 of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Brookshow. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Brookshow on this Wednesday, last week in September. Hope everybody's having a great, great week, getting ready for October. It's almost here. All right, let's see. A bunch of stuff to talk about today. We will start on that in a minute. I'll remind everybody that you can ask questions in the super chat, or, yeah, just in the super chat, or you can use it to support the show either way. And I'm going to try to, for the rest of the week, do these shows at 1 PM. So 1 PM, news roundup, pretty much every day. Again, next week, we'll be a little disrupted. And then once we get into mid-October, everything is going to be very disruptive, because I'm going to be traveling all over the place. I'll tell you more about my travel schedule, maybe tomorrow, and encourage you to come to some of my events as I travel around the world. I will remind everybody that if you are interested in participating in a public speaking seminar held by me, full day, small group, intense, lots of personal attention, then please write to me, iranaturanbrookshow.com, iranaturanbrookshow.com. I'm thinking of doing one in the US, maybe Miami, sometime in the future, so I'm trying to get names of people who'd be interested. The cost will be probably $750 a person. And I do have, and do anticipate doing one on October 18th in London, so if you're in Europe on London and are interested, please email me, iranaturanbrookshow.com. All right, let's jump in. So there's this court case. It's really, really hard to keep track of all of Donald Trump's court cases. He has been accused of so many different things in so many different jurisdictions. It's hard to keep track, but this is a business lawsuit. It's against Trump and a variety of different limited liability corporations that Trump owns, that Trump family owns, Trump businesses in the state of New York. It's a lawsuit filed, but in it's a civil lawsuit, not a criminal lawsuit, filed by the District Attorney of New York, or the Attorney General of New York, against the various Trump organizations accusing them of committing fraud. If you remember, the Trump organizations were accused and found guilty of committing tax fraud, what was it last year, I think, and I think the CFO is going to jail. But in this case, this is civil and it's business fraud. It is interesting that the state is bringing the lawsuit, not the victims of the fraud or the alleged victims of the fraud. This is the state doing it. It's not clear why, and it's not clear why the victims are not involved, although we'll see the trial is set for October 2nd. There were some summary judgments made before the trial started, and the Trump lawyers tried to get the judge to basically do a summary judgment that basically throws out the case, claiming that there is no evidence that the public was harmed by Trump's actions, so there's no there, there, there's no, why are they suing? Well, what is the purpose of this? They also are claiming that some of the allegations happened so long ago that the statute of limitations should apply. The judge has refused Trump's argument for summary judgment. What's interesting is the prosecution asked, the state asked, for summary judgment over one aspect of the case, and that is the factual question of did Trump lie about the value of his real estate when applying for loans? So think about the fraud case as I'm asking you for a loan, you're the bank, I'm asking you for a loan for, let's say, $100 million, and the bank asked you, me, well, what kind of collateral do you have? What kind of assets do you have? You know how you and you apply for auto loan or mortgage to ask you about your income? They wanna know how much are you worth and what's your regular income? Can you afford to pay back the loan? And sometimes they act for documentation, sometimes they don't, but the argument is that Trump basically inflated the value of all of these things that his lenders asked for. So instead of $100 million, all the home he claimed he was worth 300 million instead of X, they claimed Y. The bank does not have to do an appraisal and often won't because it might not be collateral, specific collateral for this loan, it might just be an assessment of your net worth in order to know whether they will give you a personal loan or a business loan or whatever. So the bank in these cases and the cases cited in this lawsuit did not do an appraisal. It wasn't necessary, you know, you get an auto loan, they ask you about your income, they don't ask you for W-2s. I mean, a mortgage they ask for more and they definitely do an appraisal because they're basically using the value of the homeless collateral for the mortgage. But it's not always the case in business loans, you can get a business loan without appraisals. So the argument here is that Trump lied about the value of his properties, inflated them in order to get better terms on the loan, in order to make himself be perceived by the financial institutions as safer, safer risk than he really was. And there's a