 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Brookshow on this Wednesday. It's already the middle of December. Can you believe that it's already the middle of December? God, time is just going to be Christmas. Isn't that like next week or something? And new year and then 2023 is right in front of us. Anyway, I hope everybody's having a fantastic week. Leonardo's here from Brazil. That's cool. Thanks for joining us, Leonardo. Yeah, we should get an upgrade from Brazil. What's going on is Lula going to be sworn in on January 1st. The riots and demonstrations are going to continue. There's a lot of riots and demonstrations of Brazil from the Bolsonaro crowd claiming that the election was stolen. So there's a lot of upheaval in Brazil right now. Also a lot of upheaval in Peru. We talked about that. We've talked about that already. All right, so today we're going to run through a number of news stories. I couldn't really list them all because there's so much space that you can put into the title. So I didn't list them all, but loving these times are Malta. Sean is in Malta. God, we have listeners in Malta. How cool is that? All right, let's see. All right, and then of course, so let's start with the good news, Argentina won yesterday. It was a great game. Argentina played really well. Messi was in tough form. When Messi is in tough form, he's kind of unstoppable. Thank you, Daniel, for reminding me of Messi's performance yesterday, definitely worth commenting. It's fantastic to see great athletes performing at peak performance, peak level. And Messi during this tournament generally has done phenomenally well, and he did phenomenally yesterday. Oh, we've got Erhard in Thailand. Oh, I love Thailand. I need to visit Thailand. Erhard, can you arrange for me to give a talk in Thailand? We should be able to arrange for me to do a talk in Bangkok. That would be fun. And then Hamad from the United Arab Emirates is also joining us. So this is great. One of the advantages, I guess, of doing a show in the morning is you get, I think, a more of an international audience. All right, Erhard said yes. He'll do it. I'm looking forward to it. I love, I visited Thailand twice and really, really enjoyed both times. All right, so where are we? Yes, so Messi was phenomenal. Jatina goes to the finals. I hope they win. I hope Messi gets his, I like, virtue-rewarded. And he's been the greatest soccer player in the world for over a decade now. It would be great if he was, he also was a world champion. So that would be fantastic for Jatina to win. Now that Brazil, unfortunately, Brazil is out. So I was rooting for Brazil. Today we've got Morocco versus France. Let's hope, I mean, this game is full of quote symbolism because it is the colonizer versus the colonized. So it's going to be filled with politically correct sub-themes. But overall, let's hope the colonizer wins. I hope France wins. It will be, I mean, France, Jatina finals in the World Cup will be a terrific finals. You'll have two of the best players in the world playing against each other. What's his name? The French Dimbabes? Something like that is just phenomenal. He's young. You know, he's probably not anywhere near the level of Messi. Certainly not the level of Messi when he was at the peak. But he is the up-and-coming superstar on the global scene in Bapé. And to see them both playing and hopefully Argentina wins in, like, I don't know, that's a three to two. That would be a great score to end this World Cup on, a World Cup that I thought has been particularly entertaining with a lot of goals, a lot of upsets, no kind of obvious winners particularly once we got out of the first stage. All right, let's see. We're going to start with, you know, I mentioned this yesterday. I thought I'd mention it today in terms of news. Fusion, yesterday, was announced that they launched Livermore Lab with funding from the Department of Energy, has produced the first ever net gain from Fusion, from a Fusion reaction. I don't ask me what that means exactly. I mean, I know that they used super powerful lasers to elicit some kind of change in hydrogen, I think. But in the past, they produced Fusion. But the energy to produce it exceeded the energy that was produced from it. And in the past, when they've reported that that wasn't a case, they were cheating with the numbers. This time, it's clearly a real net gain. But the problem, of course, is we're probably 20 years, at least away from taking that maybe scientific achievement and turning it into a technological achievement. That is turning it into an engineering achievement, turning it into something usable. Right now, those kind of lasers, you can't shrink them. You can't produce enough of them. You can't bombard enough in order to produce enough electricity to do anything. So you would really have to shrink the whole process, get even better lasers, more powerful lasers, be able to scale this God with decades away. And what I read yesterday, maybe not 50 years, but it's probably