 Though radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights, this is the Iran Book Show. All right everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show on this Monday, March 25th. I hope you all had a fantastic weekend and looking forward to this coming week, and it started off, it's Monday, it's great. All right, we've got a lot to cover today and a hard stop at three o'clock, so let's jump right into it. Before we get to Russia, an ISIS breaking news, breaking news as of I guess an hour ago, 117, less than an hour ago, you probably all familiar know that Trump has been having a really hard time raising the 458 billion dollars or million dollars, not billion million. I think about government budgets, it's always billion and trillion, but in real life, real people, most of us, the very rich deal in millions. Anyway, Donald Trump has to raise 400 something million dollars for this bond while he appeals his fraud case, both the conviction and the size of the penalty, and he hasn't been there to raise the money, he hasn't been able to get such a bond, and he went to the court and asked the court to consider lowering the size of the bond because ultimately he's going, he's appealing the size of the penalty. And a court decided, I guess today, this morning, that Trump can post a bond of 175 million instead of the 454, he has to do it within 10 days, and 175 million is probably a lot more doable for Trump than the half a billion dollars he would have had to post before so. So we'll see, maybe this is also a hint that Trump will have it easier on his appeal, at least on the size of the penalty. I don't know that he'll be able to appeal anything to do with the conviction, but he might be able to appeal the size of the penalty, which was, at the time I said, absurdly high given what he was found guilty of, it was just obviously punitive in a way that was ridiculous and absurd. And of course, Trump did everything he needs, his power to piss off the judge and encourage him to do something punitive. Anyway, we'll see what appellate court decides and how it decides it, but for now, you can all breathe without too much concern and Donald Trump will probably pay the bond and the District Attorney General of New York will not be confiscating his property. He'll probably be able to raise 175 million dollars, that would be my prediction. All right, I guess the main story of the weekend was the attack on a Russian theater by four terrorists who basically shot up the place. I mean, the videos are pretty horrific. There were videos making the rounds. I think they were taken down on X, but on Telegram and other places, literally showing these terrorists just killing people point blank while yelling Allah Akbar as they were doing this. And they killed 137 people, hundreds, others are injured. They threw bombs. They shot them point blank. They sprayed bullets into the crowd. Just devastating, just again, another one of these horrific acts of nihilism done in the name of the great religion of peace, Islam, and while shouting Allah Akbar and all the rest of it. The four people responsible for this have been arrested by the Russian authorities. They are all from Tajikistan origin. Tajikistan is in the southeast of Russia and a place where there's not too far from Afghanistan, not too far from kind of the base of where this particular group of ISIS, which took responsibility for this, is based. ISIS took responsibility for this. We'll talk about ISIS in a moment and declared it in a letter or in a post online. They also ISIS then published videos of the attack. So whatever the attackers were wearing cameras and they streamed it to whatever ISIS server and ISIS had access to it and then posted it on various channels. I mean, it really is horrific and disturbing. Again, the kind of just complete and utter disregard for human life, the complete and utter barbarity of it and the nihilism of it. I saw the Russians posted interrogations of these people. Hard to tell with these kind of things if they're real or not. One video was real where they literally, the Russians caught one of them and they literally cut off his ear and fed it to him. He had to eat it. I mean, the video was taken off X after a while, but it was there for a little while. I didn't watch the whole thing. I just believed the description after I saw the ear cutting off. I didn't watch to see if he actually ate it, but that was what the description said. So a number of different angles here that we have to discuss here is one is the effect on Russia and the way Russia is kind of spinning this. That's only one aspect of this. Another is ISIS, who they are, where they are and what their ambitions are and what's next, I guess. Yeah, I think those are the two angles we want to attack. So let's start with Russia. Of course, the first instinct that Russia had was to blame Ukraine and to claim that the Ukrainians were evolved supposedly, again, according to Russian authorities. I don't know if we can really trust Russian authorities, but according to them, the terrorists had a car and they were driving towards the Ukrainian border and stopped at a check post heading towards Ukraine. So yeah, I don't know if we can trust that. I don't know if you can believe it, but that is at least the Russian's argument for why they're claiming Ukraine was involved. No other