 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Book Show. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Book Show. Good morning to some of you. Good afternoon to others. Good evening to still others. I see we've got London. We've got the West Coast. We've got much of the country covered today. All right, let's jump in. I'll just remind you there will be a show tonight. 8 p.m. I'll have the topic and everything up online soon, but there will be a show today. Sorry, 7 p.m. East Coast time. Jonathan, thank you for the support. Let's jump in with some of the highlights of the news today. I thought given that we talked a little bit about the debt ceiling, and since there are going to be a lot of discussions in the weeks and months to come about debt ceiling, about government spending, about everything that's going on for a physical and about taxes from a physical perspective, there would be good to basically just review a little bit about government spending, about where the money goes, and so on, so that you guys just have a context for all those debates and all those discussions. They're going to be coming down the Republicans' supposed attempt. We'll see if it's a real attempt to reduce government spending. All of that, I think, is going to dominate the news cycle in the, again, weeks and months to come. So I thought today would be a good opportunity since it's not a huge amount of news out there, other than the stories we've already covered, like more tanks, more tanks, you know, to kind of go over where we are with regard to all of that, and then, well, and with the discussion of Musk's day in court, or two days in court, he testified yesterday and testified today, we'll go over the court case and whether a little bit and whether any of it makes any sense. Let's see, so let's start with this issue, this question about Social Security. So when we discuss government spending, I think it's crucial to realize that 19% of the money the government spends, 19% of all government expenditures, are spent on Social Security. That's more than health, which that's going to shift, but I think health will dominate that number within a few years. Social Security's 19%, health is 15%, all other, oh, wait a minute, all right, so separate that. Social Security's 19%, health is 15%, that does not include Medicare, Medicare is 12%. Income security, that's welfare generally. Income security's 14%, national defense is 12%. So Social Security's significantly more than the national defense. Medicare is 12%, but if you add Medicare with health, those together are 27%, 27%, Medicare, I assume under health there's Medicare, Medicaid, I assume there's everything else that the government does vis-a-vis healthcare. Together, Medicare and health generally, 27% of the government, that's over a quarter, right? So when Trump says the other day, whatever the Republicans do, whatever the Republicans do in the House, Social Security and Medicare should be off the table. Social Security and Medicare should be off the table. If you just take Medicare out of the health, and Social Security, that's 29%, that's basically 30% of the budget is off the table. And that's a growing percent, that is the amount of Medicare, the percent of a Medicare in the total budget is only gonna increase, it's only gonna grow. And indeed, I expect Social Security to grow because baby boomers are retiring. And I'm at the edge of the baby boomers, right? I haven't started drawing Social Security. And so within a few years, when I start drawing Social Security, that's probably close to the peak. So Social Security's only gonna increase. So if you take out Social Security and Medicare, what are you gonna cut? You can't cut net interest on the government debt. That's a contractual agreement with bondholders. You can't cut that. You can cut national defense. You can cut other health expenditures. You can cut education, training, employment, so services, and welfare, how much? Are they really willing to cut any of those? But all of that is penny change if you're not willing to touch 30% and 30% that's actually growing and it's gonna be much bigger in the future. So Trump wants to take Medicare and Social Security off the table. I think another example of the fact that Trump is harmful to the Republican Party. The fact is that the Republican Party should be the party suggesting new ways in to restructure Social Security and Medicare. He made it to protect current retirees at the expense of younger people who are younger. I mean, there has to be reform and the Republican Party should be at the forefront. It should be thinking and devoting energy and focus on trying to figure out how to do exactly that. And it looks like they are not. So it looks like Trump is preventing that from happening. If the Republicans propose any kind of reform to Medicare and Social Security, Trump will call them, I don't know, traders. Trump will advocate against them to the Republican base. To the Republican base. And of course, part of the issue is that Social Security is a bust, right? So Social Security, the pretense of Social Security today is, well, there's all the money that's being saved. There's the trust fund that pays out Social Security. Well, remember