two to three decades away from Fusion being realistic. Also a story I talked about yesterday, but I thought I'd repeat here, because I know the audience is the same, is the census has just formed a sudden investigation into vaccines and into vaccine production and into vaccine approvals and into the side effects of vaccines and into the heart inflammation that vaccines cause in some young people. And all of this, a popular gimmick to get the anti-vax and to get the anti-vax vaccine, COVID vaccine, people behind him, it's a disgusting effort. It is unjust. It is a repudiation of the massive achievements and the benefits we got from actual Moderna and Pfizer's vaccine production and distribution. It is a play. It is a play to the base. There is no way you're going to get the truth out of a politicized. The government shouldn't be involved. The truth will come out in the medical journals. The truth will come out from doctors. The truth will come out from researchers. The truth is already out. There is no truth that we don't know of today. There's a lot of made up stuff that doctors who have resentment against the system for a variety of different reasons keep distributing. It is misinformation. It is fake news. The stuff that they are discussing and elaborating on and for a politician to play that in order to win the political base is a disgusting form of populism. It takes DeSantis another one down, in my opinion. This is the same guy who, of course, abandoned cruise ships from requiring vaccines in order to enter them. That is violating their property rights by requiring them to take people in are vaccinated, which is, again, I was willing to forgive DeSantis a lot because he was an alternative to Trump. At some point, Trump becomes a non-entity. And he's quickly becoming that. The recent poll showed DeSantis 23 points ahead of Trump among Republicans. Now DeSantis comes under scrutiny. And so far, thumbs down on DeSantis. And the fact is that he is working himself into a position where he won't be electable. That is, he's working himself into a position. He's working himself into a position where he is going to win the base. To a large extent, that base is crazy anyway. That base is a base that was excited about Trump. That base was a base that was, to a significant number of them, were excited about all kinds of conspiracy theories, QAnon, and all kinds of other stuff. He's going to win the base. He might win the nomination. And then not be able to capture the independence and not be able to capture so-called moderate Republicans because he's taking out a position on the wacky right. Very disappointed in DeSantis. Very disappointed in those who support this kind of nonsense vis-a-vis the vaccines. I've looked at all the numbers. I've looked at all the hysteria. I keep saying, OK, maybe I'm wrong. And I keep looking again at the numbers and at the research papers, the research papers that actually pass scrutiny. And there's just very little question that the benefits of the vaccine far, far, far, far, far, far exceeds, yes, some risk to young people. And from the beginning, I said young people shouldn't get vaccinated. But far exceed, I mean, the risk to young people of getting COVID and getting heart inflammation, far exceeds the risk to young people of getting a vaccine and getting heart inflammation. The whole way this is presented in the people who are presenting it, that is, the scientists that are on that side, the anti-COVID vaccine side, is just ridiculous. This is another one of those examples of a crazy conspiracy theory. It's a global conspiracy theory because countries all over the world are using mRNA vaccines. And as I told you, I think last time, China has seven different companies trying to create their own. Young people at age of 18 to 30, a far more risk of getting heart inflammation when they get COVID than getting heart inflammation because of the vaccine. And it's much worse for them if they get COVID. So it's not even close. It not even close. Yeah, there are side effects. Nobody's saying there are side effects on the vaccines. I suffered side effects. Well, I suffered side effects from getting the vaccine. And there's no question that you get mitochondria from the vaccines, but it is a minor side effect. Again, mitochondria, the inflammation of the heart is much worse under COVID. The data here is pretty clear. And yeah, young people and children should have never been vaccines. I never thought were particularly good for young people. But you don't need a government investigation, a government partisan investigation with a clear partisan mission to appease a political base in order to discover that what you need as scientists to keep doing the research and to keep figuring out what worked and what didn't. All right, let's see. Biden signed the Marriage Equality Act yesterday that, yeah, some mitochondria, so myocardotias. Thank you, Ian. Yes, I get these words wrong. Oh, yes, the good news yesterday. Shit, I forgot about this. Whoops, I