evidence has been presented for Ukrainian involvement in this. Again, ISIS took credit from this. Putin did a five minute, I think little talk on television about this to the Russian people. Didn't mention ISIS, didn't mention Ukraine. So clearly they're trying to spin this. Putin on the one hand, this makes him look weak as a president who can't protect his own people. But on the other hand, this could play into his hands in the sense of his willingness, his, I don't know, argument to do a much bigger mobilization of the Russian armed forces for battle with Ukraine and to the extent that he can blame the Ukrainians for this and that the Russian people will buy that to that extent he is, you know, that helps him and with Russians, with common people in Russia. Russia, I mean, one of the great, one of the tragedies here and one of the indications of kind of Russia's complete corruptness. About two weeks ago, the United States told Russia that they had intelligence suggesting that ISIS or an Islamist group was planning an attack on Moscow and warned the Russians that this was coming. The Russians not only ignored this, but Putin in a public statement about a week ago, a week and a half ago, literally said, this is just the West wanting us to feel afraid. This is just the West fear mongering. There's nothing to this. Trust me, don't believe what you're hearing from the West. And he looks like an idiot, given that the United States, the intelligence the US had turned out to be incredibly accurate. The United States heavily monitors ISIS. It's been at war with ISIS in one way or the other, kind of a soft war, warm war, not a hot war since, what, the 20 teens, since the Obama administration and in Iraq and Syria and is at war with them also in Afghanistan. This particular attack is the ISIS of Afghanistan, the ISIS group that's in Afghanistan, training in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility. ISIS and interestingly enough to talk about ISIS. So ISIS Afghanistan is at odds with the Taliban. They don't like the Taliban and the Taliban are too moderate and too appeasing. ISIS is more radical and more, more consistent. And although I don't know how you can be more consistent in the Taliban, but I think ISIS, Taliban has mainly devoted themselves to subjugating their own people. They allow terrorists who want to expand Islam to the rest of the world to function there, but they leave it as is, right? They leave it at is. But right now, the ISIS on the other hand is dedicated to worldwide jihad, the dedicated to converting the rest of the world to the jihadi cause. And so that is what animates them and that's what motivates them. And I think that is the source of their resistance, of their conflict with the Taliban. It's great. I mean, one of the good things about evil people is that they don't get along, that they hate each other and they fight constantly. I think in World War II, we had the Nazis and the communists who cut a deal early in the war, at the beginning of the war, and then the Nazis were negged on it. And you've got in the Islamic world pretty much all the different terrorist organizations, to one extent or another, hate each other and fight each other constantly, which is lucky for us. ISIS from Afghanistan was responsible for the killing of 13 Americans. Do you remember the frantic evacuation of Kabul in the, as the United States, when was it last year, the year before that, when the United States left Afghanistan? Well, if you remember, there was a bomb, a suicide bomb, a series of suicide bombings that killed 13, I think there were marines, during the evacuation. Well, those suicide bombs were not the Taliban, they were ISIS, ISIS, Afghanistan. Then a few months ago, there was a massive explosion in Iran during a commemoration for Soleimani, the leader of the Iranian Republican Guard, who had Iranian Revolutionary Guard, who had been killed by the Trump administration and killed like 80 people in Iran. And the first instinct the Iranians had, just like the Russians, was to blame Israel and to blame the United States, only it was soon discovered and acknowledged that ISIS, Afghanistan was responsible. The Iranians then bombed Pakistan and Afghanistan and Syria, Iraq, or Iraq, as a response to it, trying to hit ISIS, I guess, based in those three states. And indeed, ISIS is prevalent in Afghanistan. It has bases in Pakistan. And of course, ISIS was born in Iraq and on the, particularly in the Iraqi-Syrian border, where during the peak of the ISIS, so-called Caliphate, they actually controlled land, both much of northern Iraq and much of northeast Syria were controlled by ISIS. The Americans and then the Russians basically, and the Kurds, basically pushed ISIS back and defeated them to the point where ISIS controls no real territory in that part of the world. But they're still there. They're still alive and well. They're still functioning. And it's one of the reasons or one of the excuses, depending on how you want to think about it, that the United States still has troops in Iran and in Iraq and Syria is because of the ISIS is still there and ISIS could regroup so that they're still there in order to make sure that doesn't happen. Let's see. What else was there? So, yes, ISIS also controls large swaths of land and is very active in North Africa. The Sahel, the region in North