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... I can't keep track anymore. Wednesday, Wednesday morning, December 28th. We're approaching New Year's Eve very quickly here. Don't forget we've got a big show on December 31st. I hope you can all join us at 2 p.m. East Coast time. All right, let's jump right in. Title 42. Yesterday, Jennifer asked me a question about Title 42, which was that the Supreme Court had just ruled to keep Title 42 basically indefinitely until the court hears arguments and then makes a decision. So we're looking at probably well into spring of next year. Title 42 allows the border police to instead have people who cross over and want to apply for asylum instead of them filling out the forms, doing everything and then waiting in the United States, I guess, in detention until they have their day in court, which is taking longer and longer and longer because of how many people are coming for asylum. It allows them to send them back across the border to Mexico. And I guess there's a Trump administration cut a deal with Mexico to do that. All of this was passed during COVID and the excuse, the justification for the executive order to, in a sense, overturn regular legal American procedures was COVID. So this was explicitly a executive order signed in the context of COVID, in the context of a health emergency. And whether you like this particular provision, Title 42 or not, it's a question of the rule of law is that is the health emergency has passed should the law keep going or should there be something else passed? There should be some other law rule that is passed in order to deal with this. This went to the Supreme Court. 19 Republican states, red states applied to the Supreme Court to ask the Supreme Court to extend Title 42. The Supreme Court chose yesterday to grant that extension and to hear arguments about it later in the year and to see whether they would extend it permanently or not, but it for now will extend into the spring. What I found interesting when it all came out was that Judge Gorsuch, Neil Gorsuch actually voted against this decision. So the decision was five to four in a 63 conservative majority. Gorsuch sided with the liberal justices. And I predicted when I talked to Jennifer, I predicted that he did it on the basis of a rule of law division of powers and so on. And that's exactly what happened. So this is the quote from Gorsuch's opinion in opposition to keeping Title 42 around. And he writes, the current border crisis is not a COVID crisis. Courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency, only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency. The different emergency is all those people on the border who want to come, who would cross over if Title 42 was eliminated and wait for their asylum in the United States. He added, we are a court of law, not policymakers of last resort. That's good. He's a good writer. So I agree completely with Gorsuch. You want to solve the border crisis, pass a law. You want to solve the issues, the underfunding of the courts, the underfunding of Border Patrol, the crazy asylum laws that we have, pass a law. You want to institutionalize Title 42 as forever, pass a law. The courts should not be here allowing the executive to use a order that was passed to deal with one emergency in order to deal with another emergency. I think it's wrong. I think it's a violation of the responsibilities. So it's a violation of the separation of powers. Congress should do its job. The president should do its job. You remember when Conservative used to complain about the courts legislating from the bench and Conservative says, no, no, the court shouldn't legislate from the bench. It's not their responsibility. Well, that's what the Supreme Court just did. They legislated from the bench. Here's a continuation of what Gorsuch wrote. He says, quote, the states may question whether the government followed the right administrative steps before issuing this decision, an issue of which I express no view. But they do not seriously dispute that the public health justification undergirding the Title 42 order has lapsed. So whatever you think of Title 42, and I don't have a strong opinion about it, I would like the whole immigration law changed or at least the whole portion on asylum change. There has to be a more rational way of dealing with these kind of things. And it cannot be that anybody, the United States must, in its immigration law, prioritize asylum over everything else. So you need a new immigration law. You need a proper immigration law until Republicans and Democrats come together to actually do something rational here. The border will continue to be a mess. Building a wall will not help. Having Title 42 has not helped. Getting rid of Title 42 will not help. None of these things, these all little, they're not even band-aids. They're nothing. They're nothingness. And they're just a waste of resources, a waste of energy. What needs to happen is to actually, and there was talk about a compromise bill that just dealt with the issues happening on the border these days between, I think, cinema and one of the Republicans, and they had a compromise bill, but maybe because cinema has left the Democratic Party, the Democrats didn't want to support it, and maybe because Republicans are just obnoxious about immigration, about any aspect of immigration, and don't want to offend the base, which is fanatical about immigration. A compromise bill around something like this cannot be achieved, and therefore you can't have a solution. If your legislature is dysfunctional, there are no solutions, and the court should not provide a solution.  All right. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Ryan. We do have our usual 250 Super Chat goal, so please jump in with your support. Mike and Ryan didn't even ask a question, just showed support. But you can ask a question, so far no questions. So we, there's plenty of room and time to ask a bunch of questions, Super Chat questions. Tesla stock. Tesla stock. Tesla stock has been going down all year together with the NASDAQ. It has high beta, high correlation with the NASDAQ, but over the last month or so, it has accelerated its decline. I think yesterday it went down something like 11%. It is down 71% since the beginning of the year. It has done dramatically since its highs at the end of last year. You know, it has come down to earth. Now, you know, some of you think I enjoy saying this, and I guess maybe I do. I told you so. I told you so a long time ago. Tesla stock, I think, was bubbly. It was overvalued. It had a lot of hype associated with it. It was associated with a hype related to Elon Musk, Magic Touch. It was associated to the hype around electric vehicles, but more than that it was associated to the hype, I think, associated with the fact, oh no, no. And I was told you in the chat, Tesla is not an electric vehicle company. It's a data company. It's really competitive with Apple. Really? So yes, Tesla has a lot of data on people driving. Whether that data can easily be monetized, it's not clear. What Tesla can exactly do with that data that is monetizable is not clear. A lot of companies have a lot of data. I don't think you build a business just around having that data. Yes, Tesla also builds robots. My guess is those robots are expensive to build. A lot of R&D goes into them. But where is the monetization of those robots? It hasn't happened yet. On the car side, on the EV side, Tesla faces ever-increasing competition. It faces competition from American automakers who are using electric vehicles, building electric vehicles because they're mandated to do so. They're building electric vehicles because they are being subsidized to do so. They're building electric vehicles because electric vehicles can be lost. Leaders, American auto companies can afford to sell electric vehicles at a loss. Or generally, people who manufacture automobiles in the United States, and that includes German car manufacturers, Korean car manufacturers, Japanese car manufacturers, who actually manufacture cars in the United States, can afford to sell their electric cars at a loss because where do American car makers make money? American car makers make money on only basically two types of cars. And this has been true for decades now. They make money off of pickup trucks and SUVs. They make money off of heavy cars where these cars for a variety of reasons are less regulated. They have less restrictions on gas efficiency. And there is a 25% tariff, 25% tariff on importation of pickup trucks. Maybe SUVs, but certainly pickup trucks. So American companies face a lot less competition, a lot less competition. Ford, GM make their money on pickup trucks. So they can afford to sell cheap EVs at a loss. They can over time compete with Tesla. Even if Tesla makes the best, competition will drive down profit margins. That's what it always does. Competition will reduce its market share. It has to just run the numbers. And the second, the other aspect of this is one of the great advantages that Tesla had is its networking, its network of, they've decided to clean the windows just outside my office right now. So if you hear booming sounds in the background, that is they got pounding in my window as he's cleaning it. What was I saying? Yes, Tesla has an advantage because it's built this charging network, right? It has these electric charging networks that are specifically for Teslas. And it has that advantage. That advantage is going away because the bipartisan bill, the bipartisan bill, infrastructure bill that was passed this year, earlier this year, actually allocates gazillions of dollars to build a massive charging network all over the country, basically subsidized by the US federal government, subsidized by all of us who are taxpayer money and our children and grandchildren. And so that advantage that Tesla has is going to go away over time. So all of that does not bode well for Tesla.  