what's in that trust fund? There's no money in that trust fund. What's in that trust fund is IOUs from the federal government. The federal government spends every dime that you put into Social Security. Every dime that you're taxed, Social Security tax, is spent immediately by the government. And so all you have is IOUs there by the government. So there is no trust fund. But whatever IOUs are in there will be ground down to zero by 2033. So by 2033, Social Security will be the pool, whatever IOUs are in there is all negative and will start having to massively increase the amount of money going into Social Security. So the CBO, this is the Congressional Budget Offices, without legislative actions, CBO estimates that benefits would be automatically cut by 23% across the board upon insolvency. Over 75 years, CBO projects or Social Security will face a shortfall equal to 5% of taxable payroll or 1.7% of gross domestic product GDP. This means restoring solvency would require the equivalent of reducing projected benefits immediately and permanently by 26% or increasing dedicated taxes by 40%. So you're gonna permanently decrease benefits by 26%, which I'm not against, or increase taxes by 40%, the payroll tax. Now this is around the corner. So by ignoring this, Republicans are just playing into the hand of future massive increases in taxes. Surprise, surprise, but this is of course what they've taken off the table, off the table. Now I've told you, such a great as 19%, as I said, National Defense is 12, NAND interest payment on the debt is 8%, that's probably going up, given interest rates are higher right now, so any bonds the government is issuing right now are significantly more expensive to it in terms of interest payments than they were in the past. So the situation of the federal spending is only going to get worse. Just to give you a kind of a quick overview, and I'm not gonna go way in depth on this because that'll take us a long time, but just in terms of taxes and spending by the US government in 1929, in 1929, US government receipts as a percentage of gross domestic products. So the amount of money the federal government took in from all the different programs as a percent of the size of the economy, gross domestic product was 3.7%. I mean, even as late as 1932, before the election of FDR, government receipts were 3.23%. So the government in the 19th century and early 20th century ran basically on 3% of the size of the economy. Now, given the new deal, that rose to just under 8%, but the numbers pre-war like six, eight, seven, so seven, eight percent of the economy in the pre-war era, pre-World War II. Today, that number is, this is in terms of taxes, the money coming in, we'll get to the money going out in a minute. That has grown since then to about 17% as of 2021, it peaked. The highest it's ever been since World War II, well, it's about the same as what it was in World War II, was in 2000, 2019.8. And the reason tax receipts were so high in 2000s was because in 2000 was because stock market had done phenomenally well, massive amounts of capital gains, incomes have risen, and we had huge tax revenues. So tax revenues were about almost just under 20% in 2000. They were also at 20%, guess when? At the peak of World War II, 1945 was the highest gross receipts. And this is, that's not a consequence of capital gains, that's not a consequence of people making more money, that's pure consequence of tax rates going through the roof. So the government has gone from taking about, I don't know, three, four percent of the size of the economy every year to taking 20% of the size of the economy, or really 17% today of the size of the economy. Taxes, tax receipts are very sensitive to recessions. Tax rates, but more to recessions. If you actually look at the graph, it's been at around 17, 18%. So like everybody says in 1953, 52, 53, remember marginal tax rates on income were 80, 90%? Tax receipts were 18% of GDP. In 1969, during the Vietnam War, and during the Great Society, tax income was 18.4%. They peak again in 1981, tax receipts are 18.7%, probably as a consequence of adjustments for inflation. And then you keep going on and on, I mean, 87 to 17%, 86 to 16 and a half. The fact is the amount of money coming into government doesn't seem to change that much based on tax rates, income tax rates, or based on any of these parameters, it's mostly based on the amount of economic activity, based on how well the economy is doing. So you see a decline during the dot com bubble bursting and a decline during that recession and then an increase after 2004 and then a decrease during the Great Recession in 2008, 2009 and then a slow increase up until 2015 and then slight decreases in the beginning of the Trump administration and then up flat basically during the rest of Trump, probably caused by the capital, by the copatax decrease that caused the percent of revenue received by the government to decrease. So 18%, 16 to 18% is what the government takes from the economy pretty much every single year. What does it spend? Well, going back again to 1929, it spent 3% of the economy. So in 1929, the federal government spent 3% of GDP, total expenditures, everything. It peaked highest it's ever been is during World