Africa between the Sahara Desert and kind of the sub-Saharan Africa, there is a strip of land. In the news recently was the fact that Niger, you remember months ago we talked about the Niger coup where the military took over the Niger, not the Nigerian, the Niger government. And then the Niger government kicked out the French and then about a week ago, the Niger government decided to kick out the Americans. The United States has a military base from which they fly drones that they spent $100 million building in Niger. Well, they've just been kicked out of that base and it's dubious whether they can use it. The base, the drones, were all there in order to combat ISIS of North Africa. So, ISIS is still around, still prevalent, still interested in killing non-Muslims. And as we can see, has extensive reach into Russia. Tajikistan, there are many Tajikistanis who live in Russia, so there is a fairly open border between Tajikistan and Russia. Tajikistanis, Tajiks, I guess they called, come to Russia to work. I think they're over a million and a half of them in Russia. And so it's relatively easy for terrorists to come across from Tajikistan. These four, they have said, again under interrogation, that they were paid $5,000 to do this. So this is interesting. Most ISIS attacks, at least most ISIS attacks and scale outside of the territory they supposedly control, almost all of them are suicide bombings. So if you, or suicide attacks, ISIS was responsible for many terrorist attacks in Europe during the mid-20s, those were all suicide, or mostly suicide, or they knew they would die, even if they didn't commit suicide themselves, they knew somebody would kill them, whether it was the cars ramming into people, knife attacks, or just gunfire, they all knew they would be killed. Here, it at least appears that they thought they might be able to get away, right? They had a getaway car, they drove off, which is a little atypical of ISIS. So that's one consideration to think, well, what exactly is going on here? Could it be something else? It's not something else. It's pretty clear ISIS. Other than that, it's got more on it. And again, they've admitted and US warned in advance that it would happen. And what the suggest to us? ISIS has now struck Iran, it's struck Russia. It's not taking sides in the Ukraine war. What it is doing is testing out its reach. And the more terrorist attacks like this they are, the more prevalent they are, the more widespread they are, the more they make the headlines. The more likely it is that ISIS can recruit people in Europe and maybe even the United States to commit terrorist attacks in their name in those regions. So it wouldn't be surprising at all if ISIS attempted some terrorist attacks in Europe. There is a large Muslim population, a tiny fraction of whom are susceptible to ISIS. And again, as soon as ISIS lost territory and lost the momentum and wasn't in the news and wasn't being portrayed as winning, terrorism in Europe disappeared. But now they're back, they've attacked Russia, they've attacked Iran and they could they could do a lot more damage. They're in the news, they're getting headlines. There is a real possibility of terrorist attacks in Europe and even the United States. So I'm sure the intelligence agencies on top of this, it is somewhat reassuring that the American intelligence services knew that something was brewing and warned the Russians. One would hope they would know something is brewing if something was going to hit Europe or something was going to hit the United States and as a consequence could take it seriously and actually stop it. But anyway, tragic, but ominous, ominous in terms of kind of the rebirth of ISIS and their willingness to attack and attack far away from their base. Again, their bases today are Afghanistan where because of the United States exiting Afghanistan, they are free to train. The Taliban don't like them, but I don't think the Taliban are going to go out of their way in particular to fight them off. So they train in Afghanistan, they are also in Pakistan and in the eastern part of Iran. And Iraq and Syria, they're in, even though they don't control territory, they're there as well. And then maybe the place where they control the most territory where they have the most mobility is in North Africa. And all the U.S.-European allies and countries that were helping them fight ISIS in North Africa, they have all turned against the U.S. and Europe. And while they haven't exactly sided with ISIS, they're going to be a lot less effective in fighting ISIS without U.S. support and without European support. So ISIS will only, from this point on, get stronger. And I don't know that Russia will do anything to stop them. I don't know who they attack, where they attack. Does Russia really want to do something in Afghanistan? It tried that once, didn't go very well for the Russians. I don't think they want to get involved in that. Maybe that launch of missiles like the U.S. always did into some random ISIS camp in Afghanistan and leave it at that. I just don't think Russia is going to do anything of substance here. It did. When they were functioning in Syria, they did attack ISIS pretty harshly in Syria. Maybe the Russians in Africa, maybe they would attack ISIS in Africa. Hard to tell what the Russian response will be. All right. That is Russia. All