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 Tuesday. February 27th, the month is almost over. Hope you're having a great week so far. All right, I mean, it seems like, yeah, every few years, those people in the culture, and it's not always the same people. It kind of shifts and moves around, and it's new generation. There's a new generation of people, constantly, who actually believe that in the evil of capitalism, who hate capitalism, despise capitalism, who despise and hate individualism, who can only think in terms of collectivism. And it seems like every few years, every few decades, every generation, they come up with a new idea on how to make it right, how to do it, how to get rid of capitalism, how to provide a real, viable alternative this time. We've got it. And their goals seemingly change. Their ideas seemingly change. The name they call their ideology is constantly changing. But the one thing that is always there is really a nihilistic hatred of individualism, of individuals making choices for themselves, and of individuals succeeding in the world around them. The degrowth movement is just the latest variation of a pattern that really, to some extent, goes back hundreds, thousands of years. But it's been quite prevalent in the West since the birth of capitalism, since the beginning of the 19th century. It's interesting. I was listening to an interview with Iron Man about the anti-capitalist mentality. Of course, von Mises had a book, I think, titled The Anti-Capitalist Mentality. Anyway, there was a Q&A about the anti-capitalist mentality. I mean, what motivates people to be anti-capitalist? What is it about capitalism that they hate so much? And she made the following observation, which I think is consistent with what I've said when asked about this in the Q&As in the past. But it's interesting the way Iron Man always formulates these things. Fundamentally, psychologically, what the anti-capitalist fear more than anything else is independence. And what is meant by dependence is what they really fear more than anything else is that they will have to rely on their own rational mind. Deep down, what they are really rejecting, what they really reject at the deepest level, what they really reject is reason. It's rationality. It's relying on their own mind. And at the end of that is they're rejecting reality.  They're substituting reason with emotion. And they're rejecting the primacy of existence and embracing a primacy of consciousness. If they wish hard enough, if they want it hard enough, if they then whatever they wish they desire will happen. If they pray hard enough, I mean, think about all the praying that's done. Isn't that a great example of exactly the same thing? A primacy of consciousness. There's a consciousness, your consciousness, a global consciousness, a communal consciousness, a God consciousness, a nature consciousness, motherhood, I don't know, whatever it is. If you just pray, wish, beg, desire hard enough, then that consciousness would make it real. Reality doesn't matter. Reality is mullible. You just have to wish hard. So they want to escape from reality. They want to escape from reason. They want to escape from thought. They want to escape from effort. What they really just want is the desires to somehow be fulfilled and to somehow try for reality in that way that'll basically confirm for them that their desires are superior to reality and therefore legitimize those desires. I mean, this is over and over and over again. We see this. People don't want to think for themselves. They don't want the virtue of independence, maybe the virtue of independence of all the virtues is the hardest for people. We are so taught, trained, conditioned to rely on others, to basically follow orders, commandments, to be told what to do. And they're terrified of living by their own judgment, their own mind, their own thoughts, their own reason, and to be constrained, not exactly the right word here, by reality. God, that's frustrating. A has to be A. I don't want it to be A. I want it to be B. I want it to be non-A. Just for today, please, right now. Can't get away with it. And I'd say particularly today, well, not particularly today, but today in its secular form, this mentality is really how our kids are raised in school. To feel, to emote, to share their feelings, to participate, to engage with other people, to share, to consider other people's emotions, to everything, everything really geared towards this idea of the primacy of emotion, the primacy of whim, the primacy, the subjective nature of their beliefs, the primacy of their own consciousness. And they're not taught to reason, to think, to facts, facts, facts, reality. Now, of course, altruism plays a huge role here as well. Altruism is a ideal moral system for non-independent people. It places the entire focus on others. You are not important. You are insignificant. That gives you, in a sense, moral justification for not being independent. Who am I? Who am I to think for myself? And by the way, the modern version is this emotion through our educational system. But think about religion is exactly the same thing. Religion is emoting for God. It's all about faith. It's all about rejection of your own reason, your own independence. And it's about following commandments. It's about praying. It's about wishing. It's about desiring. It's not about reason, ever. They can pretend. But it's not about reason.  You are not the focal of attention. You are not morally important. They are or it is.  You are nothing. And therefore, how can you be independent? How can you be independent? Independence is impossible really to an altruist. It's impossible really to an altruist. The whole focal, focus of attention, the whole focal point, the whole orientation, it's towards other. It's otherism, altruism, otherism. What do they want? What do they think? What do they need? And me? Reality? Just who cares? I just need a sacrifice for them. So you immediately see altruism and a lack of independence as going together. And of course, we know that altruism clashes with capitalism. So and capitalism requires independence. It requires rational thinking. And it's non-altruistic. We can debate what it is, but it's certainly not altruistic. They have to hate capitalism. They have to despise it. And then it's just a matter of in various forms and various errors in various places. They find the right excuse. They find the right system. They find the right theory to justify their hatred or to justify why we should move away from capitalism, why we must end capitalism. And a deep growth agenda, which is an agenda today of much of, I'd say, the left, much of the radical left, but not radical left necessarily in a woke sense, but the radical left in a political sense, the radical left in Europe, the radical left in a world economic forum, the radical left across the board. But put aside woke for a second, because I don't, I think woke all support this. But this is much more international. Woke is very much American. It's got big European influences and it's influenced Europe significantly, but it's very American. Whereas this is global. So what is the reasoning behind degrowth? And no mistake about it, the primary focus of degrowth is the destruction of capitalism, the destruction of freedom. And I would argue really deep down, the destruction of individualism, the destruction of reason, right? The destruction of the ability of individuals to use their mind to pursue their values and really a negation of the idea, a negation of the idea that your values really matter at all. They don't. Don't care. Your values don't matter. That's super egoistic. That's super individualistic. That's super selfish. The real question is, I don't know, humanity, mother earth, species, the planet, the globe, the world. And one of the things, the degrowth movement, just like many in the environmentalist movement do, is that they realize that they're at the disadvantage because of the anti-reason perspective mentality. So they kind of embrace pseudoscience or they pretend to embrace science. They pretend that what drives them is scientific, whether it's scientific with regard to, we'll talk about it in a minute, climate change, or whether it's scientific with regard to their view of economics. They hide behind science to pretend that what they're offering is somehow consistent with reality and consistent with science. And indeed, when you tell them they're wrong, they will call you anti-reason, anti-reality, anti-science. So where does degrowth come from? I mean, the degrowth platform, again, it's motivated fundamentally, I believe, by hatred of capitalism. But this situation justifies itself based on some simple ideas, that in the economies in which we live today, where the focus, as they argue, is on economic growth, debatable, the focus is economic growth. What we need to do is grow, grow, grow, where that is the political agenda of almost every political party, one way or the other.  