whole list of properties. Anyway, the judge has ruled, yesterday he ruled that yes, Trump was guilty of fraud in that he, and this is before the trial ever begins, which is weird, in that he inflated the value of the real estate. Now, it's hard to tell here what exactly is going on. There's already stories today about the fact that the judge doesn't know what he's talking about, that some of the real estate he's arguing is worth a lot more than he's saying it is, that Trump is much closer to truth than what the judge is saying. It's not clear what kind of expert witnesses, the judge accessed, if you will, what kind of information he accessed in order to make his ruling, because it wasn't a court, it was a summary judgment. Again, I find this strange. The court case itself only starts on October 2nd. None of this is in front, as far as I can understand, none of this is in front of a jury. It is all in front of a judge. Of course, the accusation is the judge is a Democrat. He's out to get Trump. He's in the pocket of the prosecutor. The prosecutor, of course, is the attorney general of New York who is a Democrat as well. So this is political. Could it be political? Sure. It's a little strange to me that the banks themselves are not a party to the lawsuit, that it's just being followed by the state. Again, maybe some lawyers in my audience can correct me. Maybe that's standard practice. Maybe that's not unusual at all. So is this political? Maybe. I'm not sure. Is it unusual for courts to rule in favor of prosecutions in cases like this? Yeah, I mean, I always go back. My suspicion of the court system basically goes back to Giuliani and Giuliani being the district attorney of the Southern District of New York and filing all those fraud cases against and RICO cases against financiers in Wall Street. He got prosecutions. Mostly, he won. But then in many cases, many, not just a few, they were reversed on appeal. So, and he was clearly motivated, not purely politics, but motivated to make a name for himself, motivated by slamming Wall Street, motivated by a philosophical, political, ego agenda that had to do with him making a big name for himself. I since then, this is the 80s, I despise Giuliani with a passion. And so it's so hard to tell unless you really dig into this case. And the sad thing is that Trump is gonna position this as, oh, this is all political. And a Democrat, the anti-Trump people are gonna say, oh, no, no, no, this is the rule of law. And it's, it would be nice to have some, I don't know, objective impartial observers actually give us some good information about what's going on in this court case and what's actually happening in there. I mean, some of the other court cases, I think are much easier because they're easier to understand. Here it's, what is the exact standing, the exact context. And it does, I mean, the judge claimed that Trump's moral logo estate is worth $18 million. And real estate agents are coming out and saying, no, no, no, this could list today for 300 million. I mean, the numbers seem to be completely distorted and out of whack. And so it's hard to tell what's really going on. What this does, and maybe this is healthy, I don't know, is it's causing all of us, it's causing everybody to really question the legal system and to elevate the politicization or the perceived politicization of the legal system. That is the main harm. And that's the harm. And Trump will do this on every single case. Every single case is gonna be about politics. Every single case is gonna be personal. Every single case is gonna be a miscarriage of justice. And Trump is gonna use that. And unfortunately he's gonna sway a lot of people to doubting the justice system, the court system. And that is very, very dangerous, even though there are real flaws in the justice system. Look, the Giuliani cases were reversed on appeal. Massive injustice was done in the process. But they were reversed on appeal. The system, in a sense, worked. It's gonna be interesting. Trump's already appealing this case. It'll be interesting what the appellate court will decide here. I still think that process as a whole probably works more often than it doesn't. But I think we're gonna see much, much more doubting. And this is part of a bigger picture of doubting the entire American political system, doubting the entire American way of doing things by Americans themselves, increasing the cynicism and skepticism, not healthy for a free country to start completely doubting its institutions in the way that I think is happening in America today. Not healthy. And again, a precursor for somebody coming in and saying, let's do away with these institutions. Here's a better way. And that's authoritarianism. Talk about distorting institutions and, you know, so labor unions been going on strike in America for well over 100 years. Maybe it's 150 years. And labor unions for most of that period or maybe all of that period have been affiliated and associated with the Democratic Party. But presidents in the past have really made an effort to not get involved. I mean, they might comment on unions but