right. Let's turn to the United States, the Supreme Court. Again, the Supreme Court will hear the case tomorrow about the abortion pill. This is a case that, coming out of a federal court in Texas from last year, if you remember, we talked about this quite a lot. I can't pronounce the judge's name, but he made a decision. It was, I think, last April that basically foes made it inaccessible to use a particular Miphaprax or mill anything with mill, I can't pronounce it. Anyway, with this chemical that induces abortions. His argument was, he had all kinds of arguments about the emotional state that this causes women and the FDA is responsible. This is a drug approved by the FDA and that no, it had much worse side effects and so on. Now, the Fifth Circuit, which is, as I've said before, is the most conservative circuit in the U.S., I believe, basically overturned his ruling and made the drug available again, but with a lot of restrictions. They basically invalidated changes that the FDA had made in distribution of the drug, changes they made in 2016 and 2021, and thus, restricting the drug to only 49 days after pregnancy versus 70 days, which the FDA had approved, and also restricting the quantity used by the drug instead of 600 milligrams to 200 milligrams. Why they did this? Who knows, just to make it difficult for women to access this and to make it possible for them to have an abortion. The Supreme Court is going to hear all our arguments tomorrow about this, and the restrictions of the Fifth Circuit Court were significant and made it much more difficult for women to access this drug, which I think is just horrific. This is a relatively risk-free way of doing an abortion. It is only useful in the first 70 days and the first trimester. I don't see why anybody has any argument against this kind of abortion in the first trimester, but the religious right is nuts, and of course they do. There are a lot of legal issues about jurisdiction, whether federal courts even have a jurisdiction over this. Ultimately, this has implication for other drugs. Does this mean that any federal court can second guess FDA decisions and question drugs? Of course, it has huge ramifications for the issue of abortion rights and whether women can have access to this drug. In particular, can have access to this drug in states that have banned abortion procedure, can state ban this drug even though it's federally approved? So there are a bunch of issues here that relate to the authority of the FDA, the authority of the courts, and the whole, of course, what do you call it, abortion question and how it relates to everything else. So we'll see what our arguments are like tomorrow. Expectations are that the Supreme Court will throw out this case and will in favor against the court decision by the federal courts in Texas and also overrule the Fifth Circuit. But it'll be interesting by what majority it does that. How will the conservative justices vote? Will they try to find some middle ground? Who knows? Who knows with this court and an issue like abortion? It's just really hard to tell. We'll know more about this after the arguments and then, of course, we're going to make the decisions at the end. All right, we all kind of know that federal debt is out of control and that the government is issuing debt at an unprecedented level and it's just insanity. But I thought it would be good to give you a visual illustration of this. This is a graph that I'm going to show you right there. This is a graph of basically the debt that the US government is issuing in order to fund its deficits. It starts in 2001 and it goes through today. You can see the trends. I think these trends are super interesting. You can see that debt increased systematically throughout the Bush presidency but at a growth rate that was not super high. It was super high as compared to what was going on before it but it's compared to what comes after it. It seems pretty low. You can then see that financial crisis caused a significant increase in the slope both in the final year of the Bush administration and then under Obama, the amount of debt just exploded and here you can see. So this is the bonds that the government issues to finance is the debt. Then you can see it continues at a slightly milder slope than it did under Obama under Trump but still dramatic increases in bond issuance under Trump. Then you get COVID and under Trump in 2020 a massive increase just a slope that goes almost straight up in terms of issuance of debt and then and you kind of incredibly steep slope under Biden and even under Biden with the Republican Congress. Look at that end of the graph there where it takes another even steeper slope. That's Republicans and Democrats working together for your benefit to increase the amount of bonds issued even further. This is the amount of bonds out there. It is kind of interesting in the sense that you know when interest rates were zero and long-term interest rates were very very low the government could have issued a lot of bonds that's the dark blue which are the long-term bonds and they could have and they could have issued them at fixed rates so that the interest expense doesn't go up over time. That would have saved the US taxpayer a huge amount of money but they didn't. They continue to issue most of the debt of a warming majority of the debt as short-term