That that should be rejected. It primarily should be rejected because, look, that focus on growth, that focus on more material stuff, more material well-being, at least for some people in society, comes at a huge cost. For example, it requires enormous amounts of energy, which requires burning fossil fuels, which leads to climate change, which leads to catastrophes, many, many catastrophes towards human beings, where millions of people will die, whole areas will flood, catastrophic weather events will annihilate large segments of the human population, we are told. It's also true that all this economic growth leads to just ecological breakdown, the disappearances of species, the destruction of the environment, which coupled with climate change is just unbelievably destructive to the world, to the environment, to the world around us. And the other issue is, and here they're capitalizing very well on kind of existing angst in the world, is in addition to that, what we've seen is that when COVID-19 hit and when Russia invaded Ukraine, what happened is that many economies contracted. There were these huge economic convulsions, but activity improvement stagnated, resources became scarce, and things got really, really bad, and because everybody expects growth, everybody demands growth, everybody didn't know how to cope with this degrowth and what they're saying is, at the end of the day, we're not going to continue to grow. Growth has limits, growth has huge costs to the environment primarily, but it also has limits. And the other thing, of course, that happens with growth, and growth here is just a standard in a sense for capitalism, is that growth creates inequality. Inequality is not sustainable. The people who are left behind as they see it will rise up against those who are gaining, benefiting from all the growth, and they will rebel against it. What they're asking for is let's reconsider the whole issue of growth. They're saying, look, if we really want to, if we really want to reduce emissions, if we really want to take climate change seriously, we cannot grow our economies anymore. Forget about it, it just can't happen. You remember I did a story in one of my new shows about the fact that environmentalists now want to stop me from playing airplanes. They say, you just have to accept that in like 20 years, there'll be just no airplane travel. If you won't be able to go to Europe, you just won't be able to go.  But, you know, airplanes, airplanes is not, is not. Now note that these are not old-style Marxists. This is not the old left. These are, this is far more nihilistic than that. I mean, Marx, Marx was pro-growth, pro-economic growth, pro-industrialization, pro-the use of nature for betterment of mankind, pro-capitalism as an intermediary step in the necessary evolution of human history towards a utopia of equality among the proletariat. So no, this is a modern left. This is a new left. This is a much more nihilistic left. This is a left that is given up on human beings, that is not seeking a utopia, or it is seeking utopia, but it's seeking utopia not in Marx's utopia of wealth. If you really think about Marx's utopia, all your material needs are taken care of. Everything is accessible. As much food as you want. Whatever technology you want, everything is just there.  And then what you do in that utopia is you pursue your hobbies. So Marx, this isn't that. This is a utopia that takes us back to the Dark Ages. I mean, that's not what they claim, because they don't tell you exactly what they claim, but that's the implication. So what do they want? They want us to stop thinking about growth. They want us to accept the fact that growth is destructive. And what we should actually do is reduce growth. Now notice, and important here, and this is true of most economic discussions, and this is what bothered me in Millet's last speech, because he is on the other side of this, but uses the same terminology. Notice the collectivism in the whole approach here. Notice the fact that it's growth for whom? Who gets to grow? Who gets to decide? Can I grow while everybody else doesn't? Can I choose to innovate and accumulate wealth? Why other people don't? Well, of course not. The whole assumption here is somehow we, we, the grand we of a society, we get to decide whether there is growth or not. We get to decide who benefits from who, how resources are allocated once there's no growth. Remember once there's no growth, the pie now is fixed. The pie is not growing. Wealth is not created. All that's left now once the growth ends is redistribution. So everything here is about a centralized planning perspective on the economy and human life. Growth is out. We now have a zero sum world. We now have a fixed pie. How do we distribute that pie? And what should be the principles? But first you have to understand that what decode does is it frees up energy and materials. And one of the advantages of that, particularly if the developed world degrows, then those resources can be put into poor countries growing so that they can reach the same level as the developed countries and then they can stop growing so that we can all stagnate at once. Declose according to them, decode according to them is a purposeful strategy to stabilize economies and achieve social and economic goals, social and ecological goals unlike recession which is chaotic and socially destabilizing and occurs when growth dependent economies fail to grow. So what they want is to purposefully put us into a conscious recession, a conscious state of stagnation where because we're not expecting to grow, because we're not planning to grow, because we're not building kind of infrastructure on growth, we now dedicated the resources to maintaining stability so that people don't feel like they're losing their jobs or there's inequality or anything like that stability. So it reduces energy consumption, reduces carbon emissions. It gets rid of what they called less necessary production. Notice who decides what less necessary production is. Well, some central planner. It means scaling down destructive sectors, destructive sectors as they would call, as such as fossil fuels, mass produced meat and dairy, fast fashion, advertising, cars and aviation, including private jets. So you prefer private jets? Tough. You like fast fashion? Tough. You want to eat meat? Tough. Standard is not you. Standard is not your desires, your wishes. Standard is not your values. The standard is what collectively we believe is good. We got to get rid of less necessary production. Not unnecessary motors, less necessary. You got to prioritize because it's a zero sum world because it's a fixed pie. We got to prioritize. And clearly, fossil fuels put aside all the positives because we don't consider those. We think about all the negatives.   Advertising, who needs advertising? It's just a form of brainwashing. I mean, who needs it? And cause? You don't need cause. You can walk. Walking is good for you, much better for you. Lower health care costs, aviation, airplanes, travel. Again, so selfish. No, there's no justification is given. Less necessary, by whose standard? Well, by, I don't know, democracy, central planner, dictator in chief. Now, this is going to create problems. For example, if people don't have cause, how are they going to get around? Don't worry, the de-growth people have this taken care of. We're just going to invest in public services so that we're going to have great buses and great trams and great, I don't know, bicycles. But more broadly, we're going to have public free, high quality, guaranteed, high quality, free health care. Guaranteed, high quality, free education, high quality, free housing, high quality, free transportation, high quality, free internet, high quality, renewable energies and nutritious food. We're going to provide universal public services and that will deliver strong outcomes, social outcomes. And people will love it. People will fall in love with it and they won't want to leave it because, you know, we're providing them with what they really want. They don't really want to go travel in Europe and fly in planes and make a lot of money and buy nice stuff. What they really want is just high quality health care, education, housing, transportation, internet, renewable energy and so on. And we will deliver to them. We being the government, the authorities, and we'll make them good. We're going to improve them. We're going to make them much better. How blank out? Who knows? Where's the money going to come from? I'll tell you later. And then, of course, we're going to introduce, and this is from the Green New Deal. Remember the Green New Deal? AOC's favorite plan for a few years ago. Green New Deal, we're going to introduce a green jobs guarantee. That is, we will guarantee a job for you. We'll put you to work digging ditches and filling them up. No, no, sorry. I mean, installing renewables, insulating buildings, regenerating ecosystems, refurbishing homes, improving social care. I mean, you could be a teacher. You could be, you could do these things. You could drive a bus. I mean, this will end unemployment forever. And ensure everybody has a job, always will have a job. And if they don't like their job, they'll just leave. And there's always a job available for them because the government will guarantee it. Of course, this will all be paired with a universal basic income. So if you decide, if you decide that all these wonderful jobs that the government is going to provide for you, you don't like them, then you don't have to work because the government will give you a universal basic income. So don't worry, this is not a program to course you into actually working. You will have the freedom to not work. We're also, by coercion, this is, okay, well, wouldn't say coercion, by fear. We're going to lower retirement age. You can retire when you're younger. We're going to encourage part-time working.  You shouldn't have to work, really. I mean, it's so 20th century, this whole idea of work. So we're going to shorten the work week, you know, allow you to retire earlier. And this is great because you'll drive less. You'll be able to take care of elderly parents better. You'll be able to do community service more. And again, it will stabilize employment because we know that the longer hours you work, that just takes jobs from other people. Like, if you only worked half the time, then somebody else would fill in the half of a job that you didn't do. Now, I don't even want to get into how... What is it? Completely dishonest, all of that is, given what we know about economics, right?  