 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 on this Sunday, November 13th. Hopefully everybody is doing phenomenally well, having a great weekend, already starting to be Thanksgiving. And here in Puerto Rico, I have to say, any excuse to start putting up Christmas lights and everything else. So Christmas is already, I think, officially started in Puerto Rico. It's a holiday. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if everybody just went on vacation from now until the end of December. But yeah, in Puerto Rico, the lights are up. People are starting to get into the festivities. No snow on the ground yet. Any day now, any day now, I'm sure there'll be a little bit of snow. But other than that, it'll be a perfect Christmas. So hopefully you guys are all ready to get into the holiday spirit and have a good time. All right, so I'm back for a couple of days. Today, tomorrow, I'll probably do a show tomorrow at 8 p.m. I will be doing a show tomorrow morning. I'm not sure exactly what time. It depends on other things in the schedule. But I am expecting a show tomorrow morning. The new Yuan Book news highlights that happen every morning. Not every morning right now. But every morning, hopefully starting in December, other than days that I'm traveling, we will try to do this week. We'll start on Monday. We'll see. There won't be one on Tuesday because I'll be flying. But we'll see about the other days of the week, depending on my schedule. But I'll try to do as many as possible. Those are going to be, you know, they'll be half an hour, 45 minute long shows, updating you on the news of the day. So you don't have to bother going and reading the news for yourself because you could be completely dependent on me that way. No, I'm kidding. But that way you can get at least my analysis of the news. And then three or four times a week, we'll do the regular long format shows. We'll go deeper into a topic like we're going to go today. So we're adding a significant amount of hours of Yuan Book show to, for your, I guess, enjoyment, for your enjoyment in education and what is it, motivation, fuel, however you want it, however you view the Yuan Book show as for you. For that, you know, I'm hoping that this will work out to also increase funding because time is money. If I'm going to devote an extra, I don't know, five hours with prep time and everything to this, then hopefully that you guys will increase your support. So I'm hoping for those of you who support me monthly, maybe bump a little bit of your support up. For those of you who do not yet support us monthly, please do so. You can do on Yuanbookshow.com slash support. You can do it on Patreon, subscribe, start locals. And of course, we'll have super chat and we'll have targets for the long shows that will stay for now at 6.50. And we will also have targets for the short shows. I think we'll start there at about 2.50. And hopefully we can meet those targets as we have in the past. But again, that's up to you. Primarily those of you who are listening live. You're the guys responsible for the... There goes Dave. We'll be talking about Dave's movie, Shoshak Redemption in a minute. Well, a few minutes. So yes, we're keeping the target of 6.50. Hopefully you guys will rise to the challenge. And we'll establish a $250 to $300 target on the short episodes. I want to remind you, and then I'll jump right into the topic, because I promise you we'll be talking about Bitcoin. We'll be talking about crypto, particularly FDX. Almaden, we'll be talking about what happened, what this bodes for the future of crypto, and for the future of Bitcoin and things like that. But we'll also be talking about, after that, we'll be talking about Shoshak Redemption. I'll give you my views on the Shoshank. So I want to remind you that sponsorship of a show is $1,000. You can also sponsor, which means you get to determine the topic and get credit for the show. Also, you can sponsor the new shows, the morning shows, five shows, a week of shows for $1,000. So if anybody would like to do that, would like to get their name associated with a week's worth of shows that's $1,000 or $200 a show, whatever you want to do. That's how much it is. If you want to do a $200 a month subscription, that'll give you one show, but generally it'll be $1,000. If you want to do a week, $1,000 for the show. Of course, movies are $500. Songs are $250. TV episodes are $250. Books, I don't have a number. You'll just have to offer me something if you want me to read a book. Books are long. All right. So that's where we are. Looking forward to more changes for the Iran Book Show as we move into 2023. I really want to figure out how to increase the profitability of this platform, but also increase the number of subscribers. For some reason, I think maybe it's all my coverage of the election and maybe the election outcome. We've lost some subscribers over the last week. That's not good to be in the negative. So we're just under $34,000. We had reached $34,000 and we sunk just underneath. So I think it's going to be important to figure out ways as we move forward to increase subscribers. I'm open to suggestions from you. Maybe as Twitter evolves here, we'll be able to do some advertising on Twitter, maybe figure out how to do that, so as to increase visibility of the show around the world and increase the number of subscribers. We should be at $100,000 by now, but let's get to $34,000 and hold, at least. And of course, I could use your help with that and I think the primary help that you can provide is by sharing the show. Also remember, you can become a member of the show. I see Fred Harper and Wanda Freeman and Daniel and Alicia are not members yet. So you can become a member. It's like four bucks, something, five bucks. I mean, they're different levels. You can become a member. That's another way to support the show. I will start. I promise. I know I've said this before, but I will start in December to do a member's only show periodically. So that will happen starting in December. So if you want to participate in that show in the chat, but also to be able to view it live, become a member. Again, you can do it for five bucks a month or more, but so you've got that opportunity. Just click on the whatever the tab is in YouTube. Become a member or something like that. So now is your opportunity. Now is your opportunity. Daniel is going to be a member's only show. So sign up now. Now's the time to do it. All right. Alexis says just to celebrate, he gives me 17.99 pounds, which the pound is increased in value now. So as interest rates in the United States are plummeted for a different show, we'll talk about that. But he says just to celebrate all the subscribers you lost because they couldn't handle seeing the dearest leader getting whacked. Thank you, Alexis. Alexis is a great way with words. It's perfect. Perfect. All right. So let's talk about FTX and crypto. And I apologize in advance for two things. I apologize in advance. One is that it's crypto. So a lot of this is super abstract. A lot of this is difficult to understand. And I have to admit I'm not an expert on crypto. I'm not an expert on this. I think I get what's going on, but I'm still not an expert on it. So as a consequence, you know, I'm going to try to explain it, but I'm sure they're getting people in the chat saying, oh, no, no, you're on. What are you talking about? Be patient with me, but we will get through this and we will get this right. So we're going to talk about what happened. So one, I'm apologizing in advance for my limited, although I think substantial knowledge. And second, I apologize for the fact that it's super abstract. It's difficult to get your head around. So I'm going to try to help you to simplify it. See, Daniel just became a member. See, it works. Daniel just became a member. You too can become a member. Friend Harper, who else? Alicia, you could all win the Freeman. This is like a nice Frappuccino or something. So yay, you know, become members and we'll do the members only show. All right. So this is abstract stuff. So we'll try to explain it in simple terms, but it is, there are challenges involved. So there are challenges involved. So hopefully I'll be able to break this down in a way that is understandable to everybody. Let's start just with the headline story. FTX, which is the third largest crypto trading platform, together with its sister company Alameda Research, which was a nominally a crypto, a trader, not a trading platform, but somebody who traded crypto for profit and did other things as well, invested in different crypto companies, invested in different things, we'll get to Alameda in a little bit. Both of those companies, plus the US subsidiaries Alameda is in Hong Kong and FTX is established in Bahamas. I will stop calling people by name to do it. Sorry, guys. But thank you for all of you who are subscribing to the membership platform. Thank you. So all of the entities in the US subsidiaries as of Friday filed for bankruptcy. Sam Backman Freed, Sam Backman Freed who goes by SBF and is known as SBF in the crypto world and talks about himself as SBF in the crypto world. SBF six months ago or so, seven months ago in the spring was worth $26 billion. He's the second largest fortune made from crypto as far as we know. They might be richer people who we just don't know, but SBF had $26 billion with a B, billion with a B as of in the spring. As of last Friday, not this Friday or a week ago, maybe two weeks ago, not sure the exact date right now, he was worth $16 billion. So he had lost some money with all the crypto challenges and all the crypto, everything else declining in crypto. He had lost some money, but he was still with $16 billion. I don't know if you have a sense how much money that is. That is unbelievable in terms of the size of wealth, the quantity of wealth, one of the richest people in the world. As of today, he's worth some way in the vicinity of zero, zero. That is one of the largest individual wealth, although I'm going to put wealth in quotation marks for now, wealth destruction in history. And it's happened faster than I know from anybody. So we saw it collapse within a week from $16 billion to zero. That's pretty amazing. That's pretty amazing. All right, so let's try to walk through this and let's try to see. First, we'll talk a little bit about SBF. And we'll talk, we might mention CZ, whose name I can't pronounce, but CZ, who is actually the richest person in the crypto world, who is the CEO, founder and owner of Binance, another crypto exchange. So I want to go through kind of the history of this, the story that is involved about this. And we can see then what lessons can be learned on this. It's very simple to say SBF is a dishonest guy. He's a bad guy. That's it. It has no relevance to the rest of the world because he's just a bad guy. He's a fart. He's a crook. Maybe to turn out he's a farting crook. There's no question that he did some fraudulent things here. There's no question that he lied and deceived. That's no question. The bigger question is why did people engage with him? If everybody knew he was a farting crook, why did people continue to engage with him? Why did this scheme continue to go on for as long as it did? Why was he worth $16 billion? Is this relevant to anybody else? After all, FTX is not the first crypto exchange to go under. It's not the first crypto scheme to go under. Many others have gone under. In particular, some very large ones over the last six months have gone under. So is this really an aberration? Is this an aberration because one individual is a bad guy? Does this represent something more substantial about crypto and a weakness in the system, in the market? And then now the big question, of course, which is going to hover all of this in a big way, and you're going to see people talking about this a lot, is does this mean that crypto needs to be regulated, controlled? Is this proof, as many people are already claiming and you'll hear more in the days to come, is this proof that generally finance has to be regulated? Because finance left alone, as crypto generally is left alone, results in instability and collapse and disaster in all these horrible things that are actually, indeed, happening in the crypto world. Is this a consequence? And this will be the language. What is this a consequence of too much freedom? Of too much freedom, right? So those are some of the issues, I think, that are important to discuss and go through as we look at this. And if I skip any of what I just promised to talk about, feel free to send me a, what do you call it, a super chat to remind me that I promised to talk about X, or Y, or Z. I see a lot of super chat questions coming in. That's great. We've got time today. We should cover them all. It would be great if ultimately we had some on the topic. I also see a lot of $20 and $100 for Michael. Thank you, Michael. Super chat questions coming in. Feel free to, yeah, I mean, $20 plus dollar questions are significantly preferred, particularly when we have a lot of content and we can't go all day. So yes, let's blow away the $650 goal and reinforce the new strategy for the Iran Book Show. Okay. So just a little bit of history because I think it is interesting. There's a gentleman, Fried, a graduate from MIT. He's got both his parents are professors of law at Stanford, which is interesting because I suspect Sam is going to need a good lawyer. So he comes from a successful family, a family of academics. He is an MIT grad. So he obviously did well. He worked for Janus, I think Janus Securities for a while. In 2017, he found a crypto trading firm. So this is a firm that actually trades in crypto and this is Alameda Research. Sam is SFB. Sam is SFB, sorry, SBF. Sam is the founder and up until