War II and basically much of the economy was nationalized and basically huge expenditures for the war. It peaked around just under 41%. But then since about 1953, the government has been spending somewhere between 15 to 20% slowly increasing, slowly increasing, but basically stabilizing just over 20%. And then in the 1990s, remember I've told you in 1990s we're a pretty good era, decreasing government spending as a percent of GDP decreases every single year and it bottoms in 2000 where the government spent 17, 17.4%, something like that. Then it starts to increase again under George W. Bush, George Bush Jr., the spender with the war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan with all the other government spending associated with him and it goes up to like 19% of GDP. All the Clinton years by every measure were some of the best years economically the US in modern times since World War II has seen. Clinton years spending decline, income actually went up whether you consider income a good thing or not, but income actually went up during that period primarily because of the stock market but spending actually declined. Now it actually starts with 1990, spending peaks at 21.5 in 1991 and then declines as a percent of GDP every single year. Now that continues after 1994 when Republicans take Congress but it starts declining in 1992. It starts declining even before Republican state Congress and then it keeps going. Now part of that, a big chunk of that by the way, a big chunk of that is what was called then the peace dividend. A big chunk of that is a reduction that George Bush Sr. started in 1991 because of the fall of the Berlin Wall. So reduction in defense spending, substantial reduction in defense spending during the 1990s. So the 1990s saw reduction in defense spending and caps on other spending primarily after 1984 when Republicans took over Congress but you basically see a declining government spending through 2000 again as a percentage of GDP, not in absolute terms. GDP is increasing every year as a percentage of GDP and then you see it increasing from 2001 under Bush basically from 17.6 to 19 really. Then spiking during the Great Recession under Bush and then under Obama to 25, 24% then again declining under Obama. I know this is a shock to your system but primarily after the Republican state Congress but once Republicans take Congress, government spending as a percentage of GDP declines from a high of 24, really probably 23 post stimulus package to a low in 2014, 2015 of 19.97, so 20%. It stays like that under Trump. It stays at just over 20%. Basically it doesn't change and then in 2019 it goes up under Trump to 21% and then in 2020 which I will remind you 2020 is a Trump year, 2020 was Trump spending the government spent 31% of GDP, 31% of GDP. So government spending has gone up from about 20% to over 30% to 31% during the COVID year which is Trump's year, which is stimulus, all the nonsense that the government was doing during the COVID year, sending everybody checks and money. Since then it's been declining slowly but slowly. I saw somewhere, let me just see if I can find 2022 number. Yeah, 2022 number is down to 25%, so coming down more. Yeah, don't blame the boss, don't blame the guy who's in charge of everything. Blame Fauci, give me a break Scott, anything to excuse your moronic commander in chief. But yes, don't blame the boss, blame the underlings, always blame the underlings, there's no boss. No, there wasn't, there wasn't any, there wasn't anybody at the top, there wasn't anybody in charge. All right, so that gives you a little bit of an overlay. We've gone from 3% GDP spending to 30% GDP spending in, you know, during COVID to 20% of GDP spending during normal years, you know, I mean, we have gone from, again, a government that's tiny, 3% of GDP to a government that's massive, 20% of GDP. And of course, tax revenue, flat, 17, 18%, and that's how you get the deficits every year. And when you go to 30% of tax revenue stays at 17, 18%, you get a massive increase and you keep getting these bumps, like the great financial crisis, big deficit. COVID, big, big, big, big deficit. And those just add to the national debt and this is kind of the national debt exploding is a direct consequence, a direct consequence of that. America's debt today is six times what it was in 2000. Six times. Most of that is a consequence of stimulus packages doing 0809 and during 2020 and 2021 to blame for this. And of course, let's not forget the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, which cost the US anywhere between $2 to $6 trillion, who knows how to come. If you wanna blame anybody for it, you should blame Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. Nobody gets off the hook here. Everybody spent like crazy. And nobody cared, nobody cared about a balance of money. Nobody cared about a balanced budget. The last time we had a balanced budget, 99, 99, 2000 under Clinton. We had a small surplus because tax revenue were going up, they peaked then and spending would actually gone down as a percentage of GDP and a percentage of GDP, good money coming in. So you've got six times greater and then it's, we're expecting a debt to increase about 1.3 trillion a year for