Maybe millions, hundreds of millions, I don't know. But that's okay because, you know, that's the most sustainable. The fewer people, the less resources we need to steal from the earth, and the more sustainable it will become. You know, they give examples, for example, of Vienna and Singapore have high quality public housing. Nearly 100 cities around the world offer free public transportation. Their jobs guarantees and experiments and basic incomes in Finland, Sweden, New Zealand, and other places. So these are not crazy ideas that are in the world right now. People are trying them. Now, how do you pay for all this? Well, you pay for it by, you know, taxing, wealth taxes, you take money from all those rich people who benefit from economic growth, and you take it from them. And that'll provide at least a one-time big cash inflow. I mean, it's not clear that people will continue to create wealth under these circumstances, particularly if you tax it all the way from them. You massive redistribution of wealth, much more progressive, sorry, progressive taxes, much more progressive taxes. You really tax the evil industries, like fossil fuels.   And then, you know, you can always, you can always, the Fed can always print some money up.  I think it was $700 billion, almost a trillion dollars. Nothing bad happened.  Yeah, we got a little bit of inflation, but it wasn't that bad.  Like, yes, there was a $700 billion bailout of the banks, but you know how the bailout was structured? You probably don't, because nobody seems to know. It was structured as a loan. So, $700 billion was sent to the banks as loans. And do you know how much money came back to the government? How much money do you think came back to the government? Well, I won't keep you in suspense. More than $700 billion. The government actually made money off of the bank bailout of 2007, 2008. Now, I'm not saying that as an excuse for the bailout, I'm against it. I'm against it. I'm not saying that as a justification for future bailouts, but just this idea that you can just print money and hand it out to bankers, that's not what happened. Money was printed, handed out to bankers, they had to return it. And when they returned it, they returned it with interest. So the government made money off of it, and indeed, the whole process took money out of the economy, not in the long run. So yeah, there was no inflation because of the way it was structured, but that's not what they're talking about. So this is also rolling in. I don't know if you remember a few years ago, before the inflation, before the Biden inflation, there was a big, big movement called MMT, Modern Monetary Theory. They basically claimed you could print money and it was no problem and hand it out to people, and it wouldn't cause inflation under the right circumstances and we could manage it and so on. So these guys, these degrowth people also rolling in MMT. They just roll in MMT. They say inflation risk must be managed, but we can be creative on how to manage inflation risk. We're pretty sophisticated. We have these really, really developed models. We can do it. We can figure it out. We can solve it. That's not a problem. We'll just print the money. Then I worry too much about, I think, innovation because innovation is needed for economic growth and if you're not worrying about growth, then you don't need innovation incentives, all of that. And what about how do you allocate these resources? Well basically, the government's going to allocate everything.  It will decide how much you need and it will allocate the appropriate amount to you or to the people providing you with the resources and you will be happy because you get how much you need and you don't want any more than that and that's fine and that's how you should live. All right, that's enough of that. Right? At the end of the day, this is just rehashed communism, couched in environmentalist reasoning without, without the ambition of communism. So this is like a hundred times worse than communism. Communism was ambitious. It wanted economic growth. It wanted to be rich. The communists really believed, the ones who took the communism seriously, they really believed that they would become richer than the West. They really believed their system was, quote, better than the West in terms of creating wealth. Now, I don't know how many of them, I don't think any of them honestly believe that, but that's what they told themselves. That's what they convinced themselves and that's what Karl Marx taught them. These people accept the fact that communism cannot create economic growth. They accept as fact that communism, this kind of communism, will probably lead to great, to, you know, stagnation. What they're evading is that it will lead to massive population decline, massive poverty, huge famines, people dying by the millions. That's what they evade. But they have reconciled themselves with the idea that communism does not lead to great economic growth, does not produce great innovation, and they're okay with that. The anti-growth movement is a deeply anti-human movement. It's a movement that is basically, and it's, you know, this article, I was reading segments out of an article, this article is published in Nature, right? Nature is a pretty mainstream science magazine, right? Not particularly political. They're talking about, but they're talking about in the article, how do we get this? How do we do it? What do we do? You know, we got to get government. We got to get government to do this. We've got to convince people. We've got to pass policies and start moving us in this direction. Life is self-directed, self-generated action. Life is movement. Life is growth. It's the generation of energy, the constant generation of energy. If you don't grow, then you shrink. You can stagnate for a while, like Japan has stagnated. But even Japan stagnation, it's just, it's grown. It's just grown very slowly. But if you really stop growing, which means you stop innovating, you stop producing the things necessary for individuals' lives, necessary not by the standard of a central planner, not by the standard of the philosopher king, but by the standard of individual values, which is what should matter, then you have to grow. People want more. And when they stop wanting more, when they stop being ambitious, is when they stop wanting to live. It's when they stop caring about life. It's when they've just given in. And when that happens, you don't get stagnation. You get massive population, economic, cultural collapse.  What do they want? Well, nothing.    And they've got a lot in common. They've got a lot of common with the conservatives who want to go back to 1220, because that's what they're calling for. That's what will happen. If you stop growth, we will go backwards. And we have a precedent. The dark ages was dark. And from the glory and wealth of Rome, they went back backwards and it's disastrous. And people's lives are destroyed. And the idea, the idea of the material wealth doesn't matter. The idea of the material wealth, idea of the material wealth is irrelevant. The idea of the material wealth is optional. Is the idea that human life is optional? Material wealth, to a large extent, buys us time. Here they think everything will just fall from man up from heaven. Public transportation gets supplied. But public transportation is going to break down. It's not going to be replaced. There's not going to be the money. There's nobody to take the money from. There's nobody producing enough money to take it from them. You can print, but then inflation destroys it all. Where people are going to eat? Where does the food come from? Without industrial farming. And industrial farming is obviously evil, obviously bad. So people have to go back to the countryside. They have to go back and farm. They have to go back and raise their own food. It doesn't take more than two, three generations. We're back at subsistence farming. And the population of the earth is a tenth of what it is today. This doesn't happen slowly. It happens fast. If these guys get into power, if this agenda is ever passed and it is passing in little modules, then we fall off a cliff. Now, luckily, I think, particularly Americans, are too greedy to let this pass. Americans want economic growth. They want success. They want stuff. But this is hatred. It's motivated by hatred of self. It's motivated by hatred of their own rational mind. It's motivated by fear, fear of themselves, fear of the need to be independent, fear of choosing the wrong values, fear of the world and reality. Oh, my God. Climate change is going to kill us all. And the response to fear is to kill all of us. They will never admit it. They don't even think it. They can't allow themselves to think it. But they know it. It's deep down there. They're celebrating in this article, the election of socialists in Chile and Colombia. They're celebrating progressive cities like Barcelona and Zagreb. Barcelona is a nice city. I don't know how progressive it is. And they want us to live in a city and they want us to learn from de-growth economies like Cuba that hasn't grown actually shrunk. And Japan, that's the model. They want us to stagnate. But of course, we know what the model really is. Where would Cuba be if not for the rest of the world? It would be so much poorer. If not for Venezuela for many years. If not for the Soviet Union before that. If not for European tourists going there today. Where would Cuba be? It would be starving in Japan. Well, Japan is not exactly a de-growth story, but that's a whole other story. All right, this is a thoroughly anti-man evil ideology dedicated to destruction of our way of life, motivated by fear but a fundamental hatred, nihilism that drives them. Ultimately, what this would lead is for rationing, rationing homes, rationing transportation, rationing food. Ultimately, this results in mass starvation, mass homelessness, mass destruction, and a collapse of civilization. And I'm not exaggerating. I'm not exaggerating. De-growth means getting rid of human beings or at least getting rid of a majority of human beings. De-growth means death.  