 So 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 Tuesday, March 19th. Hope everybody is having a fantastic week. And yeah, another episode of News Roundup. And the first news item is kind of now really news, not in the conventional sense, not news you'd read in newspaper, but news nonetheless. I've been hinting at this, and I think many of you have already guessed it and knew this was coming, and some of you might have already seen the announcement on Twitter. But Javier Millay is coming to the LineRand Center Latin America Conference in Buenos Aires, in what is it, two and a half weeks, two and a half weeks now. It does appear that at least the plan currently and plans change all the time. So just that is a reality, particularly with politicians, they could very well change their mind and not come, but he is coming. His speechwriter's coming as well. His speechwriter will be on a panel, I can't remember which one, but he will be on a panel, and Millay himself will be on stage. It appears with me doing a panel, or a Q&A with Maria Malti, who runs LineRand Latin America asking us questions. So exactly how that will work, because he claims he doesn't know English. So exactly how all that will work, we will see. But Millay is scheduled to be there. He is, office have confirmed. He has, he is fine with sharing the stage, if you will, with me and doing a joint event. We still have to work out the logistic sense of the language. And of course, things can always change. So that is at least where we are right now. I'm excited about it. And I hope I have some time to talk to him as well, not just on stage. And I'm excited to have his people there. And I'm also excited by the fact that because he's coming, I would expect that there will be a lot of people coming to the event that wouldn't have otherwise come. So people who attend the event that otherwise wouldn't attend. I don't think, I don't think it's gonna be livestream, but it'll definitely be recorded and hopefully we'll be able to put it up at some point on YouTube or whoever. So, exciting news. And yeah, I'm looking forward to it. And I'm looking forward to a successful and a successful event in Argentina. And yeah, we will see how it all plays out. How it all plays out. All right, and he is gonna, I don't know exactly what the theme yet. I know we're working on some questions that will be asked. And so I don't know exactly what we're gonna cover, but I'm sure we're gonna cover some things that we'll disagree on. It's my intent to cover some things we disagree on and the things we agree on. So anyway, it'll be a lot of fun. And I think this will be incredibly valuable and incredibly valuable. I think, in particular, it's spitting Ayn Rand's ideas in Latin America, which is ultimately what we all want. And ultimately, I think Millay needs if he's going to be successful in what he wants. He needs a cultural change. He needs a cultural change. All right, so that is the good news. I think that's all the good news I have right now, but that's the good news about Millay. Let's see, we've got a lot of stories now, particularly, I'd say, within the kind of the leftist, the center-left, pro-Biden, mainstream media, economic analysts, bloggers, podcasters, and so on. A lot of them are trying to figure out, you know, what's going on with people's perception of the economy? We've talked about this before. The numbers, the top line numbers are pretty good. GDP growth is pretty good. Unemployment is historical lows. Usually, low unemployment is a huge benefit for the incumbent, that is, with low unemployment and a growing economy, even if it's going slowly, incumbents almost always win. So why is Biden, they're asking themselves, beyond his age and his senility and his incoherence, why is Biden so unpopular, and why do people still feel so insecure about the economy? Why do they still feel like the economy's screwed up, messed up, and no good? And there's a lot of soul-searching going on among economists and others to try to understand this and to try to explain this and you see it all over the place. But it says auto sales are very tough right now. Yeah, and it makes sense because auto loans are very expensive which brings us to the latest attempt to explain this. And the explanation is really that what is not measured out there by a lot of these factors is the fact that many people are carrying enormous amounts of debt that people have gone into debt over the last few years. Not only do people have mortgages, most people have fixed rate mortgages and if they don't, well, they're in trouble but those who have fixed rate mortgages, the rising interest rates have not affected them. But surprisingly, a lot of people carry real credit card debt. We talked about that in my personal finance show on Saturday, the fact that you should never, ever, ever, if you can help it, carry credit card debt at the full interest rates that you pay on a credit card. But people do. A lot of people have a lot of consumer debt and people buy cars, for example, with debt. And of course, as interest rates has gone up, that debt has become more and more and more expensive. And a bigger portion of every household, including by the way the federal government, has become a bigger portion of expenses for every household has become the interest payment on the various debts that they have taken on themselves. So it becomes more difficult to finish a month, not only because of his inflation and prices have gone up, that might be moderating somewhat. But because interest rates are high and interest rates, at least for now, are not going down or at least it doesn't appear that the Fed is going to reduce interest rates in the very near future. I think they're meeting tomorrow, so we'll know more tomorrow, but it seems unlikely that they will reduce interest rates tomorrow and will probably not reduce interest rates for quite a while. So people have this incredible debt burden. Usually when interest rates go up, people also make money on the interest rates going up because they might own financial instruments that pay them like checking accounts, saving accounts, CDs, or bonds, that actually start paying them higher interest rates over time. That is, interest rates have gone up, they start being paid higher interest rates. That is not happening this time. And I think it's not happening for a variety of reasons, maybe banks are slower to stop paying you for your saving accounts. I know some of the banks, I have accounts with don't pay much, even with interest rates so high, other banks are paying a lot. It also seems like Americans are a little lazy, right? A little lazy, Americans