 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 Thursday evening, December 2nd. Hope everybody's having a great week and you're ready for the weekend just around the corner. I still am. I'm tired today. Hopefully that won't affect the show, but I am tired. I don't know. Let's see. Where are we? So today we're going to talk about mysticism, mysticism in the culture, the way mysticism affects the culture, the impact mysticism has on our politics, and just everything in our world around us. Well, let's talk about what mysticism is. I'm going to separate and differentiate between mysticism and religion. Mysticism, I think, is the broader concept. Religion is a narrow one form of mysticism. A lot of stuff going on in the news. We've got COVID hysteria continuing and unabated. We got today from Biden, his strategy for dealing with COVID. Luckily, he claims that he was not going to advocate for lockdowns and he was not going to advocate for vaccine mandates. Moving forward, we'll see what he actually does. He is encouraging home rapid tests, which is a good thing. Anyway, we'll be talking more about COVID because I didn't want to talk about COVID today, because we'll be talking much more about COVID on Saturday. Amish Adulja will be here at 7 p.m. east coast time on Saturday. So I hope you all join us. I hope you all get your friends to join us. I hope you all bring your questions, those who have doubts, those who, you know, question. Amish, bring your questions. We'll have super chat. We'll be open. We'll be answering everybody and anything. You know, you have to be respectful. So hopefully we'll have a great show. Looking forward to it. Looking forward to getting an update on both on the new variant, also on the vaccines and whether there's an assessment of how the vaccines have done. And here's assessment of where we're heading from here and what is happening politically and what is happening in places like the CDC as well. So we'll have Amish on Saturday. Generally, I'm going to have a bunch of guests this month. So we'll have Amish on Saturday on the 14th, I think, of December. We're going to have Don Watkins. He's going to come on and we're going to talk about a bunch of stuff, but including his new book. I Am Justice, which it's his thriller. It's his fiction book. So my co-author Don Watkins is now a published fiction writer, which is quite exciting. So we'll talk about fiction writing, but we'll also talk about other stuff as well. So, and again, feel free to come on board and be ready to ask any questions of Don. Well, let's have Nikos, who's last name I can't pronounce. Nikos from Eora Europe and from, you're probably knowing from a lot of the broadcasts of the Iron Man Center UK. Nikos will be coming on. He's just got a new book out on tribalism. So we'll have him on to talk about tribalism. And then finally, I'm hoping it'll happen in December. I'm going to have Harry Benz wearing it on. So we'll have philosopher Harry Benz wearing on. And we're going to talk free will and anything related to epistemology. Anything available regarding epistemology that you might have questions about. But particularly, we're going to focus on free will and epistemology. So please, you know, come on for that one with all your questions about free will and all your challenges and everything you have, bring it forward. We'll be talking about Sam Harris's views on free will and what the Iron Man Institute has to say about that. But of course, we can continue to, but anything, anything related to psychopistemology, anything related to epistemology, feel free to bring those questions. We'll have philosopher Harry Benz wearing on. And that's just in December. And then my expectation is that we'll be doing a bunch more interviews going into next year. So I definitely, definitely start breaking up these shows, have more interviews, give you guys an opportunity to ask questions on the interview. So that is part of the plan for what we're going to be doing into December and really is part of my planning now. I am planning for 2022 kind of what the Iran book show is going to look like. And so if you have ideas, if you have suggestions in terms of changes you'd like to see, you drop me an email, iranbrokeshow.com. Adam suggested the other day that I do these shows in the middle of the day so you guys can watch it live during lunchtime. I'm curious if anybody thinks that's a good idea other than Adam. Adam was pretty passionate about it, but would you rather have these in the evening, your time evening? Or would you rather have them around lunchtime and take a break and listen to your Iran book show? I'm assuming, I'm talking about the live you guys were on live. I'll also try starting in December and then into next year to have a more regular schedule so you guys can know when it's happening and everything. I'm spending December planning the show for next year, your input. I'm excited about getting your input. Iranbrokeshow.com, you can also use the super chat here to provide input ideas, suggestions, disagreements and so on. Now that I mentioned super chat, don't forget we do have goals in terms of raising money. The show is a big chunk of my time. Basically the super chat is my earnings. It's you buying my time and you paying for the show. If the show is a value to you, please support it. You can support it in your Iranbrokeshow.com. You can support it here on super chat. You can support it anyway. I will try and behave myself and do a lot less asking you for money during the show, but part of the reason I do it is because it frigging works. When I don't do it, super chat revenue drops significantly. To the extent that you guys are self-motivated and contribute to the super chat and ask questions, to that extent I will stay quiet and not bug you about contributing. But you have to realize that this is my income. So please support the show and you can do it again here. And you can do it on Patreon, Subscribestone, Iranbrokeshow.com. Last fundraising stuff until an hour from now or so on, something like that. If anybody wants to sponsor Iran Rules for Life shows, then please do so. I'm looking for sponsor. I had a sponsor for five months who sponsored those shows, an anonymous sponsor who sponsored those shows up until through October or through November. No, through October. Anybody who wants to sponsor those shows moving forward, please let me know. We'd love to have a reason to do them kind of on a regular basis and getting all that stuff done. So thank you guys. Thanks in advance for anybody who wants to do that. Of course you can also sponsor any topic show that you would like is available for sponsorship. Within limits, of course, within reasonable limits. I discovered late, otherwise I might have done a show about this. But today is the 20th anniversary of the bankruptcy of Enron, which was a, I think, a seminal event. Part of the general erosion in, I think, people's trust of capitalism that ultimately led to the world in which we live today, where almost nobody trusts capitalism and led, not directly, but led in terms of attitudes was kind of the precursor to what happened during the financial crisis. So I think the fact that Enron, the whole bankruptcy in Enron, the whole attitude around it, everything that happened around that is important. I need to figure out when and how to do a show about that. But that would be kind of interesting. I'd have to engage in a bunch of research to figure that out. But that is definitely something I want to talk about. And then finally, before we get to the topic at hand, although this is a little related to the topic at hand. This week is probably going to go down as one of the most important weeks in, I don't know, in the battle for individual rights and in the Supreme Court. I think this is the week in which Roe versus Wade basically was finished. I think that when the Supreme Court comes back in June and rules and then the Mississippi Abortion Law, I think you will find that they, I think they'll uphold the law and they will, it looks like we'll see what ultimately happens, but it looks like they will basically repeal or completely walk away from the precedent of Roe versus Wade. And we will enter a completely new regime, a new state of the world in terms of abortion, where abortion will be left to the states to decide. And where a big chunk of America, basically the South and, you know, parts of the West, but primarily the South, will basically now have, women will have no access to abortion and without taking a long road trip to get there. So that the ruling will probably be, that's what I read, is that it's going to be in June. It is six months, but they heard the case today. I think we might get a ruling on Texas before that, but a ruling on Texas that doesn't relate necessarily to the issue of abortion, but relates to the type of law that Texas passed. And that'll come in sooner, but I think June is when they're expecting a ruling on the Mississippi case. So I think it'll be a very sad day for this country, but it's going to happen. So brace yourself, it is going to happen. And the political battle, the political democratic ballot battle of abortion will start and it will get ugly. And it could very well, and we'll talk about this more when the ruling comes down, it could very well reframe or, you know, realign the electoral map in the United States because I think there are a lot of Republican women who are pro-abortion and what they choose to do and how they choose to vote on this issue. I mean, 69% of Americans in polls are pro-abortion. That's a lot of Republican women are there as part of that. And some of them live in some of these red states. And what exactly happens in these red states and how long these states stay red, abortion could be one of the most interesting and confrontational electoral issues of the next 20 years, if over suite, goes down in flames, which I think is what's actually going to happen, actually going to happen. All right, let's see. Sina Huda has a question about private prisons. Super Chat is available. You can use the Super Chat to ask those questions. I'm not taking questions from the chat. There's no end to that if I start doing that. All right, let's talk about the topic today. Just one last marketing kind of issue. First, don't forget I like the show before you leave, but any of you who are interested in helping promote the show, it would be great if you clicked on the share button right now, and you just put it out there on Twitter that the show is on live right now. That would be a great way maybe to let people know that it's on me, put some hashtags around religion and stuff like that to get to some new people. And it will let the world know that we're live. Hopefully we'll get some additional