They don't even make sense from a carbon emissions perspective given the cost and the difficulty of creating the batteries. But the real problem, I mean, there are lots of real problems with EV, we'll have to do a whole show on them. But one of the big problems with EV is we're going to have hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of charging stations all over the United States. Most of them are going to be in the middle of nowhere and are going to fall into disrepair and nobody's going to have the incentive to maintain them and to repair them because the government is subsidizing, building them, paying to build them, not to maintain them. But second, where's all the electricity going to come from? I mean, nobody talks about this. We have blackouts everywhere. Where's all the electricity going to come from? The grid that the United States has cannot, cannot sustain everybody driving electric cars. It cannot sustain charging stations all over the country, including in the middle of nowhere. There is just not enough electricity flowing through the grid. The grid is not stable enough, the grid is not robust enough, and there's just not enough electricity generation. I mean, if we replace fossil fuels with electricity to move our cars, you're just going to have to burn a huge amount of additional fossil fuels in order to create that electricity during the cars. So it's just, it really is insanity. Instead of letting the electric vehicle market grow organically based on demand, based on people's priorities, instead of letting charging stations grow where they're most needed, where they sell the most electric cars, that's not going to happen because the government is just going to plaster the whole United States with this and it's going to create, it's going to create massive problems both for electric car owners and for the rest of us because our electricity is going to get sucked away into electric cars instead of lighting our homes and running our computers. So yeah, nuclear power should be a big part of the solution, but good luck with that. Good luck with that, right? Again, way behind on the 250s is just a reminder on that. And then finally, the reason for Tesla stock, the reason given by many Tesla stock investors for selling their Tesla stock and putting downward pressure on the price is the fact that their CEO, the CEO of Tesla, is a little distracted by the fact that he is basically a full-time CEO of Twitter. And the Tesla investors are claiming is a massive destruction. Tesla is also, you know, those kind of signs that Tesla might be having problems selling all their cars. They might having some problems with production in China again because of COVID, but they're trying to get rid of inventory right now. So all kinds of business signals that Tesla might be having problems. And then the CEO is not running Tesla and has not appointed a replacement CEO, but instead is running Twitter and engaging in Twitter wars and devoting all his time to that. And we might all love it that Elon Musk is at Twitter. I think it's super entertaining and I think probably the end result of it will be a better Twitter. But in the meantime, but that's because I don't own Tesla stock.  Where's your CEO? And on top of that, he's selling Tesla stock. Not a good sign when your CEO and largest owner is selling stock. Now he's not selling stock because he's lost, we think he's lost faith in Tesla. He's selling stock in order to beef up his position in Twitter. And rumors have it that Twitter bondholders, the banks are basically putting pressure on Elon Musk to buy their debt or to basically put up collateral Twitter stock as collateral for the debt. And they're asking for $100 worth of Twitter stock for every $25 of debt. So of Tesla stock, $100 of Tesla stock for every $25 of Twitter debt. So Elon Musk is going to have sold a lot of Tesla stock in order to be able to fund and run and sustain Twitter. He's basically subsidizing Twitter after Tesla stock. Now maybe he'll turn it around and make it profitable, but that is not in the near future. Not in the near future. So there is downward pressure from Elon Musk selling from people upset at Elon selling. People have set it along because he's not running the company and because he's selling and because he's distracted and because the company might have some issues and then people are also coming to realize maybe it was never worth as much as it was worth. Maybe it was just a bit of a fantasy to believe it was worth as much as it was worth. Now I know I'll get people telling me that oh it's going to be a $2 trillion, if the first $10 trillion company or whatever and wait and see you're on. Yeah, I'm here. I'm waiting. I'm not going anywhere. You can come back and tell me, told you so down the road. But for now, I don't know if all of the bubble is burst, but much of the Twitter bubble, sorry, much of the Tesla bubble has burst and the people have lost a lot of money and the people who were buying on dips have been losing a lot of money because the dips are just getting deeper and deeper and deeper. We will see what happens next year with Tesla stock. Maybe now is a good time to buy. Certainly wasn't a good time to buy late last year and early this year. All right, let's see. Quick update on a developing story in, oh, just as an aside, I just wanted to, just because I've been covering this story about Russia for a while, a Russian tycoon a couple of days ago died after an apparent fall from a hotel window in India. He fell from the third floor. I think he was probably going for a low floor because of this tendency of Russian tycoons, oligarchs to fall out of windows. This guy fell out of the window, the third floor and died in India. Reports say he was depressed and he committed suicide. And the reason he was depressed, we are told, is because his travel companion, who was also a Russian something, wealthy Russian person, died a few days earlier in the same hotel from what is described as a heart attack.  Of course, Indian authorities are saying this is all, there's no far play here, no far play. I mean, one Russian drops dead out of a heart attack, wasn't poisoned, I'm sure Russian heart attack, and then the other, and both of them in India are not in Russia. I wonder why they're not in Russia, maybe because Putin, maybe because they were running away from Putin. And then the other one falls out of a window and the assumption is it's suicide because he was depressed because the other guy had died. You cannot make this stuff up, but this is the news as reported by TheHill.com, right? And I think it was in Reuters and it was elsewhere. Russians, and you know, for those of you who are pro-Russia, all these Russians are falling out of windows in spite of the fact that Russia is this wonderful country with this amazing, masculine, phenomenal leader and Russians is just who the Russians love and embrace. And the Russian economy is doing fantastically well. This is why all these Russians are falling out of windows, particularly in places that are not in Russia. Although, they're falling out of Russian windows too.  And yet, he's the good guy. No, Zelensky, he's the bad guy. Putin's the good guy. Bizarre. All right, there is a region in Europe which is on at the brink of war again. You know, and again and again, this is the Balkans. There seems to be significant tension between Kosovo and Serbia. Troops on the border and a lot of Saber-Ratling. This is, Kosovo is, the common tension is an outcome ultimately of the war that was fought between Kosovo or people who live in Kosovo and Serbia, what both used to be part of Yugoslavia. This is a war fought in 1998 and 1999, a war that NATO, including the United States under the Clinton administration, participated in on the side of Kosovo. Kosovo wanted to split off and create its own entity. The Serbians objected. There's a significant, so here's the thing.  They are tribally part of the Albanian tribe. They are Albanians. They are Albanians ethnically or, I don't know how you want to call it, tribally. And they are also generally Muslims, very secular Muslims, but they are generally Muslims. The Serbians who live there are Slavs. They are not from the Albanian tribe. They are from the ancient Slavic tribes. And they, you know, so that's Serbia. There's also, of course, Bosnia. There's also Croatia. There's also Macedonia. Sorry, northern Macedonia is not a lot of call themselves Macedonia, the northern Macedonia. And there's Montenegro, each one claiming some kind of tribal identity that separates them from what used to be Yugoslavia. And of course, God forbid the tribes actually lived together under one shared national roof. What would happen if all governments did was protect individual rights and actually let tribes live together under the same place?  