Iggy Azalea just purchased a new home in the Exclusive Hidden Hills area and where it is, she's already clashed with a neighbor over renovation. The rapper wasted no time starting to work on her property in the Exclusive LA community, a $5.2 million ranch-tala estate with guest house. Iggy has been renting a mansion for the last several years in the nearby Calabasas neighborhood and prior to that, she sold her former Tarzana house she once purchased off of Selena Gomez. Today we'll take a look at a couple of Iggy's properties including her new one. In these videos we don't reveal any addresses and even though I've done a house tour of my own place, please do not show up at any private residences because it's not safe for anyone. Iggy Azalea is a rapper, singer, songwriter and more who moved to the US from Sydney, Australia at the young age of 16 to pursue her music career. She earned recognition after releasing two of her music videos on YouTube which were instant hit. At the time of this recording, Iggy has not only sold nearly 50 million records worldwide but has masked herself a net worth of over $6 million to go along with it. While Iggy has been renting a fancy mansion in Calabasas for the last few years, she just treated herself to a house in the Celeb Favored hidden hills area. While she paid a whopping 605k over the asking price for the property, Iggy still wasn't satisfied as she has some major renovations already on the go.  Hey everyone I'm Cara the Vampire Slayer and I'm bringing you another exclusive house tour here on Famous Entertainment, this one featuring the homes of rapper Iggy Azalea. If you haven't already, make sure you subscribe and ring that bell for notifications because we post brand new content daily. As always you can follow me on Instagram and let me know who you want to see featured next. Now let's get into this video. Before we get into her new home, let's check out Iggy's former Tarzana residence she sold back in 2017. It had been nearly a year since the Australian rapper parted ways with her ex-fiance Nick Young. So it made sense that they decided to get rid of the home they once shared located in Tarzana, California. Iggy and her ex had purchased this home in 2014 for 3.45 million dollars from none other than Selena Gomez and then listed it for sale around 3.5 million dollars. The home was beautiful but looked slightly traditional at the same time. Maybe it just wasn't fancy enough for Miss Iggy? Well let's take a look and you be the judge. This house was made up of 6,630 square feet of living space with six beds, seven full baths and two half baths all spread out on a single level. On top of the garage there was also a bonus private guest house with one bed, two baths, a full kitchen and even a wrap round balcony. The living spaces appeared to be both indulgent and functional including a combination family room and kitchen that had a full wall of French doors out to the patio. The gourmet kitchen was open concept over a center island in casual dining space and possessed fresh white cabinets for a clean and modern look. Before head, this main area had stylish vaulted ceilings as well. Iggy had plenty of room to entertain guests in the Tarzana residence as formal living and dining rooms were on either side of the entryway too. The formal dining room was set up with a metallic and lavender color scheme and there were dark hardwood floors underfoot. If the Eden kitchen and dining room weren't enough, the light filled residence had another dining nook with a bar and doors that opened to the pool to let in some breeze. Elsewhere there was a study with fireplace and built in bookshelves and a smaller room was set up as a cozy den. Iggy and her ex also once shared an impressive master's week which looked super glamorous thanks to a velvet bed frame and another fireplace. The rapper of course had plenty of award chosen events to get ready for and there was space to do all of that in the beautiful all white master bathroom with vanity. Moving outside to the grounds which you could also easily access from Iggy's master bedroom, the property spanned just under an acre of land and had a resort style backyard. This space encompassed everything from stone paved terraces, sprawling gardens and green grassy lawns while elsewhere there was a sports court. On top of that you can't forget the free form swimming pool and custom lit spa which is definitely an eye-catching feature of the home. When you get bored of swimming you can have a barbecue at the built-in grilling station or choose to cozy up next to the fire pit. I wonder if the Aussie singer ever threw some shrimp on the Barbie back here. It appears that after moving on from this house Iggy was renting until she decided to put down some roots and purchase her current home. In recent news Iggy just settled down and bought a new abode in the celeb-favored neighborhood of Hidden Hills, home to many famous faces including most of the Kardashian-Jenner clan. At first glance the exterior of the ranch style house may not seem like an upscale mansion but the property is full of surprises including the nicest guest house I've ever seen. Iggy was renting a home for a few years in the nearby Calabasas neighborhood so she likely had her eye out for properties that fit her need. While she moved in about a week ago the rappers reportedly feuding with the neighbor already. Iggy wasted no time with getting renovations underway at her new homestead and it seems she got some complaints. Iggy took to Twitter calling an unnamed neighbor a snitch and a bored housewife. So I guess we'll have to see how this plays out. Who's the last person you tweeted? I remember. Built in 1963 and renovated fully in 2006, Iggy decided to go all out and spend $5.2 million on the property which was $605,000 over the asking price. Safe to say she really wanted the home. It's a classy one level wood and brick ranch style estate with a full guest house situated on over an acre of land with plenty of possibilities. The 5,228 square foot residence looks like the perfect place for Iggy to raise her one year old son Onyx whom she shares with her ex-boyfriend Playboy Cardi and it sounds like some of the renovations she has coming are going to be just for him. You'll see what she has planned in just a moment. Her ranch house is secluded from the street by a traditional and picturesque white picket fence as well as tall trees. While moving inside you'll find many of the common spaces have high ceilings and an open feel. The house is made up of five beds and five baths so Iggy and Onyx will have their choice of bedrooms and then some. This spacious great room is definitely a center point of the household with its soaring beamed and vaulted ceiling with stone fireplace blanked by doors to the patio. Moving into the kitchen there's a ton of space to cook and gather but the shade of green that the island is painted here is a little questionable. Other than that I would have no complaints considering everything here is professional grade with brand name appliances, double ovens and much more. Not to mention the kitchen opens up to a screened and covered porch and there's also a bonus butler's pantry and fireside breakfast. If she's in a classier mood Iggy can eat all the tacos she wants in the formal dining area too where there's another fireplace endorsed outside. A highlight of this property that I really like is the private bedroom wing. The wrapper has an entire retreat to herself here that comes decked out with a corner set fireplace and sitting area doors to outside and room for any size bed you would like with space left over. Since we know Iggy needs room for her luxury wardrobe her massive walking closet is just perfect. Finally the en suite bath is spawnspired and after a long day of recording tracks Iggy can definitely kick back here in the soaking tub. Elsewhere the residence sports three more guest bedrooms one of which will be for Onyx and a quiet office space to get work done. I absolutely love the guest house here but who knows Iggy may transform it into a recording studio or gym. Either way the detached space is slightly hidden under some greenery and walking in it's nicer than most upscale apartments I've seen. The loft like home includes a fully stocked kitchen, a living room and spiral staircase leading to the upstairs loft. There's a private bedroom here so the spacious loft has the potential to be anything from a work area to a fitness center or even a playroom. Outside Iggy has plenty of yard space which she clearly already has ideas on how to improve to her take. Currently there's a patio out back with fireplace and barbecue area and elsewhere a basketball court. Additionally there's a sparkling blue pool and spa set in stone and a peaceful meditation space all of which overlook pasture views since it is a ranch cell property after all. While Iggy didn't disclose many details about these renovations she started on they've apparently already been approved by planning commission. Furthermore she did say she's planning to construct an entire backyard playground for her son complete with features like a zip line. The Aussie rapper also thinks these renovations will take at least a year and a half so her neighbor is better gear up. Alright guys so that brings us to the end of our Iggy Azalea house tour. What did you guys think about her property? We took a look at both her former house in Tarzana, California and the new home she bought in the exclusive Hidden Hills community. Her former residence is beautiful but her current house is more memorable in my opinion and I don't think it'll be long until she fixes up the house to her unique and glamour style. Out of all the amenities and rooms at Iggy's new ranch home which was your fave? Would you rather have a pool and spa combo like she has or a home gym? Be sure to let me know down in the comments. I like the pool and the spa area since it just looked so refreshing and like I mentioned I adored the guest house. It looks more spacious than some houses and the loft style with spiral staircase was a bonus. I've also been reading all your comments in our house tours and I'm gonna be shouting you guys out. I love hearing what you guys have to say about the celebrity home. These are from our recent Fager Parks house tour. Showstopper1 said, OMG I don't know which I like best between the first and second home. Both are gorgeous. Didn't know Fager had it like that. Very nice, exceptional. Agreed the woman has some great taste in design. And Shed wrote, Nice previous home, the French home as well. Now her buckhead digs are outstanding. Living in Atlanta I've seen the spectacular home live. The area is excellent. Fager has been stylish for quite some time. I prefer the French style home. The aesthetics suit my taste more. I can only imagine how nice the area is. And while the French style home is smaller, I think I prefer it too. I just love the build and everything about it. But it's definitely hard to choose. If you guys want me to show you, well be sure to drop me a comment about Iggy's homes and what you saw. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram and I will see you all next time. Bye.