Friday, the CEO of FTX. So he founded Alameda Research as a trading company. He founded this company in Hong Kong to avoid basically US law and US regulations because the things he was doing were illegal in the United States. And a lot of what they did early on was what's called arbitrage. Arbitrage is, you know, arbitrage should be risk less. And what you're doing with arbitrage typically is taking advantage of mispricing. Of a price, let's say, let's say, I'm trying to think of an example. Let's say the iPhone is selling at the store over here for $1,000 and across the road it's selling at a store for $1,500. And you can trade. You can trade with the stores and you can replace the stores. So basically you go into the store for $1,000 and you buy it and basically you sell it for $1,500. You're the store on the other side of the road. You sell for $1,500. Now, like that can't happen if the stores are across the street from one another because people would go to the cheaper store and they would never go to the more expensive store. But it can happen on sophisticated assets like a Bitcoin when the two assets are trading on exchanges on different continents, maybe with different rules, maybe because there's information is moving slowly. Maybe you have some kind of informational edge or maybe you have just a trading edge. So what SBF, what they would do is, SBF is back when we feed. So what Elameda Research would do is they would buy Bitcoin where it was cheap and sell Bitcoin where it was expensive. And you don't make huge amounts of money on any particular deal, but if you do it in bulk you can make a lot of money. Now this was a business in 2017 that was quite profitable. Today it probably is not profitable at all because a lot of people in the business as you do that, the price is converged and it goes to zero. So it just doesn't exist anymore. And of course networks have become faster, arbitrage goes away. But that's how we got to start basically on trading strategies, how to make money off of Bitcoin trading. That expanded how to make money off of crypto trading. Generally buying and selling crypto in some extent speculating, buying the cryptos that may be peaked, sorry, selling the cryptos that may be peaked, buying the cryptos that were up and coming. You know cryptos have this, you could launch a crypto and it can go through the roof suddenly. Dodgecoin if you remember which was launched as a joke was embraced by Elon Musk and it went through the roof and it still trades at a massive price. So the whole idea is to try to figure out who the losers and who are the winners and buy and sell and buy and sell and buy and sell. And then he got into the business and he created FTX and FTX is a platform that basically allows people to store their coins, their cryptos and to trade them to go through this exchange. I can buy it, I can give them dollars and get Bitcoin, I can store my Bitcoin, I can use that Bitcoin to buy Ethereum or I can buy Dodgecoin or I can buy FTT which is the coin issued by FTX which is the exchange. They issued a coin, think about the FTT coin, the coin some crypto companies issues is almost like stock that they've issued. It gives you some stake in the company. Now you're a lot of people because they're trading, right? They're buying and selling, buying and selling, buying and selling into different cryptos and also in and out of dollars. They store their crypto in at the exchange. So it's stored at FTX so that it can easily be you've got an account at FTX, it's like you guys have an account, let's say a Schwab and then the money's sitting in an account in cash and then you can use that cash to buy stocks whenever you want. So you don't have to like, oh, I want to buy a stock right now. Let me transfer money from my bank to Schwab and then no, you keep the money at Schwab. Well, people kept their equivalent of their money, their cryptos, at FTX so that they could trade them. Now FTX promised that everything that you stored at FTX was going to be held by FTX so anytime you would want it, anytime you wanted to withdraw your money, it would be there because they claimed they had it fully reserved. Turns out that was a lie. It turns out that they were using some of your deposited crypto for other purposes. Maybe the biggest purpose that they used this other crypto was to lend money to their sister company, also owned by SBF. And that sister company is Alameda Research. Now Alameda Research, when it was being trading, we don't know how much money it was making on trading, it was doing speculative things, but it was also investing in startups, in crypto startups. All kinds of crypto startups, very, very illiquid, out of a crypto startup very quickly, if at all, if ever. So it was acting like a venture capitalist. In addition to trading, in addition to doing who knows what, we will find out in the months to come what else they were doing. Okay, remember that. In addition to that, when a lot of the other crypto exchanges and crypto companies got into trouble earlier this year, Alameda Research marched in and helped bail some of them out, literally gave them money to bail them out in exchange for, I think, an equity position, and it sometimes just took them over. So both the exchange, FTX and Alameda went in and bailed people out, used whatever resources they had to bail them out. Now, one of the questions is where were they getting their money? Well, it turns out that a lot of what Alameda Research was doing, this trading and bailing everybody out and investing in venture, was not just the equity, the money that its investors had given it, but it turns out that it was borrowing money from banks, borrowing large sums of money from, you know, I don't even know if it's their banks, we'll find out again in the months to come, but they were borrowing money from somebody. Large amounts of money they were borrowing in order to engage in, all I can say, speculation, and I'll say something more about crypto in a minute in speculation and crypto, but in speculating and in making these long-term investments. So they were borrowing a lot of money. But when they started bailing out these troubled companies and when Bitcoin started declining dramatically earlier this year and all the other crypto were going down significantly, particularly over the last six months, but really over the last year, when all of that started happening, its borrowers said, wait a minute, we want our money back. We're a little worried. This looks a little riskier than we thought in the go-go days at the beginning of last year when anything you touched in crypto went through the roof. We want our money back. We're not going to lend you more money or we want you to pay off your debts. Well, it turns out that during that period, FTX lent money to Alameda Research, Almeden Research, not Alameda. Almeden or Alameda? Almeden, I think. Almeden Research. Lent their money in order to pay back the banks. Now, what was this money? This is the money that the equivalent of. This is the money backing up those deposits people had with FTX. So they went out taking your deposits and shifting them with the idea that Almeden will pass back. When they pass back, we'll hold with our investors. No problem. It turned out that Almeden, and I'm sorry this is getting complicated. I know it's complicated, but life in the world, certainly crypto and fraud generally is complicated. It turned out that Almeden Research, who was borrowing money from all kinds of people, right? Sorry, Alameda. Alameda, okay, so Alameda Research, was borrowing money from all these people, was using in a sense as collateral as a basis for the valuation, the asset base. They were using FTT, which was the coin issued by FTX. She can see now how everything was kind of wrapped around itself. There was no there, there. There was no real asset. There was just FTX and Alameda switching money around to where it was needed and moving it around. Now, I think FTX was probably profitable off of its trading business, just because what does an exchange do? An exchange takes no risk theoretically. All exchange does is it facilitates transaction. It takes a fee. So it really looks like FTX just straight out on their trading business was profitable. But most of those profits were sent to Alameda, which was not profitable, was losing money. Or it was investing in a very, very illiquid stuff that we won't know if it's profitable for a long, long time. And at the same time, and at the same time, they were covering for each other. So that both in the end landed up being insolvent, because a big chunk of FTX's assets now, all those profits and some of the deposits, were now basically in IOU from Alameda. But Alameda, its assets were basically the coin of FTX. If one of these two goes under, both go under. So about a week and a half ago, an article was published in one of the big crypto magazines, Coinbase, something like that. Basically saying, you know, we've looked at Alameda's balance sheet and it looks kind of spooky. It doesn't look very clean. Something weird, coin desk. Thank you, coin desk, probably should. It doesn't look very clean. Something wrong is going on here. It has too much of this FTX stuff. But it looks like this business is really losing a lot of money. As a consequence of that, people started selling the coin, FTT, that underlies FTX and Alameda, and its price started going down. People also started withdrawing, because they knew of this relation between FTX and Alameda. They started withdrawing the coin from FTX. The real kicker was, I think it was Monday or Tuesday last week, the CEO of Binance. His name is CZ. He goes by CZ, they'll let us see the letter Z. Announced that they were selling all of their FTT coin. It turns out that they had invested in a bunch of FTT coin. They had a lot of it. Now we'll get to other reasons why Binance didn't like FTX. There are other reasons, legit, that they didn't like them, but we'll get to that in a minute. I haven't yet looked into the business model of Binance and whether it's solid, but we will see. So CZ announced that they were going to sell a bunch of FTT, all of their holdings of FTT coin. This, of course, only accelerated the sale of FTT coin across the board. People were drawing their money from FTX. SBF, Sam Bankman-Fried, came on and said, oh, don't worry, people, we're fine. We can redeem you. We can pay you back. Everything is good. We can actually, if you've got coin deposited with us, we will return that coin to you. Don't worry about it. Everything's covered. Within a day, it was obvious that was not true. Within a day, it was obvious that they could not. They could not redeem everybody out. They could not send coin to everybody. While SBF was telling the world that everything was fine, no problem, he was calling up potential investors. Beginning, he tried to raise $1 billion to give them liquidity to be able to cash people out. But as the day evolved, it turned out that $1 billion was not going to be enough. It went up to $6 billion. And of course, there were no investors out there willing to bail him out. Nobody was willing to put the cash, even though for a variety of reasons we will get to, SBF was the poster child of crypto. Nobody was willing to give them the money. And as the week evolved, it was clear that they were bankrupt, that they were going bankrupt. On Wednesday, I think it was, CZ announced that Binance would actually buy FTX and bail them out. Not clear what the price was, he said. We'll do our due diligence, we'll determine the price, but we're going to buy it at a significant discount and we're going to take it over. By Thursday, CZ Binance announced that they were not going to buy it. The things looked much worse at FTX than they expected, that they did not want the headache, they did not want the hassle and it didn't look like it was worth it. And they withdrew, they were offered to buy them. And at that point FTX imploded Friday morning, they basically announced a complete and utter bankruptcy. We'll see how many people get their money back, you know, how many people, you know, there are billions of dollars here of people's deposits. Some people will get their money, some people will not, some people will get a fraction. We will see how it all ultimately evolves. All right, put a line in the sand there, that's kind of the story of what's happened. One other dimension to this which I think is fascinating and which is really reflected in, you know, watching a post headline from yesterday, which I think captures a dimension of this which I think is interesting. Crypto, this is the headline. Crypto King, Sam Bankman-Fried, charmed Washington, then FTX failed. Now this is actually a pattern, a pattern. It turns out that Sam Bankman-Fried was at the forefront of trying to get government to regulate crypto. He was very active in Washington D.C. He knew everybody in Washington D.C. There is now suspicion that SEC, I think SEC chairman, Gensler, was somehow involved with SBF and maybe even received some funds from him. So maybe there's corruption at the highest levels of the SEC. We don't know pure speculation, but there is a story out that suggests that maybe something was going on there that is irresponsible. Or fraudulent. But we'll see, I'm not going to say it is because I don't want to get into trouble and I don't know for a fact that that's the case. But there's no question that SBF spent a lot of time in Washington. Many people say he spent more time in Washington lobbying than he spent in the Bahamas where the company is based actually running the company. His lobbying was to try to put together regulation. That would benefit FTX. And according at least to Binance, CZ at Binance, this regulation would have helped FTX and heard Binance and heard the rest of the