But in Yugoslavia, when the communist government ultimately was eliminating Yugoslavia, what happened was a shift from communism to tribalism. And the shift from communism to tribalism involved wars, where the Serbs who were the dominant faction within Yugoslavia tried to keep Yugoslavia together under their rule, of course. And the Croatians, the Bosnians, the Montenegrins, the Macedonians, and then ultimately the Kosovoians all rebelled and tried to establish their own little domains. Ayn Rand wrote in anticipation of this in the 1960s, she wrote an essay called Global Buccaneization. This is before the 1990s Buccaneization, but it's been known for 200 years that this part of the world is insane, nuts, murderous, tribal, and tribal to the extent of being willing to basically massacre the other side and the wars when Yugoslavia broke up were horrific and brutal and involved massive massacres. To this day, Bosnia-Herzegovina is this mishmash place of trying to have two tribes under the same roof and flare-ups come up. Anyway, in 1998, 1999, Kosovo decided it wanted to split from Serbia. Serbia objected. They started massacring the Kosovoians. NATO said, wait a minute, this is in Europe. We need to intervene to a large extent out of guilt because they didn't intervene in the wars with Croatia, in the wars with Bosnia, in the wars with the other wars. So they intervened here. They intervened on the side of the Kosovoians because they were the weak side and basically allowed Kosovo to win the war. NATO troops were stationed in Kosovo, including American peacekeeping troops, and for a while Kosovo had no real political identity, but then in 2008, 10 years after the war, Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia and now there are basically two countries where Serbia doesn't recognize the existence of Kosovo and is objected to things like Kosovo joining the UN and all kinds of other things. There are still NATO troops, by the way, in Kosovo patrolling them. So that's kind of the background, but there's always tension there because Belgrade, Serbia still thinks Kosovo is part of it and it doesn't really recognize the government in Kosovo. Kosovo claims independence and has NATO troops to protect it. Other aspect of this is partially because of historical reasons, partially because of tribal reasons and partially because of being anti-NATO reasons, Serbia is aligned with Russia and aligned with Putin and there's no question Putin would like to distract NATO, Putin would like to distract the Europeans, Putin would like to create tension somewhere else in Europe to distract everybody from what's going on in Ukraine and therefore over the last few weeks we've seen a significant escalation of tension between Kosovo and Serbia. That tension really escalated when Kosovo arrested a Serbian police officer claiming he'd attacked something or other. I don't think the details are that important. The Serbians insist he didn't do it and insist that he be released. The Kosovoans say no, the Serbians then, this is Serbians inside Kosovo. These are the Serbian minority tribe within the Kosovo majority, Albanian tribe. So they start attacking each other, they set up roadblocks, they closed the border with Serbia. The Serbians then objected to the way the Serbian brothers, in quotes, were being treated by the Kosovoans and now they're all in the bink of war and NATO's frantic because NATO has troops there, NATO would be in the middle of it and the Russians are of course egging on the Serbians and who knows, I don't know if Albania has any stake in this, but it's just insane, it's just crazy, it's just irrationality, tribalism, this is what it leads to, this is what happens when countries split up and fragment into this tiny little thing, this is what happens when you let everybody secede. But of course the alternative to letting everybody secede is to have a massive war and force them to stay, which is untenable either. So all of this is basically a consequence of irrationality, of tribalism, of a disrespect, a fundamental deep disrespect of individual rights that permeates the world. Ayn Rand talked about it brilliantly in global organization, an essay that should be read today, it is essential for reading today, and God help us from a world descending into tribalism is a world of violence. It is a world, this is what the National Conservatives want, a tribalistic ethnic based world where every little ethnicity and tribe has its own little country, and of course this is complete fragmentation, this is disintegration, this is how the world disintegrates into little wars and goes back to the Middle Ages where that's what we were, little tribes fighting each other. All right, that's the Warner Balkans. I thought you'd want a quick update because it's in the news and it's all over the place. Tiktok, Tiktok continues to be in the news, Tiktok, there's still no kind of solution for the issue. Tiktok is a company that owns it, by dance is headquartered in China, every Chinese company by law has to be willing to give its data to the Chinese government. Whether Bitdance has given the Chinese government data or not is unclear but it could and therefore there are privacy concerns and there are national security concerns or at least claims of national security concerns. Part of the national security concerns have to do with disinformation, oh all our young kids are going to be brainwashed by Chinese propaganda on Tiktok and therefore we have to stop Tiktok from brainwashing our kids. I don't buy any of the disinformation BS. What we need to do is, I didn't buy it when Russia was trying to change the election results, people need to be responsible for the information they consume, they need to be responsible for figuring out what's true and what's not and stop blaming foreign agents for quote disinformation. I think we need responsible people in the United States who are fact checkers, responsible people in the United States who are trying to present objective information and let everybody try to fight that. The issues of privacy are a real concern but you know those are issues that individual Tiktok users should be able to deal with. There's absolutely zero reason to ban Tiktok unless there's an actual national security issue. What the US government can and should do is tell American people, look, if you use Tiktok, understand the risk. The risk is that China might use your, might have access to your user data. If you don't care, if you don't care that the Chinese government might have access to your user data then keep using Tiktok. If you do care, stop using Tiktok. It's very, very simple but it should be an individual decision. I don't see how the government has any business in this except if there's a national security issue. And where is the national security issue? Okay, so CIA operatives, please don't use Tiktok. FBI agents, please don't use Tiktok, although FBI, I'm not sure, sensitive people in the Defense Department don't use Tiktok. So I'm fine with not allowing federal employees to use Tiktok although most federal employees are not exactly, you know, dealing with classified information so who cares.  They all want to get rid of Tiktok. Why?  Everybody is eager for us to be in some real conflict with China and I'll do a show next week about this. Why?  But there is clearly a desire on left and right to escalate this and to make it worse than I think it has to be. And maybe, and I think that is going to push us into a situation where we will have a cold or maybe even a hot war with China where the United States is pushing in that direction. So, Robert says, the national security issues that they obtain enough metrics and uses that they more easily able to manipulate users to be Chinese sympathetic. There is no national security, propaganda is not a national security issue, sorry. Manipulating people, people have free will and, you know, treat people as adults. It's time that the American government treated us as adults. And the more they treat us as children to be manipulated by the Chinese government, the more we will become children. The more the government treats us as children with welfare and everything else, the more we will be children. It's time for the US government to treat us as adults. We can figure out what data, what information we should use or shouldn't use. The idea that we're all just easily manipulated by some Chinese bots or some Russian bots is an insult to human beings. In addition, supposedly there's a solution whereas Oracle has agreed to store all the data of American citizens on servers in the United States and not allow the Chinese access to it. I mean, I think it is incumbent on the US government to warn Americans about the potential use of this data, to warn them about what China might do with this data, to warn them about potential manipulation. But it's individuals' responsibility to decide whether to use the platform or not and then whether they are willing to be manipulated or not. Bree says, I have wholesome videos on TikTok and so does Iran. I have videos on TikTok. I guess I do, but I've never been on TikTok. I know what TikTok is, but somebody puts videos of mine on TikTok. I have no idea what's on there. All right. You know, an American company should compete instead of going to the government to protect themselves. Who benefits from banning TikTok? Facebook, Twitter, those are the beneficiaries. Instagram, which is Facebook. Oh, and YouTube. YouTube has short YouTube shorts, which are basically competition to TikTok. Obviously not very successful. So Google, Twitter and Facebook are the beneficiaries of banning TikTok. I don't think those companies have anything to do with the fact that there's so much hype about banning TikTok in the United States. All right. So that's my spiel for today, December 28th. All right. Let's turn to Super Chat. Before we do that, I'll just remind you, I don't know why I keep clicking on the button three times. I'll have to control myself and only click once. Oh, $180 short of our goal of $250. I know we do have the December 31st show, which is going to have a $10,000 match on Super Chat. And some of you might be saving your ammunition for that. So it's whatever I want to say. Yeah. Anyway, so some of you might be saving it, but hopefully there won't be then a downfall in Super Chat money after the 31st. But we'll see. Anyway, we do have a $10,000 match. I hope you all join the show. It's going to be a long show, but you can come in and out, say hello, make a contribution and support of the show. It'll be December 31st at 2 p.m. East Coast time. All right. We don't have a lot of Super Chat questions. That's good because I went over today as