We're now going to take a look at what the difference between streamlines means. And if you recall from the earlier segment, we're dealing with two-dimensional incompressible flow. And we said that with the stream function, we talked about the definition of v cross dr, where dr was a vector element going in the direction of the stream function. And we said that if dr was on a streamline and you cross it with the velocity vector, that would have to equal zero. And consequently, what that means is that the velocity vector is always tangential to a streamline or a line of constant stream function. So there can be no flow across a streamline. So what are the implications of that? Let's try out a schematic. So there we have a schematic of a number of streamlines or stream functions. So we have stream function of psi one, stream function of psi two, and a stream function of psi three. And what we're going to do is we're going to take a look at the flow rate across a number of those lines. But from what we said that the flow always needs to go tangential to the streamline, what that means is that between any of these lines, the flow rate needs to be constant. And so we can write, given that each of those lines is going between stream functions, the flow rate between any of those lines needs to be the same or along any of those lines. And so what we'll be doing is we'll be taking a look at the analysis of that. We'll begin by evaluating the flow rate along AB. So across AB, we can write that the volumetric flow rate is equal to the U component of velocity. Now, if we look back at AB, you might have a V component of velocity, but it's going perpendicular to the flow direction or the mass flux or volumetric flow rate. So only the component going to the right is going to contribute. And so that is how we evaluate the volumetric flow rate there. And what I can do, I can make a substitution for the stream function. And so that gives us an equation. Now, along AB, the other thing that we know is that the value of X is equal to a constant along line AB. And so if we look at the total derivative of psi, and we saw this in the last segment, we can express it this way in terms of partials. And if X is a constant, that means that that term is not contributing anything. And the other thing to notice is that this term here is actually the term that is in our integral up there. So we're going to make a substitution. And what we then obtain is QAB. It's the total derivative of psi. And when you integrate that, you get psi at 2 minus psi at 1. So what that shows is the volumetric flow rate is just the difference between the two stream function values. And now what we're going to do, we're going to do this for another one of the lines. And we'll look at the line BC. So we'll now work on this one. So let's take a look at the volumetric flow rate between those along that line. And in this case, the flux across that line is going to be perpendicular to it. So we can express it in the V component of velocity and making a substitution for the value of our stream function as we have that. Now along BC, looking back at that line, we see just like before, along BC, y is equal to a constant. So we're going to use that. And what that means, looking at the total derivative of psi. Now if y is a constant, then the second term here cancels out. And just like before, this here is in there, except it's the negative of it. So we're going to make a substitution. And when we integrate that, we get, oops, sorry about that, we get psi 2 minus psi 1. And if we look back, that is exactly what we got between A and B. Therefore, we can write QAB equals QBC. And then that is equal to the volume flow rate per unit depth. So that is one of the principles of the stream function. If you take the difference from one stream line to another, one stream function line to another, you get the volume metric flow rate per unit depth. Now we've been talking about Cartesian coordinates. If you look at 2D incompressible flow in the r theta plane, so this would be for cylindrical or polar coordinates, continuity for that can be expressed in this manner. And in terms of stream function, we can write this. So that would be the stream function definition if you were dealing with polar coordinates. But what this segment has told us is that the difference between stream functions is equal to the volume metric flow rate. So we'll continue on in the next segment looking at an example where we will solve for the stream function given a velocity field.


Welcome to my show. Welcome back, I should say. It's been a difficult few months. I've missed you. I'm glad to be back in this studio. We could have done some Zoom internet things. I preferred not to. Today I'm alone, but I promise you that the next show I do, I'm hopefully going to have a guest. Today I'm going to talk about three topics. The first one is the elephant in the room, the COVID-19 virus, the elephant in our lives, the elephant sitting on our chest. Ladies and gentlemen, this is without question one of the most serious things that's ever happened to our country. My grandfather, Ellsworth Runlet I, died in 1918 from the so-called Spanish flu. He was a young man, only 38 years old. And back then, if you've read about the Spanish flu, the Spanish flu was attacking healthy people. Whatever this disease was, it only wanted healthy people, young, healthy, vibrant people. That was my grandfather. He had a storage place on the waterfront. It was called Runlet Storage. You can see it in old pictures down near DeMillo's. As a result of my grandfather passing away at a young age before 40 years old, my grandmother became a widow. My father became basically a son with no father at age six. And I was 12 when I lost my father in 1958 from a heart attack. And I've discussed that on this show. This virus is serious, ladies and gentlemen. And when I see people on television that say that this is a hoax, that this is some sort of liberal agenda that's going on to change the course of politics in this country, I shudder to see people look at a TV camera and say, I don't need to wear a mask. I'm protected by the president or whatever politician happens to be in the room. When I see people saying that they don't believe that this is as serious as the doctors of our country are saying, the doctors throughout the world, ladies and gentlemen, I ask these people, why would these physicians, these very experienced men and women in disease understanding, why would they lie? What motive do they have? What political or monetary motive do they have to be making up how serious this disease is? If you are one of those people who believe that certainly this is a big hoax, or it's not as serious as you think it is. It's only a few hundred thousand people dying, then I would suggest that you take every bit of your money out of the bank, go to Oxford County, and put it all on black and take that similar gamble. With that in mind, I now want to discuss what's happening in Maine with COVID-19 and the legal system. This will be the first of several shows I intend to do as noted as a COVID-19 legal report. When this show is over, I'm gonna sit in negotiations with the manager of this station to hopefully do more programming and to offer more to this station than I've ever given before, because I think now is the time for me to give back to this station and have this station do what it has been organized to do to serve the public. So with that, let me talk to you about what's happening in our justice system. First of all, I can guarantee to you that there is one entity that does not believe that this thing is our hoax, or just some passing fad in the night, and that would be the court system of the state of Maine, the Supreme Judicial Court, the Superior Court, the District Court, and the lawyers of this state, including myself. As a member of both the Maine Bar Association and the Maine Trial Lawyers Association, I can assure you that virtually every lawyer in this state is working very hard to make sure that justice and the constitutional rights of its citizens are still upheld. With that in mind, I want you to understand what is happening in the court system. For a period of time, the court system was essentially in a state of just on hold, everything was on hold. They could not have jury trials because the jurors would have to sit six feet apart. They could not deliberate in a small room the way they've been doing. So jury trials were put on hold for both criminal cases and civil cases. The next thing that was happening is family law cases, divorces, protections from abuse, custody issues, visitation issues, all of those matters had to be put on hold. My law firm, Charles Runlet Nelschuler, does a lot of divorces, and we found that we had to regroup in almost every case that we had. So what has happened in that particular area with divorce and family law? They came up with a priority system, and that priority system was essentially the only cases that were of an emergency nature, emergency protection from abuse, cases involving domestic assault, those were the cases that had to be heard immediately by a judge. When it came to less important issues, maybe they're trying to fight over a bank account or personal property or real property, those cases were put on the so-called back burner. The next came the criminal cases, serious criminal cases in which defendants had to have their rights to be bailed out of jail or to be arraigned, those had to take place. The less serious cases, the speeding cases and some of those less important cases, parking ticket fines, whatever, those had to be put on hold. The next thing was landlord tenant. Evictions were put on hold. They had to tell the landlords of this state we cannot handle these evictions, especially if people are not paying rent because they just lost their job. The other area that has become extremely important is unemployment law. You're reading every day, every single day in the paper about unemployment law. Just before I came over here, I read my own town newspaper, the Cape Courier, in which the police went to over 25 homes with a report