy into all that. What difference is whatever Ireland does make to the global production of carbon in the world? Ireland is a tiny little country, five million people. It has .06 of the world's population. It produces a tiny bit of carbon even with all the cows that it has. Indeed, it's a very rich country on a per capita GDP straight basis not adjusted for prices and stuff. Per capita is over $100,000 or GDP per capita over $100,000 which makes it significantly richer than the US and any other western country and that's primarily because it has become a home to a lot of major corporations for tax reasons. Ireland consumes a certain amount of electricity, not that much even though it's very rich, it doesn't consume a huge amount of electricity because there's just not a lot of people. So even though per person maybe they consume a lot, they don't consume that much particularly given their wealth and consumption of electricity go together. They don't produce a lot of carbon footprint. So if you just took Ireland to zero, let's say you really wiped out all the cows, wiped out all the people I guess, you literally took the carbon emissions to zero. What impact would have that on climate change? Well, none. None. First of all, it's just too minute of a quantity to make a difference to the effect of the greenhouse gases. And second, the reality is that more and more greenhouse gases are being emitted. Use of coal is going up. Use of natural gas is mostly going up. Use of gasoline in one form or another is mostly going up. There's some noise. It goes up and down. Last year gasoline went down a little bit but it's still below in other words. It's 11 in 2019 but this year it's likely the consumption of gasoline is going to be higher than that in spite of all the electric cars. So Ireland is not registering. It doesn't make any difference. And nothing really makes a difference. The reality is that gasoline production, natural gas, coal, all of that is going up because the fact is that no matter how much the rich world decides to sacrifice for the sake of more expensive natural gas or more expensive coal or just suffer the consequences like in Texas and other places of just having an unreliable grid because you're now dependent on wind and solar and all of that stuff no matter how much the rich sacrificial west is willing to do that the rest of the world is not. Poor people are not going to let you get away with that. The less gas you burn, the more gas they all burn. They want to be rich like you. They're not going to accept expensive electricity, expensive power. They're going to find every lump of coal they can and every piece of natural gas that they can and they're going to try to use it to produce energy and electricity as they should because they don't want to be stay poor. So all of these efforts, all of these localized efforts are just futile and silly. The world will continue to use fossil fuels as long as it's efficient and cheap to do so and it might not be efficient and cheap anymore in the west because we're taxing it and we're putting all kinds of codes on it and we're limiting it and we're destroying our capacity but it's still going to be efficient and cheap relatively speaking in third world countries. If the Russians can't sell gasoline to Europe, let's say because gasoline consumption in Europe is declined which it hasn't but let's say it has then they'll sell it in India and they'll sell it in Africa ultimately People will buy because people want to get rich and solar and wind if you take out subsidies and you take out all the controls and you take out the reliability, the lack of reliability so you have to add batteries and all that, far more expensive than reliable, good, cheap, reliable energy. Alright, so lots of cows going to be killed in Ireland. We'll see if the farmer rebellion in Ireland is similar to the farmer rebellion in Netherlands but it's just one little, I mean the story in itself is not that important. What's important is just this general tendency of people to just go nuts over this issue of climate change, no cost-benefit analysis, no real perspective on what they're doing and what benefit it has even if you take their assumptions seriously. Just arbitrary targets, just shooting for those, not really looking at the entire picture and then taking those most hysterical assumptions seriously and then destroying people's lives as a consequence. I mean, are the Irish people going to eat less beef, drink less milk? No, they're just going to import it. So Africa will start producing more of the beef and more of the milk and they'll lower tariffs to Africa so that they can import it from there because they don't, you know, so they feel better. They'll feel a little less responsible because their CO2 emissions will go down. Now the fact that their CO2 emissions go down will cause CO2 emissions in Africa to go up because they'll produce more cows and they'll feel better. But nothing in terms of nothing real, nothing in the world real in any sense, even in terms of net carbon emissions, is going to change unless people are really willing to eat less beef. But I don't see any indication of that. And by the way, it's much cheaper anyway to grow food and to bring food in from Africa to Europe than to grow it in Europe. So