people watching live. And if we get more people watching live, that will ease the pressure on you guys to. More people means easier. Super Chat. All right, so mysticism. I mean, one of the great frustrations of all of us, I think, one of the great frustrations of anybody rational in the world in which we live today is the extent to which people are irrational. The extent to which you can argue facts. You can discuss science. You can present evidence. And it doesn't seem to matter. People are oblivious. Seemingly. And this is shocking in many respects, given that we live in the 21st century. We live in a century where science is already well established and is shown to be efficacious. We saw that in its application to the industrial revolution, to going to the moon, to the computers we have in front of us, to the myriad of gadgets that we all play around with. That's science in action. All of that. Science in action. It's reason in action. It's rationality in action. It's our understanding of the facts of reality and our ability to change reality, but to manipulate reality based on our scientific knowledge. And in spite of all that, in spite of the fact that everybody out there uses the technology and takes for granted the state of the world, the advanced technological state in which we live, benefits from everything that the industrial revolution have given us. That in spite of all that, it seems like people are again oblivious to facts. And they're not really interested in facts. They're not interested in evidence. You know, they're interested in whatever tribal disputes they happen to be engaged in right now and where you're on versus where everybody else is on. They're interested in their emotions. They're interested in their fears. They're interested in the latest hysteria and panic. They're interested in what their leaders tell them to be interested in. And their leaders could be anywhere from a conspiracy theory podcaster to the president of the United States to, I don't know, some guru at the World Economic Forum or Buddhist or their preacher on one of their televangelist TV shows. It's everywhere. And as I said, we're living a 21st century. It is surprising. One of the trends that we have seen since the Enlightenment, really, dominantly in the West is the slow decline in religion, certainly in Europe, but even in the United States. We saw for a long period of time the marginalization of religion, particularly from public life, but from many aspects of life to the growth recently in people who say that they don't have a religious affiliation. So, for example, the share of Americans holding no religious affiliation has risen from 6% in 1991, I think this is according to Pew study, to 28% in 2021. 28% of Americans say they have no religious affiliation. You think that would reduce mysticism. It also means that 72% of Americans in the 21st century have a religious affiliation. I don't even know if religious affiliation means their believers or what exactly it means. But in 2021, you'd think that this would be the era of science, reason, evidence, facts. But even this so-called secularization of America in this 21st century is a mirage. According to a Pew survey, 41% of Americans believe in psychics, 21% believe in psychics, 29% of Americans believe in astrology, and many of them seek astrological guidance. They're apps. It's got sophisticated, right? You don't just do the astrology thing in the newspaper anymore. Now you've got apps. There's an app called CoStar, which uses NASA data coupled with, quote, methods of professional astrologers, including algorithms to generate insights about your personality and your future. If you want to know your future, go to CoStar. Mystical services market is a $2.1 billion market in the United States, astrology apps. So even though Americans might be less officially religious, less affiliated with a particular church, and indeed church attendance in the United States has dropped dramatically over the last 30 years. By about a third, it doesn't seem to matter in the sense of they've exchanged Catholicism, Protestantism, whatever their particular religious affiliation used to be now with a bunch of supernatural mumbo jumbo nonsense. And even atheists, right? There's been research that finds that most atheists, most atheists in the United States. I don't know what this is like in Europe. Maybe one of you can tell me. In the United States, embrace at least one set of beliefs encompassing astrology, karma, supernatural beings, and other mystical phenomena. Among evangelicals, they combine their belief in a particular God, in a Christian God with one-fifth of each other, and evangelicals believe in reincarnation. Valduan says, I should become a psychic and tell people their future, and they will pay. I'm telling you the future. I've been telling you the future for years now. Some of you pay, some of you don't. Some of you listen, some of you don't. Some of you argue, some of you don't. Generally Christians of all stripes are not just religious, but combine the religiosity with all kinds of mystical stuff. But also, one of the interesting things about, I think, Christianity in America is that because the Protestants believe in this relationship you have with God, and that you are in a position to interpret in a sense the teachings of Jesus as an individual, what you see is a complete fragmentation of the church and a vast variety of teachings coming out of religion. All equally mystical, of course, but all kinds of fragmented beliefs. I often tell pro-capitalist Christians that they actually love Tom Scheffs and more than they do Jesus, and they love the Constitution more than they love the New Testament, so they take those documents, and they take Jesus, and they kind of squeeze and morph them into what they want them to believe, but they're stronger believers in America. That's the best of them, of course. But there's definitely a prevalence in our culture of mysticism, supernaturalism, and in a sense what that means is there's a rejection of reason, the rejection of human consciousness, of the particular means by which human consciousness functions, and the embrace, the embrace of mystical means of knowledge, and once you understand the extent to which this is true, then it's not surprising then that you get cure-non-conspiracy theories. It's not surprising then that you get the vast array of non-scientific approaches to COVID, all the way from people who wear masks to the shower, and maybe when they're swimming, I don't know, all the way to people who reject vaccinations for everybody, no matter the evidence, and hypothesize about maybe in 20 years there'll be some damage to yourself because of the vaccine. It's not surprising if what we have is a populace that fundamentally rejects science. So let's think about what mysticism is, and here I'm going to refer quite a lot to Inran's writings about mysticism. This is primarily out of the Inran lexicon, so these are highlights from what she's written about mysticism, which she's written generally, these are highlights that relate to mysticism. So this is from the section on mysticism in the Inran lexicon, which is a great resource available, free, online. All you have to do is type in Inran lexicon and you can get some of these amazing pulls of wisdom from Inran. So what is mysticism? Inran writes, mysticism is the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one's senses and one's reason. So mysticism is the acceptance of something devoid of proof, or that contradicts the evidence. I was just reading that somebody wrote this long letter to Trump complaining about the fact that he's had it, he's fed up because time after time after time after time the QAnon predictions are not coming true. I mean, how many of these predictions have to not come true before you stop believing in QAnon? Well, I know the answer to that and you guys know the answer to that because how many of the predictions of every religious sect in history didn't come true and then yet people continue to believe in that sect, continue to believe in the ideology, facts. Don't let facts, don't let evidence ever interrupt with your mystical beliefs. QAnon being a good example of those completely utterly mystical beliefs. But that's true of, you know, you can take people and you've got all these smart people and, you know, they're arguing about what we need is to, you know, and you've got, this is in Europe primarily but now in the US, we've got to stop using fossil fuels and we have to shut down nuclear energy and we have to cut emissions, emissions to zero and we can increase the number of jobs and increase the prosperity and everybody's going to be rich and we're not going to miss any CO2 and we're basically going to run the whole world on renewables, you know, which ones. Well primarily, you know, solar panels in the UK and Germany and windmills in the UK and Germany and you point out just basic facts about how this is clearly an impossibility. You can't generate enough electricity, what happens when there's no wind, what happens when the sun doesn't shine, which is most of the time in the UK and Germany. And they just blank out. They're not interested in the evidence of the senses. They're not interested in reason and facts and evidence. There's no communication going on. There is a dogma. There is an accepted truth that they have received from somewhere. We'll talk about where they get that in a minute. And they live by that. And they're not interested in anything else. They're not interested in the facts. One of the few women says pixie dust and magic beans. Yes, pixie dust and magic beans. And you could argue with them all you want. You can give them facts and evidence and numbers and graphs and statistics. And it doesn't matter because none of it actually registers knowledge for mystic is not accessible to me humans. It's not accessible to reason, to facts, to evidence, to our senses. Inran writes mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-identifiable means of knowledge such as quote instinct, quote intuition, quote revelation or any form of quote just knowing. They just know. Now, many of them present the guise of science because they just know that science gives them respectability. Science is legit. Science lets them pretend that they're in the 21st century and that they're pro-progress and pro-reason. But as soon as you question them a little bit, as soon as you challenge them just a little bit, immediately, immediately they go all emotion on you. Immediately, they go all just knowing, who are you? 95% of all scientists, whatever, whatever. Is it 98? It's 98%. 