industry. Indeed, one of the conflicts between Binance and FTX was around this idea of regulation. Binance at least says that they are for, they are for markets, free markets, no regulation, let crypto rip, and no government regulation. And FTX was obviously for regulation. So one of the areas of conflict and one of the comments that Binance CEO, CZ mentioned when he said he was going to sell FTX's coin, FTT, was we don't want to support somebody who's trying to regulate the business and trying to regulate in a way that favors them and hurts us. So good for them for doing that. Another aspect of SBF's time, if you will, in Washington is that this became kind of a political issue. It was not just now just even a regulatory issue. It was not just now an issue of the business model. Sam Bankman-Feed became, if you will, a real political figure. It turns out that SBF is the second largest contributor, second largest individual contributor to the Democratic Party. Anybody know who the largest contributor to the Democratic Party is? I'll give you five seconds to think of it before I tell you it is, of course, George Soros. The second largest benefactor to the Democratic Party individual is Sam Bankman-Feed, who gave hundreds of millions of dollars last year to the Democrats. SBF got involved in a number of different campaigns and a number of different political issues and became a real force behind the Democratic Party and bought lots of influence within the Democratic Party. This is going to make the whole court hearings and his trial and prosecution, if it's going to come, to that very, very interesting because this guy is deeply connected into the entire Democratic Party infrastructure. One other dimension of this, which I think is interesting, fascinating case, fascinating case. One other dimension, SBF not only $26 billion, not only the biggest supporter of the Democratic Party, not only an advocate of regulation, but all of this comes from a philosophical perspective. SBF is one of the more philosophical CEOs, at least was until Friday, CEOs in America. SBF, who's, by the way, only 30 years old. Imagine being worth $26 billion when you're not even 30. But SBF, 30 years old, was a big, big advocate of effective altruism, which he picked up at MIT. And he claimed that the reason he wanted to be rich, the reason he wanted to make as much money as possible, the reason he wanted to make a gazillion dollars, gazillion dollars, gazillion, whatever that is, is to give it away. That's effective altruism. That's the idea that you should go into the profession in which you will make the most money so that then you can give that money away and be effective in giving it away. So the other part of effective altruism is when you give it away, you give it to the best cause as possible and you monitor them and you check their effectiveness in the goal of filling the blank, whatever the goal that they make up for effective altruism. Indeed, before Friday, effective altruism, SBF and his variety of entities had given well over $100 million to effective altruism causes. I mean, one of the real cries of despair you probably heard Friday and over the weekend all across America and maybe all across the world is from people involved in the effective altruism cause who probably lost a lot of money because a lot of them were part of SBF's world of investment and coins and all of that. So they've lost a lot of money. And second, all the people running charities that were getting money from the effective altruism investors have gone. Indeed, I've seen some articles on the web declaring effective altruism over, finished, gone. And indeed, many of the charities that were doing effective altruism are probably going to be hoarding significantly because of the extent to which they were dependent on SBF. Anyway, so that is the world in which we live. That is the world in which we live. It's a crazy world. And there's a sense in which all of this is built on kind of a speculative mythology that's going on. There's a mythology around crypto. And that is that these coins are worth anything. That is that there's a business model here that makes some sense. Now, I get Bitcoin. Bitcoin wants to be the world's currency. People who are Bitcoin advocates believe that it will become the world's currency. That if there's enough adoption and it has these amazing characteristics and it can be anonymized, that it can become a decentralized private currency and they want to demolish central banks and this is the way in which it will happen. And they've created an algorithm with a finite number of Bitcoins so that you can have inflation. You have other problems. I'm not going to get into the whole critique of Bitcoin. You have all kinds of other problems, but it's a currency. That's its use. The use of Bitcoin is a currency. I get that. I even respect that. I don't think it will ever happen. I think it's a myth. I think it's part of this mythology, but they have a case. There's something to be done here, right? I also think that Ethereum, to some extent, to the extent that I understand Ethereum, is trying to make a case that they are creating something that's more than a currency. They're creating, in a sense, a medium exchange that is tied up with a contract, with a customizable contract so that when you exchange stuff, you're not just transferring money, but you're actually engaged in a contractual relationship with the other side. And that is what Ethereum, this is the whole idea of smart contracts and a gazillion applications of smart contracts. So I get the value and I think there's something there. Again, I don't understand it enough. I haven't dug into it enough to know, but it strikes me that there's something there. I don't think anybody's figured out exactly what that thing is, but I think there's something there. So I get Bitcoin. I don't think it'll succeed, but I get it. I get Ethereum. I actually think it has a better chance of succeeding, at least the model, whether it specifically exceeds or not. But then all these are the coins and cryptos. And what are these exchanges actually doing? I mean, it's one thing if the exchanges were involved in people buying Bitcoin or buying Ethereum or buying, let's say, half a dozen other crypto coins that had some rationale behind them. But my understanding is most of what happens in the exchanges is people exchanging coins for coins, tokens for tokens, not using dollars to buy stuff, but constantly just living in a world in which there's speculation around these different coins. Now, the reality is that in the world in which we live right now, 90% of those coins are actually worthless, that the only thing keeping them afloat is people's interest in exchanging them. There's no there, there. This is speculation for the sake of speculation. And indeed, I think it's not just speculation, because speculation is actually a good thing. There's no speculation. This is mostly gambling. I think Dogecoin will go up this week. Let's buy some Dogecoin. Oh, the relate wheel hit red and I bet on red. Cool, I won. So what is going on in the crypto world or has been going on I'd say over the last two plus years is pure gambling. Just, you know, the worst kind of speculation. Now, again, it could be that in some cases there is some value somewhere. And some of the exchanges that are doing this speculation probably have value because they're making money off of the stupidity of other people. They're facilitating this trade. They actually have reserves to cover all the deposits. They actually have reserved one for one for every dollar deposit they ever reserve. For every coin deposit, they have the coin there. They haven't done what SBF has done. They haven't done what FTX and Alameda, which was unique because there was the two entities. They haven't done what the previous situations are stable coins, which were anything but stable. Algorithmic stable coins, which is just, again, gambling. It's just speculating that as long as people like your coins, everything is fine. The algorithm that keeps the coin value stable keeps stable. But as soon as people start disliking your coin, it spirals out of control and you go bust. What did it happen with them in just a few days? So, most crypto is worth zero and it's kept afloat by nothing other than people's subjective desire. Now, people's subjective desire is obviously worth something. People buy stupid stuff all the time. Remember, maybe you don't remember because this is back in the 70s or whatever, people used to buy pet rocks. I mean, people buy dumb stuff all the time. Stuffed animals for thousands of dollars. All kinds of things. Stuffed animals at least are kind of cute. But people are buying coins for the sake of buying coins. There's no there, there. What does a coin represent? What is it worth? Worth? How can you even talk about worth? Now, again, NFTs are a little bit more complicated because NFTs, you're getting something in return for your investment. You're getting an image. You're getting something that supposedly gives you some kind of unique property right over it. One of a kind or whatever. Again, that's your estimation of the value of it. Fine. NFTs, I have no problem with NFTs. I wouldn't buy an NFT because I don't value the thing that I would be getting. But this isn't even an NFT. This is just coins. It's just stuff. It's just a digital zeroes and ones. People are fascinated by this. Just like they were fascinated by tulips. Just like they're fascinated by certain stocks. They're fascinated by .coms. They're fascinated by real-world stocks when they came out. Here, of course, it's all hyper. It's hyper. It's more than any of those. It's a bigger bubble than any of those. Because it's all abstract. It's so easy. And people have convinced themselves that other people desiring it gives it actual value. Actual value to do what? I mean, I get Bitcoin. Bitcoin is, if you believe in the dream that it will become a currency one day, well, as a currency, it's going to be very, very valuable because there's a limited supply of it. And if it has to fund every transaction in the world and it's going to replace the dollar, that's where the value comes as a medium of exchange. Again, I think that's a bad argument. I don't think it'll ever happen. But if it happened, I get it. But all these other coins don't even have that dream. And there's no basis for that dream that any of them can be issued. I mean, one of the things that happened this morning or yesterday is that they've suddenly discovered 400 million extra FTT coins were distributed, were issued yesterday out of thin air. They're supposed to only come out on a certain schedule and yesterday was not part of that schedule. And then they, so somebody hacked, it looks like somebody hacked the FTX system and distributed 400 FTTs, 400 million FTTs, worth of FTTs. Now, God, I mean, that's the point. You could just issue 400 and what's it worth? What do you buy? What's behind it? So one other case of FTX, there seems to be financial fraud. And we'll get to the kind of financial fraud because I think it's interesting because I think most fraud cases, and this is a good example, the person doing the fraud never sits down and thinks, how can I fraud people? I don't think SBF was a fraudster in the sense of I'm going to take people's money, I'm going to steal people's money. That's my goal in life. I think he got into the slippery slope of trying to cover his ass, which is what mostly happens with financial fraud. We'll get to that in a minute. Crypto today has mostly, has no value, yet people trade it. The only value of the crypto exchanges is people exchanging crypto that probably doesn't have any value. People give it value only because of their desire to hold it. And at some point, that desire switches, goes away, transfers to something else. They need to buy a house. They have to liquidate the crypto. They need to buy this. They live in the real world. So be very, very careful. Be very, very careful. Now, suppose the Binance has a better business model than FTX. I don't know. Do you know for a fact that that's true? One of the things they're trying to get, all the crypto exchanges to do is actually audit them so that they have a proof that they have every coin that was deposited is still being held there for you. But there's challenges with auditing. Partially, it goes against the whole idea of crypto because you can have human auditors, the whole idea is to eliminate the human. There are protocols that could do the auditing, but they're not for proof. So they're real challenges. I would be careful. I would be very, very careful. This is in many ways much worse than Enron. So let's talk a little bit about financial fraud and then we'll talk about regulation. Most financial fraud happens in the following way. And this is what I'm describing now is basically a financial fraud that happened in a number of companies in the early 2000s, late 1990s, early 2000s. Let's say your company is doing great. And every quarter, you're announcing better and better earnings. And the share price is responding accordingly. It's going up and up and up and up. And shareholders are happy and you are happy as the CEO and all your employees are happy and the world is just an amazing happy place. And then suddenly, one quarter, earnings disappoint and they don't go up. They maybe stay flat or maybe they go down a little bit. And you say to yourself, you know, if I announce these earnings, people are going to be disappointed. They're going to be unhappy. People will sell the stock. The stock will go down. Investors will be unhappy. My employees will be unhappy. I will be unhappy. But I know I'm convinced, convinced that next quarter we're going to have phenomenal results. So what I'm going to do is this quarter