the next decade. So we've got 31 trillion of debt right now. It's gonna increase by about 13 trillion over the next 10 years. We're heading towards 50. National debt is now as a percentage of GDP, as a percentage of the size of the economy. It's never been higher other than maybe in World War II, but in World War II it was easy to cut back because you basically brought the troops home. You had two effects. One is you cut spending on war. Second is people came back and the economy became dramatically more productive because people started working again. And now, how are you gonna cut this? Particularly if you follow Trump and you refuse to touch Social Security Medicaid. Total GDP is about 21, 22 trillion dollars. All right, I know a bunch of numbers about your economy, but just a sense that the economy, our government spending, our government in general, it's out of control and it's out of control and nobody, there's nobody, not a single person out there is actually offering a plan of how to start shrinking significantly government spending. A total complete reform of Social Security Medicaid. The last person to suggest reforming Social Security Medicaid was Paul Ryan. And Paul Ryan today is considered a Republican by name only, a rhino, but he's the last person to actually suggest reforming these things. What Trump did was take that off the table completely and he's doubling up on that. And I would be shocked if DeSantis, if you ran against Trump, would suggest anything, anything close to reforming Social Security Medicaid. I think that's off the table now completely. All right, let's see. Quick story about pay increases. This is just, you know, who got the highest pay increases last year? Low income wages. So if you look by educational status, the highest increases last year were for people with less than a high school degree. So low income jobs got a real boost, a significant boost to income. I hate these kind of graphs, but you know, the Wall Street Journal publishes them. So, you know, I'll report it. Blacks saw the largest increase in wages of any quote race, bigger than Asian whites overall, Hispanics, Latinos, in 2022 in terms of wages for blacks was one of the best years ever. Not one of the best years ever, but best year in, they did better than anybody else, put it that way. They also did well in 2020, by the way. And low income have done pretty well. They did well in 2018. They did well during COVID in 2019. Sorry, in, they did well in 2018 and 2019. And they did well relatively speaking during COVID, highest, and then, you know, they actually sort of decline in wages post COVID. And then last year, there's so significant increase. And then finally, if you look by age, the people who got the highest raises last year were young people, 16 to 24, right? And the bottom 10% of wage owners, so the highest raises. And this is, I think, to some extent, a consequence of the labor shortage, the fact that a lot of people are not going back to work, that if you remember all those wanted signs and restaurants and all kinds of places, and most of those were for relatively low paying jobs. And I think that, as you know, if supply and demand, the only way employers could attract people to come and take those jobs was by paying them more money, by paying them more. In the short run, this is probably also an impact of all the restrictions in immigration, even though immigration over the long run and across the entire economy raises wages. In the short run, if you, in the short run and for manual laborers, it is possible that a restriction in immigration, restriction of people coming in and increasing the supply of labor would actually cause wages to increase. All right, let's see, Bonnie, thank you, Gail, thank you. Wes, thank you, Adam, thanks. And Jonathan, again, thank you. Thank you for all of you guys. Yeah, we're still at a point where everybody watching would have to put in two bucks for us to get to where we need to be. Okay, so wages have increased, increased relatively quite a lot last year. Most of them didn't keep up with inflation. Low income wages did keep up with inflation. So one group that saw wages exceed, wage increases exceed the official inflation rate was low income, low income people. So again, interesting fact, I mean, all of this, yeah, anyway, interesting fact, let me just see if there's anything else on the wages. But yes, low income wages generally have done well over the last, I'd say five, six years. Parts of that is the cutting corporate taxes. I said at the time when corporate taxes were cut, one of the great people, the people who benefit from cutting corporate taxes are customers, prices go down, and wage earners, employees, wages go up. And indeed, since the corporate tax cut, wages are generally trended upwards. All right, let's see, oops, what did I, I didn't intend to close that. All right, all right, some of you might know, Trump, Elon Musk is under trial today, yesterday and today, he testified yesterday, he's testifying today, in a trial brought against him by shareholders of Tesla, who claim that a tweet he made in 2018, God, I closed the window where I had the tweet lined up for you guys, so I could read you the exact tweet that Elon Musk sent, but