95 is too low. 98 is a bit of a number. There's no argument. There's no argument. And note what Inran notes as mystical, you know, instinct, intuition, revelation. I mean, it's interesting because I was thinking as I was reading this that to some extent the evolutionist psychologists are mystics. The whole idea of rejecting free will, if you reject free will, you're really rejecting cognition, control over cognition. It's all automatized. It's all inevitable. It's all just happens. It's all just intuitive. It's all just instinctual. So who are you to question me? Whatever I know, I know. I just know. How do I know it? Because evolution programmed me that way. It's amazing when I read Inran, how much of what he says is so applicable to stuff today, even stuff that wasn't really being discussed. And in the end, the mystics will always say they just know. They have expertise that is not accessible to others. And sometimes they use science as the guise for that. And you see that in the debate about abortion, you know, light begins at conception. I mean, that's complete mysticism. There's no human being at conception. There's DNA. But it's complete emotionalism. Or we're all going to die from the climate. Or, I mean, the whole debate about socialism, the whole debate about socialism is, you know, how do you know socialism will work? It's never actually worked when we examine the facts of reality. We don't see socialism working. They just know. They don't need the proof. They know. And then now they work backwards. They start with the knowledge of socialism being right and just. And now they will reinterpret all of reality to justify the idea that socialism. I mean, socialism used to be, at least Marx pretended that it was scientific, right? So it was based on a scientific theory of a theory of history and the evolution of history and an observation of the world and the alienation of the workers and a certain understanding of how capitalism evolves. Yeah. And a lot of people bought into that. A lot of people bought into it. And then it was tried and then it failed dramatically. And then they said, well, to hold a science. Now we'll just believe in socialism and they're with the past. They're trying. We'll just lie about it. We'll just make stuff up because for mystic knowledge and truth don't come from the world. To a mystic knowledge and truth come from another dimension. They come from somewhere else. I mean, in religion it's fairly simple. They come from God. And for the critical race theories, the racist, the reject of free will, they come from your genes. Truth comes from your genes. You're programmed to be a truth detecting machine. How do you detect the truth? Who knows? So the mystic has to assume this other dimension. But how does he actually communicate with the other dimension? Because we know there isn't one. So how does he fall himself into thinking there's another dimension? Where does he actually get stuff from? Where does he get the truth from? The truth in quotes, well, really two sources. The two places in which the mystic gets truth from. Ultimately it's only one, but it manifests itself in two ways. One is from other people. Mystics, and here unfortunately this is true of what seemingly is a majority of people out there. Surrender their mind. They've given up on their mind. They're not going to challenge. As soon as they encounter other people, the majority, the people in power, the charismatic people, or the people that influenced them when they were young, as soon as they encounter other people, they suppress their own thinking. And accept what the other says. A mystic is afraid of his own independence. How can he trust it? How can he know it? What would he do with it? He'd have to stand up against the mob. Much easier to join the mob. So mystic usually at a very young age, and again the sad thing is this is true of most people maybe. The mystic surrenders his mind at a very young age to others, to the authority of others, to the authority of the authoritarian on whatever topic we're talking about. The authority of the charismatic teacher, the charismatic broadcaster, the charismatic fearmonger that is on the news or that is in teaching the class. So Ayn Rand writes, and I love this, this is a great sentence, faith in the supernatural, any supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others. It begins in a sense with lack of self-esteem. It begins with surrendering your own mind to other people, and that leads you to surrender your own mind to the Almighty or to the fortune teller or to whatever. And what guides you in terms of which other people you should surrender your mind to? What guides you in terms of what you should believe in? What you should have faith in? Whether it's explicit religion or whether it's your politic of views or whether it's your views about generally the world. Would you get these truths from other people in the body? But how do you choose which people? At the end of the day, once you give up on reason, there's only one other source and that is your emotions. If you're not going by reason, you're going by emotion. Even if you are complete second-hander and just doing what people around you tell you to do, you have to choose who to follow. How are you going to choose? Reasons out. Whoever makes you feel better, whoever makes you feel more secure, whoever says something that sparks a more positive feeling in you or the flip side of that, whoever generates the most fear in you, people are immensely motivated by fear, mystics have always been motivated by fear. And the witch doctors who might present themselves as scientists, the witch doctors know this and understand this and refine the skill of inducing fear in people. Because when people are afraid they're looking for solutions they want to believe in something they want and out. And if they've given up on reason, they've given up on facts, they've given up on reality, they've given up on science, then what are they left with other than their emotion, other than following the leader, other than in jumping on the bandwagon of the power luster of the moment? So, you know, one of the common ways in which to induce mysticism in a culture, and this unfortunately Western philosophy has done for the last 200 years, is to teach skepticism, it's to embrace skepticism, it's to pound skepticism constantly. How do you know? Nothing, no absolutes, nothing is knowable, can't trust your mind, you can't trust your senses, you can't trust, you know, maybe the sun will come up tomorrow, maybe it won't. It's a skeptics by making people believe, by encouraging people to believe, by teaching people to believe in the unknowable, that the reason is not capable of giving them absolutes. The reason is not capable of teaching them about reality. Well, then how do we know what to do? How are we going to survive out there in the world? How are we going to achieve anything? How are we going to feed ourselves? How are we going to get anything? Well, if not by reason, then by emotion, and there's always a witch doctor, there's always a witch doctor, just waiting around the corner to capitalize on your skepticism, to capitalize on your desire to believe and your rejection of reason at the same time. Ali says this is on point. I see many people who can't think for themselves. I tried at least to listen to many sources before I take stance on stuff I don't know. Good for you. You're absolutely right. I mean, this is the problem. People can't think. Look, in a sense, when you say think for themselves, that's, you know, you're just repeating yourself. The only thinking that can happen is for yourself. Nobody can think for you. Nobody can eat for you. And what people who follow other people are doing is not that they are letting other people do the thinking for them in the sense, no, they're not thinking. They're not using the faculty of thought. They are defaulting on thinking. The only thinking that can be done is to think for yourself. Rand talks about people have been taught two sources of knowledge in a sense, two ways. One is or two, two attitudes towards knowledge. One is that knowledge is impossible. That's the skeptics and you're driving those skeptics right into the hands of the mystics. Or the knowledge is available without any effort. It just implants itself on your consciousness, which is what mystics are, right? That's your revelation. It just appears. You just know it. It's just they can prove it because it just showed up. And you can see that skepticism leads to mysticism and mysticism into the end, the only alternative to reason and mysticism at the end of the day is just emotionalism. Since knowledge cannot implant itself without effort on your consciousness, the only other place you can get what you think is knowledge is your emotions. So people are emotionalists. And that's what we're seeing around us, you know, whether again, whether it's dealing with COVID or whether it's dealing with, take the election fraud or whether it's taking election fraud. It's just emotionalism. Again, facts, evidence. They don't matter. Reality is irrelevant. It's emotion, emotionalism, which at the end of the day is just the default on having to do the work, which means having to do the thinking, engaging your consciousness. And this is why again, everything we're doing is so hard. This is why it's not just about, oh, if only you formulate a little differently of only we had better marketing or if only we had a better slogan, if only we all support a Trump. What we're up against is not just a mild disagreement about political application. It's not even that we have a mild disagreement about history, about what the facts are. We have a fundamental deep disagreement about the necessity for facts and how facts are validated and where knowledge comes from. We have a fundamentally epistemological, even metaphysical disagreement about the nature of reality and the nature of man's ability to understand, to know reality. And that is not an issue. That is not a problem that can be solved easily, quickly. It's not an issue that can be solved through marketing. This is a long term philosophical, educational campaign. We're going to have to teach people how to think, how to use their mind. But in the process, we have to, and I think this goes hand in hand, right? In the process, we have to also, what are the right words? I don't even know what the right words are. The point I'm trying to make is this, for people to think for themselves, they have to have a certain level of self-esteem. They have to have a certain level of confidence in themselves. They have to have a certain sense of confidence in the future and in their minds. And these things go hand in hand. You have to teach them how to think, but you have to give them that, you can't give them, you have to encourage them to feel this efficaciousness. This is why, by the way, I think one of the