I'm going to inflate my results a little bit just so we have a good quarter. Next quarter, when we have a phenomenal quarter because I know it's happening, I will deflate the results a little bit. This is called income smoothing. I'm going to smooth my income. I'm not going to announce disappointment or earnings. Just fudge a little bit, a little bit. Nothing serious. So you do it once. Nothing bad happened. Earnings announced. Stock keeps going up. This is cool. The problem is that the next quarter turns out not to be great. It turns out that maybe the previous quarter was down for a reason. Maybe there's a recession looming. Maybe there's just less interest in your firm. And the second quarter is again disappointing. Now you can announce big disappointment. The first quarter would have been little disappointment. Now it's big disappointment. You don't want to do that. She said, look, this is just silly. It's just accumulating. Everything's going to be fine. I'll just smooth it again. And you get to see a phone involved and there's enough flexibility with accounting that you can do this without it completely being nuts. You do it again. And everything's fine, except the third quarter is even worse than the first two. This is exactly what happened at WorldCom. WorldCom. So you fudge again. And now if you don't fudge, you're going to have to admit that you fudged in the past because now it's not smoothing anymore. It's not little stuff anymore. Now it's big. Now you're trying to save your ass. You're really trying to protect yourself now. It's legal stuff. And you can do this for a while. You can get away with false earnings for a while. And if you get lucky and things turn around and things go through the roof and things become great again, you can probably get away with it. You can smooth it all out. But it really happens that way. It really happens every time. So once in a while maybe things will go back up and you'll be fine. But enough times things will continue going down and you'll be crushed. I have a feeling this is exactly what happened here. FTX wanted to keep a one-on-one, really good, what do you call it, liquidity for its investors. They wanted to be able to redeem everybody. But then other companies started going bankrupt around and it was there and it was like, all this other crypto stuff is so cheap. I got to get involved in this. I don't have enough money right now. I'll just borrow a little bit. I'll pay it back later because I know I'm profitable. And I know, I know by the way, crypto will turn around, Bitcoin will turn around, everything will turn around. Remember everybody holds Bitcoin as collateral because Bitcoin is the most stable and Bitcoin is down almost 70% for the year. 7T, 7-0, that's a lot. Things will turn around, everything will be fine. So you help everybody out, everybody likes you because you're an effective altruist and everybody loves you and they send their love to you. But then things get worse and now some of your investment go bad and Bitcoin continues to go down and other cryptos that you're using as collateral continue to go down and the whole balance sheet is off and you have to lend even more money to Alameda but it will all turn around. I'm sure SBF till the very last minute believed crypto such a solid asset it all turned around, everything will be great. But it isn't because once, this is a great moral point. Here's the moral point. This is the objectivist moral point. Evasion never works. Evasion always leads to spiraling out of control. Lying, deception, dishonesty and by the way, the worst of all, dishonesty and by the way, the worst kind of lying, the worst deception, the worst dishonesty is lying to yourself, being dishonest with yourself always involves more and more and more and more dishonesty. It doesn't just end. It doesn't get fixed. Things just get worse constantly. Always. Think about from this. Not just if you're in finance, generally in life. Once you start deceiving yourself and others, once you start on a path of deception there is no coming back. It is a disaster. It is an absolute disaster. Evasion, ignoring facts of reality, pretending things are not something different than what they really are. Pushing stuff into the future I'll think about it tomorrow. The famous line from God, gone with the wind. I'll think about it tomorrow. Whenever you're tempted to do that, stop you're self-destructing. Bad things are happening. Don't do it. So that kind of evasion, that kind of dishonesty, that kind of pushing things to tomorrow, I'll think about it then. I won't think about it now. I'll pretend things are better than they are. Always comes back. Always backs fires. Always is destructive. That's the bigger moral point here. Think it through. Face... We all fail. We all make mistakes. We all screw up. All of us. Face it. You have employees. You have... Admit it. Pay up. Pay the piper. You will be so much better off. If disappointing earnings happen in the first quarter, okay. Stock will go down. I'll be worth a little bit less. So what? Well, I have my integrity. I'll have my honesty. And yes, it might get worse, but then I need to look at the recession. Is it the economy? Is it me? Is it the company? Do I have some bad salespeople? What is going on? But you see, by covering it over, you don't take the necessary actions to fix it. By rationalizing it away, you don't do what is necessary to put you back on the right track. You rationalize it away. And then things are guaranteed to get worse and worse and worse because you never fix the problem. So the bad something is reflective of. So a lot of good life advice from following these things and knowing what not to do in the future. All right. Let's see. Two other things I think that I find interesting. One is a lot of times companies that have CEOs that spend more time in Washington DC than they do at corporate headquarters are the first ones to go. Enron was like this. The CEO of Enron really didn't run the company. He was in charge of regulatory schmoozing. So a good sign of a stock to avoid, of a company to avoid, of a person to avoid, of a business to avoid is when they themselves spending huge amount of time in Washington DC. I guess everybody needs lobbyists. But if you're there, if you're schmoozing, if you're interacting, if you become politicized in that way you're probably not doing what's good for the business. So avoid political schmoozing CEOs. Jeff Immelt of GE was a schmoozing political CEO. So that's one. Second, this is not to condemn markets. This is what happens in markets. People do stupid things. They pay for them. And some of the people doing the stupid things are the people who invest in these kind of people. The people who use these kind of exchanges and don't do their due diligence. Don't do a proper due diligence into what's going on. Ultimately, they're going to be responsible for what happens. So this is not sold by regulation. Enron was a regulated business. Indeed, I would argue that more financial crises happen in regulated industries than in unregulated industries. So regulation is never the solution. And indeed, banks when they were free market under a proper property rights regime not in the United States, but in places like Canada, Scotland did phenomenally well with no regulation even though they had a fraction of reserve banking but they held enough reserves and they were disciplined by the market and you didn't have the kind of bank runs you had in the U.S. which was a politicized financial system from day one. The more politicized it becomes, the more problems there will be. Regulations doesn't solve this. Banks anymore. At least small banks anymore because we have FDIC insurance. The government can solve the bank run problem, but by doing FDIC insurance you create other problems. More hazard problems you create other problems that are associated with inefficient banks, with lack of innovation, lack of progress, lack of good investments, all kind of other problems. Regulations are never the solution. I have to admit that one of the astounding things about FTX is that some of the investors in FTX are pretty smart guys. Sequoia Capital had $260 million invested in FTX. They have basically written a letter to the investors saying they have written that down to zero. They have lost $260 million of their investors money on FTX. Now Sequoia can afford to do that because they make so much money on other investments at least used to. We'll see in the future if Sequoia is the same Sequoia as it was when it, you know, the founders of Sequoia basically passed away. So this generation of Sequoia VCs, are they as good? Do they know what they're doing? I saw them once make a big investment in a company that went bust in nine months. So even in the good old days they went bankrupt more than they succeeded, but when they succeeded they succeeded so much that they could afford to go many, many times bankrupt. But this is still a big amount. Right. That's what I have to say. I'm sure there's more to say about this and I'm sure as the story evolves I will be talking about it, maybe on the newsy shows that I'm going to be doing in the mornings. So starting tomorrow we'll start doing shows in the mornings. Short shows and then evening long shows. I know we have a large number of people live right now so I'll just mention this. Let me also mention we do have a super chat goal for the show, for the today's show, $650 we're about $300 short of that so given that there's so many people live on right now you can help support the Iran Book Show. If you found value in what I did today, said today please consider supporting the show with like a sticker or with a question. Try to make the questions $20 or more because otherwise we'll be here all night. We need 300 bucks so if somebody wants to do $100 like Dave Goodman did earlier that would be terrific so we can get there quickly. Yes, so please keep supporting the show. This is what makes it run. This is what makes it possible for me to devote the time that I do devote to the show. You can support it monthly at www.yuanbookshow.com. I see people are leaving because I'm asking for money but you know you got a value value for value guys. All right. Also don't forget to like the show before you leave. We've got 71 likes, 175 live watches so please like the show before you leave again assuming you like the show or you benefited from somewhat from it please please like it. All right. Let's see I'm going to look quickly through some of the super chats to see if there's any on the topic. Okay. Brie says has there ever been an economic study comparing the size of government to cronyism or corruption? It's pretty clear that the bigger the size of government the more corruption there is. I think we need to be able to prove mathematically that the government is a problem. PS, SBF airplane flew to Argentina on Friday. No it didn't actually. SBF in the Bahamas he's being monitored by the Bahaman authorities. He will not be allowed to leave the Bahamas. There's some speculation in flew to Argentina. It turned out he did not. There's some speculation now he's trying to go to Dubai but I think that the reality is that that people are going that what do you call it that the Bahaman authorities are watching him carefully. They're not going to allow him to leave. He still could leave. He could go by boat. Who knows? There's a lot of reasons why I don't think you'll leave. Colleen, thank you. Really, really appreciate it and thank you and Ryan for all the support you provide the show. Really, really appreciate that. Mike says thanks for the explanation. FTX $50. Really appreciate that. Mike, thank you. Thank you for that. Let's see if there's any others related to this. That's not it. Aristotle against Plato says what would happen if what would happen if never there were a new unit of currency introduced by anyone anyway? Wouldn't the global moratorium on this pact shut down the looters and moochers? I don't know what you mean. I mean wouldn't a global moratorium moratorium what on starting new coins on starting new currencies? You're not going to get either one of them. It's all hypothetical. The real monetary villains today are the Fiat bankers or the central bankers. But central banking is not going anywhere and it's too valuable for governments to keep it around. It's a huge source of power that they have over the economy and they're not willing to give it up to private enterprise. We've talked about the Fed and we've talked about the need to get rid of the Fed, but it's not happening. But I don't think crypto is going to replace that. I don't think crypto can replace that. I mean, I think it can in theory, but it cannot because governments won't let it happen. I also don't know that they ever will because I think that if you had free banking I don't think that crypto would win. I think gold would win. But let competition rip, right? Currency introduced by banks. Banks don't introduce currency. Banks don't create currency. I mean, this is a fallacy central bankers create currency. I do not have people say, banks just print money out of thin air. That's just not true. The best person on this is George Seljian. He's written extensively. It's just not a reality. I know that people claim this. It's just not true. It's just not true. Now, it's factional reserve banking leverages the currency that the Fed creates to create more currency. But I have no problem with factional reserve banking as long as it's disclosed, as long as it's not fraud. So, no, it is absolutely not true that banks create money out of thin air. Banks create money out of the reserves that they have, out of the deposits that you make. But money is in the hands of government. It's not going to go away. They're going to determine its future. And