generally, the entire agricultural sector in Europe should be wiped out, not by government, it should be wiped out by competition. If Europe lower tariffs to zero on agricultural goods, Africa becomes the breadbasket of Europe and not only does it enhance the economies of Africa, wealth in Africa, it also allows Europe to restructure the economies in ways that promote their own comparative advantage and increases wealth in that sense. It makes food a lot cheaper for Europeans. Yeah, a lot of farmers will be unhappy. Can't make everybody happy and you shouldn't. That shouldn't be the goal of the policy ever. All right, talking about making people happy. Congress is contemplating another bill by Dick Durbin. The Durbin Amendment in Dodd-Frank is not enough. The Durbin Amendment basically put price controls and limited the ability of businesses for a variety of services for businesses, for what do you call it, ATM cards, for debit cards. So it used to be that there was competition over debit cards. You'd go and different debit card companies would negotiate different rates with retailers and there were sliding scales and there was about 15 companies that were doing this and there were a variety of ways. And the Durbin Amendment basically said one rate for all companies, they cannot compete on rates because, he argued, there was a duopoly visa and mastercard dominated the space and as a consequence of their dominance consumers were overpaying on debit cards and therefore debit card fees were capped by government, government price controls. That has basically reduced competition. Not clear that consumers have got any benefits from this, quite the contrary. They probably pay costs. What's happened is banks have had to make up the difference. They don't get the fees from the retailers anymore so now they have to make up the difference so they have to raise fees and lower interest they pay on other kind of products in order to still be able to return a decent investment income. So Durbin Amendment in Dodd-Frank, you know, if you look at it, it's been a disaster. In 2017, Republicans had an opportunity to do away with the Durbin Amendment. There was a bill in the House of Representatives that is part of some restructuring and some regulation and deregulation was going to get rid of the Durbin Amendment. Republicans had the House, they had the Senate, they had the presidency, couldn't get it done. There was massive opposition among the Republicans to passing the bill that eliminated Durbin and therefore we still have the Durbin Amendment on the books with regard to debit cards. Well now, they want to do the same thing to credit cards. So credit card companies, as you know, charge different fees from retailers so you pay with the credit card for every transaction the retailer might send to the credit card company two or three percent or one and a half. You know, I don't know. Again, it's competitive market and these things are negotiated in a sense retailer to retailer certainly with the large retailers. A part of the way in which credit card companies try to differentiate themselves and return some of that money, right? Some of the money they get from the retailers to you, the consumer to me, the consumer is through cash returns like you get two percent. Some cards even go up to five percent on different things that you consume. Points for airlines, points for hotel chains, all the branded credit cards that give you points. Basically, they're collecting a fee from the retailer and giving you the points. That's how it works and credit card company takes a fee. Well, this new amendment sponsored by Dick Durbin and, wait for it, I'm sure you'll be shocked, JD Vance, the Republican new senator from Ohio, Republican conservative, super conservative. They are both sponsored a credit card competition act that basically is going to cap fees on credit cards by capping the fees pretty low. They will eliminate, basically destroy all your favorite, my favorite at least, points that you get from airlines, airline credit cards, hotel credit cards will disappear. You won't get the cash back that you get today. They claim that there's no competition in credit cards and it's dominated by two players, Visa and MasterCard, completely ignoring the fact that American Express is pretty big, certainly on a dollar basis and quite a bit smaller but still growing actually, competitive, is discover. I think discover, I keep getting requests from them for 5% cash back. That's a 5% discount on everything you buy. So, just unbelievably destructive, anti-competitive, you see what they have, I don't have a lot of time somehow, I've talked a lot, they have in mind all these political idiots, have in mind a model of competition they learnt in school, or maybe their advisors learnt in school. And that is the idea of perfect competition. Perfect competition is where everybody is selling exactly the same product, at the exact same price, with exactly the same information, everything is exactly the same. And economists, I mean the really, really dumb ones, consider that, quote, perfect competition. But that's not competition at all. And the world doesn't work that way. And I always tell economic students, take that section in the textbook, perfect competition, monopoly pricing