that somebody had used their name to file a false unemployment claim. It was one visit after another of the Cape Elizabeth police going to the homes of people whose identity was stolen so that people could file unemployment claims. Those range in not the hundreds, but the thousands in the state. I submit to you that many of those people that filed those fake claims, unemployment claims, might actually end up going scot-free because it just won't be enough time or resources to prosecute them. So those are the areas of law that I'm gonna discuss tonight. If you have a matter pending right now in the court system and you have a lawyer, you should have been in contact with that lawyer to find out what is happening with my case. Do not assume that because you haven't heard from the lawyer or you haven't heard from the court system, do not assume that that case is currently on hold. That is not the case. If you put your head in the sand and think that this case is just gonna go away because you haven't heard about it, you're making a huge mistake. You can reach your attorney by whatever method you've decided, text, email, telephone, and if they do not respond, if they do not respond after two or three tries, then you probably will have to call the board of overseers to have them intervene and have their lawyer, have your lawyer, excuse me, your lawyer contact you. If you do not have a lawyer, do not sit back and simply wait for the court system to notify you. Contact the court system. Ask for the clerk, who is in charge of my case? What is happening to my case that is now pending? My criminal case, my civil case, my divorce, whatever. You need to find out exactly where that case is right now and whether there are anything pending that you need to pay attention to. If you fail to do this, unfortunately, you get caught in the quagmire and it will take you more effort to get out of that quagmire than it was to avoid it in the first place. If you have a criminal case and you do not have an attorney, then you need to contact the district attorney for whatever county you live in and ask them what is the status of my case. If they say it's been dismissed, it's gone, it's gone forever, you don't have to worry about it. You should ask for that in writing if you can possibly get it, even an email to confirm that your case has been closed because otherwise you could be driving along, get stopped for a tail light out and be arrested because the police didn't know that your case had been dismissed and there's a warrant for your arrest. When it comes to landlord tenant, if you are a tenant, I'm gonna recommend to you that you be in touch with your landlord if in fact you are in arrears. You should try to work out an agreement with that landlord to either pay some rent toward your rent, if it's due, to do something other than not pay rent.  They pay their mortgages, they pay their expenses, the upkeep of the property and they need to be paid. So I recommend you contact your landlord and discuss it with them.  I'm gonna recommend that in the highest degree. There are several in Portland and throughout the state who handle matters specifically for landlords just as there are entities to handle matters for tenants. For the tenants, if you don't have a lawyer, you cannot afford a lawyer, you should be contacting Pantry Legal or the Common Legal Aid Clinic and they will hopefully be able to direct you. I can certainly tell you that I am well aware that the Legal Aid Clinic and Pantry Legal and all of those services that are doing pro bono work for clients are absolutely overworked and certainly underpaid. They are working many, many hours to see that justice is done here in the state of Maine. So when I do my next show, I'm gonna give you a second report on how the justice system is faring. One of the things that's happening throughout the state and throughout law firms in the state are what we call Zoom meetings. Meetings by internet, they're doing depositions by Zoom, they're even doing medical negligence hearings by Zoom where the parties are not in a courtroom, they're not in some hearing room, they are doing them by Zoom where the witnesses including doctors who are testifying and plaintiffs who are testifying and lawyers are in sometimes separate rooms and even in separate buildings. This is gonna be the wave of the future. This is how law is gonna be practiced until they hopefully come up with a vaccine and people can once again sit within a few feet from each other as opposed to six to seven feet apart. I now wanna talk about a case that just came down from the United States Supreme Court. It is of great significance to me. For those of you who have been watching this show for the past years, you will know that I'm the author of a book called Full Circle, A Father's Journey with a Transgender Child. This would be my daughter, Nicole, Nikki, the most important person in my life along with my wife and my other kids. And what I wanna say to you is that this case that just came down from the Supreme Court took place several years after the famous landmark decision in which gay marriage was recognized and allowed throughout the entire country. My daughter was one of the first people in Maine to have a gay marriage in August of 2013. I presided over that ceremony at a place known to many of you in this county and that would be Portland Headlight. After the wedding was over, my daughter kindly gave me this beautiful picture of Portland Headlight. Here we go. Of Portland Headlight with quotations that I said when I was presiding over that wedding. And one of the quotations was this. 100 years ago, a wedding between a so-called white person and a Native American would have been illegal and I would be prosecuting for performing that ceremony. Less than two years ago, a wedding between two people of the same gender would have also been outside the law. You, Nikki, and your wife could have had a ceremony with you where you could declare yourselves committed. You could have referred to yourselves as life partners or significant others and you could use any other word to describe your relationship except the word married. There are those who still strongly believe that such a word and such a legal declaration should only be used by a male and a female. Thank God for progress and I closed with this. It is my declaration that not our children, for they are the very ones here who have fought that legal battle and not our children's children because they have been witness to that battle. I am positive that the children of our children's children will ask this question. Why was this ever an issue in the first place? Just as we wonder how anyone with a soul and a conscience could pass a law that says that people of a different color should have to walk miles to a school while others ride a brand new bus. That would be Brown versus Board of Education. This past week, one of the most important decisions in Supreme Court law came down the pike. It was a gay rights case called Bostock versus Clayton County. It involved a man who was fired from his job because they saw photos of him in a picture with a gay softball team and he was discharged. Ladies and gentlemen, what's the most amazing about this is that we knew that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the finest justices who ever served would rule against discrimination. We knew that her fellow justices, Briar and Sotomayor, would go the same way. But what we did not know is that the chief justice of the Supreme Court, appointed by a Republican and a justice by the name of Neil Gorsuch, appointed by Donald Trump as his first Supreme Court nominee would not only join the majority in the opinion outlawing discrimination in the workplace against people who are gay or transgender or bisexual or lesbian or any other difference based upon that. That judge was David Roberts and none other than Neil Gorsuch. It is one of the biggest fakes, that's Jock fake, somebody who's never heard about faked out of your Jock. They are amazed when this case gets discussed in the constitutional law classes of this country, this will be the first thing the constitutional law professor will discuss is the amazing part of this decision. Why? Because the president himself had legal advisors argue for discrimination. When the president was running for election, he said several times, look at the sign behind me, the gays, the gays and the lesbians, they're all on my side, they are all on my side. Come to find out after he was elected, one of the first things he did was to go after the transgender community in the military with respect to health coverage and other attacks upon transgenders. These were making front page news, these weren't under the headlines, they were making front page. I once sat with a couple of friends who are gay, these men got married in Las Vegas, they are dear friends of mine. And I asked them, how are you going to feel if the Supreme Court nominees of Donald Trump, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh vote against you and vote that you can be discriminated against for either your job or to even go in a restaurant and be served or get a room in a hotel or take a ride in a amusement park. Their comment was this, we will trust that justice, we will trust Justice Gorsuch, we will trust Justice Kavanaugh. Amazingly enough, Justice Kavanaugh, who was confirmed by the United States Senate with a vote from Susan Collins, voted a large dissent, a very vocal dissent in this case. It's amazing because when Susan Collins said that she was going to confirm his commitment, she quoted some opinions in which she thought that he would be a very pro-gay rights person. Who knows how he will rule on other issues that may come before him. But I will tell you that to the gay community, Neil Gorsuch is without question a hero. I wish to quote from his opinion. He wrote and I quote, it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex. If a company fires a male employee for no other reason other than he is attracted to a man, the employer discriminates against him for traits or actions it tolerates in his female colleagues. In other words, if you fire a man because he is attracted to men, but you allow a woman who is also attracted to men and marries men, then you have discriminated against. Why is it so hard for Kavanaugh and the other dissenters to not understand that? How can they say that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which the Congress and Kennedy and Johnson and all those people fought so hard to come up with, why do they think that that act does not apply to every human being?  