it would be great if crypto could take over the world. But it's not going to happen. It's just not. Okay, let me see. Okay, I think that's all the stuff that was directly relevant to this, at least in the $20 plus category. We've got a few. Here's one. Rob C. says, thanks for unpacking the SBF FTX Affair. Do you think a central bank digital currency is inevitable? God, I hope not. I mean, a central bank digital currency is a very, very scary proposition because the thing about a central bank digital currency is it's the opposite of crypto. It's the opposite of being anonymous. A central bank digital currency will allow the central bank and their full government to be able to track every single one of your transaction. It'll be able to track everything that you do. And it'll be able to create, like the Chinese, some kind of social credit system. It'll decide next time they do a COVID shutdown who to give money to and who to not very efficiently and very immediately. The last thing you want is to give government more tools to be more effective in controlling us, in monitoring us, in keeping track of us. Now, is it inevitable? I certainly think the powers to be Democrats and Republicans are going to push for it ultimately. There are a few voices standing up against it both within the Fed and outside the Fed. But it is the direction we're moving. I mean, what they're going to do and there was some talk in Scandinavia about doing this a few years ago, they're going to outlaw cash. Remember, cash is the ultimate anonymous mechanism as long as you don't take it to a bank. They're going to outlaw cash and they're going to acquire you to use the digital currency and that will be the end of liberty, the end of freedom. And it will be an unmitigated disaster if it happens. So it's something worth really, really, really fighting against. Isn't it inevitable? I hope not. I hope not. Mike says thank you for the explanation, FTX. We really appreciate the $50. Thank you, Mike. Let's see. Friend Harper says big fan of the news updates. They happen while I'm working so I can't make them, unfortunately. But the focus topic coverage is very appreciated. I'm rooting for the operation to succeed. Me too. Thank you, friend Harper with $50. Really appreciate that. All right. So I'm going to leave the rest of the super chat questions for later. Let me jump into a review of the movie Shawshank Redemption, which Dave Goodman suggested. And by the way, the $100 that was given earlier was by Michael Sanders, not Dave Goodman. I think I attributed to Dave earlier. Dave gave me $500 to review Shawshank Redemption. You can too. Give me some money to review a movie you like, but we can do that. Aristotle against Plato says did you just, I'm just, because it's relevant, did you just say Faction of Reserve Banking is not fraud? Does the guy you just courted know who to define the difference between money and counterfeit and connect the answer to article one, section B of the term USC? No, Faction of Reserve Banking is not capital and fraud because it is disclosed to you when you open up an account at a bank. You sign a document that permits the bank when you open an account. You sign all kinds of stuff. One of those things is a document permitting the bank to, you know, to basically not hold your money in reserve and to use it to make loans. It actually says that you cannot receive your money on demand, that there are circumstances in which the bank can delay returning your money to you. It's completely legal. It's a contractual arrangement between you and the bank. If you want banking with no Faction of Reserve, then you can negotiate that with somebody. But banks today are all Faction of Reserve Banking and they were under free banking even in the best regimes like Scotland and Canada. And there's nothing fraudulent about it. There's nothing fraudulent about it. It's not disclosed by force. The banks could be 100% reserve banks. Now today, in a sense, everything is fraud because the money is not real money. The money is paper money. The money is a money created secretly by a Federal Reserve that manipulates the value of that money constantly and is manipulating you. So there's a sense in which my system today is fraud. But in a free system the money would you know there is no fraud. It's a contractual arrangement. You could hold your gold. You could keep your gold. You could exchange the gold for currency only for the purpose of paying taxes and keep the gold and never deposit it in a bank. And that's fine. And some banks during the free banking era actually had 100% reserve and you can use those banks. But you'll have to pay them to hold your gold. Versus other banks that are fracture reserve banking, you would put the gold in and they would lend it out and they would pay you interest on the gold you had. So in a truly free banking banking system, different banks would behave in different ways. They'd have different profiles. Some would be super safe. Some would be risky. And you as the consumer as the consumer would decide on the level of risk you wanted to take on and that would determine where you deposited. There's nothing fraudulent about that. What's fraud today is not the banking, the banks the banks are just playing within the system they've been given. What's fraudulent today is the central banking system. But get rid of the central banking system and you get fractional reserve system. You still have fractional reserves without deposit insurance provided by the government. But the fractional reserve part of it is not the essential fraud. The essential fraud is the Fed. It's central banking. And here I massively disagree massively disagree with Rothbard and those Austrian economists who think that fractional reserve banking is a problem economically and as a fraud legally and morally and I completely disagree with people like George Seljan and Larry White who have written extensively about this, about the history of banking and about the benefits of fractional reserve. Alexis says quickly.com and housing bubble all over again with they're too good to be true deals. Why do people still fall for these scams? They still fall for them because a lot of them are young and they didn't live through the previous one. Each one is different. Each one sells a different kind of dream. Each one has lasts a little differently. But yes, the history is filled with these going back to chiller bubbles and in a world in which we live it's going to happen more often, not less often partially because money is not anchored in something like gold because of the central banking system that we live under because the false safety that we have, we think the government is going to take care of everything, the government will bail everybody out because of the dumbing down of all of us that happens because of regulations and government guarantees. So imagine a world in which you didn't have deposit insurance and you didn't have government guarantees to protect you at every corner people will develop better skills in determining what is a scam or what is not. All their financial world will not be about just blindly putting their money into a bank because the government guarantees it. But they would from the very young age would have to start considering and start looking for the kind of signals would be provided about what is safe and what is risky and how much risk and how much return do they require in order to take the risk and all of that which can only develop, that kind of society in which people think about risk in this way can only develop under freedom and the more freedom the more we start thinking that way. But when we don't have freedom and we don't think that way what do we get? We get a dumb down dumb down culture where you get more and more and more of these kind of scams or these kind of eras or these kind of mistakes or this kind of stupidity. But we definitely get dumb down culture. There's no question about that. All right, let me just quickly update you. I've got 96 likes but 173 watching live so they have to be people who are willing to just click that like button on your screen on your phone or whatever you're watching. It just helps the algorithms. I really appreciate it. It's not even money. It's just a little click that you do and it helps me who is providing you with these values that would be easy. In addition we're like 40 bucks short of making our goal. So if somebody wants to Aristotle with another 20 bucks that'll get us a little closer but Aristotle said just part of the fractional reserve if part of the fractional reserve is money then what is the name of the currency that is printed out of Confit? USC 1.8.6 I don't know. I don't really care because it's not relevant to the actual nature of money. No, all paper is all paper is all the notes are in a proper monetary system notes are claims against money. Money is gold or money is whatever we whatever the society decides in a sense through the market process is money is the money let's say it's gold and then we print pieces of paper which are claims against gold and we can print more claims against something for a short period of time as long as it's pending liabilities. So the pieces of paper are your use that's all they are that's what money is today. Now because there's no ultimate gold there's nothing I can claim against my dollars other than the purchasing power that's what creates the fraud. The fraud is created by but yeah Aristotle against Plato asked the United States Constitution is irrelevant. The United States Constitution is completely irrelevant to the question of what is money. What is money is a much more fundamental question than how do we form a Constitution or what does this particular Constitution say what our Constitution in America says about money is irrelevant to what money really is you know money is whatever the market will determine money to be money is not work that's that's nonsense. Money is represents the work but it's not the work the work is work. Money is the asset that represents the work. Money is an asset. Money is a physical asset in this case it's gold so but look I'm not going to get into the whole thing you should yeah money is not work itself. Money is exchanged for the work it's what you exchange your work for. It represents the value of the work that you do. So again U.S. Constitution is not a document in monetary theory. U.S. Constitution is not a philosophical document. U.S. Constitution was the founders the founders setting up a system a particular system of government but any particular element with it might be good it might be bad it might be wrong it might be right. The philosophical nature the nature of money is a different question. Alright let's move on because otherwise we'll be stuck on this question of money forever. I want to talk about Shashank Redemption. So I got to see Shashank thank you Nikolai Nikolas Navarro thank you for the contribution. I saw Shashank Redemption again last night in preparation for doing the show today as I said Dave Goodman paid me $500 to do it and I have to say after watching it again maybe the third or fourth time in my life that I've seen as saw when it first came out then I the Shashank Redemption I think my knowledge of movies Shashank Redemption is a really good movie and it's really good in many many many dimensions indeed I would argue that Shashank Redemption is one of the best movies made in the last 40 years. It's a movie if you haven't seen it I'd say definitely go watch it you know it's it's supremely enjoyable it's a movie that was made in 1994 so for many of you it's like a classic from a long time ago a classic but this is a terrific movie in every aspect it's beautifully acted just beautifully I mean it's Tim Robbins by far Tim Robbins plays the main character Tim Robbins by far best performance but I also think it's Morgan Friedman's best performance Morgan Friedman is excellent in it you know acting is superb I think in every aspect of the movie making way the cinematography is beautiful and amazing the things that the cinematographer chooses to focus on versus things that it doesn't focus on the way it lays out the prison, the way it creates that claustrophobic sense of what's going on there the things that it chooses to show you and the things that it chooses not to show you for example it doesn't choose to show you the extreme horrific violence that is involved in the movie you don't need to see it including sexual violence you don't need to see it but it's there and it's got a presence it's got this mechanism of narration that doesn't always work in many movies doesn't because it kind of distances you from what's going on I think it shows you how redemption it actually works really really well I think it's it lays out the story it gives you the highlights it gives you the things that you need to know in order to understand what's going what's happening what's going on and it gives you an intimate connection with the character Morgan Freeman who is doing the narration you get to learn about him as much as you get to learn about the plot you learn about his character and what kind of person he is and that is all good it's a movie that manages to handle some difficult topics topics that have to do with redemption topics that have to do with criminals these are criminals with exception of the lead character everybody in the movie is a criminal they're all murderers most of them are murderers not all of them Morgan Friedman we never know what exactly crime he committed but it sounds like he murdered somebody and it is a movie about redemption and about about rehabilitating oneself and what that means and I think it's quite effective in doing that it also I think deeply psychologically interesting movie in the sense of the kind of psychology