usual. Schausbach says, how many solar panels does it take to make a solar panel? I don't think solar advocates have thought of that. How many solar panels does it take to make a solar panel? You know, solar, I have no idea. I don't know. All right. Schausbach says, what would happen to Putin and Russia if he televised the executions of his opponents rather than disguised them as accidents? Well, some of these, I don't know. Some of these oligarchs might group up together and try to depose him. I'm not sure there would be much of a difference because everybody knows what these things are. And so it's a very thin disguise, but I really don't know. Maybe some of the governments where agents are killing Russians off, like India and other places, would be more forced into being more hostile towards Russia. Right now, they can pretend that these are all accidents, but maybe if they couldn't pretend that, maybe they would actually be more hostile towards Russia. Jeffrey, thank you. Really appreciate the support. Ryan says, let's see, I call current government dictates and subsidies eco-fascism because they are manipulating business economy to meet societal goals. Is this a good term? Will there be a reckoning at the ballot box? No, I don't think there'll be a reckoning at the ballot box. Nobody cares. And is this a good term? Yes, but it's an insider term. Most people don't know what fascism is. Most people don't understand the relationship between fascism and economic control. They think of fascism as racism or Nazis or things like that, and they don't quite see it. I would call it eco-statism. It's broader. I think it's more understandable. It's a state trying to intervene in what we do, and it's broader appeal to both left and right. Eco-fascism, they'll assume it's all on the right somehow. They won't know what to make of it because it's taking a leftist and a rightist term and combining it. So I don't know how useful it is, although it's true. And I don't see what reckoning there'll be at the ballot box. Certainly wacky environmental ideas, when they are explicitly expressed, tend to lose at the ballot box. But the Republicans are afraid to attack many of these wacky ideas. And the ones who do attack them have their own issues and problems that make them unelectable. So that's the problem is we don't have an alternative at the ballot box. A legit alternative. If we did, a lot of this nonsense would go away. Bash, Branigan, in your view, what monetary investment value is there in the prospect of self-driving cars? I mean, there is massive value in the prospect of self-driving cars. Self-driving cars will truly be a revolutionary thing. It will change the way our roads function. It will reduce traffic jams. It will reduce accidents. It will free up all of us, free us with time to do other things while the car drives itself. It'll make carpooling more logical and reasonable. So in every respect, it will be incredibly valuable and there'll be money in it and it will destroy the current model of autos because it's not clear that individuals will own automobiles.  So there's a lot going on there. But I think the question is not the value of it. The question is when does it happen? And I think we're far away from that, from it actually happening. I think that the promise of self-driving cars, just like the promise of electric cars, is a lot further into the future than what we think. It's a very complicated problem to have. It's a self-driving cars are facing massive regulatory barriers. They're basically big technological barriers, but also massive regulatory barriers. There's going to be a lot of lawsuits about self-driving cars once they go into place. So the vision of everything is self-driving and no traffic jams and all of this stuff. That is in the future at some point, but it's in the, I think, quite distant future, much more distant than most people believe. And therefore very hard to estimate its value today on a particular stock or what the cash flows are going to be and what the discount rate should be. Frank says, what is the difference between A is A and A equals A? I think is stronger. It's the same thing. It's an indication it's exactly the same thing. Equals is, you know, I can't exactly, equals doesn't always imply that it's the same thing, the same entity. It's more of a quantitative measure. A is quantitatively the same as this other A. Whereas A is A says that exactly the same thing. They have the same identity. It's beyond just quantitative. Colt says, I think that the breakup of Yugoslavia was more a bad thing other than socialism ending.  Well, thank you Colt. I'm glad, I'm glad I've had a positive influence there. But yes, I think it's a horrible thing and it's inspired lots of other breakup movements, including Scotland. I did this talk about why Scotland shouldn't be an independent country. It's worth watching. I didn't. I think it's a good talk. You can find it on my channel. Just put you on book Scotland. I think you'll find it. John says, I've never understood the hysteria about TikTok. What's the worst a Chinese company could do? Send targeted ads to those who watch dance videos, et cetera, on TikTok. Well, they could write the algorithm to emphasize Chinese propaganda and they could suppress anti-Chinese content on TikTok and stuff like that. But that would make them very much the same as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube using the algorithm to suppress certain information, to highlight other information. And this just would be from a Chinese perspective. Who cares? So I would say it's good to have the information. It's good to know that this is happening and then adjust your behavior. They're a private company. Again, they can do what they want. You can use them or you can choose not to use them. And maybe you should choose not to use them, partially because they're Chinese, they're disturbed. But yes, this is part of Donald Trump's campaign to make us all hysterical about China. And again, part of certain elements within the conservative movements campaign to push for a type of Cold War with China. And again, I will talk about what I think their motivation is on a show maybe next week. John says, do you have any plans on visiting Austin or Mexico City in the near future? I was just in Mexico City a few weeks in, what was it, October, November? I was in Mexico City recently and gave a talk. And I gave a talk with Gloria Alvarez. And yes, I've done a lot of events with Gloria. Several of them in Mexico City, but we've done events together in Brazil, in Argentina, in Guatemala. I think in Guatemala, yes, Mexico City in Costa Rica. So yes, I'm quite friendly with Gloria. I like Gloria.  She's a popularizer. She's not a philosopher. Don't hold her up to those kind of standards. But she is, she's impressive. And I think she does good work and she tries to get the ideas out there. And again, I'm sorry you missed us, John, but we were both, we did events recently in Mexico City. I will be in Austin on, let me pull up my calendar. I will be in Austin in January giving a talk. It will be open to the public. So I hope if you're in Austin, you can join us. I will be in Austin. And I'll be talking about, you know, the fight for freedom engaged in the world today. I'll talk about Iran. I'll talk about China. I'll talk about Russia. That'll be on January 26th. More information coming soon. But January, what did I say, 26th? January 26th in Austin, Texas, at the university, I will be giving a talk. So I hope you can be there at the University of Texas, yes, at UT. So hopefully you guys can come. It'll be open to the public. And it will be something around what's going on in Iran, China, Russia, trying to see a connection between this and the broader fight for freedom. And the fight for liberty. All right. 50 minutes. All right. I just can't control myself, you know, and talk for less than 45. Thank you, everybody. Really appreciate it. Really appreciate the support by the superchatters. We didn't make our goal, but I understand people holding back, given the anticipation of the December 31st show. And so I appreciate those of you who did the show just quickly. Friday, oh, there's Armin and just basically got us almost to the target. So thank Armin. Thank you. Really, really appreciate the support from you over the last few months. I do want to mention, and this is to encourage everybody to become members. You can become a member by joining YouTube here. There will be a members only show. So only members will be able to see it live and only members will be able to participate in the chat. There will be a members only show on Friday at 7 p.m. East Coast time. Look for that. You should be able to get a notification about it. If when you signed up for membership, you asked for a notification. It will be 7 p.m. So look forward East Coast time on Friday. And it will be about my thoughts and changing the world. And I'm interested in your thoughts about how we change the world, how we change the culture, how we change politics, how we do that. So become members. You can join. It's only $4.99 a month. You can join and I will do a members only show every month. And it could be, it should be a lot of fun. Press the join button. Not a lot of money. And you can also give a lot of money through that function, but not a lot of money for most of you. Join and join us on the Friday show. We'll also have a news show in the morning tomorrow and we'll have an interview with Tara Smith tomorrow night.  Two morning shows Thursday and Friday. A Thursday night show with Tara Smith, a Friday night show for members only. And of course, December 31st, Saturday, 2 p.m. East Coast time, the 10K match, overview of 2022, looking forward to 2023. See you all on one of those shows or maybe on several of them. Thanks guys. Have a great day.