shouldn't have said the S word. But anyway, I forgot about this. Ian, thank you for reminding me. Yesterday, Moderna announced that together with MOOC, another one of those evil big pharma companies that are just trying to screw you. I mean, it's amazing to me now that the left and the right have merged in the hatred of big pharma. It's amazing. Anyway, yesterday, Moderna and MOOC announced that in trials of using a MOOC anti-drug compound, an immunotherapy that is a therapy that encourages your own immune system to fight the cancer. Together with mRNA technology of Moderna, they have managed to reduce the recurrence of melanoma of skin cancer, deadly melanoma, skin cancer in patients by 44%, which is massive, which is massive. It's relatively an easy treatment. It's not chemotherapy. It's not poison. It's getting your own body to fight the cancer itself. This is a massive step forward. Moderna and Pfizer are also going into trials on a number of other applications of mRNA vaccine technology for cancer treatment, for other types of cancers. It is amazing what is going to be achieved by this stuff. And this is a technology that Republicans now are demonizing. And that Republicans and Democrats are demonizing the companies that are responsible of this technology. This is a technology that might be a massive breakthrough, might see a massive breakthrough in cancer by using mRNA technology to stimulate our own body to fight the cancer that we have. Glenn, thank you for the $50. Really appreciate that. Triple C, thank you for the $40. Thanks, guys. You brought us not quite to half, but almost a half of where we need to be. All right, let's see. So yes, that announcement yesterday about Moderna's mRNA vaccine was a brilliant dose of good news, very, very welcome news. And again, I think it's just, to me, this vilification of Moderna and Pfizer and Big Tech more broadly, and this idea that they are repressing all this data about, I mean, data that is available, by the way, openly at publicly accessible data that is available all over the world in country after country after country that use these vaccines. You'd think, you know, scientists in Israel, given that everybody in Israel got the Pfizer vaccine and all that data is available, that somebody would have discovered the horrific consequences, the deadly side effects of the vaccines. And yet I don't know any country that is withdrawing the vaccines, you know, withdrawing them completely. Some of them were paused in, like, Denmark and another place who paused for a little while and then returned to them. There is no data to show that, sure, there's risk in anything, but that the risk is excessive or that the risk does not justify the benefits. Again, the benefits primarily accrue to the people who are primarily sensitive to COVID and that's always been old people. And this obsession about young people throughout a political elite, but throughout, everywhere really, is bizarre and I think a consequence of egalitarianism. We talked a lot about this. You know, you can't treat old people differently than young people. You should and you can. Yeah, I've listened to Pete McClough. I've listened to the, I've talked about Robert Malone who feels slighted because he never got the credit. He, quote, supposedly deserved for the mRNA technology because politically they kicked him out at UC San Diego. I've researched all these guys and they all have some pet peeve and they're all in that gaining hugely from disseminating false information about the vaccines and some of them are literally making up numbers and scaring people and they're doing a massive disservice. Obviously we have free speech, you can't disqualify them but no, people like McClough should not be listening to. They're not credible scientists when it comes to COVID and haven't been from the beginning, haven't been from the beginning and if you wanna list scientists, I can list hundreds of them that disagree with those and far more eminent, far more prestigious, far more credentialed. So, you know, but these people are literally, I mean, you can go and you can find the people debunking them, people on Twitter, not the authorities, not the CDC, debunking them and the debunking is embarrassing because these people are using statistical methodologies, they're using made up numbers, they're literally making stuff up in order to confuse you and in order to benefit themselves but it doesn't take a lot of really trying to dig in to this data and trying to dig into this to show that these people are not credible and if you look at the history, particularly of Malone and you look at his frustration for years and years and years, he finally found a way to get to the limelight after being frustrated because he believes, I mean, he was so, he feels he was so mistreated that he ultimately even left the whole field of mRNA and did something completely different in medicine, I think he became a doctor after being a scientist because he was so frustrated and finally he