you develop in prison and how difficult it is for prisoners to leave prison and how they associate their life with prison and they can't tolerate life outside I think that was really interesting and I think again important for all of this for the theme of the movie but the most interesting thing about the movie is its lead character Tim Robbins who plays Andy Dupree said in Massachusetts Andy Dupree is falsely accused of murdering his wife and her lover it's not a crazy accusations there's lots of evidence to suggest that he actually did it but I think we all as viewers know from the beginning that he did not we don't know who did at the beginning but we know it wasn't him again even that feature of it is that when the discovery about who is the murderer comes through it's a very clever I think plot twist plot device that is used Andy Dupree is a banker one of the few positive not just positive heroic portrayals of a banker ever in all of movie making just that would get short check redemption high on my list of favorite movies but he is a smart banker and one of the themes of the movie and ultimately the theme of the movie is that if you will redemption success and even hope and hope is this mixed term even hope because hope is requires reason requires thinking requires using your mind requires engagement thinking focus and the beautiful thing about this movie which is so rare in movies particularly prison movies is just the way in which Andy Dupree survives prison and ultimately gets out of prison I'm gonna try not to give too many spoilers gets out of prison through the use of his own mind he's for a variety of reasons he's in a really bad situation in his prisons things are not going way well for him but there's a scene in which he overhears one of the gods talking about a tax thing that he has and he basically goes up to the gods says I can solve this for you I mean the god almost kills him because how day he talked to him but he basically provides a solution for this god's tax problem which then which then turns his whole life around in prison because he becomes a tax advisor to all the prison gods and he starts doing the fraudulent accounting of the prison warden and his relationship to all of that changes dramatically and yet even when he's doing that even when he's writing high even when it seems like he's got a lot to lose the thing I love about Andy Dupree beyond not just the fact that he's using his mind using his reason is that he never loses his love of life here's another lesson for all of you never loses his love of life never loses his love of beauty my favorite scene in Shoshak redemption my favorite scene in Shoshak redemption since chills down is Andy Dupree is just he's running the library that's one of the the better jobs that he's gotten because he has he's helping out the gods and the wooden with all this money stuff but he gets a he gets a batch of new records for the library and he's playing around with the records he's looking at the records and he takes out a record of Mozart's of God what was it anyway one of Mozart's operas and he puts it on the record player in the office and the God has gone to the bathroom he locks the God in the bathroom and he turns it on he turns it he turns it on and he starts marriage a figure thank you Tom Thomas he turns it on and he starts listening to it and wow he's having a good time he's enjoying it and the God in the bathroom starts hearing this he goes he starts yelling what's going on there and then Andy the prey has this great idea he takes the microphone that projects into all of the cells and all of the prison and he turns it on and he and he and he starts um he starts transmitting this aria sui aria it's a duet two female voices in the marriage a figure into the prison and everybody stops I mean I'm getting goosebumps just telling you about it everybody stops all these hardened criminals stop beauty beauty in its most in a sense most abstract form but most immediately emotional form is projected into their lives and Andy the prey the warden now is calm everybody wants him to turn this off he's gonna get into massive problems of this he's gonna be beaten up he's gonna be sent into isolation it's all worth it for this moment of beauty it's all worth it to feel alive to feel free and to share that moment with all these other people it's just a beautiful beautiful little piece of the movie it's just a few minutes but it's just so stunning and it's emotional impact on you the viewer on the emotional impact it's having on the prisoners so it's an amazing amazing scene and it's truly beautiful and it shows the thing about Andy the prey is he's a man of reason who loves life the best line in the movie the best line in the movie which I think in a sense captures the whole movie is the line let's see if I get it right because I have to get it right maybe some of you don't correct me if I get it wrong get busy living or get busy dying in a sense that's the only alternative in life this could be a you wrongs rules for life get busy living or get busy dying that is the only alternative in life if you're not busy living if you're not busy living if you're just acting which means doing which means thinking which means focusing on your life to make it better in every aspect possible available to you if you're not doing that then basically you're getting busy dying so you either live with a capital L or you're slowly diminishing yourself and you're slowly dying pursue values and that's the thing about this movie in every point of this movie Andy Dupre is pursuing values and it turns out at every point in this story Andy Dupre is pursuing his freedom because freedom is a value this movie is about the pursuit of values in every dimension and in many respects what he's teaching the Morgan Friedman character and the redemption is really not Andy Dupre's the redemption is the Morgan Friedman's redemption and in a sense anybody that Tim Robb that Andy Dupre touches in the movie he's teaching them to be valueers there's a young kid who comes in a little thug who keeps getting caught stealing stuff Andy Dupre at some point says you're not very good at this stuff you might want to think about doing something else but the point is he teaches the kids to value his life he gets enrolled and pursue a what do you call it a high school degree Morgan Friedman goes from just in a sense accepting his lot living his life to starting to think as a valueer so the redemption is everybody else's not Andy Dupre Andy Dupre never needed redemption Andy Dupre facilitates everybody else's redemption by teaching them to value by teaching them to get busy living get busy living and in that sense it's such a powerful good movie with good values how rare is that with a fantastic hero Andy Dupre I mean he clearly makes a mistake early on in the movie but morally this guy is perfect he's rational he's willing to fight for his values his hope doesn't come from empty hope because hope can be something completely empty his hope doesn't come from emptiness his hope comes from his values from the fact that he knows how to achieve them his hope comes from his constant busyness around living he is busy living so I think the movie is excellent I loved it I think everybody should watch it I think it will inspire you if you don't have the biggest smile ever on your face when it's over and that I guess I'm giving away a little bit but that's okay then I don't know what's wrong with you I mean I love Andy Dupre I love Morgan Friedman they are just fantastic characters that people you fall in love with and you want to embrace you're winning you want them to be successful and you watch every step and you're anxious you're anxious about what's going to happen it's going to be one of those dark prison movies it's going to all end in tragedy it's all going to be horrible so I've taken a little bit of that anxiety away but how it evolves I'm going to tell you because there are too many spoilers and I think there are too many cool twists the warden is evil evil is evil good is good how much better does it get than that really good is good so go see you can rent it on Prime you can rent it on Apple TV you can get it on any way you want it's easy to watch and it is a truly truly fantastic movie and fun to watch don't you miss movies that are fun to watch I mean put aside Game of Thrones and all these other way everybody's being slaughtered and you have to watch every little trickle of blood over the world and over the place here's a movie that's well written well produced, well directed the music is terrific I don't know who wrote the music but the music is terrific based by the way on a Stephen King novel a short story actually short novel by Stephen King Stephen King is a great storyteller director is Frank Darabont I think this is the best movie he made but he did do some Indiana Jones movies and other popular movies but this is I think the movie he made it's in every respect of the movie making profession I think this is well done, well made it stands the test of time what is it 28 years ago was made the fact that I'm telling you the word isn't as bad is not a spoiler, the fact that he's corrupt I don't think it's a spoiler I don't think any of those are spoilers all I said was the spoiler was that you're going to end the movie with a smile on your face that's the only spoiler I think but I'm not going to tell you what the rest is so I encourage you encourage you to watch this movie really encourage you I think of all the movies I've reviewed this is well I mean this is the most enjoyable of all of them and probably in many respects the best as a whole just a good integrated work of art alright we have blown by the target so thank you everybody for helping us achieve the target today let's see, Dave Goodman says what a classic the 1990s produced some legendary films with down with down climb since then it's as if we got a little taste of 19th century optimism for a decade before we're voting back to our cynical there's nothing cynical about this movie it could be cynical you could go cynical Morgan Freeman starts out as a cynic and it demolishes cynicism it demolishes cynicism Dave why don't you send me a list of what you think are the best 1990s movies that have this optimistic thing because I don't know that many but you seem to think there are a lot of them let me see if there are other Shawshank redemption related questions let's see okay Thomas Schubert says thank you for talking about Shawshank not asking for a full review but can you give an opinion on the lives of others yeah I mean I love the lives of others it's an excellent excellent movie very very different in every respect I think with Shawshank but still a very very good movie a German movie made by I think a former East German but about East Germany about the conflicts that exist the conflicts that are created between people because of a police state because of totalitarianism excellent excellent movie one of my again one of my favorites one of the great movies of the last 40 years so those lives of others I encourage people to go watch it Richard says do you know any great movies about education besides standard delivery yeah they're quite a few of them actually I'm becoming convinced we should focus on our political efforts on ending the government monopoly on education what do you think yes I mean if there was one issue in politics that you should focus on that's it it's the most important it's the most long lasting it's the one that will have the most impact long term so yes I think that's absolutely what we should focus on in a sense of movies there's a bunch of them to so with love thank you Anna Friedman see I could remember names like this so it's hard for me to just spout them out but I've seen a lot of movies it's a kind of topic that educating Rita I enjoyed educating Rita I think that's good again if you want me to review a particular movie 500 bucks sorry but unless I'm going to watch it anyway I'm trying to think of others anyway that's that's never say to so with love I don't know why is that anyway it's a good movie the other movies about yeah I don't know I mean I know that they exist I just don't know their name sorry Richard alright let's see we're going to do these let me just pick up on these okay let's we'll start with a hundred dollar question then we'll go for the twenty dollar questions then we'll do the ten to five dollar questions we're ready almost the two hours miracle work is not really a it's a epistemological movie it's not really about education it's it's about the deepest source of education that is concept formation miracle work is a brilliant brilliant movie one of my favorite standard deliver he said there are others I mean there's a lot of them I just need a just I would need a list to check off the ones that I think are great a few good men is not is not a education movie miracle work is not an education movie although one of my favorites all right I see people are just randomly putting together movies all right Michael asks do you think there is a way to reduce gas prices or are we destined to always pay more if that happens wouldn't the gas company fail since no one would be able to afford gas God no I mean gas prices don't always go up I mean the fact is that gas prices have gone up and down and up and down and up and down and in real terms in inflation adjusted terms gas prices before this current crisis were cheaper than they were 20 years ago 30 years ago 40 years ago I mean gas has been incredibly cheap most of the 21st century so no there's nothing that says gas prices always have to go up what determines gas prices is supply and demand is demand is not constant but demand is constant growing maybe not growing that fast because the cars are more