really somewhat of a distance. Primarily because there is an understanding in the American system that government has somewhat of, not completely unfortunately, but somewhat of an arms length relationship to business and the economy. And the idea was even if I support the labor unions, they need to work this out with management. They go on strike and there's a negotiation and they work it out. Now, certainly the Obama administration completely disrupted that in a horrifying manner. One of the worst things any president has ever done was what happened with the auto industry in, I think it was 2010 when the Obama administration came in and kind of enforced as part of a bailout enforced settlements that restructured general mortars and I think Chrysler as well. And basically screwed the barn holders and involved government intervention in ways that are new and very bad for the long-term prospects for America. But what President Biden did yesterday is really unprecedented. It's a president who's never done this. President Biden yesterday actually went to the picket line where the UAW is picketing the auto companies and actually participated on the picket line. Now, this is disgusting and un-American and another step in the direction of the presidents have been making for a hundred years of greater and greater involvement of the government in our economy and in the very nature of employment and the government already does a lot, but this is symbolically, it's not, there's nothing really happened, but it's symbolic. Here's the president of the United States taking sides, actually physically taking sides in a case where I think the auto unions for the most part are wrong because of, this is an inflection point and auto in the industry it's, and they're gonna put US auto companies really put them in place of real issues and problems and challenges given where the auto industry is heading. Anyway, he was on the picket line yesterday. Now, we all know why he did it. He's trying to show up support for his campaign for president. He's trying to get the unions to support him. The unions are not happy with him particularly because of all the support for electric cars, which they know is gonna hurt them. The fact that the Inflation Reduction Act which supports batteries and electric cars and all of that didn't include requirements that all these plants have labor union unions. So, we know that he has to show up support from the union. We know he's in trouble with the polls. We know that he is very unpopular as a president and in the latest poll, depending on which one you believe, he's either losing to Trump by eight points or in a dead heat with Trump. But in any case, you know, he's not doing well. So he goes and he, I think compromises his position as president of the United States by taking a position and going and standing on a picket line, disgraceful. Disgraceful, disgraceful, disgraceful. And a sad point in where we are as a country and where the presidency today is. All right, talk about sad points. Yesterday, we finally got what we've been anticipated. I've talked about this in the past. This has been anticipated for months now. But the FTC and together with, I think, 17 states, FTC is the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, is responsible in the United States. It's the alphabet agency responsible for, quote, competition for antitrust enforcement in the United States. The FTC, together with the attorney generals, are 17 states. Sood yesterday in federal court accusing Amazon of monopoly power, which has allowed it to leverage what they're calling a 50% tax on sellers, but basically squeeze them and create monopoly profits for Amazon itself. I mean, as I told you, Lena Kahn, who was appointed ahead of the FTC, has been eyeing Amazon since she got the job. She wrote an undergraduate paper going after Amazon's monopolistic position and she became famous in 2017 with a Yale Law Journal note that titled Amazon's Antitrust Paradox and which detailed her view of how the prevailing approach to antitrust enforcement was failing to account for the vast scale and network effects presented in digital markets and presented by Amazon. The lawsuit is defining a new category of retailer calling an online superstore claiming that the superstore status that Amazon has shields it from all competition, that it doesn't really compete with other online or offline retailers. It's a monopoly. It dominates this. The company argues that Amazon argues that it only represents 4% of all US retail sales, but the government is gonna argue that they capture 40% of all Americans online spending and that online doesn't really compete with offline. Who knows what they can argue? They allege that Amazon has monopolized the market of selling services to online merchants. So if you're a merchant and you wanna get online, it's easy for you to become a seller for Amazon for the Amazon marketplace. You know, what do you call it? Other firms have tried to do this. What was it called? Anyway, other firms have tried to do this. Amazon has captured this. It's monopolized that, whatever the