gets, this is his retribution, this is his way of getting the limelight that he believes he deserved all along. These people are so not objective, so not objective. Now granted, the government screwed this up from the beginning so I understand people's frustration and understand their anger and I unbelievably angry at the government and at what they did and at lockdowns and the fact that we didn't resist the lockdowns or the fact that the American people didn't resist the lockdowns. I resisted as much as I could and mandates, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, any kind of mandates, which I think are wrong in a lack of testing tracing and isolating the lack of doing the actual work that you need to do in order to reduce the pandemic. I mean, yes, what the government did was super frustrating but to jump from that to attacking the actual science, that's just ridiculous. All right, where are we? Marriage Equality. So Biden signed the Marriage Equality Act, 12 Republicans voted for the Marriage Equality Act. So it was good for them. Many of the Republicans or some of the Republicans who signed it were Republicans that are not running for reelection, I guess, but it's pretty bleak that the Republican party, again, marginalizing itself and putting itself in a position not to win elections is behind the curve here, historically, with regard to history. The fact is that American people overwhelmingly support gay marriage and it's the right position to have. The American people support overwhelming and a lot of bad things, but in this case, they're right about it. But one of the truly despicable things that were put into this bill, I mean, it's good that it were put into it, but it's despicable that it needed to be put into it because of fear that the Supreme Court might overturn this is the protection for interracial marriages. That is, there are people out there who fear and maybe legitimately and this is because of a line by Thomas in Hobbes that maybe the Supreme Court would rule constitutional states saying that interracial marriage is illegal. And I can't imagine a state doing that, but who knows. So now it's federal law that interracial marriage is legal. And can you imagine that you need that in legislation? In federal legislation? It's just, I mean, it's a consequence of Jim Crow, but it is stunning that we believe that that kind of racism still exists in this country where in some countries we think that in some states we think that they might pass anti-mixed marriages. Mind-boggling, mind-boggling. Anyway, I'm glad to see this bill pass. I'm glad to have seen 12 Republicans vote for it. I wish 50 Republicans had voted for it. I'm glad Biden signed it, I'm glad. I mean, I don't think the Supreme Court would rule it unconstitutional. I think that basically solidifies and finalizes the idea that gay marriages are done deal. And the only way to, you know, the Supreme Court would invalidate it is by claiming it's an issue for federalism. It's an issue for state government, but I don't think they will. I don't think there's any chance they will. They seem to revert to whatever Congress wants and rarely do they overturn an actual bill that Congress passed. All right, let's see. Quickly in the Ukraine war, Russia has for weeks now been pounding the infrastructure of the Ukrainian state, shutting down, you know, bombing electricity plants and shutting down energy and making it possible to get natural gas to people, to warm their homes, to get electricity to light. They've recently gone after Odessa in the South and knocked out the electricity. Last night, there was a massive drone attack from the Russians using Iranian, isn't that bizarre, but Iranian just shows how desperate the Russians are. Iranian drones to knock out electricity in Kiev and to attack certain, I mean, it basically is showing the futility of Russia's attempts on the battlefield, the fact that they are losing ground on the battlefield, that they have made no progress and they have lost a huge amount in the battlefield and it is a sign that they are losing on their funds and what they're trying to do is demoralize the Ukrainian people. Of course, in war, that is a legitimate tactic. When you are on the right side, when you are on the evil side, when you initiate the war, no tactic is a legitimate tactic. This is an illegitimate war by Russia against the Ukrainian people, as I've said from the beginning, but the tactic is interesting. Ukraine is insisting that they are going to make progress during the winter, that they expect to capture more of their land during the winter, that they are not slowing down, they counter-offensive, we will see what happens. I think they will probably be attacking the South, they will be attacking the Southern District, they've achieved their goals with Gershan, but now there are other parts of the South of Ukraine that the Russians hold that they would like. I think the progress in the East is going to be tougher. The East is very close to Russia, it