are a little lazy in terms of moving money around to find a higher interest paying account. I mean, Apple is paying what, 5%? American Express is paying on a saving account, 4.6, I think. There is the possibility of getting higher interest rates on your savings, and yet Americans do not seem to be moving the money around in order to gain access to those higher interest rates, which is surprising. You'd expect Americans to be doing that more aggressively given this payment, but they're not. So what you have is interest payments to people are going down and interest expenses going up. But even that is kind of a cooked up story, right? Because the reality is that the people who have large bank accounts or saving accounts or CDs or buy bonds and live off the interest are not the people who have credit card debt. Not the people who are buying automobiles on credit. So what's actually happening is that the people who have very little money in the bank account have, and therefore are not getting any interest on their money, but do have credit card debt. They feel poor because they've got all this debt that they have to pay, and therefore they have less disposable income. The people who actually get interest income are people who have a lot of money and don't carry that debt. Now, of course, people also are hooding if they've got variable rate mortgages because interest rates on mortgages have gone up and suddenly you're expected $3,000 a month payment is now maybe $4,000 a month payment. Those are big increases. If your credit card debt, you were paying 10%, now you're paying 20%, those are big increases, so a big part of what's going on out there is not just the cost of inflation, the fact that your groceries are more expensive than they used to be, but a big part of it is that your debt payments, how you're paying for all this and what you pay on your credit cards is increasing significantly and reducing the amount of money you have for other things. Another reason, by the way, that the interest payments on debt, the interest received, the interest that people get from owning, saving accounts or bonds, is low is that most people are now heavily invested in the stock market and they're not dependent on interest income on bonds. They're much more dependent on dividend income and the dividend income is now higher than interest income in our economy, which, and that suggests there's more investment in equity and there's more expectation that companies will reward shareholders with dividends than maybe there has been in the past. And of course, people in the stock market have done quite well. People in the stock market have done quite well with the exception of what was in 2022. They did well coming out of COVID and coming out of March, really, of 2020, and they did well in 2021 and they've done well in 2023 and so far 2024 is also a good year. So a diversified portfolio of stocks, globally diversified, generally a good long-term strategy, not necessarily ever anything is a good short-term strategy, but certainly is a good long-term strategy. All right, so just thought, fill you in, it's kind of making the news in terms of, and again, I don't think it's an explanation. I think generally people's mindset is negative about the economy because inflation, politicians always seem to underestimate how negatively the public views inflation. Inflation is a burden that is not properly captured in the numbers and it's a burden that is not distributed equally. So some people, if the areas that are inflating in particular are higher in certain goods that affect some people more than others, they're gonna be more affected, but also generally people who have less affected more when prices go up than people who have professions where it's easy for them to adjust the prices or what they do, it's easy for them to make more. So while in aggregate inflation might not have a huge economic impact, specifically on individuals, it can have a massive impact and I think people are feeling that, they're experiencing that and that's a big part of the negativity that people express about the economy to people who ask and it's a big part of the lack of popularity of Joe Biden. I think a huge part of it is indeed the economy. It is people feeling like it's struggling even though in many respects, the economy's doing fine and they're not really struggling or they've forgotten what it is to really struggle. It is interesting that it seems like some of our perspectives on a lot of different things have changed post COVID and people seem much more sensitive to their feelings about the economy versus the fact that they have a job which is, which during most recessions, people don't have jobs and yet people are behaving as if there's a recession now when according to the job market, there is none. Since we're in interest rates, I'm gonna go out of order, right? Since we're in interest rates, I'm gonna jump to a different story which is the story of Japan. Japan is this weird phenomenon in terms of central banking and in terms of finance. Japan has since 2007 basically had negative interest rates, negative interest rates. They've paid you to borrow their money and this is bizarre, this has been an attempt by the Japanese central bank and the Japanese government to spur the economy to stimulate growth to get the economy going. There is this Keynesian perception that in order to get the economy going, you have to have some inflation. Japan has suffered from deflation that its price is going down for a very long time and the response that deflation has been for the central bank of Japan to cut interest rates and cut interest rates and ultimately to the point where they're negative. I think everybody is shocked or most people are shocked or at least the Japanese are shocked by the fact that in spite of those negative interest rates, the Japanese economy has not grown that much. There just has not been significant economic growth and Japan has lagged behind the United States, lagged behind Europe in terms of economic growth and while Japan still has many phenomenal companies and brands, it is far from the days of its dominant economic position in the 1980s. It's the third or fourth or fifth largest economy in the world but when it comes to entrepreneurship and when it comes to just economic dynamism, it hasn't happened in Japan in spite of these negative interest rates which you would think people would borrow money, start businesses, economic activity would flourish and here the point is, so the news here is that for the first time since 2007, the bank of Japan has actually raised interest rates to zero so they are no longer