No, they don't care what I order about your values, your choices, your judgment. None of that matters. All that matters is what the philosopher King decides is good for the group, good for the collective, good for the planet, for mankind, for something else. And what are they capitalizing on? Altruism. Don't think for yourself. Don't choose your own values. Don't pursue your own values. Think of others. Think of the planet. Think of the other. Fill in the blank who the other is. It doesn't matter. As long as you don't think of yourself. As long as you don't pursue your own values. As long as you don't pursue your own happiness. If I want to fly a private jet, tough. If I want to go start a new company and grow, tough. No, you have to be the same. You have to knock down achievers. They don't talk a lot about this, except in the wealth tax. But you have to knock down achievers.  You have to bring them all down to the lowest common denominator. Take their stuff, redistribute it. And if in the end there's nothing, then everybody will have nothing, but everybody will have equally nothing. And that's okay.  It's a war of all against all. Some will survive. Most will die.  That's what they want. That's what they desire. That's what, and this is, again, in nature, what do we have? We have all these academics. Jason Hickel is a professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the University of Barcelona in Spain. George Callis is a professor of ecological economics. There's a topic for you. And political ecology, another topic for you. At the University of Barcelona. Also in Barcelona, Barcelona. Ooh, maybe I shouldn't go to Barcelona. Tim Jackson is director of the Center for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity. Prosperity. University of Surrey in UK. Daniel O'Neill is an associate professor of ecology of economics in the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds, UK. So UK and not a lot of Americans. He is an American. Juliet Shaw is an economist. God, she's not an economist. I can promise you that. But look what department. She's an economist at the department, a professor in the department of sociology. This is what an economist in sociology, that's what he gets you. At Boston College. This one's University of Lucerne, York University in Toronto, Canada, and Central European University in Vienna, Austria. These are respectable academics. And they're writing in Nature magazine a respectful journal advocating for the annihilation of the human race. Advocating for global poverty. Advocating for wholesale destruction. God, I miss Marx. The Marxists were nice in comparable. All right, I mean, they're just nihilists. And it's, and they're couched in this academic, but the academic's always the most dangerous. And their ideas filtrate through the World Economic Forum. They're in, you know, every leftist movement out there is inspired by this stuff. And yeah, I mean, luckily, I don't think that I'll ever gain control, but God help us if they do. God help us if they do. It's always, yeah.  The, I mean, this is the thing about the Enlightenment that people don't understand, I think. The Enlightenment was fundamentally an age of optimism, of pro-growth. This is the first era in human history, really, where people started thinking about the future from the perspective of, yeah, life can be much better in the future than it is today. They really thought about the endless possibilities that are open to mankind, open to human beings. They had this really positive energy, which of course inspired, I think, the Industrial Revolution. And got it going. They were discovering explanations to how the world worked and how to use those explanations to make the world work even better for human beings. They loved human beings. The modern left and to a large extent the modern right hate human beings and want to see, and want to see, not explicitly, and I'm not going to say this, but deep down, they want to see the destruction, the annihilation. A return to 1220, not a good year. Not a good year by any human standard. And these people are inspired, of course, by post-modernism and neo-colonialism and post-colonialism, whatever they called it. And of course, all the environmental nonsense. So it's a combination of the woke and environmentalism. This is the new integration. Of course, and the redistribution of wealth will be done on woke characteristics on the basis of intersectionality, who needs more from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. That is the communist logo. That is definitely them. Communism is not Marxism necessarily, right? Communism predates Marx. There was communism in many Christian communities starting very early on, starting in the very early church. There were always spin-off communities of Christians that established communism. Ultimately, monasteries were a form of communism. Communal living, communal property, communal job responsibilities. I mean, the first monks were communists. And then there were many Christian communities through the ages that embraced various forms of communism as what they believed was the true essence of Jesus' teaching.  Marx gave a particular type of spin to communism and presented it in a particular context of historical evolution. Capitalism had to come first. And with a particular goal at the end, not an afterlife, which is what the Christians were, which is very similar to the Marxist utopia, but a particular utopia, a technological utopia, a utopia of excess, of prosperity. This is not that. This is communism without the Marxism. This is communism with all the evil. Yeah, monasteries still lived off of peasants. That's true, but it was communism with slaves. But the monks themselves had no private property and they all owned it communally and all of that stuff. All right, let's see. All right, we will do a super chat. I see there are a lot of questions, but many of them in the two to five dollar range. Wow, not even tens, all two to fives. Look at that. Cool, that way you get a lot of questions in. And then we have some 20 and 50s. We need a lot more 20s and 50s. So step on it, guys. All right, let's see. Um, yeah, $200, $250 would be good, at least. All right, a little bit of water. What I need to remind you of tomorrow we'll have a show, another new show. And yeah, you know all the rest of the stuff. I'm not, I don't have much to enlighten you with. Don't forget to like the show before you leave. We'll do that. Don't forget to like the show before you leave. All right, Michael, Michael had a $50 question. There it is. From my experience left us a far more second-handed than people on the right. If you don't have a PhD, they will not listen to your chain of logic. You see this in their attacks on Alex Epstein for only having a bachelor's in philosophy. Yeah, I wouldn't read much into that. I mean, they hate Alex and they're looking for any excuse to go after him. But if Alex was one of them, if Alex agreed with them, they wouldn't care if he had a PhD or not. They only use the PhD argument because he's, you know, he's opposed to their perspective. But look, it left us up very, very second-handed. But so is any Christian. I mean, what is a Christian? If not somebody who follows dogma? The Christian creed. And isn't that Christian creeds developed and produced and presented to you by somebody else? And aren't you just supposed to follow it on faith?  It just manifests itself in different ways in different people. But it's almost all second-hand. What do people think of me? What other people think? Who are the experts? Who should I listen to? Who should, who should command me? And look, I'm actually pro-expert. I'm pro-elites. I'm an elitist. I'm just pro-the-right elites.  I'm pro-good elites, rational elites, knowledgeable elites. I'm pro-expert, good experts who actually know what they're talking about. Not pseudo-experts who don't know what they're talking about. I don't count PhDs as granting you expertise. Expertise is knowledge of reality. How much of reality do you know? So I don't think that this, do you have a PhD or not? I mean, would Jordan Peterson be as successful as he is without a PhD? I don't think so. I mean, he basically got on the stage based on the fact that he had taught these classes. And on the other hand, Joe Rogan doesn't have a PhD. And on the left, you've got plenty of people who don't have PhDs that the left follows in the left respects because they feed them what they want. The same thing is true on the right. All right, Michael says, what degree of liberty do you think you'll see in your lifetime? Flat tax, decriminalization of all drugs, abolish the minimum wage. None of those. I don't believe I'll see any of those. My lifetime, God, what is my lifetime? My lifetime. 30 years? 30 years? I don't think any of those will be in 30 years. I don't see it. I mean, 30 years, look at the last 30 years, we haven't got even a sliver closer to that. I mean, it would be nice if in 30 years, we're talking in terms of how do we promote, I mean, politicians at the top levels of power are talking about things like, how do we move in that direction? Now, maybe it happens before that. Maybe there's a crisis and maybe somebody like me lay commons on, I don't know. But I just don't, as we're moving today, we're just bouncing around, around more and more statism. And the advocates of liberty, for the most part, not all of them, of course, but for the most part are pretty pathetic. So to think that they are going to have success in bringing about these kind of changes that really would shift the way people think, I don't see where that comes from. I just don't see it. I mean, I wish, I hope I'm wrong. I hope we see all three of those in my lifetime. I just don't think that happens. I would just like in my lifetime, to see respect, interest in iron rand being taken seriously by the culture more. That's what I want to see.  