has the best supply lines, the Russians are well entrenched over there, but Luan's province, the Ukrainians could make progress over there as well. We'll see warfare in winter in that part of the world, very, very, very difficult, a real challenge. All right, okay, two last stories. Quickly, that one we did, we did that one. Well, no, let's skip that one. Okay, two stories. One is everybody in the financial markets is sitting today and chewing the fingernails and insulating great suspense. We are waiting, everybody is waiting for the Fed to decide our fate, isn't it great when our fate is decided by central planners who sit down for two days and yap, yap, yap, and look at economic analysis and do some graphs, economic analysis that is not very good because they never predicted the state that we are in today. Why would it predict the state we'll be in in the future? And then voting to decide what interest it should be, the most important price in the entire economy. The expectation is that the federal rates interest rates by a half a percent, so it will get a close to a four and a half percent as the lending rate between banks, also the rate at which the Federal Reserve pays banks to keep reserves at the Fed. So the Fed is paying banks to keep reserves there not to lend them out. This is part of their effort to slow down the economy and thus slow down inflation. And I believe that there will succeed in slowing down the economy, they already probably have, and I believe that we will enter as a consequence of all this recession early next year or sometime next year. When will they stop raising? Hard to tell, probably raise a little bit more early next year depending on the recession hits exactly, but I wouldn't be surprised if they raise in the first quarter another twice. I wouldn't be surprised if we get to a five percent and that's what the market I think is expecting that by first quarter in the first quarter next year we will be five percent Fed funds rate. And then after that we'll see it depends on inflation, it depends on the recession, depends how deep the recession is, it depends on political pressure. The Fed is very susceptible to political pressure. And so we'll see what happens, but I just find it every time the Fed meets I find the absurdity of everybody holding their breath to see what the central plan is gonna tell us. What's the five, not the five year plan, but the one month plan, the two month plan by the central plan are going to be, when clearly they get it wrong all the time, they don't predict the future all the time, why do we trust anything that they do? And I think the better people in the marketplace don't, but it's an important variable that we need in order to calculate the value of our investments and to predict the course of the economy going forward. Instead of letting that interstate float, instead of letting that interstate be determined by the marketplace, we give it to the hands of 12 bureaucrats, 12 guided by the largest pool of PhDs in economics in the world. The Federal Reserve is the largest employer of PhDs in economics I think in the world, certainly in the United States. All right, let's see, that is the Fed. Final story, Avatar the sequel has opened, I think is just opening this week. It's 13 years since the first Avatar. I think when I saw Avatar, I did see Avatar. I was convinced to go see it like in IMAX because of the special effects and how beautiful it was and everything. Yeah, it was pretty impressive visually. But philosophically, one of most evil movies ever made, anti-man, anti-civilization, anti-human, anti-reason, anti-all our values, anti-corporation, anti-business, anti-capitalism, but much more importantly, anti-human, anti-man, anti-reason. So by every level, Avatar the first one was truly I think one of the most evil movies ever. I think the sequel is gonna be just as bad and the sequel is a beginning of a series. So unfortunately, we're going to have to suffer through a number of avatars. I will not go and see Avatar the sequel. I suffered once, will not suffer again. I do not hate James Cameron. Indeed, some of my favorite movies from the 80s were James Cameron movies. I think some of his movies are truly amazing movies. From the first Terminator to the Abyss, to the second Terminator to Aliens, the second Alien movie. I think those four movies are some of the best movies made in the 1980s. I think he was brilliant in those movies. They're very philosophical, they're very pro-reason, they're very benevolent. You know, what do you call it? The ending of The One Under Water, which I just mentioned, but now I slip my mind, is problematic, but almost every one of those movies, I mean, even True Lies is a fun movie, so I'm not, but once you start with Titanic and Avatar, two of the worst movies ever made, at least philosophically, ideologically. Yes, thank you, The Abyss. The ending of The Abyss is stupid, but other than the ending of The Abyss, The Abyss is a brilliant, brilliant movie, and the