there it is, I got it. All right, so this is the tweet Elon Musk tweeted in 2018. All right, come on, open, there we go, all right. Quote, I'm considering taking Tesla private at $420 per share, funding secured. Now, at the time, Tesla stock was trading at significantly below $420 a share, about 20% below. This is gonna be a 20% premium over the price. So again, I'm considering taking Tesla private at $420 a share, funding secured. Now, it turned out days later, that he was not gonna take Tesla private and that the funding was not secured in the sense that he was still negotiating with the Saudis, the Saudis were gonna provide the money to buy Tesla and he was negotiating with them, it turned out that they backed off the deal to buy Tesla, help him buy Tesla at $420 a share. So the question is, did he mislead investors here? Did this cause investors to lose money? Did this tweet, tweet, remember, this was a tweet, that this tweet was, you know, cause people to buy Tesla in anticipation that the stock would go up to $420, did this lead people to, I don't know, cover positions, change positions, did it change their behavior? And the answer to that is, I think, yeah, it must have. I mean, this is real information. Remember at the time Elon Musk was both chairman of the board and the CEO of Tesla? So there's no question that a tweet like this, which provides new vital information, important information, significant information to your investment, would change your behavior as an investor. But then the question is, okay, but was this, was this a, you know, just providing information to investors and then it turned out the information didn't come true and tough, or is this constitute deception? And the deception, again, and a lot of this is gonna go down to the way the law is written, but deception I think has to do with, partially with intent and partially with, did Elon Musk actually consider taking Tesla private? Or was he lying? And the second question was, is was funding secured or at least was Elon Musk convinced that funding was secured? Now, this is a case that's already been decided by the SEC in a sense. The SEC decided that this was, this was an inappropriate communication by the CEO. It decided that this hurt investors, that this was a violation of Elon Musk's fiduciary responsibility to Tesla shareholders. And they have found, they have massively fine Tesla for this and they find Elon Musk. So all of that is already done. And, you know, there, I think you would know my position. My position is, SEC shouldn't exist. This is not the purview of the SEC. The SEC should be looking for fraud. There's no reason to believe this is fraud. The SEC should be budding out of this. On the other hand, this lawsuit is completely appropriate. The lawsuit actually makes sense. This is the appropriate venue to, you know, get the facts and for a jury to decide whether this was, this tweet was deceptive and whether Elon Musk knew it was deceptive and whether he had violated his fiduciary responsibility shareholders. This is the forum in which these kind of issues should be discussed. Now, let me just say that if any CEO out there had said this about his company and it turned out not to be true, they would have been fined by the SEC. Indeed, my guess is that Elon Musk, because of the high profile that he has, probably got off easy from the SEC. I think another CEO would have been, you know, would have just been destroyed by something like this by the SEC. All right, so, but remember this is not, okay, put that aside. Okay, so this is, so this is Tesla 2018, I think this tweet was put out in 2018. So the real issue here is a legal issue. Did Elon Musk know what did he have reasonable reason to think when he said funding secured, did he have reason to think so? Now, Musk is saying, look, I actually did intend to take Tesla private or I was considering it. He doesn't say here is a done deal. And I actually thought the funding was secured. And he says, look, I had a handshake deal with the Saudis and then they backed down. I had talked to another people who said they would probably back the deal. I mean, my guess here is that funding secured is inaccurate and wrong and he shouldn't have said it because the funding wasn't secured. My guess is that legally funding secured means something. You have a contract, you have a real commitment. It's clear that he didn't. I think this is why one shouldn't communicate by tweet, important issues because tweets tend to be loose. I mean, but that's what he's testifying. He testified yesterday. He actually thought he was doing the right thing. He said that he made this announcement in order to let all investors know because the next day there was gonna be a story in the Financial Times that suggested this is a possibility. By the way, if he just let the Financial Times, article come out the next day, he would have spared himself all this legal trouble, all these fines, anybody with a little sensibility with regard to the SEC, anybody with a little sensibility with regard to shareholders and what, shareholder lawsuits, you don't make these kind of public statements. You just don't. So this is a little bit of Elon Musk being impulsive. This is a little bit of Elon Musk, not