negative. It's between zero and 0.1. This is the rate that banks lend from the central bank so they're still unbelievably low. They're still low versus pretty much any other Western country and I consider Japan a Western country. They are though not negative anymore and that is a big deal in Japan at least and it could be significant for the global economy. Hard to tell how the others would play out. This is the challenge and it's the same thing about the US Federal Reserve and of course Japanese central bank is no different. I've said this many times but you just gotta keep repeating it. Central banks can't be right. Central planners cannot be right. There are kinds of wrong that they can be but they cannot be right. To be right means to be able to know exactly what effect your control of prices is gonna have over a vast economy. That strikes me as crazy. You can do it. I mean we know the central planners can't even price the price of bread. They can't put a price on anything. They get it wrong. The most complex price in all of economics. The most complex price in our entire economy. The one that depends most on individuals' values and individuals' risk preferences and individuals' time horizons is the price of money interest. I could argue interest is the price of time but it's just so whatever the central banks do is going to cause distortions, misallocation of resources, misallocation of capital, misallocation of wealth and they can do it in a more egregious way causing inflation or financial collapse or they can do it in a less egregious way where there's malinvestment and we don't really feel the cost of these interest rate changes but it's there, we just don't feel it. And economists, even you could argue, economists have a very hard time pointing. Okay, this is the distortion. This is the problem. Often the problems occur a lot years after the changes happen. Often the problems are in second or third order, not in the first order, not in the first level and the consequence is that bad stuff is happening and we don't even know and we can't track it and we can't really explain it but the reality is that a zero interest rate and negative interest rate, these should never happen. In a rational world, there's never negative interest rates. It's never, you know, more profitable or never, yeah, you know, I'm happy not to spend my money today. Please take it. I'll pay you to take my money. I mean, that's absurd. It's basically, you know, anti any concept of financial self-interest and would just not happen in a rational world. Europe has had negative interest rates and Japan has had negative interest rates. The US didn't quite ever get there. They flirted with it but they got very low. It's basically since the financial crisis till today. Until what, no, a year and a half ago or so when rates started going up because there was inflation. But the interesting thing is Japan has never had inflation, not significant. Now the reason they're raising rates is because inflation might be, they hope they think maybe reaching 2%, which is the target, it's also the Fed's target. So Japan, sadly, has had several lost decades of economic growth. It has seen, you know, the gap between it and other Western countries in terms of standard of living, quality of life, rate of poverty grow. In Japan it's significantly poorer in terms of the standard of living of an average Japanese than is Europe or most of Europe in the United States. And a lot of it has to do with this insane attempts to control interest rates. So I mean, Japanese government was not only controlling the rate that banks borrow and lend from one another, it was also controlling the long-term rate, the 30-year bond, which the market usually controls in a sense of buys and sells. They were also trying to manipulate the what's called the yield curve. The United States has done that periodically but not to the extent the Japanese have. The Japanese are also, this is important to note because it might be a precedent for other central banks. The Japanese central bank has also bought real estate, real-trade trust funds, it's also bought stocks. It's basically being involved in every financial market and this is the real point. If you want economic growth in Japan, the road to economic growth in Japan goes through massive deregulation. Deregulation the Japanese have not been willing to do even after 40 years of relative stagnation. Deregulate, deregulate, deregulate. And don't allow your central bank to intervene in financial markets to the extent that they do. Don't allow the central bank to be investing in and that's distorting markets across the board. Very, very dangerous when a central bank starts buying assets that are not government assets. It's one thing to monetize the debt by buying government bonds which is mostly what the US central bank does. Although even in the US, the central bank also buys mortgage-backed securities which distorts that market and it is problematic. The US central bank, the US central bank also buys other, what they call agency bonds, but all of those are linked to the government. The US central bank still does not buy stocks. It does not buy corporate bonds and let's hope it stays that way because that would add another whole layer of distortion and perversion to our economy. All right, yesterday we talked about, we talked about SCOTUS, we talked about Supreme Court and the case brought before it by the Republican governors regarding the Biden administration's interventions, pressure meetings with the social media platforms. And I told you that the Fifth Circuit basically ruled that there should be very few meetings, if any meetings between the government and social media. There shouldn't be any meetings. And then I broadly agreed with that. Well, yesterday there were verbal arguments in front of the Supreme Court and it really does look like the Supreme Court might side with the Biden administration and not with the Republican governors. It really does look like they will maybe find some kind of middle ground where they will try to, they will try to basically differentiate between cases in which the government is putting pressure on social media and that's violating the First Amendment and cases in which they are just advising or recommending or suggesting. And of course, they're always just guiding, recommending or suggesting. And of course, every guidance, recommendation, suggestion is backed up by a gun. It's backed up by the regulatory power of the state. It's backed up by their ability to drag social media CEOs in front of Congress. It's backed up by a gun. So my hope yesterday that the Supreme Court