I don't believe anything will change, but anything will change for the better, significantly change for the better. But I would like to see in the culture, a respect for iron rand, a taking her ideas seriously, a debate about iron rand, a debate about egoism, that I think we can see in 30 years. I think we can see these ideas being discussed, being debated, being consumed in large numbers in 30 years. And then 30 years later, there'll be a political revolution. But right now, the focus needs to be in bringing these ideas into the culture and engaging in the debate and the discussion. That's what needs to happen. And that's what I expect and hope will happen in the next 30 years. That's what I'm working for for the next 30 years. I'm not working on eliminating the minimum wage. I'm not working on any of those specific political agenda. What I want is just iron rand's ideas, these ideas of egoism, reason, reason, egoism, capitalism, reason, egoism, capitalism. Those three ideas I want to be taken seriously, not dominate the culture yet, but taken seriously in the culture in 30 years. All right, clock. What did that rand mean when she said power lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of the ab... ...absconded mind. It makes me that power lusters have very active minds, always plotting to seize power and manipulate others. That's not mind as Rand uses it. It's exactly an absconded mind. It's empty minds. What power lusters are doing is not thinking. Not thinking as integrating facts and reality. Because the facts and reality go against them constantly. Power lusters are emoting, manipulating. They're manipulating circumstances and manipulating people. They're not going through a logical examination of the facts of reality, evaluating them and making... You know, let me pick up once in a lecture, said that a sophisticated plan to rob a bank was not thinking. Bank robbers don't think. Not in the sense of what meaning is thinking as pro-life action, pro-life integrations. And there's a sense in which, yeah, I mean, power lusters are not thinking. Power lusters are where thinking is gone. If they were thinking, they wouldn't be power lusters. Power lusters emote. And they use some aspect of their mind, but not a formal way of thinking, to manipulate other people in order to get their way. But it's exactly a weed that grows and it's vacant mind. Yeah, I mean, does Joe Biden think? No. He listens to different people and he finds some ideas attractive for whatever reason that part of the time he probably can't explain. And he just goes with it. Does Donald Trump think? No. There's no thinking going on there. Not in the formal sense. It's a lot of emoting and it's a lot of what they're very good at usually is reading the emotions of other people and knowing how to play on the emotions of the other people. Michael, I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened. Mark Twain. I think Mark Twain could have been an objectivist had he been alive today.  Mark Twain has a great sense of life. He's funny. He's engaging. He's a really good observer. He is skeptical of government bureaucrats. He is, you know, yeah, he traveled a lot. He saw the world, even though it was very difficult in the 19th century. Yeah, Mark Twain had a great character. I don't know that he'd be an objectivist. I have no idea. But he had a really, he was very clever and really good kind of sense of life. That doodle bunny is being gay or having a warped gender psychology and inferior state of being, but not necessarily immoral. I don't know what an inferior sense of being means. I don't think so.  So I don't know. I mean, I would think. I mean, this is just me speculating that suddenly the challenge is growing up and stigmas that associate with them when they're growing up, particularly in previous generations, create some psychological baggage. But, you know, and there's something maybe about femininity, masculinity, and how that plays out. But I don't know enough about it. And I don't, I mean, I think that to say somebody has a warped gender psychology, you would have to know a lot about psychology. You have to really understand gender and what it means and how it plays out. And what masculinity really is and what femininity really is and how important are those characteristics to a healthy gender identity? And you would have to know a huge amount about the psychology of sex. And my guess is that nobody in the world today knows that. We don't know. We have estimates and guesses and approximations and stuff, but we really don't know. Not with any certainty. And I don't know, I certainly don't know. I'm not a psychologist and I'm certainly not an expert on gender and sex. I just can observe people and I see people who are gay or happy. And I see people who are gay and unhappy.   It depends on your values, your relationships, what you do with it. So no, I don't think it's immoral and I don't think it's necessarily warped. I do think, you know, the challenge is, but the challenge is for a lot of people and a lot of things. Andrew, how do you view the relation between altruism and narcissism? Do you view them as oppositional or aligned? For example, Trump, when he may not have the soul anymore, it's hard to think of him as self-sacrificing. Yeah, I think to some extent, narcissists are people who have rejected altruism, but have rejected it for nothingness, have rejected it for self-absorption, you know, for an empty soul. So they haven't rejected it for egoism. They've rejected it for whim worshipping and nothing, right? An empty vessel and it's whim. It's not even desires because it's not clear that it's a desire. It's just a whim. So they're not about sacrificing. They're about, they've already sacrificed. They've already sacrificed the thing that's most important and that is their soul. They're just empty vessels without a compass, without any goal other than their emotions and their whims and what they think they can get away with. That's it. They don't have a morality, but that's, and to some extent, you can blame it on altruism, because altruism is so unpleasant that people are going to reject it. And in the absence of an alternative, this is what they become. Most people compartmentalize altruism, put it aside, live their lives as best that they can with a set of values that they kind of figure out, kind of common sense, a little bit of altruism. And they feel guilty because they're not full-fledged altruists, but they don't, but other people like Trump give up, they don't want to sacrifice.  They despise other people. They don't want to give up anything for other people. But to gain a state of not caring and abandoning morality completely, they give up their dignity. They give up their soul. They give up everything that they are, and they just become a vessel for their emotions. Liam says, does a primacy of consciousness and zero-sum view of the world lead to the type of rampant narcissism we see everywhere? I think altruism, and yes, and then altruism rejected altruism, rejected altruism, not explicitly, but implicitly rejection of altruism, and then in the favor of zero, of nothing, I know I called it the worship of zero. And that, you know, that encompassed with a primacy of consciousness and the zero-sum world. I mean, notice that Trump has the zero-sum world. Think about how he talks about trade, and he suddenly has this, you know, nihilistic zero-worship going, this, you know, certainly, but that's most nihilists. I mean, and he has a nihilistic streak, there's no question. Jay Mavs, how would you respond to the following? Most of the immigrants crossing the border are low-skilled labor, and that takes all the low-income jobs from Americans, and that immigrants drive costs up and value jobs down. How do they drive costs up? If they're cheaper labor, then costs go down, right? You know, if I get a gardener who's an illegal and he's charging me less, I have more money to buy other stuff, which then creates jobs for other people, higher up on the supply chain. So no, the empirical evidence and the economic theory are pretty clear. Low-skilled labor, yeah, they might take the jobs of low-skilled labor in America. And or reduce their wages, absolutely. But overall, they raise the amount of jobs and they raise income. There is a subgroup that might be worse off. So what? So what? It's suddenly a bunch of, I don't know, low-skilled laborers move out of Texas and into Florida. Some people's wages will be competed down. So what? So, but overall to the economy. The economy of Texas will suffer and economies of Florida will gain. And remember, again, low-skilled labor coming in, driving the cost of low, of gardening down, makes everything cheaper for consumers, which then gives them more money to be able to spend on higher-level things, which means more jobs for more people at those higher-level places. So theoretically, ideally, those Americans who are priced out because of the new labor coming in, because they know English and because they've had jobs in America before, because they know the culture, can now get higher-end jobs that have been created because of the demand that the immigrants have created. I mean, this is unequivocal, right? This is economics 101. Immigration increases economic well-being, pretty much everybody. Not everybody. Some people always are going to be worse off, but tough. But overall, increase