hell that means. Monopolize the market for selling services to online merchants. The government has said that the network effect between Amazon's online superstore and marketplace services allows it to further entrench its dominance. And that more sellers, the more sellers the company signs up, the more targeted and relevant data it can serve them. In other words, it provides them with valuable information. And therefore, the more committed the merchants are to using them because the service they provide them is better. The problem the FTC is saying is that here, this is what Lena Kahn told CNBC quote, given just the economy scale and network externalities, you need to have a critical mass of either shoppers or sellers in order to really benefit from the acceleration and momentum that digital markets can provide. And what Amazon's tactics have been about is once it itself achieved that scale, it's being focused on tactics that deprive rivals of the ability to gain that similar critical mass of customers. In other words, Amazon is so good at capturing customers and achieving scale and building warehouses and doing the logistics and allowing other people to sell their stuff on the Amazon platform that by being successful, they have deprived other companies from doing the same thing because Amazon's too successful for others to compete with it. I mean, this is such a, well, I mean, this is anti-trust law. So you can distort it and stretch it in any way you want since it's a completely non-objective law. I mean, Iron Man called anti-trust laws, the worst laws we have in a sense of objectivity, the foundation of the entire mixed economy. She thought they should be the first laws that were eliminated if we ever moved towards a laissez-faire. She viewed these as particularly evil and this is a great example. Here is a company we all benefit enormously from. Imagine COVID lockdowns without Amazon. This is a company that has made our lives better. It's made the lives of people who sell through Amazon online significantly better and the government wants to shut it down. The government wants to break it up. And they make up just excuses, ridiculous, absurd excuses. Again, Amazon retail sales on Amazon constitute 4% of all retail sales in America. Lena Karnosa said the idea of a superstore has actually been well-established in the big immortal world. We've had a whole set of anti-trust cases that have succeeded when defining a market as the superstore market. Well, the fact that they've succeeded in the past, it just means that they will, unbelievable, be wrong in the past. We've got two major anti-trust lawsuits going on right now. One is this lawsuit again. Amazon, the other is the lawsuit that Justice Department, not the FTC, has filed against Google. Both of these lawsuits are gonna be monumental in terms of the impact they have on the industry, on tech, on online, everything. Search ads, purchases, and everything else. They are unfortunately bipartisan, supported by both Republican and Democratic administrations. And a significant increase in the power of government over business and over our lives. Of course, John says eBay and Etsy are two companies that compete with Amazon. eBay was the leader in being a third party and kind of being a platform for other stores to sell stuff. Way before Amazon, they led. Amazon just outcompeted eBay. Etsy sells different kinds of products, but again, Amazon competes with them directly. But it's not like Amazon did anything bad on the contrary. It's real evil. And this is the problem with anti-trust. The real evil is that Amazon was really good and they forecaptured much market share. Last point I'll make. Notice that Amazon retail, that is sales on Amazon, does not make Amazon a lot of money. If Amazon was a monopoly, you would think that Amazon retail would be hugely profitable. But Amazon retail is not hugely profitable. Indeed, most years it loses money. Amazon makes money off of cloud services. Amazon makes money on other things, but on the retail it makes a little bit of money. But not anything like you'd expect from a monopoly. Monopolies make huge amounts of money. That's the claim, right? So the FTC is gonna have to become creative here to try to make the case that Amazon is a monopoly. And one of the ways that being creative is Superstore online, they're the only one. They have 100% of the market, which is of course nuts. All right, I'll be following this case. We'll be following this and we'll see how it goes. All right, finally, this is a story I guess that spilled over from yesterday. You know, a lot of people are framing this issue around water in terms of climate change, but it's not, all it is, climate does change. Climate change is all the time. And water is a resource that requires human ingenuity requires human ingenuity to capture and to make sure that it reaches the places where it needs to reach and is used in an effective and efficient way. Water is abundant if we use the right technologies, for example, desalination, but we're not. So we depend very much on rain and groundwater for almost all of our water. There