They are black instead of white. They are brown or yellow instead of white.  Why should they be discriminated against? Well, the answer is from now on, at least in the workplace, they cannot. In my next show, I intend to have one of the best civil rights lawyers in the state of Maine to come on this show and discuss this very important decision.  Well, that's it for the serious topics of COVID and gay rights. I now want to talk about a topic that is very near and dear to me. And that topic is lobster rolls. As you enter the summer and you're gonna drive around and you're gonna see signs everywhere, the best lobster roll, best lobster roll in Maine, best lobster roll in Cumberland County. I recall driving by a store near Bethel, coming back from Gulf one day, and the sign said best lobster roll in Maine. I thought this was pretty strange for a store about 40 miles from the nearest water, but I thought, my God, why would they say that if it wasn't true? Maybe it is. So I went into the store, I ordered the lobster roll. When it came out, I went outside to eat it and I realized this was not a good lobster roll at all. I went back inside the store and I said, sir, I'm sorry to tell you this, but this is not only not the best lobster roll, it is the worst lobster roll I think I've ever had. He was very upset with me and said, well, you're still gonna pay for it. I said, well, sir, I don't mind paying for it, but when I leave this store, some critters that exist in the woods about 20 feet from here are gonna have the best lobster roll in Maine. Well, I now wanna talk about what I think are the best lobster rolls in this area. There are a lot of them, folks. Some of the restaurants in town have great lobster rolls. Over at Fort Williams Park where I live, there are two establishments, one is called Bight in the Maine, the other one is the Cousins Lobsters. They have both been nationally recognized, Bight in the Maine has articles, the best lobster roll in Maine, one of the best in the country, best this, best that, and I have to admit they are excellent lobster rolls without question. They have like five different kinds and people wait in line to get it and they have blueberry soda and they've got whoopee pies and you have the view of the very light house that I just showed you a few minutes ago. And then there was another place that I can see the lobster rolls to be very good. The Ocean House variety on Route 77 on the way to Cape Elizabeth, they have what is called a giant lobster roll and indeed it is, it's about this big. I think it's just close to $20. And when my friends from the happenings was on a cruise with me that sailed into Portland Harbor last summer, the first thing I did was we took a limousine over to Portland Headlight and I had one of those lobster rolls. But in my humble opinion, the best lobster roll in this area based upon freshness, quality of the lobster meat, quality of the roll, the way the roll is cooked, the fact that you can eat this meat right out of the roll and then eat the roll by itself and it just tastes wonderful. The best lobster roll in my opinion, ounce for ounce, both of all is the Higgins Beach Market located on the Spirwink Road right at the entrance before you go down the road to Higgins Beach. Based upon all the qualifications that I think deserve to go into a good lobster roll, that place has in my opinion, the best lobster roll in the area. And I'm sure there are many, almost as good or possibly as good, but I'm gonna vote that one as the best I've had in recent times. And make sure you tell the proprietors, Ilse and her husband that I sent you. And by the way, I get nothing for free, not even a free soda. I might get an extra napkin and that's it. Before I close and before I sum up today's show, I wanna wish all of you the best summer you could possibly have, even with all this difficulties going on with the COVID virus and Black Lives Matter. On my next show, I also wish to discuss an issue that I consider to be very important. It's being brought up every day now. It's now taken over front page news, even above the COVID virus and that of course is Black Lives Matter. We are fortunate to live in a city and in a state where hopefully these incidents of police brutality or racial discrimination do not take place, at least very often. I have to tell you that the police departments of this state based upon my representation of both victims and people charged with crimes, my firm does both, I have yet to find more than a handful of incidents where we thought that the police conduct even aborted on the kind of conduct that we've seen on television. My position with respect to defunding the police will be quite strong. I believe very strongly that we should not defund the police. You would result in anarchy and I'm gonna discuss that in my next show because I think it's important to address the issue of Black Lives Matter without penalizing police in this state, including not only my son-in-law who works for the Westbrook Police Department, but others. Folks, thank you for watching and I will see you the next time on The Dairy Run That Show.


This is Jeff Deist and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. Hey ladies and gentlemen, welcome once again to the Human Action Podcast where we are not afraid to read and discuss actual books. And of course, if you've been listening along, you'll know that we recently finished Up Man Economy and State, which was a whole series of episodes that we finished with Professor Patrick Newman talking about the power and market chapters at the end of that book. So that was a really fun sort of finale to that series. And then more recently, we spoke with Jeff Booth, who is the author of a really fascinating book that came out earlier this year called The Price of Tomorrow. And so continuing in that vein of working our way through some great books, we're going to do something a little different today because I don't believe we have ever discussed a book which is not yet finished. But that's in fact just what we are going to do and we're going to do so with our great friend, Dr. Safedin Amus. Many of you know him, of course, from his Bitcoin standard book, but he is in fact writing a textbook, an Austrian textbook, which is based on two lectures, Principles of Economics 1 and 2, which he gave as his own courses through his own Academy Insight, which you can find at safedin.com. So all that said, by way of Prologue Safe, welcome. It's great to hear from you once again. Always a pleasure to talk to you, Jeff. Thank you for having me. Well, I have had the advantage of reading the Prologue to your book. And for our listeners, the book is a project where Safedin is making available to his subscribers so that they can see it in proto-development form as he writes it and as he edits it. So it is a work in progress and a fascinating one. So I guess I'll start with, you know, I have the advantage of having read the Prologue so I understand some things, but for our audience, give us just a little bit of background in as to what compelled you to take on a project like this.  And when I was teaching economics at university, it was pretty frustrating not to have a go-to textbook that you could give to students when they first enter so that they could read it and understand what economics is about. And, you know, it would be something definitive that you could get and and introductory look on the topic of economics that was reliable and coherent. And it's very difficult to have something like this because, you know, as I'm sure you know, the vast majority of textbooks that are taught at universities today are, to put it politely, garbage. It's macroeconomic in the Keynesian tradition and so it's full of confusions and it's generally a waste of time if you're trying to read and understand economics to go through most of the rituals, mathematical rituals that they teach in introductory macro and microeconomics in university these days because the important concepts that you would like to communicate to students in economics are essentially skipped over in the first couple of lectures. They go over them very quickly. They talk about prices and, you know, the market system and capitalism and ownership of production, ownership of capital being private, how the market system works. That stuff is skipped over quite briefly in the textbook. And then we move on to the assembly line kind of education, the industrial education wherein, you know, you can drive a way of asking mathematical questions about things that purport to be related to economics. But really it's just, it's essentially high school level math being adjusted and college level math, to be fair, being adjusted to somehow pretend to be related to economics. And then that's really what you spend most of the course doing and that's what the grading is about. And on the other hand, teaching human action to undergraduates or man economy and state as a start is a little bit difficult. I think most freshmen coming into college these days will have difficulty being interested in reading this and being able to understand it. And then of course it's not easy to test them and produce grades from it. And so I thought, and this is an idea that I'd had for quite a while, but it's a pretty big undertaking. It's something that I hadn't really had the courage to undertake until after I wrote the Bitcoin standard. And a lot of people told me they really liked my way of explaining things. That's really when I thought now is the time to do this. I need to sit down and ask myself what is the best economics textbook that I would have liked to have to give to an undergraduate and just write it. And that's what I've been doing for about, I can't even remember now, I think it's been a year that I've started. I haven't been exclusively focused on this book, but I've been plugging along at it. Well, it's going to be a huge interest to our professors because a lot of them are out there cobbling together courses using a variety of different sources, different articles, Mises.org, and it's not just contained in one book, if you know what I mean. Yes, exactly. This is the thing. I'd end up assigning a syllabus which contained a lot of articles and different chapters from different books, just because most of the Austrian economists have not written university textbooks. They've not written this because the university textbooks have been written by the Keynesians, unfortunately. Well, I was talking to Joe Salerno the other day and I looked this up, Paul Samuelson's textbook. It went through 1948 to 2009. It went through 19 different editions. And we were thinking how many million Samuelson probably made up that thing.  