and rip it out of it and shred it because it's useless, literally, is destructive. And here you get it. What they want is to establish one price that all the companies have to use and therefore there's no differentiation between the companies. Same service, same wire, they have to offer. So if you come to retail and saying, okay, here are the services I offer you to do your credit card transactions. And I have to offer you at one price, but also I have to offer you exactly the same services these other companies offering. Perfect competition. The way they compete today is differentiating by price, differentiating by services, custom relations, marketing, all of that. I mean that's real competition. Trying to differentiate yourself, trying to offer your customers, both the people who are buying the retailers and the retail store owners, different deals, different products, different opportunities. And JD Vance, the Republican, I emphasize Republican slash conservative, conservative, arguably new right senator from Ohio, wants to restrict the ability of credit card companies to compete with one another in the name of perfect competition so that they're all just the same. What means no new entrants, no new technologies. And I think we as consumers suffer. We as consumers will lose huge amount of options, huge amount of opportunities. Again, all in the name of helping consumers because by doing this we'll reduce costs. No, you won't. You'll raise costs for all of us and you'll make the market a lot less efficient, a lot more cumbersome. The problem with something like this is because it's bipartisan. There's a good chance it passes. Who's going to oppose it? Who's going to oppose raising, having price controls? I mean, if JD Vance means that probably a few other Republicans will join him and then you could actually pass it with a, you know, in spite of maybe Rand Paul doing a filibuster, you can still get it passed because you'll get Democrats and you get the Republicans. And you think Biden wouldn't sign this? Of course he'd sign it. So discouraging, you know, and the fact that so many people say, oh, JD Vance, what a great senator, you know, Republican Congress, the winning, all of this. All right, quickly, ooh, we already have now. Okay, quickly, just one other kind of side effect of COVID. Really, all the programs initiated through COVID, the programs initiated by Trump and then the programs initiated by Biden, although most of these are ones initiated by Trump and then continued by Biden. People are now investigating more thoroughly and digging in to how all the stimulus money was spent, how all this excess unemployment insurance and all the small business loans, the payable protection program and other similar programs. Where did that money actually go? And by latest estimates, and this is just from a partial review done, I think, by, was it Reuters, done by one of the news agencies? God forbid, the government actually monitored this. That it looks like at least, these are low ball numbers, right? Low ball numbers. But at least 280 billion, not million, billion. COVID-19 relief funding was taken by fraud. So basically people filed an insurance claims with the names of dead people or an insurance claims when they were uninsured. They fired PPP when they really didn't have a business or they just started a business just to get PPP or all kinds of things like that. I mean, who knows how elsewhere, this is just what they found. Sorry, it's not Reuters, it's AP, it's Associated Press. This is their analysis, 280 billion just from unequivocal fraud. It's probably a lot more than that, but just from unequivocal fraud. And then another 123 billion wasted or misspent. I don't even know what that means, wasted or misspent. That is 10% at least of the 4.2 trillion, 4.2 trillion. Surprise, surprise, we got inflation. The US government so far reimbursed in COVID relief aid. And I don't think the government cares because the whole point of the COVID relief aid back in 2000 and some extent 2001 was what we call helicopter money. It was just get the money into people's hands so they go and spend it and keep the economy going. And it did. And I don't think anybody cared at the time whether there was fraud and waste and all that. That's a cost of doing business. But there are people out there that have 280 billion dollars that they didn't earn. Now none of this is earned, but they didn't even qualify for. And all of this is somebody's expense. Somebody has to come up with 4.2 trillion dollars. Wasted fraud, collected through fraud and just given out by the government. And that's all of us. I mean, we are suffering through inflation, which is a hidden tax. We'll have to pay this debt back and hire taxes in the future. One way or another, we, taxpayers, consumers, are paying this and we'll pay this for years and years to come. And one of the reasons they can get away with it is because they spread it out and the consequence is slow growth. You never experienced the high growth. So you don't know what you're missing. It's higher taxes, but not one big chunk of higher taxes. Just higher taxes for a longer period of time and maybe just a little bit higher, but for a longer period of time, people don't feel that. Very good. The government is very, very