gas efficient and people are moving to electric cars and so on so demand for gas is not necessarily growing but the question is what happens to supply and there it's completely up to our choices that is to the choices of our politicians and it's not just supply of drilling for gas drilling for gas is just one aspect of gas but the other flip side of gas is the question of refining and of course refining gas is a question of not in Bayard backyard and building more refineries or at least not shutting down the refiners that we have or maybe expanding the ones that we have which is again a regulatory issue it's an issue of government so the only thing that causes gas prices to go up is government without government gas prices would be going down and you know they'd stabilize at some level and maybe they'd go up or down based on global supply and demand issues but there wouldn't be big swings in gas prices in free markets so the only thing that is driving gas prices up is government policy government policy in Europe government policy in the United States government policy in Saudi Arabia government policy period and any one of those in the United States for example could solve the problem by just freeing up its local market and then it would care a lot less about what was going on in the rest of the world Michael asks oh I said I would start with Michael's $100 question god I forgot alright can you review Newt Gingrich recent interview with Jordan Peterson alright I'll have to look into that Newt Gingrich smart guy it was fascinating Newt Gingrich smart guy then if you give really good insights into how the White is planning an M2 takeover okay I will do that let me just open up a file here so I can copy paste the name of the interview so I don't forget and I'll look for it probably a good one for me to do kind of a show on while watching pieces of the interview so I'll try to do that alright sorry one second just to whoop no it's up there okay there we go alright so yes I'll look at that I'll look at that let's see thank you Michael for $100 that's really appreciated okay another question by ooh did I skip the other ones okay oh another question by Michael the midterms were blessing if you listen to conservative talk shows they're realizing it's a trump back candidate so they're the losers when conservatives are more principled free marketers like DeSantis they win well we'll see if DeSantis is really a principled free marketer I'm not convinced of that yet but we will see I hope he is and I'll support him if he is but we'll see if he really is but in terms of their realization look the problem is that they then they backtrack right so they claim to have realized this certainly after January 6th they claim to realize this when the stuff about Ukraine came out in the middle of his presidency when he was first impeached they claim to realize this every few years and then they backtrack because the base is committed religiously committed I hope this is it I hope finally it sinks in I hope they stick to the guns I hope that they are committed I hope they have some integrity we'll see I mean the fact that Ben Shapiro is criticizing Trump is a good sign hopefully he'll continue to do so and and hopefully people like Mark Levin and others do it as well I'm curious because Mark Levin I think is a good barometer of these things is Mark Levin criticizing Trump as Mark Levin saying is enough is enough I think that would really tell you because he was anti-Trump before Trump was elected and then became more and more and more of a Trumpist as time went on and I wonder if he's ready to back off so I hope this is it let's hope by the way I didn't start with this but it looks like Republicans lost Nevada so they've lost the Senate the Senate will be Democratic no matter what happens in Georgia it's not a question of will it be Democratic 50-50 or will it be Democratic 50-149 and they still have not won the House we still don't know if they've won the House imagine if they lose the House in a midterm election I mean that would be unbelievable it would be stunning stunning if this doesn't teach Republicans how bad Trump is for their cause whatever the cause is I don't know what the cause is anymore then I don't know what will Liam says I think a charismatic objectivist like yourself would do quite well in a political race we're living under this fiction we can't win any populist fascist like Trump can win win as Tuesday shows is not the case well no not just populist like Trump but any populist fascist socialist statist can win all kinds of variations of statists can win it's just an objectivist can win but you know it's very easy I have said in the past that I am willing to run for office I am willing to run for office but what I'm not willing to do is spend the rest of my life trying to raise the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary for me to run for office so I will run for office here I'm announcing it right now office I can't run for president so it would have to be like a senate somewhere or some other you know a job maybe governor of Puerto Rico I will run for office I couldn't be president because I wasn't born in the US I will run for office when somebody raises 100 million dollars for me to run for office because you can't I mean particularly given how crazy and controversial my views are you can't run for less than that so it's 100 million dollars would be I mean I need a lot more than that but with 100 million dollars I could guarantee that I could do a really really good campaign and it would have to be something substantial I could move back to California and run for office in California I could move to another state to run in another state we could strategize which state that would be I could run for governor I could run for senate it would have to be a big time office not a small time office but it would be like a super pack with 100 million dollars in it dedicated to Iran running for office and then I would do it so I don't know there are enough billionaires you know realm of objectivism that maybe that is possible maybe that's not completely ridiculous yeah Peter Schiff did it with only 6 million and Peter Schiff lost I mean he didn't lose a little bit he lost by a big margin and Peter Schiff is not as radical as I am not when the rubber hits the road so I'm not doing it for 6 million I'm not losing you know it's not that I'm not losing I'm going to lose but I am 23 to 48% within the republican party in a primary what would he have if he'd been you know what would he if it was an open primary he would have lost by a much larger margin because he would have lost all the democrats as well no I mean and he did it with 6 million in Connecticut and he's less controversial than I am I would have to explain my foreign policy views I would have to explain my Iran views my moral views so again 100 million dollars but not for me, I don't need 100 million just to run the campaign because it would be a great a great means by which to market and advertise a political agenda so even if I didn't win there would be value there alright I need to run because I've got a dinner reservation in a little bit okay Andrew says Trump may not have started to say monstability has become one do you think it is sufficient for the right to hope he gets the hint and goes away or does the preservation of the republican party of a quite explicit repudiation well I mean here's the problem the problem is that Trump is not the problem the problem is Trump is an manifestation of the problem the problem is that what really we should be afraid of because Trump is a loser which means that Trump cannot establish himself as the theocrat as the ruler as the authoritarian what we need to really be worried of is an effective Trump a smart Trump and not a populist Trump not a pragmatic Trump but an ideological Trump that is a demagogue who is much more ideological what we need to worry about is what I've said all along we need to worry about it's people like Josh Hawley we need to worry about and it's people we don't even know their names it's people it's the intellectuals in the conservative national conservative movement it's the intellectuals in the theocratic Catholic movement in the integrationists I think they call themselves that's who we need to worry about Trump is just the dangerous signal the warning sign hey things have gone haywire in the world he's not the end of days he's not the end result it's these others that we worry about watch Josh Hawley he is the enemy he's a thousand times worse than Trump because he's ideological and the fact is young people in the right are not interested in free markets young people in the right are much more likely to be integrationists or much more likely to be national conservatives much more likely to be ideological ideologically authoritarianism authoritarian which is much worse than Trump so that's what I worry about Daniel says what do you think of the US government funding pro-western propaganda in places like Russia and China for example I think we subsidize radio free Europe do you support it I only support it if we are in a sense at war now we were in a sense at war with the Soviet Union although we didn't really engage in it engaged in it very well and we kept bailing them out and sending them food and supporting our enemy but given that we were in a cold war with the Soviet Union absolutely if we decide China is the enemy then yeah propaganda is appropriate but it has to be clear propaganda versus North Korea versus Iran we should be helping undermine the Iranian regime in any way we can including through ideas but first they have to be an enemy if they're not an enemy I don't think you can directly propagandize to them it's just weird we're propagandizing about how evil you are and how much of a risk you are to us but we keep on treating you like a normal country which is a little bit about what we did during the Soviet Union but not completely Daniel also says what do you think it is that makes you so fascinated by history is there a period you like and read about the most oh I don't know it's this human events it's the storytelling it's the it's seeing ideas play out in reality on the largest scale possible which is history can do the future so I have to do history periods I like I read all over the place you know right now I'm reading about the history of chips chips you know microchips fascinating fascinating I'll talk about that I'll do a review of the book but fascinating I'm trying to get the author to come on the show because I think it will be such a good conversation I like the enlightenment I like American history although I find European history more interesting more big scale ideas at stake Americans other than the founding fathers are not typically ideological I mean the the you know there's the founding fathers and then there's the left that's it that's the story the founding fathers progressives and that's it because everybody else is so empty and shallow in Europe it's much more grander it's much on a bigger scale and goes back thousands of years I like big stories I like the cave in the light where they tell the story of Western history from the perspective of Aristotle and Plato alright MP creates Iran I'm a young professional learning to manage my own investment for the first time in my life I'm an industrial engineer by degree what do you recommend to learn most about managing my finance investment diversify diversify diversify you're young so you should be I think in equity you should be in stock you should buy and hold you should be buying regularly you should buy index funds you should buy index funds across a wide spectrum of asset classes and international as well and if given that you're an industrial engineer if there's something that you think your industrial engineering gives you an edge about I don't know robots or particular companies are doing something particularly well that you think you have an edge over the market on then buy individual name companies but other than that diversify diversify diversify use cheap mutual funds you know vanguard or dimensional or some of these others buy an index of American stocks and buy an index of global stocks and then keep putting money into there on a regular basis and forget about it don't worry about the ups and downs don't try to time the market don't try to pretend that you know better than market professionals unless you really do know something better than market professionals you know and I did a personal finance show so if you look at my channel search personal finance and you can find it I'll do another one soon because I know people are really interested Gabe says if money I owe if money I owe use doesn't mean I don't spend money that billionaires have basically a debt society owes them no money is not an IOU the paper money is an IOU the money is in a proper economy in a proper world the money is gold somewhere is gold the paper that you use the digital money that you use that is backed by this gold the gold is the money money is an asset that you use as a medium of exchange that's in an ideal society that's the money and then what we exchange are pieces of paper that basically IOUs but money is anything that people are willing to use as a medium of exchange that's Mises's definition of money and I agree with Mises money you can find money empirically dollars on money today because they're dominantly used as a medium of exchange money is a dollars IOUs now because there's nothing to back them up they're just things that we use as a medium of exchange and what backs it up is the ability to use those dollars to pay for our taxes the government will take it but there's nothing backing it up other than well legal tender laws which make it which make it