economic well-being. Increase economic well-being for anybody who's ambitious, anybody who's willing to work, anybody who's striving will be better off when immigrants come in. I mean, estimates have it that if you just open, let's say you had to open immigration globally, every single country in the world opened its borders and people could just move to wherever they wanted to. Global GDP would double. In other words, wealth in the world, the standard of living, the quality of life would double. Now, not equally in every place, but it would generally double. And no place would be worse off. No place would be worse off. And that's just, again, economics 101. Nobody challenges these economic ideas. They've run the Pyrics, they've run it all, and economic theory. It's just fact. People who come to America become more productive. They earn more. They create more wealth. By being more productive and creating wealth, they enrich everybody around them. And now they become consumers. So every immigrant that comes to the United States gets a job, works, makes a living, is now consuming stuff. He desires housing. He wants to buy a house. There's a job for somebody to build a house. He wants groceries. There's more grocery workers. There's more farmers. There's more, more, more, more. So it's not a zero-sum world. It's an ever-growing world. So everybody benefits. Maybe the country they're leaving loses. But everybody in the country they come to benefits. Please, again, everybody is willing to work. I go ahead and many people think they are thinking. When they are merely rearranging their prejudices, moving words around by playing a game of platonic forms, never pointing to reality, saying, look, yes, never actually dealing with facts, with reality. They're just moving stuff around. I mean, it's true of so many intellectuals who are just up here floating abstractions. Everything's floating. It doesn't mean anything. I mean, these degrowth people, nothing they say means anything. It's all made up. It's all completely unrelated to reality. You cannot say any of that is actual thinking. It's just wordsmithing. It's expressing their emotions. It's not thinking. If they thought about it, they would figure out very quickly that it just, it won't work. It can't work. It's disaster.   All right. A reminder to ask questions, particularly right now, I'm looking for $20, $50, $100 questions or more so we can approach reaching our goal for the evening. And I've got a lot of $2 and $5 questions, so I'd really appreciate 20s. But you don't have to do it that way. You can also just support the show by doing a sticker, $2 sticker, $5 sticker, $1 sticker. Any amount is incredibly valued by me. Thank you. Now remember, the show is funded through support by people like you and it couldn't happen without the Shazbots and Michael Sanders and the Andrew Traegas and the Liams and James Taylor who are here regularly every single time and participating and enriching the show with their questions, but also enriching the show with their dollars, making the show possible by supporting it financially. So thank you to all of you. Let's see if we had stickers Gail. Thank you Gail for the sticker. Let's see who else. Steven, Ryan. Yeah. Thanks all of you for the stickers. We can do more stickers. Hopefully we can get closer to the way we need to be. What do you think of the cultural impact of the Mad Max franchise and others in the genre? Some people seem to expect an economic catastrophe to occur. I don't know that those movies had a cultural impact. I mean, the dystopian stories, dystopian movies reflect a certain view of the world already. I don't think they encourage people to think of the world in that way. I think it's Mad Max I think is an enjoyable movie because of the individualism and the heroism of the main character. I think of the Mad Max movies, the second one is probably the best. The value oriented, the bad guy. I mean, it was very innovative in terms of the evil of the bad guys and how suspenseful they made it. They made it really, really interesting. I don't think it's had this expectation that the world would end.  I don't think it was just economic collapse. So I don't think there's necessarily coherence to... Now we've got that one apocalyptic one with the kind of zombies which came out of a game. I mean, basically, the apocalypse is a great environment in which to have people fight over values and prioritize. And yeah, so it's a great aesthetic tool to say, okay, post apocalyptic world, now go for it, come up with ideas. And yeah, there's a lot of creative ideas on what to turn that into. I wasn't thinking of the walking dead. I was thinking of this show on HBO. I think it was that some of us, the rest of us, the rest of us, was it the rest of us? Yeah, it was an example of a context in which you can create real drama. And you can create interesting characters. That's the other thing. You can create real interesting characters. But I don't think it had a cultural impact in and of itself. James says, I wish everyone who hated Israel and the Jews, for that matter, would follow Aaron Bushnell's example. It would be a much simpler world if they just did, wouldn't it? The last of us, thank you, not the rest of us, the last of us. Yes, the last of us. It was a good show because it was focused on characters. It was a character, it created a life or death environment. It's a little bit like Westerns, right? Westerns create a life or death environment, the desert, the everything around that. And then it's an environment in which you can create human conflicts and human drama. And the life and death is almost built in because the environment is a life or death environment. A lot of sci-fi is built on that. Certainly Westerns are built on that. All right. All right. We're slowly itching towards where we need to be. But inching, inching, we need a sprint. We need somebody to provide us with some sprints. All right, James. Why did South America have an easier time with capitalism than Africa? Africa doesn't have Catholicism holding it back. Yeah, but Africa also didn't have a basically massive immigration from civilized Europe. So what really accelerated South Africa was that people came with already Western values from Spain and Italy and Portugal and Germany, a lot of Germans everywhere, and they brought Western values with them. So capitalism was not this foreign thing. Whereas in, and the locals in South America were either wiped out like in Argentina. Argentina, basically the indigenous people in Argentina were all killed. So you don't see a lot of mixture, right? And you don't see indigenous people in Argentina. In Brazil, you have indigenous people. And in Peru and in some of the Andes countries, you have indigenous people. But they were always, they became outnumbered by the colonizers. All of South America is colonized by Europeans. So it's European, it's basically European culture. And in Africa, it wasn't done like that. The Africans always outnumbered the colonizers. The colonizers typically only came to exploit natural resources and left. Only in South Africa, in Algeria to some extent, and maybe a few other countries, did they really permanently stay, families grew up, multi-generations. But even then, they were the minority. And so it had a very different dynamic. It never really embraced, and they were always treated as second-class citizens, the Africans, they never really embraced those Western values. Also, the colonization of Africa really happens in the 20th century, whereas much of the colonization of Latin America by the European starts in the 16th century. So it has hundreds of years of introduction to Western civilization. Africa is relatively new in terms of being introduced to the West. Harper, when I walk through college campuses, I see a lot of queers for Palestine signs, but I've yet to see Palestine for queers signs. Yeah, you're never going to see those. That's not going to happen. Harper says, when is your interview with Yomi Park? If you're looking to grow viewership, that's a fantastic way to bring traffic to your channel. Yeah, I mean, I've been really disappointed with Yomi Park recently. I don't know what to do about that. I did send her a message. She never responded. But more importantly, she's just floating with the right with Christianity, with conservatism in ways that are just super unhealthy. And I mean, I don't know. I'll try to interview her. I don't think it'll bring me a lot of new viewership. I think she's being interviewed by lots of people. I don't think anybody is super desperate for another interview with Yomi Park, by me necessarily. So I don't actually think it'll bring me a lot of new people. But there are things that are going to happen in them months to come. And I'm not going to say what, that I think have real potential to grow the audience dramatically. But I'm not going to say until it becomes more of a reality. All right. Oh, by the way, I should announce this. On Thursday, I'm interviewing a doctor from Columbia University, who is an expert on IVF, an expert on fertility. And we'll talk about the Alabama ruling. We'll talk about the implications for IVF. We'll talk about why the Alabama ruling will actually make babies, particularly IVF babies, less healthy in the future. Why it's such a disaster for women and children and families more broadly. Why fetuses are not human beings. Why embryos are not human beings. And he's a physician from, he's at Columbia University, at the top of his field, a real world-class expert on this stuff. And we will be hopefully talking to them. Yeah, I mean, not hopefully. We will be talking to them on Thursday. So please tune in, 7 p.m. East Coast time. Somebody says, wasn't you on going to be on Fox? Yeah. I mean, I got a text today that said, um, Kovuto says you'll have you on train this week. And then, then next text said, what's his name? So, Brett Bear wants to have you on, can be tonight, but sometime this week. I'm waiting. I'm here. I'm available. But, but yes, supposedly I will be on Fox sometime before I leave for Europe, which is Tuesday next week. I hope it happens. If not, when I come back, but there seems to be interest, but this doesn't seem to be urgency, unfortunately. That, that's the, that's the challenge. Andrew says, very interesting that Rand diagnosed anti-capitalism as anti-independence. The fear of independence is counterintuitive in the sense that mental dependence makes a person less safe. Thoughts on the causes of that fear. Well, lack of self-esteem, lack of confidence, lack of belief that one belongs on this earth, lack of belief in one's ability to do it. Fear, fear, just the emotion of fear. Original sin, the belief in original sin, religion, all of those, the reason why one would fear. I mean, think about it. God's looking. What if you come to conclusions he doesn't agree with?  