good at spitting out the pain over many, many decades and thus not getting us too upset at any given point in time. Same with inflation. Okay, so we got inflation for a couple of years. Inflation is now, I think the number came out this morning, it's not coming down. It'll go away. That 4.2 will get priced into the system and we got taxed. We got this big 8% inflation tax. We all survived. We all did okay. Now the inflation is coming back to the regular 2% tax. The inflation tax of 2% and it all just dissipates and no big upheaval and we didn't fire any of our politicians as a consequence. All right, so that was in the news. I mean, there's a lot of else in the news, but that's my quick update. I usually do four or five stories in the update, so let's move to Super Chat. Remind you, we try to make $250 the goal of the Super Chat. We're ready at halfway, so that's good, but also not a lot of time left, so that's not good. So 120 bucks left, so six $20 questions that we get there. So think about whether you can do that, support the show with $20. We've got about 90 people watching right now, two bucks a person. You can do a sticker, a $5, $10, $2 sticker and just support the show. Value for value. You're listening. It means I think you're getting some value from this and hopefully we can make our targets. Rimo says, now that you are standing in front of your bookshelf, which books do you have of finance professor Michael Jensen? All right, what's that? I mean, the main one I have, I might have had another one and I didn't keep it. This is theory of the firm. This is major contribution, I think, to finance and economics. It's the whole agency perspective and a whole theory of the firm and shareholder versus management and all of that. Very, very good. Michael Jensen, theory of the firm, governance, residual claims and organizational forms. Super interesting. So that's the one Michael Jensen book I have. I thought I had another one and kind of takeovers, but maybe where he was one of the authors, maybe not the lead author. Thank you to Marlene who came in with $3. Thank you to Katherine. Thank you to Japanista. Marlene with another $4. Robert, Jonathan and Antonio and Joseph. Thank you guys for chipping away, Linda. So we're chipping away at the goal. I really appreciate that. All right, Boyer's Pesa figured I'd start with something easy. Is the universe an accident? I mean that doesn't have any cognitive standing. What does an accident mean in the context of the universe? The universe is the universe. It just is. You can't say really much about it beyond that it is. An accident of what? There would have to be something outside the universe or something before the universe. But the universe by definition is everything there is and everything that was and everything there will be. So the universe is just is. It's just the universe. So it can be existence exists. It's not an accident. It's not purposeful. It's just right there. Thanks, boys. That was a $20 question. We've got a few of those. But still need another $5. Need another $5 to get to our goal. $20 questions. All right, recent news reported the subscriptions soared after Netflix cracked down on password sharing. Netflix was right in the end. People need to start getting used to the idea of paying directly for services they use. Yeah, absolutely. And look, it's a business decision. They made a decision before not to enforce that and let people share the password. Fine. Now they've decided to switch. That's fine, too. But revenues will go up because the reality is that people want to use Netflix. People want to. There's a real value there. And if those who produce the value, like me, actually say, hey, provide a value for value. And in Netflix case, demand it. And make it more difficult for you to share passwords and to use Netflix from different locations with different people. Then yeah, of course, they'll get more revenue. They'll get more subscriptions. They'll get more subscriptions that include multiple locations. But generally, they'll generate more revenue. So good for Netflix for finally catching up on that. And I don't think it was that painful. I don't think anybody got really upset. I think everybody gets it that if you use something, if you watch something, if you listen to something, you should pay for it. And so I don't think from a PR perspective, I don't think it turned out to be a bad thing, which I think is something they were a little worried about. Okay, Stringer Bell 31. Oh, his first super chat question. Thank you, Stringer Bell 31. Really appreciate the support and a $20 one at that. So thank you. This is great. All right. Just quickly, we're short like $100 right now. So $100 gets us to the target. $104 to be accurate. $104 gets us to the target. That's $520 questions or $250 questions or $100 questions. Should be really easy. I think we're on a streak of meeting, kind of making our goal for like over a week now. So it would be great if we kept the streak life. All right. Stringer Bell asks, in regard to pragmatism, what are your thoughts on individuals applying the 80-20 principle in their lives? In essence, individual finding the 20% of inputs that will lead 80% of success and happiness. I mean, I just think that it's not, you know, just the best way to do