are very few places in the world that use desalination. San Diego County in California and Israel are two places. There's talk about building more desalination plants around the world and they should. But in the meantime, you've got a limited resource and lots of demands for it. And the challenge is this. In the marketplace, resources are allocated based on price and they're allocated based on price so that those who value the resource higher are willing to pay a higher price and they get the resource first. And people who don't value the resource very high are not gonna purchase it at elevated prices and then they don't. So in a sense, the marketplace distributes a limited resource based on people's preferences and based on how much they're willing to actually pay for something. But here's the problem. The problem is that water sales, water distribution, water finding, water accumulation is not dealt with through a market process. The government basically runs and manipulates water every way. This is a famous movie, if you've ever seen the movie Chinatown, an excellent movie, I think it was Jack Nicholson, Chinatown, which dealt with water rates. And the government assigns who gets the water and how much they pay for it. So for example, in California, you get a situation where even though water is limited in California, you have crops that demand huge quantities of water like almonds, get preferential access to water at a relatively low price because they've got to deal with the government to get it. At the expense often of agriculture that doesn't eat a lot of water or that is more efficiently used water or to the expense of cities. So because the government has control over the water and how it's allocated and it provides favors to different groups, what you have is a constant war over water right now in the Southeast of the United States. There is a massive, it's not violent war yet, but it's gangs pushing and pulling and trying to manipulate the system. There's been drought conditions in the Southwest. The Colorado River is relatively low, even with all the rains that California got, maybe California's out of a drought, but the rest of Southwest is not. And there were real issues on who gets that water. Is it Las Vegas? Well, not really Las Vegas, but the people living there. Is it farmers? Is it water to go and I don't know, facilitate the fish swimming through the rivers? Where does the water go? Who gets it? Now again, a marketplace has an easy way to solve that. Price, whoever's willing to pay more. But price is not allowed to function. Now it turns out there is a big conflict around this in France of all places. France has seen some relatively low rainfall years and they've also seen a relative depletion of groundwater. France has vast agriculture. Agriculture that's not very efficient. Much of what is grown in France, I think 60% of all agricultural products is feed for cattle and for other animals, right, for production of meat. By the way, this feed could be grown in lots of other places around the world at much lower cost than it's grown in France. Places that have lots of water and then imported into France and sold if, but the French won't allow that because they farmers who got a business or the farmer's lobby, they won't not allow it. You could, if you drop tariff to zero on food stuff, you'd suddenly discover that Africa is pretty good at growing a lot of this stuff and shipping it to France but they won't allow that. So you got the French farmers, you've got different groups of farmers, you've got corporate farmers, you've got small farmers, you've got farmers who do grow corn and wheat and stuff like that and you've got farmers who go organic vegetables and you've got cities and towns and villages and there's a limited supply of water and there's massive fights over this water and in France, this has turned ugly, this has turned into violent confrontations. In March, there was this big confrontation where 47 police and 200 demonstrators got wounded so it's become violent. What's happening is that certain groups of farmers sucking water out of the groundwater reserves, putting it into these overground reserves and then feeding it to their farms when it doesn't rain as much, right? Other farmers are not having access to it and yet the groundwater is being depleted and cities are worried that this is gonna deplete the groundwater so they can't get water. Anyway, there's no way to resolve disputes like this other than the price mechanism. Now imagine if farmers who used a lot of water had to pay for it, a full market price or many of them would go out of business but this is good, maybe it's not efficient for friends to do as much agriculture as it does. Maybe it should export its agriculture to places like Africa or who knows where. Let the market decide. But once you take a resource like water and you don't allow the market to work on it, conflict will arise, the conflicts will only get worse if there's a shortage. When there's plenty, it's easy but when there's a shortage, it becomes hard and you get massive economic distortions, you