talking to lawyers before making an announcement, which any other CEO would have done. Maybe this is inevitable. If you get Elon Musk as a CEO, he's gonna do things like that. He has testified in the court case that he believed he absolutely had the funding secured. And he also said that he was definitely considering taking Tesla private, but was not committing to doing it. My guess is that he is gonna be exonerated here, but it really is hard to tell. I mean, it could be that they get somebody from the Saudi Investment Fund to come on and say, no, we never had a handshake deal. Elon Musk is lying, and then he gets found guilty. So this is gonna rely on, this is not some, I mean, this is not a crazy case. This is not some witch hunt. Although again, I reject the idea that the SEC should be doing this, but this is in the court, this makes complete sense. If you're gonna be a CEO in a modern corporation and you don't wanna destroy your company because it's in a heavily regulated business, if you wanna accept government money and by implication of accepted the SEC's role in regulating you and everything else and the framework of corporate law that exists today, you better have lawyers, you better have lawyers. And if you don't, then don't be surprised by what happens. So exactly what happens, we will see. I think Elon is presenting the defense basically, I thought it was a done deal and I had every positive intention and I did say consider, I think the burden of proof here is fairly high that he didn't. I think that you're gonna have to get somebody saying, no, we never promised anything. I don't know if the Saudis are gonna be testifying, but it will be interesting if they do and if they do what they say. But this is one of the usually class action lawsuits like this are completely nuts and completely devout of any merit. Here there's at least some merit. You can understand why people who may be bought on that assumption or sold in that assumption if they were holding options are pissed off and feel like they were manipulated. All right, that is in the news. We will see what happens to Elon Musk. I'll fill you in once there's a verdict and when there's a decision actually made. All right, that is it. This went way too long. Again, we're about, we need about a couple of bucks again from everybody who's listening live to make our numbers. But let's thank you, Vladimir, thank you, Scott. Thank you, Paul, thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Bonnie. All right, let's take some questions. Jeff, he says we need to talk about the end of this season of Fowder. I haven't seen the end, so don't say anything. I'll see it tonight. I didn't think this season was heading in a good direction. It's got all the positive elements. It's a suspense, intensity. It's got big plot holes, but it really keeps you on the edge of your seat. And then philosophically, ideologically, there's something a little off on this season. So we'll see what the final is and how it all plays out. I'm sure I'll comment on it after I watch it. Michael says, thanks for being the only teacher I ever had who made sense of the world to me. Oh, I appreciate that, Michael. That's a huge compliment. Thank you. All right, last question from Michael. So time is running out. If you want to support the runbook show, Morning Shows, Michael says, do you think if they cat NASA, we will see a lot more innovation in private space travel? If SpaceX gets the first man to Mars, will there change your view of Elon Musk? No, I mean, I don't think if they cat NASA, we'll see a lot more innovation in private space travel. It's not clear that NASA's holding back or prompting space travel. NASA is providing a lot of money to SpaceX. It's not clear that SpaceX is viable without NASA or any of the other, Blue Origins or the others. So it's quite reasonable to think that NASA will be one of the reasons and one of the inspirations to pushing man to Mars. The question is, what is the value of getting man to Mars? And if you cannot do it without government support, is it worth doing? And is it worth doing now versus in 2030, 40, 50 years? I mean, I find the idea of going to Mars inspirational. I find it amazing, good for Elon Musk. I'm a fan of the idea of going to Mars. But don't be out of the illusion that without the government support, this would happen. It's not clear that it would. But that also should tell you that it's not clear how much of a real value it constitutes. So without NASA, would we have gone to the moon? Probably not where we went. Maybe at some point, but not where we went. And not without some real changes. Not without some real changes to the structure of all, to the incentive structures around going to space. For example, the United States is signing on to a treaty that basically says there's no private property in space. Well, that is not gonna encourage people to go to space. You'd have to get out of that treaty and you'd have to change the entire incentive structure around it. You have to make private property the means that the engine to drive going to space. All right, ooh, we got a bunch of super chats made our goal. Thank you guys. Ashton is here. Can you be an historian and be an objectivist as well? What is