it, right? Certainly, nothing in reality says it's 80-20. Maybe it's $595. And if you're going to spend a real time figuring out what the 20 are, then you're spending real time creating a hierarchy of values. And if you're spending that real time creating the hierarchy of values, then evaluate all your values. That's the way you should be. Evaluate all the values available to you. Really think through how much each one of them contributes to your life and ultimately to your happiness. And pick them that way. It might turn out not to be 80-20 at all. I don't think the 80-20 rule applies in things like people's values. And I don't think it applies to everybody the same. Some people, it might be, and it depends on the phase of your life. So, for example, when you're young, I'd say basically, and I talked about this a little bit in Yuan's rules, right? There are basically three values that should dominate everything else when you're beginning in your 20s. That is your moral values, which should always be present. They should always be important. And I don't know how much you weigh that in 80-20 cents. Your career and finding somebody to be romantically involved with. That's where your focus should be. 20 years into the career, maybe the balance is a little different. And maybe at the very beginning of the career, you go, okay, mostly career, a little bit of romance. Moral values always. Maybe, you know, in the early 30s, you're like, okay, I'm establishing my career. Still need to focus on that. But I really need to devote more resources to finding somebody to be romantically involved with. Or maybe then you have kids and then, oh, okay, now there's a fourth one. And maybe when the kids leave home, then now you switch. So your values are constantly changing and the hierarchy is constantly, not constantly, but it's changing, can change quite often. You need to be aware of that. You need to alert to that. You need to really follow up on it. And I worry that some kind of 80-20 rule makes it simplistic. It reduces the amount of thinking you do. I don't think in life, rules of thumb are very useful. In life, you need to do the work. And the work involves thinking it through, prioritizing, creating hierarchies, figuring out what the trade-offs are and understanding what the trade-offs are and being comfortable with those trade-offs, making sure you don't sacrifice. Thank you, Stinger. Thank you for the super chat. I appreciate the support. We are $74 short, so it should be doable. Anyway, probably not, though, because we've got three very quick questions that we're going to be finishing very quickly here. Gail, thank you. Really appreciate the support. Tessa, thank you. $20, really appreciate that. And Boyz Pacer says, thanks for the answer. Hope all is well. Yes, all is for the most part well. All right, Hunter Hunter says, best restaurant in San Juan. Probably Marmalade, ultimately, I think Marmalade. But there's a list. There's like a handful of restaurants, you know, somewhere between 5, 6, 7, that are really, really good. But if I had to pick one that is absolute best, I'd say Marmalade. An old town San Juan. Robert says, just like the free member milestone chat, giving the show a like is free. I'm not telling you what to do. Oh yeah, I am. Click like. All right, that was from Robert, not from me, but yes. Liking the show, clicking that like is a way to support the show. It helps the algorithm. It really helps the algorithm. It gets a show more visibility in the world. It generally costs you nothing other than just click the button. And it really helps the show quite a bit. All right, we're now under 50 bucks. Robert stepped in with 20. Whoops, what did I, yes. A $100 super chat isn't in my budget today. But I subjectively feel this is totally a $100 chat. And if we all really, really believe it, I'm sure YouTube and your bank will credit it accordingly. Believe friends. All right, so we're going on. We're going on beliefs now. Belief status. All right, thank you, Robert. Getting us much close to the goal when only $47 a close to goal. Did I miss the COVID fall topic? Catherine says, yes, you did. So it's earlier. I did cover it though. So you should be able to get it. Daniel says, did you see Chris Christie go after Trump on CNN last night? No, I didn't. I missed it. I'll try to find a video recording of it. I didn't see many headlines about it. I hope it was effective and I hope it was devastating. But, you know, it's, it's Trump. Nothing seems to stick. And then equal to reality says, Piers, just some support. Thank you, equal to reality. Really appreciate that. All right, we are $47 short. If somebody can do that in the next two minutes, that would be fantastic just to get us over the hump so we can say that we made another target. But if not, that's okay too. There will be a show tonight at 8 p.m. East Coast time. I will advertise later on what the topic is going to be. And so we will do that. Again, thanks to all the superchatters. Thanks for everything else. And I will, I will see you tonight. And if you're only doing the news roundups, then tomorrow we'll do another news roundup. But yeah, if somebody before we sign off, puts in 50 bucks, that would be amazing. All right, everybody, have a great rest of your day. And I will see you.