theme is epistemological, as is, I think, ultimately, the theme of Aliens is kind of the role of reason, and the importance of reason, the importance of being rational. So both movies are brilliant. So if you haven't watched The Abyss, and you haven't watched, and somebody should pay me to do a review of The Abyss and Aliens because I think my review would be interesting. I don't think, I think the philosophy in both those movies is brilliant. He's bad politically, he's anti-corporation even back then, but philosophically, epistemologically, he truly was brilliant in the 80s, and then he became a complete cynic, his Marxism came to dominate, that's in Titanic, and then his, ultimately, he became a hater of mankind, which you see in Avatar, but yes. I think I have a unique perspective on The Abyss and on Aliens that most people don't see, and even Terminator, I think, are excellent movies. I mean, I think the theme of Terminator 2 is the power of free will. So, and that is much more important philosophically than capitalism versus socialism, that issue. So I'm willing to tolerate bad politics if you, in art, if the fundamental theme of the art is pro-free will, and I think it certainly is in the second number, I mean, in a number place, that's another one somebody could have me review, that would be a lot of fun. All right, so that's the news for today, December 14th. Let's jump into some of our super chat questions. We're $99 short, $99 short of our goal for today. Let's see, Kirill says, hi, Iran, have you seen that show, 1899, it was basically based on Plato's Cave, it was directly referenced in the show, it was pretty good, all things considered. No, I haven't, that's interesting. So 1899, all right, I will, I'm writing that down. I will try it out, thank you, Kirill. Let's see, oops, Jeffrey says, if you have the government's handling of COVID from very beginning, especially contrasted with countries that had better strategies would be more valuable, would be more valuable, more valuable than what? But yes, happy to do it. I think I've already done it, I don't think my conclusions from a year ago or a year and a half ago are different, but I will do a review of COVID policies, I'll try to pull out the best, and I'll also have, I'm also planning to have Amish on again to do something like this, to talk about this. So thank you, Jeffrey, I appreciate it. Let's see, Daniel, I took a Johnson and Johnson and was available to my demographic, then I Pfizer as a booster six month after, and then I Moderna a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, good for you, I mean, I don't know how old you are, so I don't know what your demographic is, but yeah, oh, Jeffrey says, more valuable than what DeSantis is doing. Yes, I think I would do a better job reviewing the status of COVID and how governments responded and why they responded, the way they responded, I think I would do a better job than DeSantis does any day, any day. Wow, Mike just put in $100 to get us to our target. Thank you, Mike, and he asked this question, how you on? Oh, you will get, I saw this on Twitter, did you tweet this? I saw it somewhere. How is fractional reserve banking possible on gold standard? Multiple claims the same gold, if that bank goes bankrupt, it seems that the multiple claims on the same gold will remain, who actually owns it? No, there are no multiple claims on the same gold, there's only fundamentally one claim on that gold once everything unwinds. So, but the problem is the unwinding, the unwinding is tricky. So here is my, you know, how fractional reserve banking works. And again, in a gold standard, fractional reserve banking wouldn't be like today, the fraction reserve would be much higher because the bank would face liability, whereas today because of deposit insurance, and because of the fractional reserve requirements that the federal, that the regulatory agencies determine because of, then banks have to basically lend out, you know, $9 and every $10 that is invested. So, and what you said, Mike, in Twitter is wrong. So $10 does not create $100 in the economy. It doesn't create, it doesn't allow the bank to create $100. What happens, the $10 create, what is it, $81, I think it's 80, it's nine to the power of, you know, some large number. So it's approaching 100, but it's never quite 100. So it's not to the power of, but it's the 100 is what the entire banking system creates over the $10 that you deposit. It's not the one bank creating $100 from your 10. What happens today is the reserve requirement is 10%. In a gold standard reserves fluctuated from some banks that had 100% reserve, so they had 100% reserved, and banks that went down to, let's say 40%, but there were no banks at 10%. 