would be good on this issue and actually rule against the Biden administration does not look like it's gonna happen. So we have to wait and see, but it doesn't look like we'll get the robust protection of free speech that I think we need and deserve and that the First Amendment requires. I think that the justices are going to give the government, Biden administration or otherwise, because this would be used by both parties, some latitude in terms of how much pressure, when to apply the pressure and so on. And they'll ban outright force, but they won't ban implicit force, the suggestion of force, just the subtle pressure. And that would be pretty horrific. Some of the justices brought up the fact that government has always done this with newspapers and so on, but that's exactly the reason it shouldn't. It shouldn't have done that with newspapers. It shouldn't have done that with any media. It can, the government can always hold a press conference and let the people know what its views are and issue A, B or C, the president can. But it has no business intervening with content decisions that media, any media or social media make. Again, unless there's a clear unequivocal national security risk and that is often abused. So I'm fearful of even saying that, but you can imagine there will be context in which that is actually true. Okay, cheap EVs, it appears, right? The Chinese company BYD currently has an electric car that is hatchback, it's stylish, angular styling, two-tone dashboard, seagull wing dashboard with six airbags. There's a 10-inch rotating touchscreen with the infotainment system. And it's a pretty car and runs pretty well. And the stunning thing about this car is that it sells for under $10,000, $9,600. And $98. Now, Chinese cars have not yet made it to the United States. BYD is not yet selling cars like this in the United States. But what if they start doing it? The average price on an American electric vehicle right now is $50,000. The Chinese EV would be 9,700, even with 100% tariff. It'll still be less than half the price of an American EV. China today, BYD today is the largest producer of electric vehicles, it's a past Tesla. And generally Chinese companies are going to dominate the electric vehicle space, to some extent like the Japanese did in terms of internal combustion engines in the 70s and 80s. In China, the average price of an EV is $30,000. Again, in the US, it's over 50. So how is they getting competition? And this really puts, I think in context, the union's demands for higher wages last year and the victories that they gain, this is gonna make things much more difficult. Much more difficult. Now, it could very well be that Trump or even Biden just banned Chinese cars from the US. But then they're not gonna be chasing these cars. They're gonna be Mexican cars or Argentinian cars or, I don't know, somebody else's cars that are imported here using the Chinese technology that drove the price down to 10,000. Banning Chinese cars is convenient when you can compete. But the reality is, I mean, multiple fold, right? The reality is that car prices are going to come down dramatically. It is so much easier and cheaper to build an electric car than an internal combustion car. The differences are huge. Maintenance is completely different. They're just fewer moving parts. The industry is gonna completely be changed by the introduction of cheap electric cars, whether they come from China or somewhere else. Now, Americans generally are resisting electric cars, but yeah, anybody would be resisting an electric car at $50,000, but a 10, 20, maybe a second car, maybe they can try it out. The industry is in for a real shakeup. In Europe, they know this. They're really incredibly afraid. European automakers are desperate. It's not clear how they will survive. So it's gonna be interesting. Now, of course, this is how our standard living quality of life goes up. Imagine if you could get a really, really good car that serves its function, gets you from point A to point B. Maybe it has a slightly lower lifespan than the car you have right now, but you might be changing your cars every three years anyway. And imagine you could get that car for under $10,000. Well, then you have a lot, you just saved a lot of money. And when you save that money, you're gonna use it to invest, to save, to consume other goods. And that's gonna drive innovation. That's gonna drive growth. That's gonna drive productivity, if it's allowed, elsewhere in the economy. So prices are coming down. EVs will probably be the future. I've driven in a few that are really nice, that people tell me they're nice to drive. They have incredible acceleration. But this is gonna be a major restructuring and shakeout. And it's gonna require people to, well, when we require people, it's gonna mean better. When you get something cheaper that's just as good, your life is better because you have more money for other things. It's gonna increase the quality of life for Americans. And yet, the politicians, the populists, the voters, that just generally, people are gonna go nuts. They're gonna go berserk over this. And politicians are gonna be hugely incentivized to ban the importation of cheap cars and keep us paying high prices for cars as the rest of the world benefits from these cheap cars. And their stand of living rises while ours gets stuck. All right, so EVs. Now the challenge, of course, with EVs, and this is why I think it's not gonna happen quickly, is where's that electricity gonna come from? We have a grid that cannot cope with everybody in the United States starting to drive, an electric car. We have a grid that can barely deal with the energy load we have on it today. And there's no emphasis on upgrading the grid and increasing the production of energy because everybody is too obsessed and too worried about and too just single-minded about climate change and reducing energy consumption or energy production. Never mind consumption. Reducing production of electricity. What we need is a lot more production of electricity. What we need is a lot more natural gas-powered plants. To produce that electricity, we have tons of natural gas. What we need is more nuclear power, geothermal power, whatever. What we don't need is lots of, maybe fusion. We talked about the story about fusion, maybe fusion power. What we don't need is a bunch, a massive investment in solar and wind that are just unreliable forms of energy. And the more people start using electric cars, the more this will become important for their daily lives. All right, quickly. Everywhere you look now, if you look at the newspaper, everywhere you look, you will