bills and notes and that means that those reprised constantly as interest rates went up and that means interest payments on the debt have exploded recently and why the debt has exploded so much is partially just to pay the interest on the debt you already have which continues to be insane but that is what it is. So here in this graph you can see both the levels of the debt and the composition of the kind of bonds that the government is issuing. The government is scheduled to continue this at these kind of rates and again it doesn't really matter who wins. Republicans are Democrats to a large extent because a lot of this is fixed. It's entitlements, it's defense spending, there's very little to cut if you take entitlements off the table as both Republicans and Democrats have and as both Biden and Trump have done. There's not a lot of stuff to play with once you take those off the table so this is going to continue upwards. This market is growing and growing and growing trade and treasuries is massive trade and government bonds. It is setting itself up for some kind of crisis, hard to tell exactly how it manifests itself but it's not healthy. It's not healthy for the government to have this kind of level of debt. It's not healthy for this market to be as big $25 trillion, $26 trillion or something. It's a massive market, a massive quantity of people's funds is in these bonds. Pension plans, insurance companies, individuals, all of us really corporations, not healthy, not healthy. I'm not sure how we'll pay for it exactly but we will pay for it. There's no question about that. All right, what else? Yeah, we're going late. Armaco, yeah, kind of an interesting story. So at the start of last week, the head of the world's largest oil companies, which is the Saudi Armaco, basically told an energy conference in Houston. It was time to quote, I don't know, maybe he's reading Alex Epstein, it was time to quote abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas. Basically, he said that the world needed instead to invest in fossil fuels to meet demand at a time when the clean energy transition was, quote, visibly failing on most funds. What was interesting about that is a lot of people celebrated this and hailed this. So one could argue Alex is having a real impact out there in the world. People's views maybe of fossil fuels are slowly changing and maybe this is good news. I mean, in the past, oil industry usually just played up and reinforced and the kind of the story about climate change. And it was all just a question of how they could cooperate or how they could, how they would do it. This is great news that some of them are standing up and arguing, no, no, no, stop this and actually not being completely shunned and completely ridiculed for doing so. So good stuff, good stuff. Hopefully, yeah, and I think you have to say that the only person consistently doing this and making these kinds of arguments on a regular consistent basis is Alex Epstein. So good for him. All right. Let's see. Finally, you're not seeing a lot of this in the press, but over the last week, there were significant demonstrations in Cuba, primarily in the streets of Santiago and other smaller cities away, I guess, in the power center in Havana. Basically, people chanting Libertad and mocking government officials. And a big reason for this right now is that the island is experiencing extreme food and medicine shortages. Now, the Cuban officials were ready for this. They, the Cuban officials already in 2021, there were big demonstrations which caught the Cuban government off by surprise. They weren't ready for it and demonstrations got a little out of hand from their perspective. This time, they were out in full force and they were ready with both a military or police and a PR campaign. And immediately, the Cuban started blaming sanctions by the United States on the shortages of food. But of course, that is absurd. Cuba can buy food from any other place, even if it cannot buy from the United States. And it's not clear that. And of course, Cuba doesn't allow its individual citizens to buy food from the United States. The United States would sell food to individual individuals. Of course, Cuba could also supply its own food if Cubans were allowed to actually have private farms and grow their own food and grow their own vegetables. The only reason Cuba is short of medicine, I thought Cuba had the best medical system in the world. Isn't that more, what's his name, Alan? Something more, more his argument about Cuban healthcare system. But no, I mean, this is what socialism does. Here's another country that because of socialism has basically regressed, regressed. But it's almost impossible to get eggs, chicken, fish, and beef on an island where you're fishing. But to go fish, you'd have to have a boat. And a boat would be private property, and private property is banned and not allowed, so you cannot go out and fish. But the whole notion of Cuba starving is sad and absurd and ridiculous and clearly, unequivocally, a consequence of a socialist regime that is nationalized all the means by which Cubans could feed themself. It used to be that Cuba used to rely on the Soviet Union for funds and for supplies. That went away. And then once the Soviet Union went away, they relied on Hugo Chavez as a Venezuela because Venezuela was a oil exporter. They