We will we are going to discuss a concept related to sprays that has applications to applications in or more specifically causes problems in Modell and Arbic Langa sorry sorry sorry. We are going to discuss a concept related to unsteadiness in sprays ok and we will see that there are two kinds of unsteadiness that we need to be careful about we need to be concerned about because unsteadiness in sprays causes unsteady heat release if it was spray combustion application and unsteady heat release as we will see later on is a cause for concern especially if the if the unsteadyness frequency is close to one of the resonant frequencies of your combustion cavity. So that is sort of the motivation for why we need to understand unsteady sprays. So we will quickly start by recapping some of our earlier discussion on what is a spray and what we mean by steady versus unsteady we did discuss this very early on but I do want to bring in definition of unsteadiness working definition and then we will look at some effects ok. What is a spray we have dealt with this quite a bit we have seen an image like this what we have here is an image from a pre-filming air blast atomizer operating at a certain air to fuel ratio this is an what you see here is an instantaneous snapshot. So as you can see there are regions where there is a slight reduction in the fuel you can see these kinds of features. Our goal today is going to be to understand what causes these features these features and as we will see what is the result what is the effect of having these kinds of features in an instantaneous snapshot. Now I do want to mention a couple of things first as to what a spray is and some of the reasons for this unsteadiness as we will see later on one a spray by definition is very polydispers. So this is an example of drop size distribution in a spray as you can see there are drops that are mostly somewhere between 10 20 microns but there are also lots of there are also a few drops that are very large. So you are going to have a very polydispers collection and that is by definition and also the speeds of the droplets as you will see vary from almost like 1 meter per second up to nearly 25. So a factor of 20 variation in the speeds of the droplets is also something that is a feature of most sprays this is what we will call polykinetic although polykinetic has to do with velocity we are looking at speeds in this plot but it still is a representation of the polykineticity in a spray. And then finally when I plot the axial velocity of every drop at a you know sample at a given point versus the diameter you will see that the diameters like we said vary about 2 orders of magnitude speeds vary by a factor of 20. And by and large there is a large group of drops right here in the middle but you can also notice that there is a general visible trend that can be picked up there is a general visible trend and this trend becomes more obvious when we look at when we fit a linear profile to this data set that the smaller drops tend to move with the smaller axial velocity than the larger drops. So there is a small discrepancy on the order of about 15 to 20% between the mean velocity of a group of drops here and the mean velocity of a group of drops here this is what we call size velocity correlation. These 3 features of the point statistics in a given spray so if I generate drop size and velocity statistics at one point using some kind of a measurement instrument at one point in the spray these are the features I can observe at any given point in the spray. And these features in turn cause unsteadiness as we will see a little later on okay. So we have a polydispersity in size polykineticity in velocity and size velocity correlation that the larger drops are moving with a larger velocity slightly greater velocity than the smaller drops. Now I can represent this in a slightly different way here is a line plot where each vector each line here represents a velocity vector of one drop. The length of the velocity vector is an indication of the magnitude of the velocity and the direction of course is indicated by the direction of this vector. So if I have points if I have drops originating at a given point so let us say here I have drops going in all these different directions but by and large there is a mean flow direction but there is a big spread in the angle in the direction chosen by the drops and this variation in the angle of the drop of the angle of the direction chosen by the drops is represented as size velocity correlation because what we had there is like an axial velocity. So even if they were moving with similar axial velocities or similar magnitude similar speeds because they were moving in slightly different directions you tend to get a different axial velocity. So there is this plot here shows you that what we call our mean velocity of the droplet phase. We talked about droplet phase in the context of multi-phase flows. The mean velocity in the context of a droplet phase is this one arrow. You can see how there is a large variation in the velocity field at one point. This is like turbulent flows basically that the instantaneous velocity vectors of a given fluid flow at a point in a turbulent flow would look something like this although the spread in the theta coordinate or the angular the angle made by the velocity vector to some vertical axis is much larger here in comparison to most turbulent flow. So this idea of polykineticity is I think best represented in a graph like this. So now let us see what unsteady versus steady mean means and we will take the example of what is called a pre-filming air blast atomizer. We have seen a design of this in the context of the various nozzle types. You have liquid coming out of here and air moving through both an inner passage and an outer passage. So you essentially have a liquid film that dribbles out of this annular passage and that is impacted by air on both sides. So this is my fuel film. So what we are going to see today is causes of unsteadiness in a spray emanating from a pre-filming air blast atomizer. Now before I go into a discussion of the pre-filming air blast atomizer really speaking let us say there are two kinds of unsteadiness. One that is intended unsteadiness and second that is unintended unsteadiness. So if I think of a diesel spray, a diesel injector typically sprays into the combustion chamber very close to the point, the phase angle where the piston is close to the top dead center and that causes auto ignition and you start to get combustion and the piston goes through its driven stroke. This process is repeated over and over again. So you have a start and a stop to every injection cycle and this is repeated whatever repeated as frequently as your RPM requires the injector to perform. So in the context of a diesel injector, unsteadiness is intended because I do need the injector to start and stop in a very very short period of time. So in most cases steady state models are not very applicable to a real diesel injector. So work in the diesel community focuses on pulsed injection. So you have every pulse causing combustion reaction and you have a power stroke the combustion followed by a power stroke and this in some sense is intended unsteadiness. What we are going to discuss today is unintended unsteadiness which is sort of driven by fluid mechanics and we want to develop an understanding for the causes of this unintended unsteadiness. So we can try to mitigate some of those causes. So let us see what are the, so like we said let us look at a very simple working definition of steady versus unsteady. I have two example sprays shown here. Both of these have these features in the instantaneous snapshots that you can see. Now I have to tell you that both of these sprays are axisymmetric sprays. So what we are seeing is essentially the droplet the light being scattered by the droplets on the periphery of this conical spray. So when I see a region where there is sort of dark, where which is sort of dark in comparison to another region that is more bright which is let us say, so that is more bright. If I look at this red hatched region versus the blue hatched region I am just, this is a region of high droplet concentration on the surface and this in turn is a region of low droplet concentration. So this rich and lean regions in terms of fuel droplet concentration is a cause for concern. We want to see how to eliminate that and the reason we call these unsteady is because if I took two snapshots one immediately following the other two instantaneous pictures those two would look different in terms of these red and blue features. Whereas if I took the second spray which is relatively speaking more steady as you can see there are still pockets which are sort of lean and rich as you can see from here. But for the most part this would be in some sense more steady in comparison to this. So the steadiness or the time variance from image to image is lower with the second image than the first. So I cannot tell that from just looking at one snapshot I have to look at a series of these snapshots from each spray compare the whole series. So develop an averaged picture of the whole spray and then look at what the variability of each of the instantaneous images is from that averaged picture. So this process there is a lot of very nice math that can go into this to quantify the level of uncertainty we are not going to look quantify the level of variability we are not going to go into that this morning we are only going to look at what causes this unsteadiness. So let us see what the first cause of this unsteadiness is and to understand the first cause of unsteadiness we are going to look at a video I think that we played very early on this is a high speed video of a spray emanating from a regular pressure swirl or a simplex atomizer. The video has been captured at 10000 frames a second and is going to be played back to you at 30 frames a second. So it is been slowed down by a factor of 30 or by a factor of almost 330 okay. So the first cause of unsteadiness as you will see is right here. I have a liquid sheet that is coming out of this atomizer as you can see with in the form of this gray cone and that cone is flapping. So there is there is sort of a movement up and down in this direction and that flapping motion is due to our old linear instabilities that grow on this liquid sheet that we are able to understand using our linear instability analysis. So I have created a flapping conical liquid sheet coming out of the atomizer and this flapping conical liquid sheet breaks up into rings. These rings in turn as we saw from our analysis. These rings in turn are responsible for our unstable and they break up into drops that is our