It's astonishing that that book is still in circulation, let alone being taught. I think my favorite story about that textbook is, I forget the name of the authors, but a couple of authors have done an analysis of how the different versions of Samuelson's textbook have treated the question of the Soviet Union's economic growth. And I'll show you all the versions from the earliest one. I don't know if it was in the first edition when they start talking about it, but at some point in the 40s or the 50s, Samuelson begins with what you would expect from somebody who really knows his Keynesian economics, which is that he makes projections for the Soviet economy and starts projecting dates for when the Soviet Central Planning is going to overtake the U.S. economy. And they show you that that delusion continued in this textbook all the way until 1989 when the textbook was published after the Soviet Union had collapsed, and yet still it had projected economic growth for the Soviet Union to overtake the U.S. sometime in the future. And so the editions in the 40s and 50s had predicted that the takeover would come in the 60s and 70s. It didn't come, and the new editions didn't question the assumption that the takeover will happen, but they just continued to delay the date for it, and that continues until after the Soviet Union collapsed. So in 1991 and 1992, American students at American universities were reading Samuelson's textbook that was explaining to them, based on modern macroeconomics, how the Soviet Union is about to overtake the U.S. when the Soviet Union had not existed anymore. Yeah, is it too much to ask that our econ 101 texts not be written by people who think the Soviet Union is the model? I mean, this seems like a pretty small, but you know, something struck me as I was going through the first five or six sections of this book, which you were kind of to provide to me, which is that, you know, books take a long time to write. So why not serialize them and update them and make them available as you go along, almost sort of like a, almost like open source software? Well, this is kind of what I'm doing. Once I felt that I had a structure for the book that I was going to be settling on and had done, you know, I decided on which topics I was going to include. Then I decided, you know, instead of going to a publisher and getting in advance and instead of doing this as part of my university publication, you know, I'm not at the university anymore. I left my university job and now I'm completely independent. And so instead of doing this for a university, I can do it for myself. And I think, you know, the amazing thing about what the Internet allows us is that I can do it directly to the people who want to read it, the people who enjoyed reading my previous book and would like to read this. You know, they can finance my, they can pay me the advance, essentially, by buying access to the book. And what I'm doing is that you buy access to the draft right now and then you get a signed hard cover of the book when it's published next year. That will be sent to you. And, you know, in this way, I'm getting a lot of the people who are most interested in my work to read it at an early stage. And they provided me with very useful and valuable feedback about the book. And I'm also thinking over the next few weeks, what I'm going to be doing is that I'm going to allow you to subscribe to start receiving the chapters of the book by email. As I make more progress in writing it, and I'm ready about it, I'm ready to start sharing it more publicly. I'm going to set up a subscriber account where you set up a subscription service where you'll be getting a new chapter every two weeks or so. And, you know, I think this is really an excellent way to be publishing, and it's much better than the traditional way. And it's, the internet allows us these possibilities where we can tap into the reader's opinion of the book before it gets committed to paper, which is amazing. And I'm imagining different ways of taking advantage of that and sharing it with my readers as I write it. Well, for our listeners out there, if you're not familiar with academic publishing, it is an absolute racket. And what goes on is shocking. And that's why, of course, we get Paul Samuelson's textbook for 50 years. I mean, that's an example of a non-market institution of sorts. But I wanted to just mention, before we move into the body of the book safe, is that you say in the prologue, this is an expressly Austrian text. You're not pretending to present Keynesian or Marxist perspectives other than as required to understand what you are presenting. Yeah, absolutely. I'm completely unapologetic about the fact that, you know, this is not going to present both sides of the story. You know, Paul Samuelson's textbook doesn't do anything to present the Austrian view. And I don't see why all of their garbage needs to be presented in a book about economics. There are a lot of fantasies in the world and there are a lot of wrong mental models. And if you're trying to communicate to a student in a foundational text, you want to focus on what's correct and what matters. You want to focus on things that help them. And so I deliberately tried to do this from scratch and to try and present it, not with the perspective of countering the Keynesian narrative. And so, you know, the mention of Keynesian and Marxist economists or their viewpoints is only brought up very, very sparingly when just contrasting. You know, after I've laid out the Austrian perspective on, say, money's emergence, since these happen to be the most popular perceptions that people have about that topic, I'll lay it out and, you know, explain what is wrong with it. But yeah, the plan is not to engage the mainstream in any way and start a dialogue or a conversation or, you know, attempt to produce a synthesis. And I think that there's no point in that. There's no real honest academic debate that takes place in Fiat academia, as I like to call it. Fiat academia and Fiat research and Fiat publication is, it's an industry of insiders and it's protected from competition. And it's not a place where the truth has much value. So fans of the show should understand that there's a lot of Menger and Bamberwerk and Rothbard and Mises and even Hoppe in this book. I mean, it's really rooted in Austrian thinkers. Yeah, absolutely. It's fully Austrian. And I think what I, perhaps what the internet has allowed me to do because it allows us and over the last few years as interest in Austrian economics has grown. We've developed a much richer understanding and a much richer command of texts and foundational books in this that. We don't need to discuss economics from the mainstream perspective and spend a lot of time on it. And I think this might be the fatal flaw for me in a man economy and state in the sense that you there's a little bit too much focus on trying to do economics in the way of the mainstream in the 20th century. And it's understandable because in that time and place, you know, this was what the economic academic dialogue was about. There was no internet. There was no Mises Institute in the 1950s and 60s where like-minded people could discuss these ideas. And so you have to talk to the mainstream and you have to get published in mainstream publishing houses. And so, you know, a lot of them, a lot of man economy and state, I think that's the biggest problem with the book is that a lot of it is dedicated towards debunking some Keynesians from the 40s and the 50s and the 30s. And people by now that nobody nobody has heard about since then because, you know, they're just interchangeable government economists that are just there to produce, you know, they don't produce their academic work. You can't evaluate it in terms of its content. It's just there like filler text, basically. There's always going to have to be a professor at all of these universities churning out new books and textbooks to explain economics. But, you know, when these people die, their books and all of their contributions and their theories are forgotten and then they're replaced with new fiat economists. And so, you know, people still read Rothbard and Mises and, you know, books written 100 years ago by these people are still being read today. But very, very, very, very few people are actually reading mainstream economists from the 1920s and 30s and even 60s and 70s or even today. Let's face it, but, you know, some of them are read today, but they're not going to be read in 50 years. And the ones that were being read 50 years ago, nobody reads them today. You know, nobody actually reads Paul Samuelsen anymore. Then he's got a whole bunch of theories, which if you were living in the 1950s, you would have been anywhere in economists you would have been familiar with. But now we have new theories and new math and new models and all the economists are focusing on that. And so limiting oneself to trying to talk to the mainstream will create a lot of, in my mind, stuff that is rigorous and essential toward establishing the case for the Austrian perspective as opposed to the Keynesian or mainstream perspective. But ultimately, if you're not, you know, if you just want to communicate it to the freshmen, you don't want to even get into all of that confusion.  