had money and they could get money and supplies from Venezuela. But of course, Venezuela has been driven into bankruptcy by the same kind of socialism that drove Cuba into bankruptcy. And now they have nothing. So it must be America's fault. It must be the United States role Castro, who is 92 years old, still holds power. There are no property rights. There was a small business reform, but it's nothing. It's basically farming out the state-owned businesses to Castro's friends and family. And they're the ones getting fat off of this. There is no production. There is no wealth creation. There is nothing. And when you get nothing, when you have socialism, what you get ultimately is starvation and people dying because they can't get their medications. So Cuba, another great example of the success of socialism. I'll just mention that in a debate I did years ago on socialism at a university, in the UK. I forget now what the name of the university was. It wasn't in York, but it was anyway university in southeast of England. We were asked, each one of us was asked in capitalism, socialism, we were asked what country today in the world comes closest to your ideal. And I mentioned Hong Kong and I mentioned New Zealand, which is before COVID. And the other guy mentioned Cuba. And I laughed. I thought that was hysterical. And this is the motto of socialism. This is the closest you come to socialism. I mean, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Western Europe, the United States are all very, very flawed capitalist countries, but or flawed countries with a little bit of capitalism. But hey, that little bit of capitalism goes a long way. A little bit of, you know, the socialism in Cuba also goes a long way. It goes a long way to starving the population. All right, I think we're done. Have a 20 minutes to answer questions. I only have three questions. We have 155 people watching, so please think about supporting the show by asking a question. $20, $50, $100 questions get priority. You can also use a sticker to support the show and then no question, but just a dollar amount. We've got Jonathan Honing, thank you. Steven Harper, John Glue, Jeremy Silvanos, Mary Alene, and Enric, and Mary Alene again, all have used the sticker to support the show with 150 people watching. It doesn't take much from you guys to get us over the threshold. This is a viewer supported show. Those of you watching live, the easiest tool you have to support the show is the Super Chat through stickers and questions. And those of you watching not live, please consider becoming monthly supporters on Patreon or on your onbrookshow.com slash membership, which is PayPal. And you can support the show by either one of those two channels on a monthly basis, which is great and very, very, very, very much appreciated. Let's see, what else? Yeah, I also wanted to mention that the Ironman Institute is a sponsor of this show. And right now, they are taking scholarships, applications for Ocon for a big conference in the summer in Anaheim. They offer a lot of student, what do you call it, a lot of student scholarships. So please consider applying. You get a free ride, you get to come to the conference for free, you get free flights and everything. So you can go to ironman.org slash start here, ironman.org slash start here and fill out the online scholarship application. Those of you who are not eligible for scholarship, please come anyway, pay them money. You will have so much fun. It is so worthwhile, it is such a great, you know, six days to hang out that it is that everybody should come. It's something every objective should do. It's a great once a year kind of getting together, meeting old friends, meeting new friends, maybe even more importantly, making new friends and then hearing terrific presentations and lectures and panels and all kinds of other stuff. So I will be there. I will be presenting a few things. And yeah, it'll be truly a fabulous event. So please join us. All right. Let's see. Sylvanos, thank you, $50. Really, really appreciate Sylvanos is here for most of these news roundups and also always is incredibly supportive if you gave a sticker before and now he's done a $50 question, you know, he makes it possible to reach our goal pretty much every one of these news roundups. You can help us reach our goal today by yeah, asking a question like Richard just did $20, another $5, $20 questions and we're really there or somebody wants to put 50, you know, make it even shorter. All right. Sylvanos says, why doesn't the right take Cuba to gain a breadbasket to compete with California? Well, yeah, I mean, what nobody wants is another war for the United States to get engaged in. I mean, the reality is that, you know, Cuba is not a threat to the United States and therefore we don't need to go to war there and conquer it. It's the best thing for Cuba is, I mean, I don't even think we should even embargo Cuba. I don't agree with the Trump administration imposing an embargo on Cuba or any administration imposing an embargo on Cuba. I don't think an American president should go to Cuba. That's disgraceful. I was very, very critical of Obama when he did that. I thought it was despicable and beneath an American president, but I also don't think we need to embargo them. They're not a threat to us. I wouldn't buy anything Cuban, but, you know, maybe