important things that we can do, and maybe one of the things that have allowed civilization to continue in spite of the decline we're seeing, is Montessori education. Because Montessori education, what you see there is one, you're improving cognitive skills. And by improving cognitive skills and allowing the child to do it themselves, you're also allowing for the development of self-esteem. So a child in a Montessori environment is both learning how to think, how to use their mind, learning that their mind is efficacious, and gaining the self-esteem that comes from learning exactly that. And if parents didn't undermine that at home, and of course you've always got the free will of the child, but that's what you need. In a sense we need all children to go through Montessori, and then we need the parents to go through the training of how to let the child gain that self-esteem and not undermine it, not undercut it, because a lot of parents do. Because even if the child learns that their mind is efficacious, but then are constantly barraged with undermining and undercutting that, some of them will develop a low self-esteem, some of them will choose what are being told about themselves rather than what they experience as they engage with the materials in Montessori. So the challenges teaching people how to think and how to appreciate their own thinking, and what you're really trying to develop is independence, independence as a virtue. Because independent people are less likely to be mystical, because they're less likely to be willing to give up their own judgment for the sake of what? A hunch, an instinct, an emotion, an authority. It's not what independence is about. Not what independence is about. Montessori is not authoritarian. Give me a break. Montessori is the exact opposite of authoritarianism. It's also not anarchy. It's a structured guidance, which is exactly what children need. They don't need chaos. So as long as we live, as long as we tolerate, as long as we accept the mystics around us, and here, look, this is equally anti-left and anti-right. They're all guilty of this. There's clearly a mysticism on the right, which is religion, and there's clearly a mysticism on the left. Well, not just religion, but conspiracy theories and all of that, and there's a mysticism on the left, which is CRT and the whole thing about climate change and socialism, which is, I think, the belief in socialism today is complete mystical. Complete mysticism. You see the kids. They have no clue. They're no facts. There's no evidence. There's no need for any of that. There's just anecdotes, feelings, emotions. I don't know when I debated Varsh. People are not paid based on their productivity. How do you know this? Because they're not. We know this. They're not. Just ask. But everybody who's ever been in business knows that they are. The more productive you are, the more you get paid. No, no. I feel it's wrong. I feel that's not the case. Look, Montessori is not the cure-all, but you're not going to be successful without something like Montessori as a foundation. It doesn't solve everything. Montessori herself was Catholic in the end. So you can have kids go through Montessori for the first few years and then undermine it and undercut it through mysticism at home, undermine it and undercut it in their primary school and high school education. Again, I said the Montessori, the knowledge of how to think has to be coupled with a strong self-esteem, and that can be undermined by a variety of different ways. And let me just say mysticism is mysticism. Mysticism is always dangerous. It's always wrong. It's always evil. New mysticism, old mysticism, it's all fundamentally the same, and it's all fundamentally authoritarian, and it all ultimately leads to violence. And this idea that somehow, no, the old mysticism of Christianity, that's nice and friendly. Yeah, you should go back and study the inquisition of the Thirty-Year War or the very few beliefs that it would be more bloody, have led to more violence than religion, Christianity and Islam in particular. So the idea that, yeah, they've been tamed, they've been tamed for now, for now, but the fundamentals are still there. All the ingredients are still there. And one of the, one of the phenomenons of the modern world, of course, is, one of the phenomenons of the modern mysticism is the extent to which it's fragmented, religion is fragmented, mysticism is fragmented. We live in a world today where I said 28% of Americans don't have religious affiliation, but many of them, a majority of them are still mystical. That fragmentation is waiting. It's waiting for a uniter. It's waiting for a, this is, you know, for something to unite it, for something to bring it together, for somebody, for some idea, for some individual to coalesce the mystics around one message or one one ideology, around one mystical form. And that's when you get authoritarianism in this country. We're creeping towards it on and off in kind of a variety of different horrific ways. But full blown authoritarianism in America will come when somebody can unite the mystics around one mystical cause. Maybe that somebody will be from the left. Maybe that somebody will be from the right, but it will be a uniter, not a fragment. Oh, see, there's no mysticism in Iron Rand. Iron Rand, everything Iron Rand did is based on reason. There's nothing in a book that's mystical. Again, let me read you what we mean by mysticism is the acceptance of allegations of ideas without evidence of proof, either part from or against the evidence of one's senses and one's reason. Iron Rand appeals to your reason. She does not appeal. Oh, imagining an ideal is not mysticism. An ideal that is based on facts, that is based on reality, that is based on human nature is not mysticism. Mysticism is not that which does not exist. Lots of things don't exist that can exist and will exist. Mysticism is that which is detached from reason, detached from the senses, detached from knowledge, detached from facts. You can be spiritual without being mystical. Spiritual just refers to human consciousness. It's an attribute of consciousness. So, there's nothing in Rand that is mystical. Even if you disagree with Rand, what she's doing is she's not appealing to your instinct, to your intuition, to just knowing. She always gives you reason when she portrays an ideal man. She's giving you reason why this man is ideal and how this ideal is based on nature. In fact, on what a human being is like, what the nature of human beings are. All right, let's see. Michael says, Isaac Newton was extremely mystic, yet unbelievably productive in other areas of his life. Compartmentalized thinkers can still move humanity forward, whereas a lot of evidence in history to show evil doesn't stop the motor of the good entirely. That's right. Nobody's ever claimed that evil stops the motor of the good. Only the good could stop the motor of the good. It's when the good gives up that the motor of the world stops. Yes, absolutely. People can become barbellies. You see that today. You see unbelievably productive people in Silicon Valley who believe the craziest nonsense in the world. You see some of the most productive people in the heartland of America who built businesses, who built successful industrial projects and believe in, I don't know, some weird trinity of mystical forces that shapes human life. You see all around us, surrounded by people on the one hand apply reason and rationality. On the other hand, a complete, crazy, complete nuts, completely divorced from the facts of reality. And how they hold it in one human being is hard to imagine, but this is why they're constantly frustrated, where they cannot really be happy, and they're constantly in this tug of war and this battle between emotions and revelations and what they're being told they have to do. And between their own reason and rationality and productivity and many of them are scientists. Newton is a great example of that. Newton was a very strange guy. From everything I've read about him, he was a very strange guy. He was one of the greatest geniuses in science ever. He was stunning in terms of his ability to understand the world and to explain the world, to explain the physical world to us. And yet at the same time he was quite mystical when he came to his Christianity. And luckily for all of us, he didn't integrate the two. He didn't allow the Christianity to destroy his science. And he rationalized it by saying that God intended him to discover the laws of physics and that what he was doing was consistent with God's plan, one of the great geniuses of all time. He was, of course, early 17th century, early 18th century. Sorry. What's the excuse of people today? 300 years have passed since. Let's see. We have a bunch of Super Chat questions. We'll go through those. We'll start with the $20 ones. I'll remind you that Super Chat is open. $20 questions get priority. We've got quite a few of $20 questions today. Thank you. I'll just give you a quick update. We're at $322. So $280 or so to reach our goal. And I'll try not to talk about it too much. All right. Let's see. I'm looking for ones that are particularly related to the topic. Okay. Ali asks, any explanation why around 3 billion people on earth, who is some, some are highly educated, believe in religion, which has flawed text at minimal, or sometimes a weird kind of God like elephant or woman with six hands? Is this like Buddhism? Why is having a God that sometimes an elephant or sometimes a woman with six hands, any different than a God that has a son who is sacrificed on a cross, that is sometimes a spirit? And the son, the father, and the spirit are all really one, but they're really three. They both three and one at the same time. And they, they love, they love all of you. If you dunk yourself in a bunch of water, and a priest says a prayer on you, then then you're loved. And if he doesn't date, you're not or whatever, whatever the nonsense that whatever the religion comes up with, right? It's all nonsensical. So the Hindus have one particular form. You know, I think a lot of this elephant and women with six hands is symbolic. It's not, they don't literally believe in a God that is that way. It symbolizes certain things for them. I'm not going to try to justify. But to me, all religion, I just don't get it. I just don't get it. It doesn't make any sense. It's a story. It sometimes can teach you something, it might be educational, it might be interesting, it might be fun, it might be historic, it might be all kinds of things. But quality religion, what is any religion? You know, we could talk about the billion and a half or whatever, what the number is, the belief in Islam and what that implies. I'm looking for the questions that are relevant