I understand why Rothbard did it because back then everybody was immersed in that discourse. But now, you know, the internet is freeing people from that. And so I think the fact that I already have a little bit of a readership in the Bitcoin space and a lot of Bitcoiners liked my book provides me. And of course, you know, the Demises Institute and all the great work that the Demises Institute has made and the audience that it has provides me with a starting base where I don't need to go and engage the mainstream. I'm just going to communicate these ideas in the best way to get them through to the freshmen so that they know exactly what capital is and what we mean when we use the word capital and why capital is important and what happens, you know, what you need in order to have capital saving and what happens if you finance capital from credit expansion. These extremely important concepts are much better explained just purely from the Austrian perspective without getting into all of the confusions of the Keynesians. Well, one of the problems you identify with Mannequin Musee, of course, is just the sheer length of the book and getting through it. Do you have a sense as to how long your principles of economics book will be when completed? I'm planning for around 100,000 words, I think it's it may go to 120 but I'm trying to keep it in that range 100 to 120,000 words, I think, which is around about 300 to 350 pages or so. I think I don't want it to be very in-depth. I'm trying to make it more broad in covering more and more concepts and may not necessarily dig very deep into them. Right. And of course, this is an economics textbook aimed at, let's say, a freshman college audience or that sort of level. One of the things for me that both in human action, which is more of a treatise and man economy and state, which in a sense maybe straddles treatise and textbook is that the organization of both books, from my perspective anyway, is unsatisfying. So give us your thoughts about how you approached organizing this book. In other words, the various silos. The way that I started it is I had effectively, I placed two foundational chapters at the beginning. So the first one is explaining subjective value and marginal analysis. And essentially, you know, the Hungarian foundations for the course is laid out in chapter one. I think these are extremely important concepts. And then the second chapter is explaining human action. I thought this would also be a very useful way to just establish the topic in that what we're dealing with in this course is that humans act. And Mises has written a whole book about this. Here's what we mean by human action and here's what it means to use this as an analytic lens for understanding economics. And then the third chapter is also somewhat of a foundational chapter wherein I explain, I focus on understanding time in economics. And I think this is extremely important because the way that I structure the book is that after discussing, I explained time and Mises says time is a unique economic good because it is irreversible. And then I posit that all economizing is economizing of time. And then when we think about it, you know, once I think of the economic problem is ultimately flowing from the economizing of time. And here this is where I bring in the work of Julian Simon. This is where it will go a little bit off the Austrian reservation and bring in Julian Simon, who was more of a Chicago economist. I mean, he was in Chicago, but I would say he was pretty Austrian in his approach. And he wrote a very important book for me, which is called the ultimate resource. And in this book, Simon explains that the ultimate resource is human time because the only thing that's really scarce because all other material things on Earth, all material things on Earth, can make more of them with more human time. And I think this is an enormously profound point in that the magnitude of anything or the quantity of anything, whether it's a final good or a raw material in Earth for all practical intents and purposes is subject to just how much time we dedicate to it. We think of the Earth as being scarce, we think of the Earth as limited, the size of the Earth as fixed.  And while that is true, I think what Simon makes clear is that the only scarcity that really matters here is not the total quantity that exists in the planet because the planet is absolutely enormous. And so whether it's gold or oil or any of those things, the limit on how much we can make of those is about how much time we dedicate to it. We always make more gold. We can always dig deeper and find more gold. But the reason we don't make more gold than we do is because the opportunity cost of gold rises in terms of our time and in terms of the other goods and services to which we could dedicate our time. In other words, we could triple global gold production, but it would require us to give up on a lot of other essentials, other economic goods. So the limit, the only thing that is really scarce is human time. And I think I like to use this as the motivation for the economic question because then I introduced the different techniques which humans use for economizing their time. And these are the, these are the, this is, I could say, you know, the meat of the book in that these are the, these are the topics usually that the economics textbooks of all fields focus on. So the first one is property and well, labor property, you know, labor is an idea. So we economize between, we can economize our time between leisure and labor. And one way we economize is that we take property so we start owning things and we start investing in maintaining them and keeping them so first durable goods. And then, you know, one special kind of property is property that is used for the production of goods, which is capital. So then we explain capital. And so each one of these gets a chapter where we're talking about this concept using mainly Mises as a human action and Rothbard's man economy and state, I would say. So we explain these concepts and then after capital we look at trade and then money and then, and then another one that I introduced, which is a little bit different from the Austrian analysis usually is energy. I thought that we should, that I should just dedicate a specific chapter to the study of the question of energy because for me, I think it's an essential part of how we economize our time that we apply, we use sources of energy to do the things that we want to do. And I think that's a very useful way of understanding energy and I think it's very topical today because as we can see in places like California, people really don't understand what they're doing with their energy and it's causing all kinds of problems. So, well, there's this part of the book and then I move on to studying monetary economics. So I focus on monetary economics in depth and Austrian business cycle theory and money and credit and banking based on mainly I would say theory of money and credit of Mises and Rothbard as well. And then I end with the kind of political economy questions of central planning and socialist calculation. Well, no central planning social calculation comes in a little bit earlier, but we discussed the socialist calculation debate and the spontaneous order and the concept of emerging order a little bit of Hayek and then we end with more of a political questions, political economy questions and the power and state, power and market section of man economy and state. Well, I, from what I've seen, I love the organization because given the benefit of hindsight, we can go back and look at Rothbard and Mises and say, well, how would I pull all that together in maybe a more digestible or comprehensive format, especially for someone who's somewhat of a beginner and just reading this stuff for the first time. So I love the organization. I'll say that also your definitions, which are sort of heavier towards the beginning of the book as you would probably imagine, you know, safe definitions are short. They're generally just a sentence or two. And, you know, they get to the meat of things early on. So, you know, I love all that, but I want to touch on, especially your part five, your monetary economics, because I think so much of this is going to be radically different from what we think of as any treatment of, I guess, hey, I don't even like this term, monetary policy in traditional texts, because you're really getting into the idea of how it is. So my interest is derived from time preference, the typology of money, fiduciary media, business cycles. Correct me if I'm wrong, but none of this stuff is even really discussed in textbooks. Yeah, definitely not in the mainstream textbooks for sure. Time preference is not a word that you come across in mainstream textbooks. And if you do, it's usually just a quick mention of it determining the discount. And then for all intents and purposes, you know, you're just the discounting rate is just a number that you plug into all the calculations. But there's very little reflection or understanding of why time preference is important. And for me, I really thought very long and hard about the monetary part and how to structure it. And I came to the conclusion that, you know, this is this is the Austrian story and we're going to tell the Austrian story from the bottom up. We're going to lay the foundation properly. And so we're not going to begin with money. We're going to begin with time preference. This is what time preference is. And once you've established time preference, then based on that we can see how interest emerges and explain the Austrian theory, the Austrian theory of interest rate, which is the time preference, the pure time preference theory. And then based on that, then I take Mises's typology and explanation of money of the theory of money and credit. And then I use that with that background, I then explain how the business cycle happens. So it's not like