necessary for people to use it and necessary for people to accept it and the fact that the fact that the government will take it as taxes money can't be work work is work money is money there are two different things one reflects the other they're related to one another but they're not the same thing so I mean that's just a fallacy and no nobody owes you anything now the money reflects purchasing power hopefully what you can buy in terms of the products and in like today the dollar what's the value of the dollar the value of the dollar is denominated what you can buy for it Richard asks finally our schedules have synced up and I can catch a YBS show Yuan do you see any positive results for education reform school vouchers, ESAs in the election sad to see Ducey leave office he signed a great bill in Arizona yes I mean the biggest the biggest downside of this election is the fact that all these people have lost the Republicans are not dominant in Arizona because Ducey's law the education saving cows might get reversed in the Arizona legislature particularly if the Democrat wins the governorship there on one hand I want Lake to lose the governorship on the other hand I want Republicans to preserve it because of the education saving accounts so it's you're very torn about these things but she should have never been the nominee you can't have election denies be nominees when they are they lose and she is likely to lose we'll see but she is likely to lose and if she loses the education saving counts probably out so that's a tragedy another tragedy of following Trump's script there are other governors around the country that are interested in education saving accounts I think Florida is with with the Sandus I think others are generally I think that there is a lot of energy behind school choice I think it's going to move in the right direction God how am I going to get through all these questions all right Aristotle gives Plato no one is to find money better than myself that's Aristotle then please have a look it is not the Austrian view that you leap to Aristotle's new ethics thanks for putting up with me unfortunately Aristotle is very bad about money so anything based on him is not going to be very good I mean his whole idea of money being barren his whole argument against against what do you call it against usury against paying interest on money is flawed so basing it on Aristotle I think is a mistake because I think Aristotle did not have a good understanding of monetary exchange money as the Austrians describe it I think absolutely correctly evolved from the market you can observe it it is empirically identifiable it's not an abstraction it is something real out there that you can find it can't be something abstract like work it's actually what people use as a medium exchange that's what money is Richard says how do you think Steve Jobs have reacted to European Union's Digital Services Act why does no one seem to be talking about in the US it's strange not even the US status to support similar laws here have discussed it well because once Europe passes it you don't need to pass it in the US basically Europe passed a law that says that all all your internet all your phones have to have the same not the same kind of connection not this one the Apple one but it has to be USBC it's an unbelievably stupid law that is going to destroy innovation and competition you can only change the thing if you convince the regulators the charging mechanism you convince the regulators that you've got a better one which means the regulators get to decide not customers not the marketplace why aren't people discussing it because what are they going to say about it the left doesn't need it because once European passes it's enough to change the behavior of all companies and the right is not going to defend markets since when does the right defend markets Richard asks my parents especially my mom are huge Trump supporters and even they're getting pissed off at Trump attacking other Republicans and endorsing crappy candidates not sure if that's the trend but make of it what you will yes and the question is will they stick to that will they be willing to say I'm not voting for Trump we can hope Alexis says warm autumn in Europe Trump being kicked out little by little I hope so Ukraine victories all over the place absolutely told you so in the spirit of being positive can you please take a minute and enjoy Putin's increasing desperation yes Gerson is Ukrainian flags are going up all over Gerson they're connecting people to water and electricity they're out into the streets celebrating yay for the Ukrainians kicking the butt of Putin again kick butt kicking butt kicking over and over again and proving me right again I love being right and I love that evil bastards lose that is so much fun to watch evil bastards lose it is so much fun to watch Putin lose and it's going to be so much fun to see Jordan Peterson and other people on the right have to backtrack from all their crazy nutty insane fear mongering that they have embraced over the last few months so it's all good I mean Ukrainian just needs to continue kicking butt and I think it's going to I think the Russians are now looking at how do we get out of the mess that Putin has created how do we get out of this mess it's not going to be easy but how do they retain whatever dignity they might have and get out of it now we'll see if they can do it and keep Putin at the top but the fact that they left Gerson so easily so quickly the fact that they're just building defenses and defenses never stand and the fact that the only offensive they have they have some offensive in Bakhmut I think it's called Bakhmut something like that in eastern Ukraine near Donbass that is failing over and over again to keep attacking and keeping everybody everything's going according to in favor of the Ukrainians right now and I hope and think that that will continue Richard says I saw this question in the chat and I'm also curious what do the Iranian freedom fighters need to do to be successful do you think the Mullahs will start a war to distract the population from the problems at home no I don't think they'll start a war I don't think it's because they're afraid of what will happen if they start a war they could be crushed from the outside they might create some regional messiness they could attack Saudi Arabia because the Saudis won't fight but they're not going to start a full-fledged war they don't have the resources it's a poor country they have drones that's about it and even those drones they're sending to Russia so their inventory of drones is going down what are the what do the Iranians need to do they need to keep at it they need to keep chipping away they need to keep at it and the more violence thrown at them the more they need to be out into the streets and they need to expand the circle of demonstrators they need to shut down the economy as much as they can they need to get as many people on their side and they just need to keep at it and as I said the great tragedy is they're not getting the support they deserve from the west and let's let's hope that there are enough people within the administration the Iranian administration that will ultimately succumb but that's the only hope just don't give up just keep going out into the streets Michael okay no more questions guys because I really do need to get to dinner okay Richard asked Digital Markets Act is even worse requiring gatekeepers to register with the EU yes it's much worse it requires companies to get consent from users to use their data for other services and could force Apple to get rid of App Store Monopoly yes and look the regulations in the US about these things all of this stuff is coming down the pipe you can see it no matter who ultimately wins the House of the Senate the one thing both Republicans and Democrats unite over is the need to regulate big tech so we're going to see much more regulations and much more things like the Digital Markets Act coming from Congress in the next few years in the next few years all right do contemporary intellectuals believe if we don't have egalitarianism are they stuck in that false alternative because of the example of Nazi Germany I don't think so maybe they rationalize it that way but it's just a rationalization they believe in egalitarianism because they believe that is the good they believe in egalitarianism because they're basically nihilistic man-haters there's no excuses everything else is a rationalization Harper Campbell do we have a tendency today to label evil as mental illness yes we tend to dismiss it a lot of things are mentally ill and then we tend to attribute it to genes which dismisses agency which dismisses moral responsibility so it's even worse than that because we don't even give it we give it no moral responsibility PB asked daughter red anthem in class and addressed egos versus altruism now assigned to design their own perfect society I read with her and helped I'm sure public schools don't denounce utopianism though no but it's great thousands hundreds of thousands of students are reading anthem in high schools because programs that the Einren Institute has in place our essay contest are free books to teachers we provide those your daughter school got the copies of anthem from the Einren Institute your support for the Einren Institute makes that possible hundreds of thousands of kids around America are reading Einren every year at least some of them because some of them are probably just getting their cliff notes but some of them are reading it because of the Einren Institute program so thank you for those of you support Shahzad thank you for the $20 he says have a tasty dinner Colt someone that's puzzled me is the FDIC solves a bank run problem however what's the free market solution well it could be bank ratings it could be you have to do your own diligence and it could be private insurance markets that guarantee deposits so it could be elements of all of the above right there's no reason we can't do that but that to really get into that would require a show $1,000 get you a show talk about anything um Fred Napa says a good episode The Bump Francisco's Money Speech in Atlas Shrug yes go read The Money Speech by Francisco Nanconia he shows you what money really is what it represents Taysie why is it called redemption oh I answered this question really redemption is all the other characters not Tim Roberts's character Mick Muffin what's a good book in Industrial Revolution I don't really have it I think that Deirdre McCluskey's books about the Industrial Revolution are excellent so I would look for Deirdre McCluskey okay Richard Bank Runs pre-FDIC were caused by unit banking regulation and joy of dinner one of the causes not the only causes they were caused by the federal government putzing around with the gold standard and the silver standard they were caused by all kinds of things government did but they were caused by government regulations like the unit banking or the regulations on bank branching which happens to be the area of my expertise I'm an expert on unit banking and banking consolidation and have a number of articles in financial literature about this but they were caused by more than just that but certainly by that, Canada didn't have that never had bank runs but it's not just that it's other things as well there's a good book called Fragile by Design written by Colomaris professor of finance out of Columbia University that basically shows how the US banking system from the beginning from the founding fathers was built in a fragile way was created to be fragile was created for bank runs alright Daniel says great movie I had a professor that was a warden tell me it was mostly accurate portrayal of prison because prisoners become afraid of being independent I think that's absolutely right and it's a fascinating aspect and so psychologically understandable I'm a big man here in prison I have a job, I have a role, I have a purpose I know exactly what I'm doing I've been here most of my life what am I going to do out there? I'm a nobody out there I'm lonely, my friends are here my purpose is here it also shows the need for purpose in life even a purpose within a framework of prison to survive once you lose purpose and they lose purpose when they go outside you die Colt says I think this should finally put a nail in Trump's coffin that makes me feel doubtful is that I don't think it's going to get rid of the new rights ideology I really hope I'm wrong about that it's not going to get rid of the new rights ideology they will just seek better candidates that's what makes the new rights so so dangerous alright everybody thank you great fundraising day hopefully you enjoyed the show whoa MP Creates has jumped in with $250 can you do an album review of Ego by Tyler the Creator looking forward to it God I'll look at that it's a little scary just by the title and the fact that I've never heard of it I've never heard of Ego the Creator why won't it copy paste let me try this again so yes thank you MP Creates $250 for an album review it's usually $100 for a song so he's jumped all the way for an album there we go I copied pasted it so I will have it thanks MP Creates alright everybody I need to run to dinner I'm already like 10-20 minutes late tomorrow morning there will be a newsy show short newsy show and a show in the evening so we'll try that format two shows in one day we'll start doing those over time mainly in December thank you for everybody joining me please consider becoming a monthly supporter to your Unbook show at Patreon subscribe star your Unbook show that comes to support or even locals thank you for all the super chatters you are amazing today and don't forget to like the show before you leave everybody see you soon