to the topic. So there she says, hey, if the moon affects huge ocean ties and seas and humans, and humans are 80% water, don't you think maybe moon and planets could scientifically affect our mood and impulses? Also Galileo is into astrology. Yeah, I mean, Newton was into Christianity. No, I mean, it's simple. You can hypothesize anything. You can suggest anything. It has to be connected to some reality. It has to be testable. And there's just no evidence for it. Zero evidence that the moon affects moods and impulses. And even if it affects moods and impulses. Okay, so in a full moon, I don't know, hormone level, spike or something. Okay, but that's not astrology. I mean, if there's a scientific idea behind how the water in our bodies is affected by the gravity of the moon, then I'd like to hear that scientific theory. But there is no scientific theory that suggests that. So what are we looking at? We're looking at a bunch of people who write astrology columns. There is no evidence, but there is no theory. And what does it mean to affect your mood, right? Somehow it changes the chemical composition in your body. Where's the evidence for that? Again, where's the biological theory that this can happen? That this is feasible? That this has any credibility? It just doesn't exist. So you can't hypothesize random stuff and say, well, it's possible. No, it's completely arbitrary. There's no causal mechanism by which the moon's impact on the body, whatever your body is, impact your mood. What's the causal relationship? There's water in our bodies, but it's water. And the fact is that I have a bottle of water here. What is the impact of gravity on this bottle of the moon's gravity on this bottle of water? It's equivalent of zero. The reason you get tides in oceans is because of the size, the scope. There's nothing going on here. And yet you want to override, whatever's going on is going to override my free will. Going to override everything else that's going on in my life because the moon is having an impact on the water in my body. It's just not, it makes no sense. And again, there's no fact. There's no fact. Oceans are huge. Oceans, there's a lot of stuff in the oceans to react with the moon. There's very little stuff here to react with the moon. I don't know why. It's just, again, you have to, if you're proposing an idea, you have to have evidence. And you have to have a causal relationship, a causal theory. And this is not a causal theory that relates to anything. And again, astrology is just about tides. All right, let me go, keep going down. Johnny asks, the Supreme Court justice is a guided by mysticism of one form or another. Yeah, yeah, I mean, a bunch of them, particularly what's her name, Barrett, the latest, the one appointed by Trump. I mean, she's a real religionist. She belongs to a religious equivalent of religious culture she used to. And religion guides her life. She's not a partial mystic on the weekend. She is a foreblown. This is now, she, she, to some extent, she cultures that or presents it in legalese. But she, I mean, she's the kind of mentality that takes religion super seriously. Is that the kind of mentality you want in the Supreme Court? I don't, but all of them, even Justice Thomas, who is maybe in terms of understanding of individual rights, maybe the best of the judges up to a point. He's pretty bad, but up to a point. He's super religious, even though he loves the fountainhead. All of them are, all the conservatives are. Well, I don't know. I don't know how, how religious Gorsuch is or how religious some of these others are. But yeah, there's a lot of mysticism on the court, and that's why they're not going to overturn. I mean, they're not going to overturn Roe versus Wade partially for mystical reasons, partially because I mean, the main reason Roe versus Wade will be overturned is because of a lack of understanding of the concept of individual rights. They have no basis on which to preserve it. They have no consistent basis. A woman can do whatever she wants with her body. Take the vaccine before it's approved by the FDA. No, can't do that with her body. Prostitute her body. Nope. That's illegal. Take heroin. Nope. That's illegal. So can a woman actually, does a woman have a right, a right to do what she wants with her body? I mean, I would say yes, but they have no basis to say yes because they have no understanding of the concept of individual rights, of understanding what it means to say she has a right to do whatever she wants with her body. And they're not willing to apply it consistently. They're not willing to apply it consistently. They're willing to apply it inconsistently whenever they feel like it, whenever they feel like it. So they will reject Roe versus Wade, not so much because of their particular religious beliefs, although that will play some role in it, but because of their complete lack of understanding. That plays a role in it in the sense that they're against abortion. But they'll reject Roe versus Wade primarily because they have no basis for individual rights. Zero. All right. Let's see. A Campbell says, Adam Campbell says, the truth is like poetry and most people frigging hate poetry. I don't know who you're quoting there, but I don't know that the truth is like poetry. You have to explain to me why the truth is like poetry. It's been a while, Adam. I don't think I've seen you here in a while. I hope you're here to stay. Let's see. I'm looking for, yeah, Ali says, irony when some religious people use modern science like quantum theory, etc. to defend it while sway staying away from basic flow of texture. Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, quantum science and the way it's been interpreted, the way quantum science has been interpreted lends it to be used by the mystics to justify their mysticism and pretend, pretend that they are, you know, based on science, that they have a scientific basis for their mysticism. But we know the problem there is both the mystics, again, the mystics over and over and over and over again, want the sanction of science. This is why the climate change mystics want constantly to claim the scientific mantle on their behalf, on their own behalf. Oh, Adam Campbell says it's from the big short. It's a good quote. It's a good quote. But yes, the quantum physics unfortunately has opened itself up to that because I think the misinterpretation of the quantum math and the quantum scientific evidence, the quantum phenomena is real, the interpretation of that phenomena. And the interpretation of much, I think, of quantum physics is up for debate and needs a kind of a reality-oriented reason-based interpretation. Let's see. Adam, thank you. Really appreciate. God bless you and your message, Iran. Adam is rocking today. He's got, he's brought a sense of humor to us. Thanks. That's very, very generous. I appreciate that. We're getting very close to our goal here, guys. Philip says, not a question, but I highly recommend Mark Derein's recent video on the dim hypothesis applied to psychology. It's on the Animus Empire YouTube channel. Wow. All right. Somebody's doing work on the dim hypothesis. That's good to hear. I hope it's good. I'll, I've copy pasted it. So I'll keep it so I can take a look and see what I think of it. All right. Let's see what else we have here. Oops. What did I do? Colt. Colt Savage says, I go to church every Sunday and pray every night, but I'm also a fan of Iran. Where I'm from, religious devotion is a joke amongst people my age. But yeah, they still deeply hold onto their faith. Any thoughts? It's time to get to stop. It's time to have the courage to abandon, you know, juvenile beliefs, which is what religion is, I think. It's something that the human race needed when we were young because we couldn't explain the world. We needed a God. We needed religion. We needed books to lay out that quote truth to us because we, we human beings hadn't developed the methodology and the skill and the ability to do it. And, and they needed explanations and they, you know, they were ready to accept explanations from wherever. But we live in the 21st century, which means we live in a post scientific revolution time. We live in a, in, in, in a time with a philosophical understanding of the world of reason. We live in a post-Iran time. It's time to chuck religion, to abandon it, to put it in the trash heap of history. And I would put together with it all the forms of mysticism. Mysticism is, is useless and, and evil. It's anti-reason and anti-factual. And it needs to be placed in a trash heap of history where it belongs. Enough. Enough. You know, we, again, we live in a world in which we have every tool in the world to be rational. We know that the source of knowledge is reason. We know that science is how we discover truths about the physical world. We don't need mysticism. Enough. Out. Gone. Go away. And if it's in within your own soul, as it is, then eradicate it from your soul. Stand up to your own emotions. Stand up to your own emotions. You don't need religion. You don't need church. Joao, thank you, really appreciate it. You don't need, you know, all this coddling. You don't need all this, you know, the, this assumption that you can't think for yourself and you can't survive by yourself and your mind is impotent. No, your mind is strong and you're a fan of iron rands. You know that. So religious devotion is, without being insulting, is a joke. It's absolutely a joke. It's ridiculous. It's based on what? What are you devoted to exactly? And for what reason? Now, I'm not trying to minimize the difficulty of giving up on religion. I know it's very hard. But you've got the basis. The basis there is Iron Man. The basis there is reality. The basis there is science. It's time to do it. It's time to do it. Thanks, Colt, for the question. Gail says, yes, dump all mysticism. It denies all individual choice. Yes, among other things. It denies you happiness. It denies you success. It denies you self-esteem. And mystics cannot have self-esteem. You are not your creation. Knowledge is not a product of your mind. All right. Adam says, what of those two timid to say selfish, who say self-realizing or self-actualizing instead? Some of them do favor using one's own reason. However timid they are on using it in their own lives. Well, it's this timidity we have to get rid of. Enough. Enough cowardness. Fine, say self-realize or self-actualize. Say whatever you want, but live a selfish life. Call it what you want to call it. Stop being timid. If you know, if you favor using reason, use reason. What I'm arguing against is this fear. Is this timidity? Is this, you know, I don't really believe in God, but you know, we've always gone to church and my parents expect me to go to church and my wife expects