primary atomization process and this primary atomization process is somewhat discretized because every time I have this flapping motion every time the liquid sheet goes up and comes down I am going to break off a ring. So I have a sequence of rings formed from every one of these flapping motions and that time frequency of formation of rings is going to cause a spatially varying droplet size distribution droplet size concentration especially near the nozzle. So if I look at even this sort of instantaneous picture I can see that there is a region where I have a large number of drops or surely I can tell that the mass concentration of the fuel is high followed by preceding region where there is a leaner concentration of fuel and I can see that there is going to be another fuel rich packet that is right behind it. So this spatial variability of fuel concentration is a result of the primary atomization process. So this temporal variation of causation of drops temporal variation of production of drops is going to cause a spatial variation in the spray itself. Now this is unsteadiness originating from my primary atomization process. Now but this happens very close to the nozzle why is this important? In a real spray combustor there is not enough time for these drops to undergo for a non-uniform field created from a primary atomization process to completely become uniform. So this unsteadiness may still have some remnant effect on the downstream process okay. So this is one cause of unsteadiness in a spray that is the primary atomization and the wavelength associated with the wavelength and the temporal frequency associated with the most unstable mode of breakup. This is the first cause of instability. You can see this sort of progress forward as you look at the process. Now any sort of variation in the mass flow rate coming into the atomizer as you can see when there is a sudden increase in the mass flow rate that causes a change in the temporal characteristics of this spray. So the first cause as we discussed is anything that happens just inside the nozzle or just outside the nozzle our primary processes. The second cause of unsteadiness is what we want to discuss in some detail today and that has to do with particle vortex interaction. So if I take a typical spray like I have shown in a cartoon here at the edge on the edge of the spray we have essentially air that is outside being entrained in. So these are representative streamlines and these representative streamlines cause a vertical roll up. I mean the entrainment process causes vortices to be formed on the edge of this spray just like edge of any turbulent jet. When you have these vertical structures the drops on the vicinity of the spray are going to interact with these vertical structures and like we said we already have a poly dispersed collection of drops. So if there is some kind of size dependence of the way by of the nature of interaction between a vortex and a drop then different sized drops are going to react differently to the vortex and that entrain could cause other non-linear effects. So we will see what this means in just a moment. This is another way to quantify what I was talking about in terms of this non-linear effect is using a technique called ballistic imaging. This is recently finding use in looking at dense sprays where the number density of droplets is very high and this group was able to make ballistic images of an effervescent spray and if the left hand side is sort of an averaged picture we are able to separate out the averaged picture from the instantaneous snapshot and quantify instantaneous variability. This instantaneous variability as you can see causes these kinds of agglomerated structures of drops. So these are regions where droplets are agglomerated together they are collected together. So we want to understand what is the cause of this collecting collection of drops. A simple model we are going to try and understand a very simple model for this clustering which is based on drag. So when I have a droplet in a co-flowing air stream that if the droplet is initially at rest the air stream is going to drag this drop to some terminal velocity ideally the same velocity as the air itself. And this process is very simple model for this process is based on our Newton's second law that says that the mass of the particle times the acceleration of the particle equals any external force that acts on it in this case the external force is my drag force. The drag itself has got two components one the fact that drag is proportional to the mean velocity between the drop this is the drop velocity and this is the air velocity and a drag coefficient. So essentially the drag force is equal to some drag coefficient times half rho u squared where u would be the relative velocity between the instantaneous relative velocity between the drop and the air and the cross sectional area over which the drag force acts. The drag coefficient itself we are going to assume a very simple model for the drag coefficient which is based on drag on a sphere of radius r over a range of Reynolds numbers. So if the Reynolds number is very low then for RE tending towards 0 you have CD which is equal to 24 over RE which is our Stokes drag for RE greater than 0 laminar or turbulent this coefficient this drag correlation due to Schiller and Norman is pretty useful. So we just want to understand the effect of the air around these around this polydispers collection of drops on the drops themselves ok. So I think we have completed our model now so I have the mass I know the radius of the drop I know mass times acceleration is the drag force and assuming I know everything else in this I am going to solve for u for the of the drop as a function of time and from there get the position of the drop as a function of time. We will start with a very simple model now these are increasing drop size so increasing r in the previous model as r increases if the air velocity is constant first of all I do get the position increases linearly with time so in other words this transient over which the drop accelerates to the air velocity is very small whereas as r increases you can see a region where the droplet is still continuing to accelerate until it reaches the terminal velocity which is the which is equal to this value C what we have plotted here is position versus time. So when the slope reaches a constant value it is equal to the velocity of the air stream around it if the air has an oscillatory nature to it what we find is that the if all the drop started at position x equal to 0 so I have a vortex essentially that is stationary and I in the middle of the vortex I have introduced a drop now as far as the field experienced by the vortex field experienced by the drop the velocity field experienced by the drop it is going to be an oscillatory velocity field because as the vortex so for example instead of the drop being at the middle if I take the drop over here instantaneously it is going to look at a velocity field that is of an oscillatory nature and two oscillatory fields one in the x direction and another in the y direction superpose to form a vertical field so that is like our a field that is causing some kind of a rotation we will only consider one dimensional flow field for a moment so if I have air flow in this direction except that air flow is got an oscillatory component so it is it is mean velocity is 0 over some time average but it is got an oscillatory component the magnitude of which is this u0 now if I put drops at x equal to 0 in this oscillatory flow field the smaller drops are just going to go back and forth so you see this is for a small drop the blue line for example is for a small drop and it is simply going to ride the wave back and forth along with the air stream the larger drops as you can see this is now increasing r the red line is for the largest drop the largest drop tends to actually move so its center of mass moves to let us say in this case 0.2 meters from 0 even if the mean velocity of the air is 0 ok so I am able to if I look at the instantaneous positions of 4 or 5 different sizes of drops some time later let us say one second after I started this process at time 0 all the drops were at x equal to 0 I subject this polydispers collection so I have 5 discrete sizes in this in this particular simulation I take the 5 discrete sizes they are all at x equal to 0 but they are subjected to this oscillating air field over one second of time the larger drops have moved preferentially outward in relation to the smaller drops so if this was to happen due to 2 neighboring vertical structure so I have one here and another here each of these would preferentially move the larger drops outward so over time I would have a region here of clustered drops because the an oscillating air field is able to move the larger drop preferentially in relation to the smaller drop this is entirely due to the nonlinearity in the drag law that we discussed so this Schiller-Nohman drag law has a nonlinear dependence of Cd with on Re and this nonlinearity in the drag is responsible for this kind of a variability or size dependence of the response characteristics of a drop to an oscillating flow so any time I have a size dependence that nonlinearity is going to result in size separation so it is like the larger drops are going to move in one direction preferentially in relation to the smaller drops and if I do the same thing in 2 dimensions and if I have a line of vortices in between 2 success in between a pair of vortices I could create a fuel rich region so right on the edge of the spray where I have these vertical structures entering air from the outside into the spray I have a region that could result in a cluster of drops especially large drops now the way to understand whether I will get clustering or not we just showed how size dependence in the drag law causes clustering so the way to understand whether I get clustering is based on a stokes number so if I take the inertia so essentially a part of this is the inertial effect the inertial force on the drop itself and the drag force from the neighbouring air so if I quantify the relationship between these 2 then this response this gives me a response time of a single particle to an acceleration field so if the response time of the largest particle to the smallest particle are comparable then I am likely to not get size separation another way to look at this is if the range of frequencies time frequencies associated with these vertical structures are on the are such that the response times of the largest drop to the smallest drop are similar then I will not get size separation and clustering resulting from size separation if the response times are vastly different