I mean, not only cocaine, fear in you, fear of God. I mean, so it's, you know, basically the religion, I think, is at the source of it. Original sin, dogma, you think independently might come up to different conclusions than the dogma? Adam, how does the leftist degrowth movement relate to the rights back to the 1200s, dark ages, denial of pro-Christian theocracy? I see Marxism as Christianity in secular pain, degrowth, a secular pain peeled off. Yeah, I mean, there's no question. Communism is, as I said before, communism comes from Christianity. It was originally practiced by Christians in all, all over during history. It was suppressed by the Catholic Church because they didn't approve it because they wanted to be rich. But it's there. I think that the anti-materialism is in Christianity. It's certainly in the Christian right today. It's all over that unless you're the preacher who wants the congregation to buy you a private jet so you can go to Europe and preach in Europe or Latin America or wherever. Then material wealth is fine because it's like war is fine if it's for the purpose of doing God's work, right? As long as you're doing God's work, all is good, all is good. I think the closely related at the end of the day, I think that, as I've said many, many times, I think that one of the ways in which the religious right takes over is not only religion, not only the flag, but also this kind of environmentalist approach, anti-materialism, back to basic, love the planet. We are, it's take care, because if you look at the, what do you call them, the new Catholic right, there's a new Catholic right. Deneen and Vermeul, I've talked a lot about them in the past, they're very poor environmentalism. Vermeul has this long essay about what God gave us nature to take care of and we need to take care of it. We need to stop emphasizing wealth creation and we need to stop emphasizing growth and economic progress and focus on taking care of the planet. So I think that the Christian authoritarians of the future will be very, very pro-environmentalism and that's one of the ways in which they are rope in, the left into their agenda. That's one way in which they'll unify the country. RDF, thank you for the sticker. You guys too can do $2 stickers and it'd be great if we do a lot of those then we get where we need to be. Yeah, Cook says Catholic social thought is very environmentalist and Vermeul and Deneen and these guys are all Catholics. They're all converted Catholics. They weren't born Catholics. They chose this crazy religion. They chose it. We just shows you how deeply corrupt they are to choose Catholicism. God, God help us. I mean of all the religions in the world to choose the Catholic dogma and the Catholic Church if you know anything about the history of the Catholic Church it is so irrational, so diverse from reality but that's why they like it. That's exactly why they like it and it's authoritarian. That's what they love about it. Michael says, is Milan altruist or has he rejected altruism in a large extent in order to be passionate about liberty? I don't think he's rejected altruism in any deep sense but I don't think he's an explicit altruist. I don't think he would advocate for sacrifice. He does buy into collectivism. His standard of value is still what's good for society so in that sense he's certainly an altruist very much like Adam Smith. I mean altruism is the thing that holds him together. It's the one thing they reject Rand about is they don't want to be egoists. Is he an altruist in the way he lives? Probably not but is his ideology still altruistic? Yes. I mean you can see it through the collectivism the social utility. Utilitarianism in the end is altruism because it demands the sacrifice of the individual for some greater good the greatest happiness of the greatest number for the greatest whatever. Utility maximization of the greater good. Do you think you can get on P.S. Morgan? Maybe. I don't know. I'm going to try. I'll be in London next week and the week after and I've got my PR team. They will try to get me on P.S. Morgan. So we'll see. Maybe. Who knows? Probably not but we'll try. Liam in what ways of people trained in disintegration? Well they're trained, they're told. Don't look for connections. There are no connections. Every fact is independent of all other facts. Don't integrate. I mean that is the way they're taught. That's the way topics are taught at schools. That's the way within a topic it's taught. That's where history is taught. This date this battle this king this thing this no integration. So it's not that anybody says be disintegrated. It's that everything that they're taught is taught in a disintegrated way. They don't know how to integrate. Integration is the effort. It requires effort. It's an achievement. It requires learning how to do it. And that's what they don't learn. So all they're left with is disintegrated. Michael is German philosophy dressed up barbarism. The Dark Ages presented a science. It's, there's a sense in which that's true. But I don't, I don't know. I mean the result is the barbarism. But it's can't at heart a barbarian. I don't know maybe. Is Hegel a barbarian at heart? He's a divorce from reality intellectually. Wouldn't one know what to do in the woods of whatever. So I don't think of them in those terms. Even though the consequence of the ideology is ultimately barbarism. Apollo, what is the best way to express your love to a woman? Treat her nicely, respect her, buy her nice things. But basically treat her with respect, treat her nicely. Respect, respect is a huge part of it. And then tell her, just talk to her. Just tell her.  I don't think so. I mean it's too benevolent. The most violent element in society is nihilism. It's hatred. And hatred is not just out of ignorance. Or if it is, it's active ignorance. Apollo says, how do I get over broken heart? Find values, orient yourself towards the values. Find, seek out, pursue, enjoy other values. Show yourself in a sense that there's plenty to enjoy in life, even if that particular value is unreachable at this point. Frank, degrowth means people and planet not profit. Yeah, but it doesn't mean people. Because the result is anti-people. The result is the destruction of people. Anti-profit is anti-people. Pro-profit is appropriate people, in a real sense. Robin Page says, do you believe eternal growth is possible? As inflated as the economy and money supply isn't some shrinkage of economy necessary? No, no. Eternal growth is possible, desirable. It can go forever. It could go at a very high rate. There's no limit to human wants, needs, desires, and ability. Productive ability. There's no end to human productive ability. And now you can use AI to be even more productive. I mean, yes, growth can continue forever. And inflation, that is money supply, has nothing to do with growth. Money supply is just an arbitrary thing that the Fed prints or doesn't print, in a sense. An economy is, to the extent the economy's inflated, it's inflated because of, not because of growth, but because of the behavior of the Federal Reserve and because of the behavior of our government. The behavior can change. Indeed, the inflated economy suppresses growth. So part of the reason we're not growing is because of the growth of the economy. Growing is because of the distortions created by the increases in the money supply. So one of the prerequisites of vast eternal growth and high growth rates is getting the government out of the business of money. Just, you know, should read some science fiction, see what's possible. Frank says, you'll talk today, maybe Earth in time of Star Trek. I'm not sure what that means. Cassandra says, thank you for this episode, but more so for the show on pleasure and sex. Great discussion. Happy you enjoyed it, and I will try to do more on pleasure and sex. It seems to be a popular topic, unsurprising. Niko Fo, my professor suggested that universal welfare programs would fix the inequalities from the legacy of slavery. What can remedy sin of slavery, Jim Crow? Freedom. Freedom. The thing that can remedy slavery and Jim Crow, you can't go back and fix it. It's done. But what you can provide is you can maximize opportunities. And the way to maximize opportunities is, the way to maximize opportunities is freedom, capitalism, liberate the economy.  Be colorblind. And that will provide economic growth, prosperity, opportunities, and people will rise up. But there's no way to compensate people for past injustices, not particularly now when you go back generations. It's too late. Now, what you need is to create those opportunities, and those opportunities are created organically by capitalism. All right, guys, thank you to all the superchatters. Really, really, really, really appreciate it. Thank you to all of my monthly supporters. Again, the show cannot exist without you guys. Please consider becoming a Patreon subscribers. I think we prefer Patreon, but PayPal is good too. But Patreon right now is the preferred method. It's easier. For some reason, it's easier on my side. But use whatever platform is convenient for you. Please support us monthly. Please help us grow this show. We're going to see over the next few months, you're going to see changes. And you're going to see, I think, my visibility rise. But in a variety of different ways that I think you'll find unexpected. And yeah, I will see you all tomorrow morning, tomorrow early afternoon for another episode of News Roundup. See you soon. Bye, everybody.