me to go to church and my cousins expect me to go to church and the preacher expects me to go to church and God expects me to go to church. Well, stop it. Who cares what they expect? If you're a person, a man, a woman of reason, it doesn't matter what other people expect. Yes, mysticism ultimately is about other people's expectation because mysticism ultimately is about placing the interest, the wishes, the desires, the fears of other people above your own mind. That's what mysticism is. Give it up. Daniel, thanks for all you do. I have been listening to a lot of Peter Schiff lately. I find you guys have very similar perspectives on economics. Do you know him? Have you ever thought to have him on your show or be on his? I've been on his show. It's been a few years. I do know Peter. You know, there were periods in which I knew quite well we used to hang out. I've talked to him on the phone since he came to Puerto Rico several times. We've exchanged emails and maybe on Instagram or something. Weirdly, and this is my fault, I think, because Peter's a little bit... I don't think Peter would initiate social contact, so it's really on me. I have not initiated getting together here on the island with him. He's in Puerto Rico. I'm in Puerto Rico. I might actually be seeing him on Sunday. I'm going to this beach party on Sunday, and sometimes Peter's there, so hopefully he's there and we can chat a little bit and maybe reconnect, and maybe I'll start visiting him with him more, but I like Peter. I've been on his show. Yeah, I might have him on the show now that I'm going to have more guests. I might have Peter on the show, and I'd happily go on his show whenever he would like it. So I'll talk to him about it, but yes, Peter and I used to hang out, because we used to go to the same conferences. We used to hang out at the conferences together. And he's... Yeah, I like him, but he's socially a little bit, I think, awkward or difficult to read, but we've always gotten along really well. When I was moving to Puerto Rico, I called Peter up and said, hey, Peter, you live there. What's it like? You recommend moving there, and he gave it a positive thumbs up. That was part of my due diligence. Before I moved to Puerto Rico is the contact people I knew who lived here already, and he was one of them. All right, let's see. Okay, we're going to go through some of these other questions. Ryan writes, the national government will take under its... This is a quote. The national government will take under its firm protection Christianity as the basis of our morality, and the family is the nucleus of our nation and our state. Anybody know who said that? The national government will take under its firm protection Christianity as the basis of our morality, and the family is the nucleus of our nation and our state. Anybody know who said that? That was Adolf Hitler in 1933. Yeah, I mean, doesn't surprise me at all. The Nazis were mistakes that tried at least to embrace Christianity as part of their ideology. Whether they believed in it or not is hard to tell, but they understood that culturally this was important. One of the ways nationalism is usually justified, and one of the things that nationalism brings to the foreway in order to provide the people with the moral code is religion. If you listen to the national conservatives in the United States, then nationalism is tied together with their Christianity and they wanting to impose a Christian ideology on the rest of us. Hand in hand, it can be separated because the nationalism is not a moral project. Nationalism is a political project, and every political project needs a moral foundation. And the moral foundation of nationalism is always religion, because they are both collectivist, and they go hand in hand. So I think you as politics today, you will see religion is on the rise among kind of these national conservatives, and particularly Catholicism. More and more of the intellectuals of the right are Catholics, and many of them are people who converted to Catholicism. So they've adopted Catholicism by choice, which is just bizarre in my view. And I think it's very dangerous, and I just mentioned the combination of religion on the Supreme Court and the extent to which that impacts their decision-making. They don't have any other guide because as I said, they don't understand individual rights, and if you don't understand individual rights, then what is the moral basis for what you do? Let's see, $20. Rani asks, Glad I was able to get my free market revolution book signed and meet you in Michigan State in November. I'm glad you did as well. Cheers to reason and objective thinking. Thank you, Rani. It was great to see you at Michigan State. Thank you for joining us there. I'm still waiting for that video. I don't know, Jennifer, can you help us get that video from Michigan State so I can post it on my YouTube channel? Michael asks, If the West can survive two world wars, massive recessions, COVID lockdowns, and a entire academic apparatus run by mystical nihilist Contians, it's safe to say the bad guys can't put the toothpaste basket in the tube. I don't know what the toothpaste is, and I don't know what the tube is here in this metaphor. But the fact that it could survive those every one of those is chipped away, chipped away, chipped away at our freedoms, chipped away at our sense of life, chipped away at our resolve, chipped away at capitalism, and the fact that none of them have killed us doesn't mean the next one won't. Before the barbarians actually sacked Rome, they spent over a hundred years chipping away, chipping away, chipping away, the Christians chipped away, everybody chipped away until slowly, at some point Rome was sacked and nobody was really that surprised. So when we get sacked, we might not be surprised because we had been chipped away by all these events for a hundred and something years. Other $20 questions, Philip says, kids are born prematurely compared to animals due to the size of their heads. All right? I don't know, I'm not sure why that's why they're born, but they're completely maturely relative to the rest of their development. Yes, again. They're incapable of surviving without support. True. Why is birth the point where a child gains a right to life which amounts to an obligation on others? Because it's the point in which they become an individual being. It's the point in which they're separated from the mother. It's a point in which they become an individuated, independent human being. They're not part of another human being. They're separate from another human being. So it's just this fact that while they're in the mother's womb, they're part of the physiology of the mother. You can't see them because they're inside the mother in that sense that they're part of her body, they're hers. It's her rights that apply to the fetus. And her right is to do with what's hers, whatever she wants. Once they're separate from the mother, they're not part of her body. They're not inside somebody else. They're separate now. They're an individuated thing. You know, we can play word games. They're a potential human being because a human is an individual and they're not an individuated. But if you want to call them human in the womb, you know, maybe you can call them human. They still are not individuals. And they don't have rights. Rights are not something you get from God. Rights are not something that is a part of your DNA. It's not a strand in your DNA. It's not a collection of what do you call it? Genes on the DNA. It's not in your blood. Rights are a moral concept. That applies to individuated, separated human beings. It applies to now, you know, beings that are now, you know, breathing on their own and out in the world. Not inside the womb of their mother. There is a difference of category between those two things. And one is part of the mother and one is now not part of the mother anymore. That's the standard. And when it's not part of the mother anymore, politically, it now has rights in a sense that its life should be protected. But look, there being cultures in which killing babies was legitimate. Now we would say that's wrong, but what about a society in which the parents can't afford to, in which it's a primitive society in which there's no abortions, you can't have abortions, there's no birth control, and they can't afford to feed the baby. Would you say unequivocally that in that society, you know, the fetus have rights that the child that's born has rights and the parents are motive. These are tricky concepts. These are not just, well, have rights because, you know, it's associated with a word human, right, is somehow in that word human. No, it's a moral concept. Not just the ancient spot has killed babies. I mean, it was quite a common practice. I mean, if you read Greek plays, leaving your baby out for nature to kill it was not an uncommon practice. So, you know, in a society in which we're wealthy enough to feed our kids and we can have abortions, once you have the baby, you have taken on a legal and moral responsibility to take care of it. And one of the reasons I am pro-abortion is because I'm pro-giving parents, particularly the mother, as many opportunities as possible to change your mind, at least up to a reasonable point. I think abortions in the last trimester are horrific and I don't think they, they almost never happen. But unless a mother's life is in danger or the baby's going to be completely deformed, I don't think doctors should do them. But the point is, up to that point, they should have as many opportunities as possible to have an abortion so that they don't have to take on this massive responsibility in burden if they are not really committed to it. Because once it's born, it has rights, you've got to take care of it, you've got to treat it well. Morally and legally, and legally, the state now is involved. Yeah, I think you should have it in the first trimester, but some women don't know that they're pregnant in the first trimester. They might only discover they're pregnant in the second trimester. So you should have, abortions should be allowed throughout the entire term, but they, you know, most abortions, 90% of abortions are done before weeks, I think it's 16 or 17. 