we start with the business cycle and then we show the manipulation of the interest rate as being the cause. First, we show how the interest rates work, time preference, interest rate, and then money banking credit. And then what happens when you expand the credit and distort the interest rate and then how that leads to the business cycle. Yeah, it's really an excellent little summation, I think, for most people. Those of us who are not economists can really benefit from how all this is brought together. The other thing I know to safe is that some of the poll quotes you have, again, Rothbard, Mises, Hapa, Manger, etc. They tend to be the kind of quotes that punch the reader in the face. They're not to put you to sleep stuff. No, definitely. I mean, I try and punch the reader as much as I can in my writings. Definitely something to aim for. So if I can bring these heavy weights to do some punching on my part, I will not hesitate. Well, one thing I wanted to mention in particular was early on in the book, you introduce money and the concept of it, but then later on in your larger section on monetary economics, you really bring in a deeper discussion of interest rates and originary interest in that concept and everything. And one of the things I think that was, I've got to say, strange about meta-economy and state was that Rothbard introduces interest rates in his production section, which is that big, meaty middle part of the book, hundreds and hundreds of pages. And I thought it made more sense here. Yeah, I thought it would make sense to introduce money conceptually in the earlier part and the part about the economizing acts and then continue with explaining the economizing acts. I should have mentioned in my summary, I skipped over actually, I skipped over the part where after bringing all these up, you know, the economizing acts of labor, property, capital, trade, money. After bringing these up, I explain how this leads to the, how this, and then I bring up entrepreneurship and economic calculation, profit and loss. And then explain how under an entrepreneurial system where all of these things are undertaken by people where people are working and owning property and trading and accumulating capital, then economic calculation in the market order becomes possible and you have the market order. And so that's the kind of punchline to the first half of the book. And ideally, I think this book would be taught over two courses and it was based on the two courses that I taught in my website. So this would be the punchline for the first part of the, for the first course, which is you explain those economizing acts and then you move on to explaining how they all come together to build a market system and how the market system functions with and how the role the prices play and economic calculation. And so I thought getting into the monetary stuff before establishing profit and loss and calculation and so on would not do it justice and also would completely deflect from the sequence that we had been following at the beginning of the book of, you know, laying out these economizing acts after establishing the foundations. So and also, you know, it would allow me to after I explain the market order then get into money in depth. So then, you know, this would be the second course based on the book. In the second part, it would center on the monetary economics and the political economy questions. Well, we're almost out of time. I just want to bring up one thing here to conclude, which is a lot of people know you as a Bitcoin guy. They think of you as a Bitcoin guy. However, if they go back and read the Bitcoin standard, they will recall quickly that really the first two thirds of that book is about money and economics, not about crypto per se. I've noticed just a couple of small references to Bitcoin in your text. Do you plan on elucidating on that? Having more is this going to just treat Bitcoin in a passing matter? Passing matter, but not very passing because, you know, Bitcoin is interesting as an economic invention, as an economic technology. So I will be discussing it in the chapter on money conceptually just how incredible it is that we have a new form of money whose supply is completely a responsive to demand. And I will be discussing it in the final section. The book is generally just recycling the ideas of Mises Rothbard and Manger and all of these economic crates. But in the final part, I'm going to, you know, after having done 20 chapters of that, I'm going to give myself a little bit of freedom to speculate. It's something that I think they might disagree with. But I think in the final chapter, I'm going to bring in the discussion of, and I haven't written this yet, but how a completely free market would treat money. You know, the gold standard was not an entirely free market and it never existed in its pure theoretical form because of various problems with banks and governments interfering in it. And I think my contention that I want to bring in that chapter is that if we have a money whose supply is fixed or a money whose supply grows at a very, very slow rate, or something similar to what was happening with the gold standard, we'll see the process of the lowering of time preference, which is really the process of civilization in that with time people start accumulating more and more capital. So there's more capital available to lend and so interest rates continue to drop. And really, you know, and I think Hopper says this in his book, Democracy. And I think it's also written in the book by, it's called a history of interest rates by Homer and Silla. The really history is the decline in interest rates as we accumulate more capital as we progress. That book looks at 5000 years of data on interest rates. And you see that it is constantly declining. Obviously it keeps rising in times of war and crisis and civilizational collapse. Interest rates rise up and they go back down. But on, you know, with all of the rises and falls, it seems that we are heading downward overall. And by the turn of the 20th century and the beginning of the 20th century, there was the interest rate on English on the back of England's bonds where I think at around 2% or something like that. So it was continuing to drop. And then World War One happened and the world went crazy and interest rates just continued to rise. And really, humanity was derailed off of its tracks in that sense. But I think if we had continued on the gold standard for another 100 years of largely peaceful and prosperous economic development, I'm willing to argue that maybe we would end up with no interest rates. We'd end up with an interest rate of zero. And that would be the free market outcome that we accumulate more and more capital. Time preference continues to drop. People's capital stocks continue to increase and capital continues to get cheaper that at some point, you no longer care about charging an interest on your capital because the interest that you would get is so inconsequential. The only thing that matters is whether you will get the money back if you trust somebody. And then if you're trusting somebody, then there's no point in lending them for a very tiny interest or for no interest. And so I think what would emerge is that equity investing would be what would make sense. And I think this is where Bitcoin comes in because I think in the Bitcoin economy, I think we'd get much more equity investing rather than debt and credit. And banking would essentially bifurcate into two functions that make sense, which is deposit banking and investment banking. So you either give the bank your money and you pay them so that they keep it safe and so that they make payments on your behalf through whatever technology is most convenient. But that's a service that has a lot of value because you no longer have to worry about securing your own money. You're putting it in the most secure vault in town. And you don't have to go into the vault and take your money out every time you want to buy lunch. You have the money there and they do the settlement with the restaurants through your credit card or whatever. So that's a service that you pay for, which is deposit banking. And then if we have a form of money where central banks can't interfere, I don't see how banks can offer interest rates to depositors. I don't see how they would offer fixed interest rates to depositors. I think they would only function as intermediaries where they would take capital from depositors and give it to investors, sorry, give it to entrepreneurs, take it from investors and give it to entrepreneurs and they take a cut. And so I think those two functions would make sense. And I think we'd get, you know, maybe the end state of economics is that we go to a world of zero interest rates of obviously not this world of zero interest rates where the money is constantly losing value. But in the money that appreciates, I think it would make sense because the money appreciates. So holding it in the bank, you know, maybe you pay 1% storage per year, but the money appreciates it's something like 2%. Well, let's hope that we live to see that system you're describing. So all that said, Dr. Saifidi, now I want to thank you for your time. Ladies and gentlemen, if you're interested in seeing this textbook as it's being created, if you're interested in buying the Bitcoin standard, which I believe is now in about 10 languages, if you're interested in accessing some of Dr. Amos's courses at his website, just go to Saifidi.com, S-A-I-F-E-D-E-A-N.com and you can find out about this project we've been discussing. And I'll ask you now if when the book is completed, you'll promise to come back on the show and talk about it again. Absolutely. I'm always happy to come and talk to you, Jeff. Just let me know anytime. Thank you so much for having me. All right, ladies and gentlemen, check out Saifidi and Amos and have a great weekend. Thanks so much for joining us. The Human Action Podcast is available on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play and on Mises.org. Subscribe to get new episodes every week and find more content like this on Mises.org.