Good evening. Today I'm going to be talking about the colorful map known only as Mario Kart. It's one of the most popular unofficial Team Fortress 2 levels ever made, and if you frequently browse community servers, you've almost certainly run into some variant of it. For this video, I'm only going to be talking about the original, which was released on January 18th, 2008 by a mapper who you might also know as the brain behind CTF Vikings and Cyberpunk. They've since moved on from source mapping to game development, with their first RPG game Phantasmata out in early access on Steam. If you're interested, you can support their ongoing and future endeavors through their Patreon, which is linked in the video description. Anyways, let's have a look at this relic of a map. As you might expect from its title, the main battleground of this map is a large race course inspired by the Super Mario Kart stage Mario Circuit 1. Due to its huge skybox and accessible rooftops, this map became very popular on servers that make use of low gravity and or grappling hook gimmicks. And of course, these ridiculous sightlines are also very alluring to snipers and wrangler engineers. As you might have guessed, this map's balancing isn't the reason people hold it in high regard. Let's have a look at the spawns. Usually, each team will spawn on their respective base, located on opposite corners of the course. Their one room structure is caved into some kind of Mario block, and their exit doors lack any type of cover. With the aforementioned sightlines, you can imagine it's pretty easy to get spawn camped. However, every once in a while, there's a chance you might spawn outside the building, which the creator confirmed to me was an effort to lessen the efficiency of sticky trapping. There's also two mobile spawn points in this map called Cat Buses, one for each team. They're a reference to the movie My Neighbor Totoro, and they circle the main race course alongside a couple of other colorful vehicles. There's two standard race carts, a tank, and the notorious 4chan party van. Go ahead, climb in. On top of those vehicles that circle the racing course, there's also a couple you can find in other areas of the map. Just outside the red spawn, there's a duck car that drives in circles over and over again. And there's a red motorcycle with skirts around the edge of the course and does cool stunt jumps. All of these vehicles used to be controllable with the same system as the carts from Half-Life 1, but they no longer function because the map entity that powers them is broken in modern versions of CF2. Nowadays, if you boot up the map, none of them work except the Cat Buses, since they move on their own.  At the center of the race course is this large two-story structure made out of rainbow blocks. There's two paths cutting through the center of the building, one of which leads to the upstairs club. This club has a dance floor, and a music selection system that lets you cycle through a total of five tracks. The first two are directly from Super Mario Kart, those being the Battle Mode and Mario Circuit themes. The third is a hard bass remix of the Mario Circuit theme. The fourth is the Mute City theme from F-Zero as it appeared in Super Smash Bros. Melee. And the fifth and final track is the 1991 song Jesus Built My Hot Rod by the industrial metal band Ministry. Weird stuff. But now that we have all of the locations on the map established, it's time to talk about what makes it special. I'll start with the little things. Physics props, like cones and explosive barrels, are littered around this map. In the club room, there's even a companion cube from Portal, and a set of speakers that you can knock around. Nowadays, most mappers avoid putting physics props in TF2 maps because they're kind of buggy, so I always find it kind of interesting when a map has them. It shows its age. There's also, by the duck car, a magic pipe that teleports you to the other corner of the map if you jump in it. Almost every edit of the map I've seen makes these thwomps into entities that crush you, so I was surprised to see that in the original there were actually nothing more than map geometry. Regardless, teleport triggers on TF2 maps are also something you usually don't see outside of event maps or maybe trade maps, so I figured it was worth noting. But of all the things about Mario Kart that make it distinctive of its era, none compared to the sheer amount of cultural references packed into it. We'll start with the video game references. As I mentioned at the start, the map's landscape is inspired by the Mario Kart series, and you'll spot plenty of other references to the Mario franchise as well. There's this image from the infamous CDI game Hotel Mario, Alakatu, the thwomps and magic pipes from just a moment ago, the giant mushrooms, and even these exclamation point blocks straight out of Super Mario World that spawn health and ammo pickups when you destroy them. But Mario is really only the beginning of this map's video game roll call. Scattered all around are tons of references to games that are otherwise completely unrelated to the Mario Kart series. For starters, there's the hack and slash game No More Heroes, which for some reason appears in this map in several different places.  Don't call that number. Other games that make appearances include Jet Set Radio, System Shock, Metal Gear Solid, Portal, and Animal Crossing. Some viewers will be keen to note that this picture actually originates from Animal Crossing's anime spinoff, and that brings me to my next segment. On top of video games, this map also contains a good share of anime and manga references, which I had to get outside help to identify because I'm far from well versed in that realm. First, there's this dance sequence from Lucky Star, which is broadcasted on a giant billboard to the right of red spawn. To the left of that, there's a picture of the character retro from the Dead Leaves series. There's two references to Yotsuba, and even the ancient Gashunk meme makes an appearance. Speaking of, being a map from 2008, Mario Kart is rooted with ancient late 2000s online inside jokes. There's the classic Know You, which alone takes me back a good bit. Gentleman, a TF2 meme that I didn't realize was old enough to appear in this map. A Crit Rocket meme that shows what I believe to be a riff of the awesome face. There's arrangement of billboards showing the Xbox 360 kid retraced to resemble each of the nine mercenaries. The reaction guy's meme appears by the bleachers near red spawn, redrawn to start the cast of the Half-Life series. And then there's the Ittort face, which appears all over the walls, floors, and ceiling of this Easter egg room, which showcases pornography based on the Portal series. Classy, I know. The creator of Mario Kart is asked to clarify to all viewers these three things. One, the map is created for a community server whose members are responsible for submitting the images seen in it. Two, the not-safe-work Portal art was added to the map as an anti-theft deterrent, but a clean version was later distributed to FPS Banana. They do not endorse the map, the server, or any material in the map, so please do not contact them regarding the map or anything in it. ["Balloon Race"] Much like Balloon Race, another one of my favorite TF2 maps, Mario Kart really helped push the envelope for how weird TF2 maps can get. Jam-packed with wacky, custom textures, its vibrant style provided an alluring escape from the default rotation of gray and brown TF2 maps. And just like CP Orange before it, Mario Kart gave birth to a whole genre of hyper-casual TF2 servers, with its steady flow of spin-offs featuring new secrets and areas helping to cement it as a popular and consistent alternative way to enjoy the game. Of course, I can't talk about this map's legacy without mentioning the late Colin Wykoff, whose tragic death from leukemia in 2015 sent shockwaves throughout the greater-source community. Best known for his channel, Kitty0706, that put smiles on hundreds of thousands of faces, Colin's iconic Garry's Mod Machinima Team Fabulous 2 is one of the first things people think of when they see this map. Last year, an edit called Mario Kart Reanimated was created in memory of him, filled with references to him and his legacy, and I think it's kind of touching. I refuse to end this video on a sad note, though. Colin's work lives on through what he left behind, and his videos still bring joy to people to this day. And similarly, Mario Kart, as one of the earliest community maps ever made for TF2, will live on as an unforgettable part of the TF2 community's history. You can still find servers hosting it today, and I doubt that'll ever change. As new generations find interest in TF2, they'll create memories on weird maps and community servers just like older generations did. And I have no doubt that Mario Kart will retain its status as a staple of weird-ass TF2 maps, a timeless map for a timeless game. Thanks for watching. Have a good day.