if they have more exposure to the United States, maybe ultimately from within, they will crumble. We should do everything we can to help that. We should support the rebels there. If there are any rebels, we should support anybody trying to kind of defeat the communist regime. It is actually quite amazing that Cubans survived as long as it has, that the castors have survived as long as they have, that the regime they've survived as long as it has. It's not a popular regime. It's a very unpopular one. But for whatever reason, the Cubans are not willing to raise up arms and go after their own leadership, which they need to and they should and all the rest. All right, Richard. Thank you, Richard. What role does the Fed play by buying and selling U.S. debt? For example, buying and selling debt to manage the money supply. I mean, that's exactly what they do. They manage the money supply. They manage the amount of money in the economy. One of the tools, not the only tool, but one of the tools and the tool, the predominant tool by which the Federal Reserve manages the supply of money in the economy is to buy and sell bonds. When they buy bonds, when they buy bonds, they're basically increasing the money supply. They're accepting, but they buy them from the public. They, or from investment banks, they accept a piece of paper and they issue money. So money enters the economy. When they sell bonds, which is what they're doing these days, they've been doing it for the last two, three years, two years, they actually reduce the amount of money. If you look at measures of M2, which is one of the measures of money in the economy, it's been going down at a very sharp rate over the last couple of years. And that's a consequence of the Fed selling the bonds that it owns. And thus, it sends paper bonds into the economy and sucks up money in exchange. So this is the major tool that the Fed has to change, manipulate, adjust the supply of money in the economy. The other way is by changing the reserves that banks have to hold with the Fed. But this is the day-to-day way in which they do it. Hamad, the deafening silence from the main EACC on the issue of Department of Justice versus the Apple is very revealing. They're against government intervention in AI and in tech, except when it comes to big tech. I think that's right. I think that's right. And it's unbelievably sad. I need to do a show on EACC. But one of the things that characterizes EACC is that they don't have clear and equivocal philosophical principles. They don't live by those principles. They don't advocate by the principles. They have just general attitude of pro-growth, pro-progress, pro-tech, pro-AI, which is good. It's better than alternative, of course. But that means that they're not going to be consistent. They're not going to apply this consistency consistently across the board. And, of course, Andreessen, who is one of the, if not founders, one of the spiritual founders, you could say, of the movement is, of course, the guy who sicked the Justice Department on Microsoft. He was at Netscape when Netscape sued Microsoft over antitrust that sparked the whole Justice Department investigation. And ultimately, I think, the crippling of Microsoft for almost a decade, really, before it made a warring comeback after the government kind of let it go a little bit. So, yeah, not surprising, very, very, very sad, very sad. It would be great if tech had a unified front against government interference. But then, of course, if they did, the ideas of EACC would have to be better and would have been better and more consistent and more principled. All right, we are only $53 away from achieving our goals. So, I've got four more questions and 12 minutes. I have to hard stop at three o'clock because I've got a class that I have to teach. Kenny, thank you for being a pillar of sanity in these insane times. It does feel like insane times, doesn't it? It really does. It really does. Oh, by the way, the Israel-Palestine debate I was supposed to have yesterday got delayed, got postponed, not delayed. It'll be next Sunday. So, yeah, otherwise, I would have given you an update on that, but it will be next Sunday. Daniel, Trump just said that Israel should finish up the war because it's losing the world's support. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense, of course. I don't know what that means. It doesn't mean Israel should finish up the war by winning, by being more aggressive, or finish up the war because it wrap it up now. Hard to tell what exactly that means, Daniel. So, I didn't see the quote directly from Trump. So, I'm curious what he actually meant. I wouldn't be surprised either way. I wouldn't be surprised at all if Trump is basically saying, okay, Israel, enough is enough. Let's have a ceasefire. Shut it down. Shut it down. You're losing the world's support. We don't want to lose the world's support. That would be awful if we actually lost the world's support. We don't want to do that. I don't have. I've never had the world's support. I can't lose it because I've never had it. Yes, also, don't forget to like the show before you leave. Give it a like. It helps with the algorithms a huge amount. We had 150 people on a little earlier. We're still 136 people live. So, you know, like it. We should have a lot more likes than we do right now. And it helps with the