get political pull, you get people deprived of a resource because they have no political pull, a complete and utter disaster. There's a long story in the, in Foreign Policy Magazine about France's water war has no end in sight and there is no end because there's no way to resolve this other than politics and politics is force, politics is pressure groups, politics is I'm gonna take from someone, give to others where the solution to these things are the price mechanism and that of course, and that's true in the Southwest, that's true in California, certainly true in France but that's the one thing nobody is willing to consider. I'd finally, just to give you another update on Armenia, about 45,000 people have so far evacuated this mountainous area in Azerbaijan that was, that Armenians lived in. They have left their homes and moved into Armenia proper. Many of them are claiming that Azerbaijanis are committing ethnic cleansing, that they're using violence against them to force them out of their home. Others are saying they're just leaving because they're afraid of that, that it hasn't actually happened. Hard to tell what's actually happening on the ground but this is, we're really seeing as I mentioned the other day the real ugliness of tribalism. The real ugliness of tribalism is people that have to evacuate their home only because they belong to the wrong tribe. Ideally Azerbaijan, Albania and Georgia would all be one country. Anyway, that's just me. All right, let's go to your questions. We're about halfway to the goal guys. So consider supporting the Iran Book Show and what we try to do here by stickers, questions. We've got 78 people watching so it doesn't take a lot of stickers to get us to our goal so you can just support the thing or ask a question. I do have a hard stop at two so we can't have too many questions. So if you can ask a question, $20 would be good. Otherwise you can do a sticker for any amount. Rimo says, how did the high yield bond change the US economy in 1980s? God, that is a big, it's $50 but it is a big, a long answer it would require but let me just say that it allowed many businesses who couldn't get normal loans and who couldn't sell equity, couldn't sell stock to raise capital. So it was a new form of raising capital by selling what are called high yield bonds that resulted in raising really billions of dollars which at the time was a lot of money. And for example, if you look at the cellular phone market or if you look at the fiber optics cables that were laid down in the ground which ultimately resulted the fiber optics which ultimately led to the internet and led to ability to communicate across the country at amazing speeds but the internet is a big beneficiary of this. All the fiber optics cables that were laid in the ground in the 1980s and that's when it started and all the cellular networks that were built and that's the first cellular, it was Macaulay cellular those were started to build in the 1980s. All those companies, the entire telecommunication, modern telecommunication industry was financed with high yield bonds and it's questionable how they would have been financed if not for the high yield bonds, right? Now in addition, high yield bonds were used in leveraged buyouts and hostile takeovers. Now again, leveraged buyouts and hostile takeovers were way in which, so on the one hand they were used to create new businesses, new business models, new industries. On the other hand they were used in order to restructure existing businesses. So large amounts of debt were issued in order to takeover companies, break them up, put their assets to more productive use. The US economy's productivity increased dramatically during this period. Its use of resources improved dramatically and so high yield bonds were used during the 1980s to restructure American businesses and to provide capital to this new telecommunication industry that was just getting started and Mike Milka deserves all the credit for that because he's the guy who really thought it up, came up with the idea of how to use them in this way and implemented the idea through Drexel Burnham which was then forced into bankruptcy by US government that wanted to destroy the Drexel and Mike Milken and was helped in that by other Wall Street firms. All right, let's see, Jason. A front loaded annual fees and mutual funds beneficial or just extra math and footnotes. Why aren't such fees included in the main figure showing the yield? After all, if the real yield is significant, fees are irrelevant. Why aren't such fees included in the main figure? Like the whole way in which mutual funds are managed and mutual funds are compensated for, managers of mutual funds are compensated for, the whole way in which they get funding through fees, all of that is dictated by regulations. All of that is outside of the, the fee amount is the mutual fund determined, but how those fees are done, how they calculate, all of that is pure regulation. You know, one of the big differences used to be in the old days between mutual funds and hedge funds did very similar, often did similar things. Two