95% of abortions are done before week 21. Maybe it's 99%, sorry, 99% of abortions, I think, are done before week 21. It's very rare to have a late-term abortion, and they have to be extraordinary circumstances to have it happen. All right, let's see, we've reached our goal, so thank you to everybody who's done the Super Chat today. Thank you to Catherine for getting this going and getting everybody excited and getting us through. I think we did it amazingly with a few $50 questions, and of course, Adam came in with $100, and then a lot of $20 questions. So thanks guys, not a lot of $5 and $10 questions today, although I have a bunch now that I'm going to go through, but I really, really appreciate it. Look, there's just one more point about abortion. There's a big difference between moral and legal. Should abortion be allowed legally in the third trimester? Yes. Is abortion moral in the third trimester? In many cases, no. A doctor's going to do abortions in the third trimester? In almost all cases, no. You have to have a really good reason to have an abortion in the third trimester to make it moral and for a doctor to agree to do it. All right, Daniel says, why does the left focus on workers rather than consumers? I don't see a lot of rebuttals to this in the mainstream. Well, because workers are in pain. They are being exploited. They are they are exerting effort. They are struggling. They are suffering. So it's altruism. Consumers, why would you care about consumers? Consumers are consuming. They are sport brats who are buying stuff. So the focus of the left is on the struggling, the poor, the weak, and Marx defined the proletarian as that. It's those that are being exploited by the greedy, successful, wealthy bourgeois capitalist. They are underdogs. Not in my view. I don't think they are underdogs. But in Marx's view and the left's view, they've defined them that way. In a sense, they've even painted them into a corner that way because they have to portray workers as a horrible thing. So it's the whole framing of Marx as the workers is being exploited, the workers is being the underdogs, the workers is fundamentally suffering. Hiram says, not eccentric, xeno-centric. I don't know what that means. And I'm not sure what it refers to. Power lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind from gold's speech. That's right. So a mind that's given up, a mind that's conditioned only to deal with other people, some of those minds are going to say, well, if it's got other people, then I want to control them. I mean, they really control me, but I want to live under the illusion that I control them and that's power lust. Power lust is that desire to control others and to give yourself a fake self-esteem through that. Liam asks, can we do a $10,000 match for the New Year's show? I'm asking you, is there anybody out there who's willing to do a $10,000 match for the New Year's show? That would be a lot of fun. It would be exciting. It would be exciting to see if we could make the $10,000, I think we could. But I don't have any matches right now for the New Year's Eve show. So anybody who wants to volunteer to do a match for the New Year's Eve show, that would be a lot of fun. It would be a great way to start 2022. Should we do a goal of 2023 for the New Year's show? It's 2022, not 2022, you mean. Not 23. But last year, we had a $5,000 match and we raised $6,000. So we got $11,000 total last year. So 2022 would actually be a decline. I think Liam is going for an ambitious goal, like let's do $10,000. But somebody has to be willing to write a $10,000 check for that. So if somebody is, I'm game, it would be fun. I'm going to a wedding on the 31st and then to dinner afterwards, but somewhere in between there we would stick a show where we could try to do a big fundraising for the Iran book show year-end, year-end summery kind of show. It would be a lot of fun. Michael asks, why would an abandoned mine grow a lust for power? You'd think he'd just become a druggy and leave people alone. Some of them become druggies. What Rand is writing is not that all abandoned minds lust for power. Some abandoned minds go for drugs. Some abandoned minds follow the crowd. They just become part of the mob. Some abandoned minds choose to create a pseudo self-esteem by controlling others, by lusting after their control. It's a sudden type. It's combined with a sudden nihilistic sense of the world. Liam writes, sorry I came late. Do you think Lord versus Wood will be overtone? Oh, yes, I do, as I said. And if so, will there be riots in the streets worse than George Floyd? No, I don't think so. I don't think so. We'll see. I don't think Antifa and others are as passionate Black Lives Matter for that matter as passionate about abortion as they are about Black Lives Matter. But it's possible. I just don't think that's where the energy on the left is. I think most of the energy behind defending abortion is with women who don't tend to riot, although some of them do. And there'll definitely be protests. There'll definitely be demonstrations. Will those demonstrations turn into the kind of riots we saw after George Floyd? I just don't see it, but I could be wrong. I could be wrong. Well, let's see also what the mood is like as we approach the Supreme Court decision over the next six months. Aimbolical, 16-year-old here, you are a genius intellectual. Thank you. I'm not a genius, but thank you. I love you and your content. If most jobs will be dominated by AI in the future, how do you make the case against redistribution? If most don't have jobs. See, I don't believe, I've talked about this in the past, I don't believe most don't have jobs. The entire history of technology is a history of technology creating more jobs than it destroys, significantly more jobs than it destroys. And that you can't imagine the jobs that will be necessary in the future. Because the kind of life that AI and robots will create for us will create a demand for things that we can't imagine today. Maybe we'll each have our own personal artist who will come in every evening and entertain us or make a sculpture for us, a painter. I don't know, I have no idea. Certainly we will each have our own personal masseuse, right? Because it will be so rich. And I give the example of 30 years ago only kind of rich people spoiled rich people got pedicures and manicures. There wasn't a business of having a nail spa. There wasn't a business. Today tens of thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands of people are employed in the nail spa business. I mean, you can't go buy a strip mall in California without seeing a nail spa. Now, who would have thought that we would get to the point where all of us would want a manicure and a pedicure? I mean, that's just, that would have been science fiction even 30 years ago, never mind, 100 years ago. So I don't know what we will desire in the future. I do know that human desires, human wants, human needs are infinite. And that the number of jobs, therefore, are infinite. You know, we'll need people to go into space and to colonize Mars and to set up, I don't know, set up mining stuff on asteroids. And yes, maybe the robots will do the real dangerous stuff, but we'll need to get the robots there and we'll need to guide the robots. And so many things that robots just can't do and plus, you know, this gets into kind of transhumanism and stuff, but are we really going to have robots up at the end, human beings you know, Elon Musk has already got a company that isn't planning chips in people's brains, and maybe we can communicate directly with a chip in our brain. Will we be part robot, part human? Why is it one or the other? Why can't A.I. be something that supplements human beings and the jobs human beings do? Human beings obviously bring something to the equation that you can't just mimic in a computer. So I mean, who knows how it develops? But there is absolute the only reason we can't think of the jobs of the future is lack of imagination. And that's okay because but we should recognize history and we should recognize the fact that technology has always created more jobs than it's destroyed. Always. And it will again. And if not, we'll have a lot of leisure time. But one of the things that A.I. will do is make us really, really rich. And everybody will have an opportunity and people say what about the really dumb people? People with low intelligence. Well technology helps those people more than anybody else. I mean, somebody with very low intelligence can still use a computer and a computer makes them like a thousand times smarter than they would be without a computer. So the whole premise of the idea that A.I. destroys jobs is wrong. Sorry, Elon Musk and all the rest of the doomsdayers, doomsayers. It just doesn't make any sense to me. Corey, thank you for the generous contribution. Would it help everybody to think of this abortion topic in the sense of life and death? We are all going to die. Does that mean that right now we are dead? I like that. I like that. We are potentially dead, therefore we are dead. Apply this to the unborn versus the born. I got this example from one of Dr. Peacuff's talks. Yeah, I mean Dr. Peacuff said these great ways of thinking about this. That's right. The fetus is a potential human being. He is not a human being yet. He will be one day if he is born. If he is not born, he won't be. You are all going to die, but you are not dead yet. You are potentially dead. And for sure you are potentially dead because you will die at some point. It's even more certain than the birth. Does that mean you are dead? No. So I like that. Thank you, Corey. Philip, don't our rights come from the fact that our survival depends on our mind? Wouldn't a fetus's rights being when its mind begins rather than just a physical separation even though this child is still dependent on the mother? You know, that to me is a more reasonable argument. I don't think it's right, but it's a more reasonable argument that the fetus has rights, right? But yes, our rights come from the fact that our survival depends on our minds and that our acting in order to survive as independent entities is going to depend on our mind. But once a child is born their mind is now actively engaged with reality. They are now that process of reason that we are trying to defend has been engaged. It's not developed enough to actually secure its survival but it is engaged and what we're protecting is that human being with reason. Not reason at its full capacity but reason engaged now with reality in the process of developing the skills to be able to manage itself which will take years. So rights start then because it is the mind we are protecting and the bigger question is what about children that are born without syndrome or something like that where they don't have reason, they don't have a mind and in a sense they gain rights, they gain the protection of the law in the sense that they are separate human beings at this point and although they're never going to reach that fully functioning of the mind that protects them we respect their life and in a sense we're giving them the presumption of being human being fully human by granting them rights. And again one of the reasons to have abortions is to prevent babies from being born without enough of a