I welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Current Yield Grants Interest Rate Observer podcast.

And I am Jim Grant, and with me as always, Eric Whitehead at the control panel and the great Evan Lorenz, deputy editor of grants.

And joining us today is none other than Jonathan Tepper from across like 3,000 miles of salt water.

Jonathan is an alumnus of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which makes him a tar heel,

but he is also a Rhodes Scholar.

He works in London.

He is the founder of Variant Perception, which is a global macroeconomic trading and research and thought shop. And he's an alumnus of not only

those aforementioned illustrious educational institutions, but also, perhaps most revelantly,

of SAC Capital. And he is with us today in his literary capacity, which is most recently that of

the author, along with Denise Hearn, of a book called The Myth of Capitalism. Now, Jonathan,

I'm going to try myself out as a perception of the dust jacket in this handsome volume. And I'm

going to, you tell me whether this is right or wrong. Okay, so the title is the myth of capitalism,

and the subtitle is monopolies and the death of competition. And the picture seems to show

the open jaws of a shark between which swims a little

minnow. And my guess, Jonathan, is that the minnow constitutes the image, the very image of

innovation. Now, is that a correct meeting? Spot on. You got it. Yeah. Well, I would, there's so much

to talk about it. And we would like to begin by asking you then to kind of briefly and colorfully

and with reference to our financial lives today, describe the thesis of this book. What do you,

what are you telling the public? Absolutely. So the thesis of the book is that over the last 40 years,

we've seen merger wave after merger wave in every decade. So effectively we've had four.

And the U.S. has gone from essentially a

very open, competitive economy with a lot of players, down to very few players. And many key

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