see headlines, you will see stories about the famine in Gaza. There was famine in Gaza, we are told. People are literally starving to death on the verge of, there's no famine yet, but everybody's saying, we're in the verge of famine. And this is clearly a campaign, a campaign by the American political class, a campaign by the mainstream media, a campaign by everybody who wants to put pressure on Israel to stop, everybody who wants to put pressure on Israel to compromise and to moderate and to give up on its goals and not to go to Rafa and not to do what's necessary to win. Every single, you know, this is one big campaign, if you will, all geared towards putting pressure on Israel to stop, to slow down, not to win. I am sure the people of Gaza are suffering right now. I'm sure the significant shortages of food and water. They should have thought of that when they supported the Hamas. They should think of it now as they continued to support Hamas. They lack water, they lack food, they lack a home given the destruction in Gaza because of Hamas, because of their own government, because of their own people, because of their own choices, because of their own decisions that they've made over the last 20 years. And they will probably continue to suffer for a long time until they repudiate, not just Hamas, but everything Hamas stands for, everything that Hamas represents. So, you know, this famine stuff, you know, they built this ports, the ships being in food, they're dropping it from the air, they're sending trucks in. Food is going to be available in Gaza. People are not going to starve to death in Gaza. But the panic and hysteria that exists is there for only one reason. And the only reason, the only reason, is pressure on Israel. Israel is allowing massive quantities of food to enter Gaza every day. In trucks, but even by air and by ship now. Or sanctioned by Israel. By the way, one of the reasons this famine in Gaza right now is because somebody is prolonging this war. Netanyahu, Israeli government, get on with it already. Finish this thing. You know, go and get into Rafa and kill the leaders of Hamas and get it done. Every day you wait is a day, the world is going to be more against you. It's a day, every day you wait, it's a day Hamas gets stronger, it's a day you get weaker. It's time for Israel. I said this on day one. Speed is essential. Speed is essential. You got to get it over with. Every day that you wait gives more fodder to your enemies. And yet Israel did this. And it did this, of course, with the support of the Biden administration and the Europeans and everybody else who don't want Israel to progress, don't want Israel to win. But Israel even wants to do it quote humanitarianly, whatever the hell that means. Set up a program of moving all the Palestinian civilians out of Rafa, move them north, screen them all with facial recognition software as they leave, and give them five days to leave and then go in and crush the place. Yeah, it's a million people. You can take them a while to leave. But so be it. There's just no other way to do this. And Biden keeps saying, you can't do it. It's not doable. You've lost a war. Accept it. Israel's just sent a delegation to Washington to convince the Americans that they can do it. It's a circus. It's an absolute ridiculous circus. Israel needs to ignore the United States, ignore the rest of the world, and just go for it. All right. Remember, I told you Netanyahu was a weak leader? I told you Netanyahu would be slow. I told you Netanyahu would probably not do what's necessary. He's done more than I thought, but less, far less than what he should have, and far slower than he should have done it. Remo, would PE be a force, private equity, be a force out there in the economy? If public companies were not that heavily regulated, or is the private equity firm plus fund structure superior to the public company structure? No, I think private equity would be a lot smaller and a lot less powerful if public markets were less regulated. I mean, Sabine's Oxley, which was passed by a Republican president, a Republican House, and a Republican Senate with basically no opposition, even not from so-called conservatives, Sabine's Oxley, is a bill that killed the IPO market in the United States, basically made it very unprofitable to go public, very expensive. It reduced the number of companies that were public in the United States significantly. It has been a drag on the US economy. It's now over 20 years, 21 years since it was passed. Maybe it's 20 years, 20 or 21 years. I went on Bill O'Reilly's show when it passed to criticize it. Everything I said about it has come true. And as a consequence, private equity, so I had dinner with a friend who's in private equity, and we were discussing this. And he said, what do you do with your companies? He invests in growth in fintech. And he says, you know, it used to be, and the ideal would be for these companies to go public. And that just can't happen. The cost is too high. So I sell them to other private equity funds. And they sell these other private equity funds. And it's ridiculous. So there's always going to be a role for private equity. But part of that role is to take companies that are not so big or not so professionally run, family businesses, other kinds of businesses, and professionalize them, increase efficiencies, maybe wall them up to create a bigger entity, and then take the public. And that is a role that will continue. That's a role that's always there. Private equity also can have a role, like it had in the 1980s, where it can take a public company, private. It still happened today. But in the 1980s, it was prevalent. It's kind of hostile takeovers. And then restructure it, improve it, professionalize it, maybe do some wall ups, go a little bit, and then take it public. But the channel is to take it public. So there would always be private equity. Private equity does have a role in certain circumstances when certain type of professional, if you will, management skill is required and the freedom to do pretty radical things away, if you will, from having to talk to shareholders on a quarterly basis. But of course, if you really had an unregulated public market, then who knows what kind of structures would involve within the public market space itself? They would do all kinds of things. So I think private equity is necessary, much bigger than it would otherwise be. And in a world of real capitalism, in a world of lesbic capitalism, we would have a wide variety of financial institutions doing different things in ways that I don't think we can easily predict. Markets ought to predict they always do