then I am likely to get clustering due to size separation okay this is a very simple model that helps us understand why you see a picture like this so let us come back to this image now like we said this is a pre-filming air blast atomizer spray so I have a spray and outside the spray it is invisible in this photograph but I have air it is a swirling stream of air that is coming from this from this outer air this outer air is like a sheath covering the outside of my spray so right around here I have a co-flowing stream of swirling air and this swirling stream of air interacts with the drops that are formed on the periphery of the spray and this interaction between this swirling air stream and the drops is responsible for these lean and rich spots so if this same spray was inserted into let us say a gas turbine combustor these rich and lean spots would cause fuel vapor rich regions and fuel vapor lean regions in the combustion zone and that in turn if the spatial distribution or temporal distribution in if I was sampling at one point in time one point in space the temporal distribution of these fuel and lean packets was had a frequency close to the resonant frequency of the cavity then I am going to get I am going to create a situation for combustion oscillations which is a form of instability so unsteadiness in sprays is very important from the context of understanding and mitigating combustion instability and so what we are so this fluid mechanic driven instabilities need to be understood through these kinds of non-linearities arising from the drag law now turbulence droplet interaction can also be understood in a similar sense if I we looked at the effect of a mean flow structure vortex is like a mean flow structure if I have a coherent structure a coherent turbulent structure so which is just turbulent fluctuations that are in phase over some region in space those turbulent fluctuations have a temporal frequency and as a model similar to what we discussed will also help us understand how droplets a polydispers collection of droplets interacts with turbulent coherent structures so whether you have a mean flow structure or turbulent coherent structure these interactions can be studied using a simple model like that and the primary cause for this clustering in both those is essentially this response time difference will stop here will continue in the next class


Hey, I don't have a joke for this cold, open, let's just go. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. Okay, so I just got finished reading The End Is Always Near by Dan Carlin, and I really liked it. I mean, it's a bit of a departure from what I normally do on this channel, from what I normally read, but it was a fun little diversion. So basically, it is kind of a historical non-fiction book, sort of. So if you're not familiar, Dan Carlin is a podcast host, and one of the podcasts he hosts is called Hardcore History. And while he isn't a historian, he is pretty well versed in this sort of thing, and so he just will pick topics that interest him and talk about it a lot, and he will usually come at it from a different angle than what a normal historian would, and he does a very good job of trying to get into the minds of people that were around during these events and into the mindsets, and into what it really would have been like to be a person at that time. And in The End Is Always Near, he's specifically talking about the end of civilizations and the end of societies, because while we tend to think of the end of the world or the end of civilization as being something in the future, as being a result of nuclear war or something, that's already happened plenty of times in the past. Like, there have been big civilizations that have been around for hundreds or thousands of years and then collapsed very quickly, or not necessarily quickly, but they have collapsed and left a big vacuum, and then people have to pick up the pieces. That's something that's happened plenty of times before. And basically the thesis of this book, if there can even be a thesis, is that, well, most of them didn't think that the end was gonna be coming anytime soon, but it still happened, and what would that be like for us if that were to happen today? And he tackles this from a couple of different angles. Like, he looks at it from a barbarian invasion perspective, barbarian invasion perspective, and specifically looks at the end of the Roman Empire. He looks at nuclear war, or the possibility of nuclear war, basically from the end of World War II up until today. He looks at the Bronze Age collapse, he looks at the collapse of the Assyrian Empire, he looks at the Black Death, and all of these are pretty well contained and they're not super long or anything. And that's both this book's probably biggest strength and it's biggest weakness at the same time, because on, okay, so Dan, like I said, is not a historian. And if you listen to his podcast, which I think you should, I think it's pretty good, if you've listened to it, he is very, well, he's very good at getting emotion out there and getting the intensity of certain moments across with his voice. But as a writer, he's not nearly as good. Now, let's not to say he's bad necessarily, because this is written more for an average person or for someone who's somewhat knowledgeable about history, but it's not a historian, because I personally have read plenty of history stuff and a lot of it is just really, really dry and even if it's important information that's there, it's difficult to get across to your average person because it's just confusing and dense and he manages to bypass that. Like he gets information to you in an easy to read, easy to understand, easy to digest way. But at the same time, he's only really scratching the surface of a lot of this. So just keep that in mind as you're going. And honestly, I would say that about a lot of popular history stuff, like especially on YouTube, they mostly just scratch the surface, they don't go that deep into it, but you know, there's other resources out there for you. But anyways, yeah, so Dan only scratches the surface with his writing, which is good because it makes it easy to get through. But at the same time, it's just, it's not that great at getting across a whole lot of information at once, I should say. Because there is hardly a page in here that does not have an asterisk or two or three on there and then have a big note at the bottom. And while that's fine in moderation, it is all over this book. And I had to continuously like read something, oh, here's something else to say and then look at the note at the bottom and then back and forth and back and forth. And sometimes it's necessary, don't get me wrong, but other times like it could have just been put in the sentence that the asterisk goes in. And I think this is partially due to his past as a radio presenter and his present as a podcast host because when you're speaking to someone, you can have a quick aside like, and oh, that also reminds me of this thing and then go off on that for just a sentence or two and then switch right back and that's fine. But when you're reading, it doesn't work quite as well. Another issue I had with this is that most of the subjects he covers here is stuff he's already covered on his podcast. So there wasn't a whole lot here that was new for me. Like if you have not heard his podcast or if you have not listened to very much of it, then a lot of this would probably still be new, but I was disappointed by that. And it's not a very long book either, and a huge part of it is just him talking about nuclear war. I think like a third of the book is just nuclear war stuff. And don't get me wrong, that's kind of interesting at first, but it really, really drags on. And it was frustrating because there were other parts that I wish he had talked more about. I wish he had talked much more about plagues because believe me, it's specifically the Black Death in Europe. You really cannot understate just how much that changed society and how much that changed the church and how much that led to other things that happened in the future. It was a huge, huge deal. And he only talks about that a little bit, so I was disappointed by that. And well, there aren't any other subjects in here that I wish he went into more detail on, but my personal favorite out of all of them was the Bronze Age Collapse because that one... I mean, I just like that subject. You know, it's a very mysterious thing that happened, and he was looking at it sort of from a modern perspective and looking at, well, hey, if something like this happened today, here's what it might be the equivalent of back then. And so that was neat. The only thing that I really wish this book had put more effort into, or the only other thing that I wish this book had put more effort into, is just trying to get into the mindsets of people that lived at the times he's talking about because he does that a little bit and he's much better at it on his podcast. Don't get me wrong, but in this you could spend a lot more time talking about how, for example, the ancient Egyptians viewed the world or you could talk about how medieval Europeans viewed the world and how the Black Death affected that view of the world or something like that. And he does that somewhat near the end when he's talking about World War II and stuff because I think those are people that are much more similar to us, culturally and societally. Societally is that word, whatever. Those are people that in a lot of cases are still alive, so we can understand them a bit better and it's just like looking at, we'll look at the circumstances they were in and here's why they acted the way they acted, but I just wish there had been more of that. That's about all I have to say though. This is a quick read. It's easy to get through and I think if you're a fan of history but you're also not a history major or an actual historian or anything, you would probably like this just fine. It's not a super focused book and it's not the best I've ever read, but I really liked it. And you know, it's a bit of a departure for me, like I said. It's nonfiction and all that, but it's still neat to get this guy's perspective on things because he's not a historian. So thanks for watching. Please like, comment, subscribe. Thanks to all of my patrons, especially Appo Savalainen, Brothers Santodes, Christopher Hawkins, Joseph Pendergraft, and Tobacco Crow. You guys are pretty cool. I like all of you and if you want to get your name on here and also get access to things like voting for video topics and that sort of thing, then just go to my Patreon. If you can't do that, well, I already told you to like and subscribe and all that, so whatever. Bye.