brain to take care of themselves. Well Michael, thank you that's very generous. Sorry, unrelated question from the book The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama. Natural human socialization is built around two principles kin selection and reciprocal altruism. What do you think about reciprocal benevolence instead? Look, I don't know why we need this reciprocal to begin with. So, yes there's no question there's a sense in which we all appreciate a reciprocality and particularly a benevolent reciprocality and it's a feature of human life and it's an important feature of human life. It's not a principle on which human socialization is built around. The fundamental principle you know this is me now I'm sure I got this from Randall Peacock but maybe not anyway. The fundamental principle around human socialization whatever the hell that means that is human being's ability to live and flourish and be successful in a society the fundamental principle of that is the benefit of trade not just trade materially but spiritual trade. The ability to engage with other people in win-win relationships the ability to ultimately the ability to specialize and the ability to you know in very primitive societies for me to make the arrows and for you to make the you know for whatever level of specialization there is it's the ability to trade and therefore be right in a society together. Why? Because we're all benefiting from one another reciprocal benevolence is is great it's true I don't buy kin selection either but it's yeah I mean it makes sense I'm nice to you I expect you to be nice to me if then you're not nice to me maybe I'm not nice to you there's a certain element of that I mean it's part of this idea of trade but there's a deeper reason why I'm nice to you and that I'm nice to you not because I expect you to be nice to me but I'm nice to you because I recognize you as a human being and therefore as a value to me as a potential producer as a potential creator and therefore as a potential trading partner with me and that's what gives benevolence towards other human beings really its foundation not that I'm doing this calculation I'll open the door for you because you'll open the door for me one day but because I have a general goodwill towards other human beings because other human beings are like me other human beings can create amazing stunning beautiful productive things and I love human beings and that to me so the whole kin selection reciprocal altruism I don't I think it's over simplification it's an essential rejection of free will it's a misapplication of altruism it's a typical benevolence it's a misunderstanding what trade really means and it's a misunderstanding of the benefit human beings get from other human beings it's a very materialistic view as well very materialistic just not surprising coming from the left Ashton Milkyway wants me to notice him on the podcast I noticed you Ashton you could have put some dollars and then I definitely would have noticed you alright Andrew sorry for the personal question but did faith ever have meaning for you or was objectives metaphysics a relatively easy integration yeah objectives metaphysics was the easiest to the extent that I understand it was the easiest for me because faith never I mean I became an atheist at age 6 I never got it I you know religion was something that was happening around me and didn't make any sense to me and I rejected it from age 6 or 7 I don't I remember the place in the world where I was when this happened so I can't pinpoint the exact age I was living in London at the time but I lived in London from age 5 and a half to 8 I think yeah 8 so I think it happened around 6 7 I rejected Judaism as a religion absolutely I never believed I used to go to synagogue I used to do the Friday night prayers with my grandfather and my parents never believed a word of it so to me religion never was never an issue so the metaphysics was easy in a sense of she didn't have to convince me that I read Ayn Rand I was a committed atheist I mean Florida Nick asked any Thomas Sowell recommendations I've just started black, red necks and white liberals and I'm enjoying it I mean I like all of Thomas Sowell's books you're going to learn something from all of them he's a good writer, he's entertaining you don't have to agree with everything he says his book in basic economics is good his book on you know, ethnic and racial issues his books on that are very good again I don't agree with everything he writes or everything he says all these formulations but he's always interesting and there's always something to learn from him Trigga asked in art anti-heroes can be interesting altruistic heroes are boring neither inspiring I agree I agree aim butical the 16 year old can you please explain to me how resources are infinite wow you're asking small questions today because think of it in this sense at the most abstract level we have and are developing and we develop the capacity to rearrange the atoms in the universe and there is no limit to the number of rearrangements we can make so let's just do some science fiction right so first just think about it this way there's oil in the ground and for years we were told over and over again we're running out of oil and then we suddenly discovered more oil how do we discover more oil well we figured out a technology to squeeze oil out of places that didn't we couldn't squeeze oil out of places in the past theoretically in 300 years or so we'll probably squeeze every last bit of oil out of what we have today of of earth right now because oil is from organic material at least that's our understanding of what earth comes from there might not be earth available to us anywhere else in the planetary series right now but given the advancements of science and technology can't we imagine that we start creating some kind of artificial oil that we create the oil ourselves that we restructure the atoms in order to create oil I don't know the point is this that the only limited resource is human ingenuity we can come up with ideas and structures and way to do things that nobody else has ever imagined and in a sense the real resource is not oil the real resource is energy and if we run out of oil for energy we'll figure out how to use something else for energy I'm not sure what that will be but we'll figure it out the idea of the idea that resources are infinite is the idea that human ability that human capacity to discover is infinite that we will always figure out that we will never run out of energy even if we run out of oil we might run out of a particular good but we'll then figure out how to make either more of it or figure out how to use something different instead of it and the limit to that is the human mind and the human mind has not shown any limitation in terms of its capacity to imagine and to discover J.J. Jigsby's Jigsby's thank you for the contribution there's a popular board game called Settlers of Katan that involves trading resources as core mechanism fun to watch even the most hardcore Galatyrians turn into ruthless capitalists whilst playing something that yeah I mean those ruthless Galatyrians hardcore Galatyrians are very ruthless when it comes to their job, their work, their startup, it's amazing right how many of them in Silicon Valley are ruthless when it comes to what they do and yet they're completely got people are compartmentalized okay our 16 year old has another question what do you think about carrying capacity and it's applied to humans carrying capacity meaning maximum amount of people, animals that we support I have no way of telling but it seems to me that the carrying capacity of planet Earth is several multiples of what we have today we have not populated the oceans yet we have not utilized the oceans as sources of food yet we have not started mining asteroids to begin other natural resources how much of the Earth's core have we actually mined, have we actually gone into I don't know a fraction of 1% a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of 1% I think the carrying capacity of planet Earth is tens of billions of people now as it happens human population of planet Earth is probably going to start shrinking at some point because people are having less kids partially because they're being scared to death by all the fear mongering about climate change and about the carrying capacity of Earth but I don't know what the limit is I mean imagine if we could build floating cities or cities under the water and if we could harvest the oceans in terms of growing food there's just no limit to these things I mean it's futile to speculate because every time we speculate every time somebody comes up with a number it's blown out of the water I mean going back to oh god I forget his name in 1800 who said hundreds of millions of people are going to die population of Europe is going to exceed the capacity for us to create food you know and that was in 1800 and 1900 and then again Paul Ehrlich in 1969 predicted the same thing and yet we can produce we produce so much food right now that a lot of farmland is being turned into forests because we don't need it anymore as farmland so the fear mongering and the lack of understanding of human ability among your teachers and among our intellectuals and among the people out there is truly sad Malthus, thank you Scott, Malthus in 1800 but it's we have every reason to be super optimistic about the ability of human beings to thrive if they are left free alright guys we've hit two hours and four minutes and you guys got us over 800 bucks today so thank you to everybody who supports the show on Super Chat thank you everybody who supports the show by you know what do you call it, Patreon and Subscribestar and Locals and and you're on bookshow.com slash support which is PayPal by the way I wonder if I accepted crypto and I promised not to sell the crypto for like 12 months if I promised to hold the crypto how many of you would contribute crypto so I'm gonna get a crypto wallet and make it possible for you to do crypto contributions and I'm just wondering if anybody would use it whether I should go through the trouble and I know some of you don't like the idea that I would sell it you want me to own it for a while so I become a believer so I'm willing to own it for a while because you know what's the worst that can happen and go down so should I get a crypto wallet would you guys contribute to the show if I got a crypto wallet would you send me bitcoins I guess the people on this Super Chat I guess the people on the chat are basically no anyway thanks guys so it's on Saturday 8pm we'll have Amish Adulja on Saturday 8pm with Amish Adulja don't forget to like the show before you leave and I will see you all on Saturday bye everybody