the purpose the historian has to impact on society? Yes, absolutely. You've got a number of objectivists, the starians, and there's no reason you can't. You can be an objectivist and pretty much be any, participate in any field. I think history has a massive impact on you as an individual and on a society and a civilization. History is the laboratory from which we learn about what works and what doesn't, what is possible and what is not. How do we know what we know about human nature and about human abilities and about, you know, almost everything we know? We know by knowing history and inducing from our knowledge of history. It's only through the knowledge of history do we know, not just in theory, but in practice, that capitalism works. We know that, you know, the history of capitalism. We know the consequence of war because we study history. We know the consequence of being weak because we study history. We know what socialism does, not just in theory, but even theory wouldn't make any sense without, you can't have a theory without empirical evidence. So it provides the empirical evidence for human action, provides the empirical evidence for human understanding. History is one of the most important fields there is and it's one of the things that is most important to teach children because it's how they know about the world. But the only way you can test hypothesis about human behavior is by evaluating it historically. So you're studying human action, human action through our time. And then of course, how do we know, which is the objective theory of history? Objectivism actually has a theory of history. That ideas shape history. Well, you can trace ideas and events and you can see the relationship between ideas and events, but you couldn't do that unless you had a deep understanding of the events throughout history. So the relationship between ideas and events is crucial. So absolutely, you know, we've had, John David Lewis was an objectivist historian and unfortunately, he passed away a few years ago, a great loss, Steve Jolivet is an objectivist historian. They have been others in the past and they will be more in the future. So absolutely, not only can you be, but we need objectivist historians. We need to understand history in order to understand the present and in order to be able to make any kind of sense to be able to predict the future. Thank you, Ashton. $100, really, really appreciate the support. Thanks for being here. Richard says, will you be in Austin in the second half of April? If so, any public appearances? No, I do not expect to be in Austin, second half of April. I'm gonna be in Austin tomorrow for a few days, but not then. John, thank you for the support, really appreciate it. Michael, do you foresee social security being partially privatized in the next few decades or will they just increase the age of 75? I think it's much, much more likely that they increase the age first to 70 and then 70 too and then ultimately 75, then that it'd be privatized. I think privatizing social security or dramatic reforming social security is way in our future. It's, you know, you would have to have a real fundamental shift in the culture for that to happen and probably have most of the baby boomers dead by then. Karen asks, what is your view on the doomsday clock that was adjusted today? I think it's just a scam mongering technique. It's just a way to, again, another millennial cult about the end of the world. It is a disgrace and ridiculous and pathetic and because it, of course, it will always increase and what it doesn't take into account is all the technologies we have in order to increase the ability of human civilization to survive. So for example, climate change causes the doomsday clock to increase. Risk of nuclear war causes it to increase. But if the fact that we can survive climate change because of human ingenuity and changing technology, would that make any difference? So no, this doomsday clock is a clock that tells us how close we are to the end of human race. I think it's completely bogus. I don't trust the people who do it. I don't trust the analysis that they have. None of it. All right, thank you guys. Really appreciate it. Really appreciate us getting to our goal a second time this week. And let's see, tomorrow there'll be no shows but tonight there will be a show, 7 p.m. East Coast time. I'll post the topic later on. And then I will try to do some shows from Austin. Morning show is probably, so we'll see it'll be earlier than these shows typically are. There'll probably be 8 a.m. or 8.30 a.m. Austin time because I have a seminar I'm attending starting at 10 a.m. So I will try to get those done in the morning early. So that's probably good for those of you in Europe and those of you in the East Coast, not so good for those of you in the West Coast. All right, everybody, Capitalism 101, Rob says, not tonight, but I will return to Capitalism 101, don't worry. And tonight might be on the media, on mainstream media and media in general. And there's a number of good articles about the media, interesting articles about the media that have come out recently that I think are worth discussing. All right, thanks everybody. I will see you all hopefully tonight. If not...