10% that is not something that's sustainable in a marketplace that's only sustainable because of deposit insurance and because of government guarantees, and because of laws that say that the reserve requirement is 10%, and therefore there's a competitive push pull to the bottom, less competitive if you have higher reserves. So you have to go to the regulatory established reserve, and there's no conception of risk because the FDIC eliminates the conception of risk. But here's how it works in a competitive market. I go to the bank, I deposit my equivalent of $10, or let's say $100, it's easier to do 100. $100 of gold into the vault. And I now have a piece of paper that gives me a claim against that 100, but that claim is contingent. It's why they give me interest on that money. And that claim is contingent. If you actually read your deposit contract, which you should, it says that there are circumstances in which the bank might delay giving you the money. The money's yours and it will give you the money, but it might not give it to you instantaneously, okay? So now let's say, so I do it, I get this contingent claim against my gold, which is in the form of a paper money. The bank that takes that, and it says, okay, we're gonna take half of that. And by the way, this has a tradition going back to the origins of modern banking, which are the goldsmiths of Europe in the 16th and 17th century. I will take half of that and I'm gonna lend it out. So I'm not gonna move the gold. The gold is still here, but basically I'm gonna issue some claims on that gold to somebody who has to pay it back, right? So it's a liability, you know. So that person owns the bank, so I'm gonna give them, let's say the $100 is equal to 100 ounces of gold. Again, just to simplify the numbers. I'm lending somebody 50 ounces of gold, the equivalent of 50 ounces of gold. The gold doesn't move, but now they owe me 50 ounces of gold. In the meantime, they take their money and they deposit that money, the money that I give them in their bank account. Now, another bank now has, instead of the 10, they now have five, and that five was deposited in an account, right? And they can then go out and lend, and they would lend two and a half. So you can see how the spirals, the 10 initial becomes a lot more as each bank is depositing, but it's still true that the bank owes me 10. And it's still true that this person who borrowed the money owes the bank five. So over time, what happens is the person returns the five to the bank, and the bank can return the 10 to me. And given that we're all doing this together, the bank has a certain amount of gold and a certain number of people taking money out regularly. And it can calculate that in 99.999% of the time, they will always have enough money to pay everybody who needs it on a given day, even though they are lending out some of their reserves. And it works. It worked in the Scottish Free Banking System in the mid-19th century. It worked in the Canadian banking system. And for the most part, it worked in the US banking system. The only time it didn't work in the US banking system is when people were afraid that the government was gonna steal their gold, or people were afraid the government was gonna do something crazy. The banking system always worked. It was politically interference it didn't. When the banks get in trouble, it's not when they get bankrupt. It's not going bankrupt. Going bankrupt is not a problem of, going bankrupt is a problem of giving out lots of loans and suddenly the people who pay me back the loans cannot pay me back the loans and the bank goes bust. But a bank, any business that goes bust can't pay for its liabilities, can't pay the people in a sense who lent it money. You need to think of every deposit you make at a bank is you lending the bank money. Because that's what it is. And it's very low risk because you have a particular type of contract that gives you huge priority over everybody else who lends the bank money. But it's still lending the bank money. Every deposit you make is lending the bank money. And when there's bankruptcy, when the bank goes bankrupt, you order the people that the bank owes money to buy the order of priority. Depositors always have the top priority. The bank will almost always be able to pay the depositors back. It's all the other creditors that will have problem paying back. The real problem in banks is what are called bank runs. It's a liquidity issue, not a default issue. And that is the case where I've lent the money out but for some reason, usually because of government intervention, almost always because of government intervention. The market is convinced that we're going to go bankrupt, that I can't pay my bills and that everybody tries to withdraw their money at the same time. The money's not there because it's being lent out. So what you do then is, what happens then is, is the banking system basically banks basically say, we're stopping redemptions. We're not going to give you your money for awhile. This is not healthy, but it's contractually legit. It's not fraud. We're not going to give you your money for awhile. We're going to work on getting back the money from our loans so that we can pay you back over time. But in the meantime, we're shutting down and we're not