stuff you don't expect, one of the reasons we're against central plan is entrepreneurs come up with ideas you can't imagine. So when you free up the juices, when you free up the juices of a real market, a lesbic capitalism, then who knows how markets would evolve? I don't think they'd look like the way they look today. I don't think the stock market would look like it is today. And I think the private markets would also look differently. It is interesting that the sense of gravity in the financial world has moved very much towards private equity, very much towards these big private financial firms and away from Wall Street, away from investment banks, away from banks generally, and really the most powerful financial institutions today are hedge funds and private equity funds. All right? And I think a lot of that has to do with regulation. Michael, I've been in Argentina for a month and people love me late. That's great that you're in Argentina. Good for you. People love me late outside of government workers. I don't think Millet is a fluke, and he is only the beginning. I hope you're right. I mean, the key is going to be the elections in what, a year and a half, when these elections for Congress, this is the opportunity to elect a Congress that is then friendly to Millet. And a Congress that is friendly to Millet will allow Millet to do whatever he needs to do. So the Argentinian people will be tested at that point. And if it is actually the case that they truly do support him in the way that Michael suggests, then they will vote in parliament in a way that bolsters his ability to bring about radical change. And that'll be terrific, fantastic, amazing. Thank you, Michael. All right, let's see. Stephen Hopper, thank you for the sticker. Jeremy Morton, thank you for the sticker. Who else do we have? We have Gephry, and yeah, that's who we have. So really, really appreciate it, guys. Those of you here now who maybe went at the beginning of the show and didn't hear the announcement, Millet will be at the Objectives Conference in Argentina next month, two and a half weeks, basically. I will be speaking there, so I'll be there. But it does look like Millet and I will be on stage answering questions together. I hope that works out. Politicians change their mind all the time. Emergencies happen, stuff happens, they don't show up. So who knows what will actually happen? But so far, so good. As of today, Millet is coming to the conference. I'm super excited. And that will also bring a huge audience, I think. It will bring a very large audience to the conference to listen, and that will be a huge exposure for INVENT, for INVENT. Let's see. Oh, Silvanos, thank you. Really, really appreciate the support. Another sticker, that's great. OK, we're almost at our target. This is fantastic. Ian, it's interesting that most people blame Biden alone for the inflation. Well, if you look at the M2 money supply, most of that increased happen under Trump. Yeah, I know. I've said this all the time. Inflation is Bidens and Trumps. Trump had the big stimulus. And Trump did not object to the big stimulus that Biden passed the first thing he did when he got into Congress, and he did Republicans voted for it. And Trump criticized it because it gave people too little money. I can't remember the exact numbers, but Trump thought it should be, the government should have been writing much bigger checks to individual Americans. But no, I mean, M2 was growing the whole idea of helicopter money, the whole idea of giving money to businesses and individuals all over the United States. That was begun under Trump and extended under Biden. So the inflation is both of their fault without any question. And generally, it is pretty amazing to me that people give way too much credit and blame for the economy to presidents. Presidents don't have that much to do with what happens to the economy under their watch. They can ruin whatever's happening easily. But it's very hard for them to actually do things that will generate in the four years that they're in office. Incredibly positive things. These things take time, and they usually don't do anything positive that is of any substance. So I don't think Trump deserves credit for his three years of relatively kind of pathetic good economy. And I don't think Biden deserves to blame unilaterally for the bad economy. I think that's a shallow understanding of how economics works and how policy impacts economics. Biden's bad policies will be felt by us to a large extent in the years to come, in the years to come. Andrew, Andrew, thank you. Andrew has a question here, but Andrew is also going to sponsor a show. So we're going to have a show sponsored by Andrew soon, I think soon, probably on Saturday. All right, Andrew asks, the ubiquity of central planning shows the liberation goal of freedom versus economic knowledge is falling. OK, let me read that again. The ubiquity of central planning shows the libertarian goal of freedom versus economic knowledge is failing. Yes, via economic knowledge is failing. Free market economics are true, but reason must be the standard of truth. Or anyway, or anything goes, economics won't save us. I think that's absolutely right. And I think that this idea of economic calculation and the impossibility of economic calculation is all true, but it's just not convincing. Finally, the only way to convince people of capitalism has to be a moral argument. It has to be an argument that people actually embrace about the goodness and morality of capitalism, not just the impossibility of central planning doesn't work. They don't believe that. Why doesn't it work? Floating abstractions, reason, detachment, reality, that's what people are used to. So why can't this political party or that political party? OK, these guys didn't get the economy right. Maybe these guys will do it. And much of our conflict lies in this idea that our politicians can actually have a much bigger say in economics than they actually can. And it's just debates about who will centrally plan. And the whole idea of actual freedom is just too scary for people to even contemplate. Actual capitalism, too scary. We'll be exploited. We'll be killed. We'll be poisoned. We'll be whatever. And you know what's the alternative? The alternative is to give power to a central planner one way or the other. All right, Lyrin, agree that government has no place offering negative interest rates. But could you do it privately to incentivize business creation or economic activity that you believe will have personal, beneficial, positive externalities? Yeah, but then it wouldn't be a, you know, you can give your kids a