The FTX crisis has shocked the crypto industry and sent markets into turmoil. But what if this is just the surface? What if the FTX debacle is going to spark a larger crisis in crypto and perhaps even beyond? To understand the broader impacts of these latest events, we sat down with Mike McGlone, senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence. Before we get started, as always, don't forget to like the video and subscribe to our channel. I'm Giovanni, let's get started. The situation is evolving very rapidly. So what are your impressions and these scenarios that you are considering at the moment? The bottom line for me is this a major shock to the entire crypto system with domino effects to everything that Sam Bankman freed might come out as potentially somewhat of a fraud. He was the savior in the space. He was considered JP Morgan of the space who helped save the financial crisis in the early 1900s. And just the fact that FTX is going under and what it turns out to be he wasn't. I mean, I recall seeing him at the salt conference earlier in the year in the Bahamas and he was him on stage with Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and it was quite significant. But that person, who I still respect, but that is the shock to the system. So Bitcoin breaking down to a new low in the year and blow 20,000 has potential to be a catalyst for everything to break down. And that's what's happened when it first hit the tape on Tuesday. Crude oil wasn't the first things that broken down and since dropped another 5% as time we're taping this on Wednesday the 9th. The stock market starting to break down. It's just the markets at that point in the year. Everybody who's bought dips all year have basically lost money and all assets. The Fed's tightening more aggressively. Ever since Rebank on the planet is tightening into recession and people have tight trigger fingers and stops. So to me this is a trigger that stops for everything. Yeah, definitely. It was the last of a number of shocks that we witnessed this year. We weren't expecting San Bank of Freedom. It seemed to be like the wide night of the crypto industry saving trying to save a lot of those troubled firms. And at the end, falling victim of this dynamics himself. Where do you see Bitcoin and Ethereum going from here in the next few weeks and months, let's say? Down. Right now, down. Something unusual has got to save it. I'm afraid Bitcoin might head to the 10 to 12,000 area. I don't see it getting above 20,000 to show anything other than more lower. It's got to sustain above that 19 to 20,000 level. And I fully expect it'll be responsive selling when we get near there. This is a major shock and you got to respect that shock. The bigger picture is at some point, I think it's going to break out, but that's going to evolve getting the central banks with Fed off that pounding sledgehammer. And parents like that still early days. So what we have here in Giovanni is 1929-ish. We have the world tilting towards recession. Clearly in Europe, our recession model for my Bloomberg economics team, our chief economist, Anna Wong, for U.S. recession next year is 100%. My colleague in Hong Kong shows China's property crisis has to drop another 25%. This is the dominoes and the number one leading most fluid 24-7 trading vehicle on the planet, Bitcoin, has broken down. From a consolidation period, I look at that as a technician, as a fundamental guy, just look for rallies to sell. I don't know what saves this. In the big picture, this is the breakdown of all risk assets. So next year, I think by the time we're speaking, this time we'll be talking about an enduring deflationary recession, maybe a recovery in Bitcoin. Potentially Ethereum doing okay. Ethereum's still been very impressive. It's holding above 1,000. It's been outperforming Bitcoin all year. It's gone through the proof of transition to proof of work at a great time. When we have this energy crisis and it's revolutionizing FinTech and financial markets, but that global digital collateral Bitcoin is under pressure and will remain. It's been one of the key leading indicators. So I fully expect, like I said, 20,000 good resistance, 10,000 to 12,000 good support for an extended period. You said that basically the loss of confidence from FTX downfall is a shock for crypto, but the macroeconomic dominoes could be more significant. So when you talk about these macroeconomic dominoes, what do you mean exactly? And are we talking about some risk of contagion? Because that's what a lot of people are talking about. Yes, it's a catalyst for people to hit stops in positions in what have been bear markets in the stock market, what looks like it's rolling over to the bear market in commodities. And it's the great reversion of 2022 just accelerating. And crypto's breaking down. Bitcoin has been one of the leading indicators on the way up, and it's a leading indicator on the way down, and it's just broken down. So expect most dominoes to follow. The number one asset class that's still up on the year, and it's still kind of sticking, is I think it's waiting for a head-sledge hammered upon it, is our commodities. Now, croppers dropped about 20% in the year, lumbars dropped about 60%. Those are the darlings of the bull market from 2020 to last year's high. The key one that really needs to break down is Crudel. Now Crudel West Brent got to near $100 last week on clear short covering. I pointed it out in futures, and it's heading lower now, and I fully expect that is the key sore thumb that needs to break down hard. The key fact is almost always in global economic cycles, commodities rally and expansions and decline in contractions. We're heading towards a contraction, and commodities are still expensive. They typically have to get cheap, have to get low to help the economy reset, to help bring on that demand and help pressure that supply. And they're nowhere near that, even close. Let's look at WTI, around $85 a barrel. The cost of production, the world's largest producer, the U.S., is around $40 a barrel. I fully expect Crudel to break down towards those levels. I've been early, I've been wrong early, did not kind of look like an idiot early in the year, went to $130, but now that pump is helping accelerate the dump, not profound with what Crudel almost always does. You need pretty significant lower plateau in risk assets, and a good leading indication for commodities that go lower. So, lower stocks, lower commodities, potentially a bottom in, I think, fully expect long bonds to start being one of the better performers that we head towards inflation. You still stand by your prediction that we're going to transition from an inflationary to a deflationary environment next year, potentially, with a recession. And you said multiple times that in such an environment, Bitcoin, together with gold and treasury bonds will come out ahead, so they will perform well. So, now I would like to know, on the background of this latest crisis that we are witnessing, how has this view of yours changed? So, from a lower plateau, unfortunately. So, I fully expect Bitcoin is going to, at some point, return to its longer term enduring upward trajectory and get towards $100,000.  Now, right now, we're hitting a blip. Now, we've had a lot of blips like this in the past. We've suffered a thousand cuts and we've survived. But the key thing that really needs that trajectory to start, first of all, it has to show a bit of a foundation bottom. And that's probably going to take the federal funds rate expectations to stop going up in terms of yield and start going down. There's still around 5% for a year from now. That's pretty high. Now, that starts trickling down. We start seeing the Fed easing, central banks coming off this aggressiveness. Then, I fully expect long bonds and gold will be some of the better performers. US Treasury long bonds will be some of the best. They've been beat up. This is one of the worst bear markets ever for bonds. But I think that's going to form that foundation for them to go back to that enduring deflationary trend. So it's not that profound. It's just what was happening before. And I think it's going to accelerate. And Bitcoin's part of that, the key thing, remember, Bitcoin's only been around for a little bit more than a decade. It's a nascent asset plastic. And also, it's still on risk on as we just found out with a major catalyst. Sam Banquenfried going down was a severe shock.