The crisis of unemployment. The average age of graduation from a Nigerian institution of higher learning is 26. A potential employee would get admission into university at 20. Maybe lose a year or two due to prolonged strikes, graduate at 25. Then there's almost a composite gap here between graduation and NYSC because of our inefficiencies in our systems. Now by the time the graduate is ready, you are competing for employment with previously employed workers who have lost their jobs due to economic downturn, recession or cost efficiency restructuring across organizations. Now jobs in certain institutions in the country have both an age and grid limitation that becomes an impediment to every new entrance. Now graduate training programs have become almost extinct, right? With employers now requiring experience that is just not possible for a fresh graduate. Recent statistics from statistic predicts that by the end of 2021, the unemployment rate in Nigeria is estimated to reach 32.5%. That's almost a third of the employable market. This figure is projected to increase further by the time we get to 2022 and data has shown that it has continued to rise year in, year out, right? This means that it is an employer's market and as it responds to the law of demand and supply. So basically, there are more people looking for employment that there are jobs. Now with an abundance of experienced workers losing their jobs and remaining unemployed or underemployed due to the devastating effects of recession and the economy, we have on our hands a national crisis with the potential to implode with both economic and social impact for our nation. This here, and I don't mind this devil's workshop, right? And employment can and will create the following ripple effect. Increase in crime rate. Underutilized capacity becomes available for civic unrest. I'm robbery. Financial crimes, aka Yahoo! Yahoo! Boys, as boys have to survive. Economic migration and a corresponding increase in mental health challenges due to resorting to mood enhancing drugs, leading to drug abuse, because a idle mind is truly the devil's workshop. Now in the last two years, despite the lockdown due to the global pandemic, Nigeria has become the thought-leading source of immigration to Canada's skilled worker program. Nigerians remain favourites for acceptance due to a high level of education and our lingua franca being English, making it easy to score the points required for entry. So basically, we are smart people. We know how to get the work done, which is why they're going to continue to take us. We are on the verge of a brain drain. So how do we change this? The time has come for us to begin to change the curriculum of our institutions to become more entrepreneurial with a focus on work readiness skills instead of theoretical context and frameworks that don't translate to real-life skills. It's time to introduce the concept of ideation and creativity to allow for broad-based thinking to come up with solutions for some of the Nigerians' biggest problems there by creating jobs. We must start to create alternative pathways to wealth and sustainability through funding of business incubators and accelerator programs to increase the survival rate of startups and support the entrepreneurial process. This government-funded but privately-run incubators can be created as private public partnerships, right, initiatives that would provide business advisory, co-working spaces and frameworks and network for entrepreneurs for easier parts to market. So basically, we want an entrepreneur to survive in this market. The Ministry of Labor will start to sanction organizations that have put discriminatory age limits for graduate roles to give everyone a fair playing field. So the Ministry of Interior and Labor should start to enforce the requirements of knowledge transfer from our expatriate community to ensure that the Nigerian workforce remains skilled and knowledgeable and employable to remain relevant for the future of work. Perhaps with this, we can start to drive the numbers down and truly provide an opportunity for full and productive employment and decent work for all in line with the Sustainable Development Goals 8. Wow. Which I must say, what I find most scary when you said 32.5 percent is if you put that across Nigeria's 200 million population, you're talking of approximately 65 million people unemployed. Yes. That's more than the population of Sierra Leone, Ghana and Togo put together. You see, and the thing about it is people want to work, right? People deserve to end a decent living. But when you've already put so many barriers, right, for them, how do they get on the job market? We're talking earlier about how, you know, the average age right now, to be honest, is actually around 28. And I remember the first time, you know, I became aware of that I was dealing with a youth population and many of them had just graduated or were still in university and I'll ask how old are you? And they'll say 26. What year are you? You're telling me you're in third year of university. So my brain's already calculating. You still have one year to go. You're still going to be at home for one year. Then you're going to graduate. How do you compete in the market, right? No one would employ you at that age because they'll say you're not young. You don't have youth on your side. People want you to work with your, one of the things that youth brings is energy. But if you're already 30, maybe you're married. You already have two children and then they want to employ you as a fresh graduate. Your priorities are different. You're thinking about your daughter, your son. You can't bring the best of you to the workplace. And then we then, there's, we don't have a conducive environment for entrepreneurship. Anyone who has tried to do any entrepreneurial venture in this country can tell you the drama that comes with it. You can't access funding, right? You can't pay the right people to work for you, right? And the cost of training are retraining because sometimes you're finding skills that are suboptimal. Now, you know, just even take piggyback on what you just said about the people in school. You made recommendation about reviewing what is the curriculum of today. I still think what we call education is a curriculum that was designed for the last century. I agree. A lot of what is being studied today can get you a job. Anywhere in the world. And if it's the individuals have to figure it out. Now, if you look at the other side, they said about 13.5 million Nigerian youths are out of education. So when you have people out of education, out of employment, you have the recipe for insecurity. I was actually very shocked when the president said, young Nigerians, if you want jobs, behave yourselves. And I really think that he's not actually seeing the cost and effect. The young people are agitated and you're seeing unrest because there is nothing to do. So you don't speak to the symptom when you haven't dealt with the cost, right? For you to say it's not my responsibility, they should behave themselves because we can get foreign direct investment. There are more things than just attracting foreign direct investment. Foreign direct investment will not fix your policy. In fact, a policy that has not, you haven't addressed or you're expecting me to bring my money to your company. A lot of foreign direct investors today cannot get their money out of the economy because of dollar scum. The biggest racket is the dollar racket. And quite frankly, a lot of people are cutting the middle here. So what I think is important because we're joking with this, it's very, very important. I went to the really, really far part of town yesterday, living like he's a bubble. You might not even know that you and I are living in this pseudo conducive environment. Going that far, you get to realize that we're only as safe as these people as engaged. And if we don't do what is needed to get them to jobs, we're losing the time. And there's cyclical employment, which means that as innovation is coming, more skills are going to become redundant. And if our curriculum is not going to upgrade people, we're preparing people for a world that has passed and they're graduating but they're dated or you're graduating outdated. So currently right now, you can actually say, is it really worth people going to university? Is it worth it considering what you're getting? It's not worth it at all. You're actually better off learning a vocational skill. You are actually better off learning a vocational skill. I run an animation company and half the people I work with, I haven't seen their degrees. In fact, if you have interest, passion, you're in. And it's not about whether you have a degree, our degrees will be prepared people for certification but not for not for industries. And if we don't solve entrepreneurial problems, it's going to really, really hit us hard. The average Nigerian is actually an entrepreneur by design. They hustle, but it's always about the quick work. The thinking of entrepreneurship should be about value creation, not just about making the margin. But how can you think about value creation if you can't eat? So it's easy to say, you know, they should be thinking a long term. But if you think on the small scale, you see these guys who want to work, they decide, okay, I'm going to set up my cart on the road to self-food. And they have their clients. I'm one of them. But one day, the local government come, they clear them up. What are they meant to do? They're actually making an honorable living. You're not supplying any support for them. They have decided, you know what? Rather than steal, rather than be a new sense, let me actually do something on which I can feed my family. And even that is taken away from them. So really, there's just so little hope. You shouldn't go to university. Okay, I want to do a vocational skill. I want to work. I want to become an entrepreneur. But again, the system is not designed for entrepreneurs. You might spend 10 years doing a four-year course. So that is that side of the waste of time. You know, for me, I think what's most the problem with the situation is even for entrepreneurship, we have double-digit interest rates. They're not conducive for entrepreneurship at all. If you look at the amount of money used to buy, okay, let's look at Nigeria's budget. We buy computers every year. Every parastartal, Nigeria has more than 1,500 ministries, departments, and agencies. And everybody buys computers every year. If that money was taken just as soft loans given to people to go into entrepreneurship, we'll actually be doing a lot better than our so-called computerized remote access to government agencies, which don't even exist in the beginning. I actually think even the civil service as it is, it's actually a place where most of what you find are duplications of roles, and many people sitting down there doing nothing. So that in itself is a place that cannot drive an economy. When have you tried to get a license, you see four weeks, it will take you two years, right? And then you spoke about access to credit and loans. Every time the government puts a face that there's access to credit and they collateralize it, they fail to understand what the country is. There are things called matching capital. In other countries, if you're an entrepreneur, you have 50%, they'll meet it. But to put a collateral in front of an entrepreneur that's trying to start, you should be giving them tax haven, telling them to have three years tax break. So you can actually scale, because the reality is that the future of job creation is in the hands of the entrepreneurs. The government cannot create jobs, they only create the climate for jobs. And creating that climate is actually creating this funding, access to funding, access to enabling environment, access to skill, right on a level, let education work and feed the economy. There's a disconnect between economy and education. And even the tech industry, see what the fintech space has done. We have unicorns now that have emerged in the last few years. But guess what the government is doing? They're not having to use regulations, stifle people bringing all those draconian regulatory laws. Regulation is not meant to kill businesses, it's meant to empower and make them thrive. If our regulation is about getting them out of the space, you're going to be reducing job. And I hope they understand that. I don't think they do. I think the business is to regulate and the business is to control and the business is to stifle. It's not to create. It's not great. Nothing with conversation or negotiation. They throw the laws at you without first understanding the premise upon which those laws are made. You know, but you know, there's something you said about the evaluate, they can look at the big picture in most developed and developing economies. Actually, most economies, including Nigeria, right? The SME represents more than 80% of the GDP, 70% of GDP and 80% of employment. So that means really you should be focusing on driving and growing small to medium, even micro, micro small to medium enterprise, because that company hiring 10 people here, 20 people here, 50 people here has a local effect across the entire economy. How many jobs really can be created out of that? Microfinance banks, ideally in Bangladesh, microfinance banks were very helpful in helping all those local farmers and SMEs assess certain kind of capital. In fact, they functioned like companies where they were doing their risk assessment was very detailed. Now we have a situation where our banks are only good for deposit collection. That's it. All they want is bring your money. Let's do that. So our banks are not specialized. So banks are actually all, it's all about, let's get, it's not about sitting down. Let's make some quick money. No, the products are not differentiated. Every product is similar. It's just about women account, children account. Bravo. Tony is up next after the break. Stay tuned.