loan at below real interest rates or zero interest, and that's equivalent of a negative real interest rate. You can do all kinds of things privately. But as an economic phenomena, it would never happen. No, there would be no private institution that would do this unless it was a philanthropy. And they wouldn't accumulate huge amounts of money. So no, I don't see what mechanism would bring this about, again, other than a philanthropy or a private one on one kind of setup, like for your kids. Suppose you travel to the future, to 23, 24, and a history student studying 2024 asked you, why people voted for Donald Trump? How would you answer? Oh, God. I mean, I think people voted for Donald Trump for a number of different, a number of reasons. I mean, the fundamental reason that people vote for Donald Trump is because a political structure, a political evolution has made us politically mindless. So you have an electorate who is in some deep sense stupid. It has no understanding of the consequence of what it's doing. It cannot project long term. And it certainly has no zero null understanding of what made America great and what sustained American greatness. So the fundamental that makes it possible for people to vote for Trump is the fact that they're mindless. And that our culture has gotten to a point where they are attracted to a loudmouth authoritarian who has nothing really to offer other than not being the other guy, but who has nothing really to offer. Because again, I will walk you back to the primaries. You could have voted for somebody else, but you didn't. So it's not the case that it's just a binary choice. It's a case that people have been voting for Donald Trump even when it's not a binary choice. And the reason for that is that they're enamored by his willingness to supposedly say whatever comes into his mind. People are not looking for a political philosophy, a political ideology, a political set of political agenda that is consistent. People are looking for somebody who will tell them everything will be OK. So I think you really have to explain not people who vote for Donald Trump versus Joe Biden. You have to explain people voting for Donald Trump versus every other possibility in the Republican Party, every single one of which was better than Donald Trump. And to explain that, it has to be the mindlessness of the base of the Republican Party, the emotionalism that reason has basically been driven out. And if you want to put it in other terms, I think that people voted for him because they're afraid. People are afraid. They're afraid because they don't understand the world. And they don't understand the world because the intellectuals have betrayed them. And they don't understand the world because their politicians have betrayed them. They don't understand the world because they've not been taught to think for themselves. But they are afraid. Fear is what drives these elections. And what makes Donald Trump popular, and I'm giving you a roundabout answer, what makes Donald Trump popular is that he feeds that fear and he knows how to address it. Oh, you're afraid of Chinese. You should be. They're going to come here and they're going to take all the auto jobs. I'm going to stop them. 100% tariff. 1,000% tariffs. I will do whatever it takes to stop the Chinese from destroying your jobs. You worried about AI? Don't worry about AI. I will negotiate a deal with the tech companies where they cannot. AI cannot take your job. We'll have tariffs on AI-produced jobs. I don't know. So it's what we live is in a world where the people have been betrayed by the intellectuals. They have been left without an explanation of what's going on in the world. They have been told that the world works in a way that is inconsistent with the way it actually works. And the consequence is that they're confused. They're afraid. And they just don't know. And they don't know. And Trump plays to that. And he's brilliant at playing to it. He's brilliant at it. And Biden will play to the fear of the left of Trump. That's the fear the left has. Paul, great work you're on. Good luck in Buenos Aires. And great to see you live. Love new setup. Thank you, Paul. Really, really appreciate it. And the new setup will keep getting better. Fendt Hoppe, is money a virtue or spending a virtue? Money is a means of gaining and keeping values. I asked because someone told me that a virtue is typically a verb like spending. Yeah, a virtue is an action. So money is not a virtue. Making money is a virtue. Producing and earning money is a virtue. And spending money can also be a virtue if done right. But certainly earning money is the essential virtue here. And you read Francisco's money speech. And if you haven't read it recently, then you can read it. It's online. You can find it online. There's videos of it where people are reading it aloud. There are pamphlets of it that you can download. But the money speech is brilliant at exactly that, showing how making money is the virtue that money is involved in. Just having money is not a virtue, unless it's a virtue in the context of saving and investing for your future. But it's making it. All right, Daniel says, love the new setup you're on. Thank you, Daniel. Really appreciate it. Oivind says, a vanity question. If you knew you would lose a substantial amount of hair, would you take hair transplant surgery? Some of my friends have done it, and I can sympathize. Congrats on relay. I don't know. Probably not. I mean, I could dye my hair pretty easily, have a nice, I could have hair color the way I had it 30, 40 years ago. I never have, never even tempt it for one second. Going bald is a little different. Maybe I would do it. Some of it might depend on my wife. Generally, I don't do the vanity things. Not to say I wouldn't ever do it, but I generally don't. But I completely understand people who do do it. I don't have any problem with that. I don't think it's a, I don't think it's, there's anything wrong with it. It's fine. There's a funny skit on Israeli television because of Turkey's, most Israelis get their hair transplants done in Turkey because Turkey, they've developed the industry really well and it's much cheaper than to do it in Israel or to do it in Western Europe. So a lot of Israelis, I mean, thousands of Israelis have gone to Turkey and got hair transplants. And Turkey's now pretty anti-Israel when it comes to Gaza and Hamas. So there was the skit about all the people returning their hair to Turkey. They're going to return the hair to Turkey. They don't want, they don't want to have anything to do with the Turks. So it doesn't, doesn't quite work that way. Yeah, I