differences, one is mutual funds were heavily, heavily regulated and hedge funds were not. Well, today hedge funds are regulated as well. Hedge funds could short, mutual funds historically could not short stocks, but you know, all fees should be included in the yield. That is, you should know in a sense what the returns are net of all fees, net of all expenses. Whether those fees are trivial or not, you need to be able to make, you need to be able to evaluate funds based on their net return to investors and not based on return before fees. It's not easy to take out the fees and to know the exact impact those fees have. As a hedge fund, we only report, formally returns net of fees. All our historical data is net of fees, net of all expenses. So they should be, exactly why they're not. Again, it's all dictated by regulations. It's all a function of some bureaucrat deciding how this should be done. Alex, can you recommend a historical book on the foundation of the United States? By the way, I've really enjoyed the shows you did on TV shows and movies. Would be great if you can make one for books as well. I'm not an expert on books. I consider myself more of an expert on TV shows and movies. It's one of the reasons I haven't done one on books. A historical book on the foundation of the United States. I'm not the guy to ask. The best person to ask is somebody like Brad Thompson. Bradley Thompson at Clemson, who is an expert on the history of the United States. I don't have off the cuff a one book. So let me look that up and I'll try to get back to you. So I'm going to copy paste this question into my to-do list so that I can get back to you with a book recommendation. Maybe I can even ask Brad what he would recommend one book on the founding of America. I mean, I've read a lot of books on the founding. I don't have that kind of memory that holds what they are. The chances Trump wins re-election is exactly zero. We'll either get another four years of sleepy Joe or Vivek Bust through the primaries. Yeah, I think the chances of Vivek Bust through the primaries is zero. I think Trump has a chance of beating Biden. The US economy might be in a recession next year. Who knows? I think there's a good chance Trump gets re-elected. I would not put it anywhere near zero. Be careful. John says, just some value for value. Thank you, John. Michael says, what are your thoughts on A.I. sex robots could really help the suicide epidemic? I'm all for A.I., you know, a suicide, you know, a suicide. Sex robots, you know, as long as you don't confuse them with a real person, as long as you don't replace real life with fantasy, then go for it. You know, have sex with a robot. I mean, it's not, you know, it's more like masturbation than having actual sex, right? I'm starting out a shrug, having already read Anthem and the Found Head looking forward to it. Thanks for the show. Sivanus just did $100 and get us over the goal. Thank you, Sivanus. Really appreciate it. And I'm amazed and thrilled, really, really, really thrilled that you're going to be reading out a shrug. Let me know what you think. Let me know. Yeah. Thank you for all the support. Really, really appreciate it. And I know you're going to love Atlas Shrugged. I mean, if you love the Fountain Head and Anthem, you're going to really enjoy Atlas. Frank, who is Tom Rand who didn't debate Epstein? I don't know. I have no idea. Sorry, Frank. I just don't know. Jin just said Elon Musk says regulation is by far the biggest block to getting stuff done, paraphrasing. And that construction has been particularly outlawed in North America and Europe. Yeah, I mean, he's absolutely right. He's not making a particular original point. He's right. Of course, he wants regulation on AI. So it's kind of sad to see Elon see it and not see it at the same time and not be willing to be principled around it. All right, tonight is the second Republican debate. So I think I'll be watching. And we'll talk about it for sure tomorrow morning. So I'm hoping that Nikki Haley has a breakthrough evening. I think she did very well in the first debate. I think there's a chance that she does well here and that she becomes the real alternative to Trump. In spite of that, I think Trump has. And unless Trump goes to jail, Trump basically has a lock in the Republican nomination at this point. Even if he goes to jail, he'll probably be nominated. All right, I will see you guys all tomorrow, again, at 1 PM. And I'm torturing myself for you guys. This is completely a sacrifice, Remo. I am sacrificing my sanity for you. No, I'm kidding. I'm watching the debate so I can do the show. If I wasn't doing a show, I wouldn't watch the debates. I mean, they're not particularly interesting and they're not particularly important. But it's like I'm saving you the trouble for watching them. It's part of my job. I view it as part of the job. Not a sacrifice, an investment, part of my job to watch the debate and report on them to you, report my impression of them. All right, everybody, I will see you all tomorrow. Look forward to it and have a great rest of your Wednesday. Bye, everybody.