allowing you to withdraw money from our bank. And that's how it was handled in the 19th century and the 20th century and it worked fine. I mean, people lost money, sure. But the places where people lost a lot of money were occasions when governing to fear in the process. Again, the best two examples, they're probably more, but the best two examples that I know of, of banks, banking systems that had fractional reserve banking and worked with the Scottish free banking era in the mid 19th century and the Canadian system until they established a central bank, which is relatively late, I forget exact date, but much later than the Federal Reserve was established. So hopefully the answer is a question, Mike. You know, we could put up a spreadsheet and I can run through the numbers exactly if you prefer that, but there is no reason if you run a bank properly and if you write the right kind of contract with your depositors that you should not be able to return the claims. Now granted, if you run a super risky bank and you're giving out loans to crazy people and crazy loans, you all go bankrupt and people will lose their money, but that's the nature of business. This is why depositors and people who lend money to the bank need to monitor the bank's risk taking. And we don't do that because of deposit insurance. We all go into banks and give them the money and we don't think twice about what the bank is doing with that money because we've accepted deposit insurance, but in a real market economy, we'd have to consider the risk that the bank is taking before we gave it the deposit. All right, thanks, Mike. I mean, people like George Seljian and Larry White. George Seljian, I think, just retired, but he was at the Cato Institute and Larry White, I think, is still at George Mason University. Both economists, both written a lot about free banking, both written about fractional reserve banking. They, I think, are the best out there in explaining it. So look up Larry White, not the Larry White in New York, NYU, look for the Larry White at George Mason and George Seljian. Those two are the best people in the world at explaining fractional reserve banking and how it works and why it's not a problem. All right, quickly, my daughter is an au pair in Barcelona until January. Do you have any must-sees in Barcelona nearby? I mean, Barcelona is just a beautiful city to walk around in. I mean, you wanna go see the Gaudi stuff. I mean, I hate it, but it's worth seeing. You know, it's like Dr. Seuss comes to life in architecture. It's the opposite of what I like in architecture, but it's worth seeing to see the opposite. So I would definitely do the Gaudi. You know, I don't know. I just enjoyed in Barcelona walking around. The other thing that's spectacular in Barcelona is the food, the tapas restaurants all around the old city and in a little narrow alleyways. And of course, some of the best restaurants in the world now, two and three star Michelin restaurants, but some of the best in the world are in Barcelona. So Barcelona food is amazing. I would definitely go see the views, the number of hills and parks within Barcelona where you can go up and you can see the city, you can see the Mediterranean. It's a really beautiful city. So yeah, I enjoy it, you know, I have fun. Oh, I guess this is for her. So hopefully she'll enjoy it. Daniel says, do you think it's a joke when people claim the Federal Reserve is a private bank? No, I think people are serious. Again, conspiracy theories, they need to explain the world, to explain it in terms of government is not satisfying because we know that government is controlled by somebody. It can't really be that we elect officials that actually run the world. That would be too non-conspiratorial, too difficult to explain kind of the trends. So we know somebody runs the world. It's the same people who run the world as the people who run the Fed. It's rich, maybe sometimes Jews or rich businessman who run the world and appoint people to the Fed and the Fed is beholden to them. And you can see because the Fed is technically owned by the banks and the banks are run by Jews who are rich. It just goes on and on and on, spirals like that. So no, I think it's part of the whole conspiratorial attitude that people have and the resentment of big business, the hatred of the wealthy, the envy of the wealthy, it all goes together. The Fed is a government institution. It's too easy to prove that. All right, thank you all. We made our goal. We had a good number of people watching live, which is great. Thank you all. I'll be back tomorrow at the same time, no show tonight, morning and then tomorrow night. Thank you guys. Thanks everybody. Yeah, Lawrence White. Larry White is Lawrence White. Lawrence White from George Mason University. That's who I meant. And George Selgen, those are the two people that I would look up with the best economists, I think, out there regarding free banking and fractional reserve banking. All right, everybody, I will see you soon. Bye.