don't have any problem with plastic surgery, hair transplants, any of those things. It doesn't mean I will do it. I don't have any, it's just a question of personal values, personal hierarchy, and personal situation. So no problem at all with it. Jason, post the current US inflation, what conditions might the US face that could lead to a long deflationary cycle? What parallels to Japan exist or could exist? I think there were a lot of parallels to Japan. And national debt, the fact that the government sucks out of the economy huge quantities of capital, money, by issuing huge quantities of bonds and uses that money to consume. Instead of that money being put into investment, it goes into consumption. So certainly if the United States continues massive amounts of debt accumulation, you will get stagnation. You will get a kind of, I don't know if it's deflation, it will be stagnation like Japan. And we're on that track. And I think already the economic growth in the United States is pathetic because of the amount of debt that we're accumulating. Now you can't, it's not easy to tie the two and show people that that's the cause and effect so people ignore debt and they don't care and they just rack it up. We're talking about the government, right? And then on top of that, if you had a, what do you call it? If you had the kind of regulations that Japan has and maybe we were approaching that level of regulations, then that regulation, level of regulation is crippling to production, entrepreneurship, innovation, and therefore to growth and economic growth. And you can understand that, then if the economy's not growing the economy can only grow through entrepreneurship, through investment. If there's no investment, there's no entrepreneurship, then the economy's not gonna grow. And then again, you get stagnation. So you can get Japan effect with debt and regulations and you're seeing an increase in all of that. Paul, what effect do various interest rates around the world have on the floor of money or goods within any specific country? You know, they have some effect because the different interest rates are gonna affect currency levels which is gonna affect how expensive our cheap goods are from any particular country that affects the flow of goods into your country that affects the competitive position your companies in your country have vis-a-vis companies outside. So a lot of the effect is through the value of the currency. And you know, the dollar right now is very strong versus the yen very strong which means Japanese goods right now are very cheap in the United States. It's one of the reasons, you know, one of the reasons that, anyway, so it's one of the reasons you'll probably see, you know, Japan exports, you know, try to boost its economy through exports, export more and it makes American companies in some sense less competitive. It is ironic though that in spite of the fact that the dollar is strong in the inner's week, a Japanese steel company is buying an American steel company. You'd expect it the other way around. But because of tariffs, that's the flow that's going to happen because of the steel tariffs Trump put together it makes a lot more sense for a Japanese steel company to buy an American steel company than the other way around. Apollo Zeus, thank you, really appreciate the support. Roland, a hundred percent reserve gold warehouse would charge you for safekeeping your gold in effect a negative interest rates but not that I think there'd be any demand for that accepting your odd gold bug. Yeah, I think that's right. But then it's not clear that it's serving as a bank. It's not even clear that it's a, it's not an interest rate. It's effectively an interest rate but it's really just a charging you to hold your gold. It's a storage fee. Roland then says, if I were a woman, I'd definitely go for the hip transplant but guys in my experience can do perfectly fine without hair. Says Roland without hair. All right, M. Azan. It's staggering how many billionaires and millionaires support environmental NGOs who are anti-civilization especially in Europe. One businessman said he supports trees more than human life. Yeah, I mean this is what guilt does to people. Many, many millionaires and billionaires feel guilty for the success that they had. Many, many, many billionaires have in spite of their productive genius have rotten philosophy and rotten ideas and we see that in their support for these anti-life, anti-human causes. They cannot escape at least in some part of their mind from the consequences of modern philosophy and modern intellectuals. He also says, why did people vote for Hitler? Because they were afraid. The change was happening. There were economic disruptions and Hitler offered them a simple answer, simple solution. He elevated their fear and then suggested a solution to it. He integrated all that around country state and by that point the German people as Lenin-Pikov documents in the ominous parallels by that point the German people were mindless. It's exactly the same process. First you make the people mindless. Then they become afraid. Then you feed that fear and then you offer yourself as a solution. So mindlessness is step one. Fear, step two. Solution, something that can everybody rally around. A flag, a simple slogan, blame the Jews or the Chinese or the Mexicans, blame somebody else. That is how that mechanism works. All fascists. Country's falling apart. It's not your fault. It's the other's fault, right? The other's fault and who's the other? People who don't look like you or people who are in the elites that you don't like and how do we solve the problem? It like me, I know how to solve the problem. I'll get rid of them. I'll replace them all and I'll stop them coming into the country and I'll cut off their goods and I'll, yeah, it's the standard stuff. I'll just kill all the Jews. That'll solve your problem. We'll solve the Jewish problem. All right, thank you everybody. I appreciate it. Let's see. Wow, this new setup looks good. I think I just hear a little echo from the room around you, but I really like this look. Interesting that you hear an echo. I'm interested that other people can hear it as well. I can't put some more acoustic treatment. We've opened up a wall. I mean, there's some stuff that can still be done also to improve the sound which we will work on in the weeks to come. Thank you guys. Really appreciate it. Thanks to all the support. Thanks to the Super Chatters. We reached our goal. I really appreciate that. I will see you all tonight. 8 p.m. East Coast time, 8 p.m. East Coast time. Topic to be determined. Talk to you soon. Bye everybody.