algorithm. Like, share, you know, go to the comment section, write a comment, participate here in the chat, all of those help. Justices, have you seen Showgun? Yes, I've talked about it in a previous show. I'm watching it right now. I haven't seen the whole show, but I'm in the middle. And yeah, I think it's beautifully done. It's interesting. I enjoyed the old series. The book is very good. I like Clavel's books, many of his other books as well. So, highly recommend the show, Showgun, on Hulu. It's on Hulu. And then I just started yesterday the three-body problem on Netflix. So, I'm curious to see how that plays out. But it looks super interesting. I've had strong recommendations for the book in the past. The three-body problem by a Chinese author, a science fiction. I'll just mention this, because this is terrific, that the show, the three-body problem starts with the depiction of a trial during the Cultural Revolution in China of a physicist who is murdered in front of his daughter for having anti-revolutionary ideas, like I don't know, relativity theory or something like that. And so it shows the Cultural Revolution brutally, which is very surprising for a show based on a novel from China. And what's happening in China is China blocks, there's no Netflix in China, but people are using VPNs to watch it through Netflix. And it created quite a stir in China, because the Chinese authorities deny the brutality of the Cultural Revolution, the brutality that was shown on the show. So to the extent that the show can educate some of the Chinese about their own history and what happened, that would be terrific. Anyway, it's a super interesting show that happens in a bunch of parallel timelines and looks really interesting. And I'm going to watch it. All right, Christian, Georgia is amazing. Oh, he's in, he's in Tbilisi, he's in Georgia, Georgia, not Georgia here, Georgia there. Georgia was amazing. Tbilisi, Old Capital, Chronicle of Georgia, Cave City, the Kazbegi Mountains on Snowmobiles. I haven't been to the Kazbegi Mountains, so good for you. The food, I'd say, and the food. And then I'd say, and the food. And then the red wine is phenomenal. Christian likes Kingali. The food is amazing. I think I said that already. No, and the people, that's the most important part, the people super friendly, super engaged. There were a few Georgians at the conference in Amsterdam. They're such wonderful people. It's, yeah, so good for you, Christian, for being in Tbilisi. It seems like you covered everything. I don't see here whether you were at the wine country. That's the only other thing I would do is go to the wine country, but it sounds like you did more than I've done, right? I haven't been to the Kazbegi Mountains. I wish I had been to the Kazbegi Mountains. All right, quickly, Adam says, Wall Street Journal today, conservatives, conservatives are younger GOPs who question unfettered markets and see big corporations as the adversary to their constituents. I mean, that's J.D. Vance. That's what's his name, Holly. That is the new Republican Party. By the way, J.D. Vance is being talked about as a VP candidate for Trump. If that happens, one more reason not to vote for Trump, J.D. Vance is about as bad as you can think of a Republican could possibly be. I mean, in every respect, this guy is a monster. But yeah, that's where the Republican Party is. Wow, Mary Elaine just came in with $100. Thank you, Mary Elaine. So quickly, I've got six minutes. Did you read TFP article Saturday on Mary where Dennett? She mailed her six pamphlet in 1915 and was prosecuted. She was a wonderful, benevolent view of sex. Her work was called obscene, lewd, lavish, I can't pronounce it, filthy, vile, and indecent. She also advocated for both control. I did not, but well, I saw it, but I didn't read it. Now I'm definitely going to read it. Somebody suggested today that I should do, that I should do an in-person seminar on sex for objectives. So like a day long or half a day seminar on sex. So if anybody's interested in your own book during a day long seminar on sex, maybe I'll have to invite my wife to co-host it with me. And people are willing to pay for that. I consider it. But thank you, Mary Elaine. I'm definitely going to look for that and read it and report back because 1915, the United States in particular was very, very prudish, very, very prudish. This is what it is. This is about the time of prohibition. Prohibition starts. This is all in the name of Christianity, in the name of morality, in the name of all that stuff. So Kenny says, seminars sex sounds good. All right, maybe we can do advice Zoom. Maybe we can do it in person. I don't know. We'll see. Let me finish my public speaking seminars. And then we can consider doing the sex seminars. All right. Thank you, guys. Mary Elaine, wow, $100. Really, really, really appreciate that. You and Sivanus made it, made, and of course all the other superchatters and a lot of stickers. Here's more stickers, Zakti, Art Lens Design, Donna E, and Kenny. I can't remember if we did Kenny already and John. Thank you all. Really, really appreciate it. And we blew past that target. And that is fantastic. I will see you all tomorrow about the same time, maybe an hour earlier for another news roundup. And I think we're on a regular schedule this week. So all is cool and all is good. Bye, everybody.