 So, you know, one of the things that come out of this coronavirus is, you know, there's a sudden sense in which the, the, the, the environmentalists, uh, using, celebrating this in some sense. Uh, I mean, I'm not talking about the wacky environmentalists. There's a, there's a bunch of crazy environmentalists who think this is great because people are dying, you know, plague upon the earth is humanity. And, uh, and therefore, um, you know, we, you know, this is great. But I'm talking about the fact that the environmentalists are basically saying, I mean, a few things, there's a few levels to the argument that the environmentalists are making first, they're just pointing out that, wow, isn't it amazing to have clean air and you're seeing a lot of photos of, uh, I don't know if you've seen the satellite photos of China with no pollution. Uh, and it's primarily no pollution because there's no heavy industry because of the shutdowns, uh, LA LA Los Angeles with clear blue skies. No, because nobody's driving. And, uh, and then the water in Venice, clear and, and see through because there are no boats on the canals. What happens, it's not because the water is filthy, but what happens when the boats on the canals is they, they cause the water to circulate and the, and the mud comes up from the bottom and it makes, it makes the river look milky and, um, when the boats are not there, everything settles down. The mud settles down to the bottom and you get clear water. So you get that. I mean, somebody was, I was reading an article where somebody was celebrating, oh, the coyotes now on the Golden Gate Bridge. Um, I don't know. People, you know, there was an article I read about how animals are coming out. This is, this is one of the three, where is this article somewhere here? Anyway, the, the three great things, you know, positive things that have happened because of coronavirus and one of them is the habitat for animals has expanded and now they, they, they feel like they can go everywhere and they, they're safe. Why, why is the safety of animals a priority? Um, and, and, um, I mean, I, I think it's, I mean, I think it's horrific. The idea that the coyotes on the Golden Gate Bridge, it's a, it was, you know, where civilization is receding animals come in when civilization disappears. Right. Civilization is the only animals that are around you, animals. You choose to be around you. You're pets, but all animals are not there. I'm not, you know, I don't, I don't consider it a sign of civilization. The coyotes or moose or bears are roaming around the streets. That is, that is a sign of lack of civilization. Civilization is where things are human, human built, concrete and asphalt, the signs of civilization. So, but they're celebrating, they're celebrating the animals coming in, the lack of pollution is a bunch of, like you have to watch this because they did a bunch of fake videos, fake, not so much by the media, but just people putting up fake videos on Facebook and Twitter. So there was a video of dolphins and the heading was dolphins swimming, you know, near, near Venice. Venice is now all cleaned up because the tourists are not there and everybody's in their homes. So the dolphins have come back to Venice. Well, it turns out that this wasn't in Venice. The photos were taken, the photos were taken in another part of Italy, near Sardinia, where dolphins are common, the dolphins, they were the tourists or not, the dolphins love that area. They're never dolphins in Venice. It's just not part of the habitat. So it's not, yeah, that was a fake photo. Then there was one of also in Venice, what was it? It was too many of these photos. Let's see. Yes. It was one of swans, swans in the Venice, in Venice. Yeah, I mean, if you know a little bit about this, then there's a whole thing of swans in the canals of Burano, which is a small island in the greatest Venice, Venice metropolitan area. Somebody took a photo of that. But when I was in Burano, there were swans. They were as well. So it's not that the swans are fake. It's fake that they weren't there before the coronavirus. And it's not that the dolphins are fake. The dolphins just what's fake is the headline that says it's in Venice. The dolphins were actually in Sardinia, where they always are. But who cares if the dolphins come back to Venice? That's not a good sign. That's mean people have receded. Civilization has receded. Yes, it's if you ever watched the movie Planet of the Apes, when all human beings are dead, then trees in the middle of the cities and roots of trees are knocking down buildings. And they are animals everywhere in the city. Not a good thing. That to me is a sign of decay, of death, of the end of civilization, not something to be celebrated, something to be, oh, my God, what happened to the civilization? What happened to these people? But you're seeing this is, you know, and, you know, three ways in coronavirus is a boom to the environment. One is decreased air pollution. Two, animals have more room to roam. And, you know, three is something about, you know, animal cruelty, oh, trading in animals were banning wildlife trade, rare animal trade and stuff like that. We won't be eating, we won't be eating bad animals. I mean, that's that's the level. But then that's at one level, right? Just looking around and seeing the kind of the what they view as the positive consequences of the coronavirus. And again, I'm not talking about the wacky libertarians who are happy to see people die. They're not that many of those kind, luckily, luckily. I'm talking about kind of the respectable libertarians, right? Libertarians, sorry, environmentalists. That's a that's called the Freudian slip, Freudian slip. But then they're the more, if you were more sophisticated, environmentalists are saying, look, there's a lot to learn from this epidemic and we should be using this as an opportunity to educate people about what happens when you have a crisis and you're unprepared, what happens when you get exponential disaster and you're not ready and you're not willing to do the things upfront in order to prevent it. And they're basically saying, look, there's no difference between this virus and climate change. The virus has exponential growth. It's fast. The only difference is climate change has exponential growth. It's slow, but we need to point out to people. The commonalities between how we need to prepare for them and how sacrifices are going to be needed. Look, people are willing to take the sacrifices for the coronavirus, but the sacrifices kind of at the last minute. What we need to do is explain to them how out to people how we can prevent the need for these great short term sacrifices by sacrificing long term, basically. So I see over and over and over again in articles about climate change and the coronavirus I see over and over again this idea that both exponential, both the problems of limited capacity to cope, when the flooding happens, we're not going to be able to cope. We need to plan ahead by restricting our activities now, by going into social distancing now, I guess, so that the flooding doesn't occur in the future. I actually thought what we should be doing is building dykes, building moats, building ways in which to control the flooding. So when it happens, it doesn't hurt us as much. That's how you plan ahead for viruses. You don't say we're going to, we're going to, you know, stop all transportation across countries. So viruses cannot spread across the world. What you say is we got to ramp up medicines. We got to prepare vaccines. We got to have ventilators and masks ready. We got to have hospital beds. Next time we got to have testing. Next time we'll do this better. But no, the way the environmentalists want us to prepare is to take the worst outcome and apply it today, which is slow life so that there's less production. Now, look, I want to say something here before we get onto the climate change. Something as in terms of background, because there might be a lot of you out there who don't know, you know, my position, Objectivist position or Enhanced position on the environment. And so I want to make something clear that because, and this is the context from which I take all of my discussions on the environment. The environment has no intrinsic value. Indeed, nothing does. There is no such thing as a value in and of itself, a good in and of itself, a value which is something you want, something you act to gain or keep. A value has, there has to be somebody who values it and there has to be a purpose for which they value it. So value to whom and for what? Nature, the environment, and I hate the term environment because environment is not a thing. There's a human environment. There's spotted owl environment. There's a dolphin environment. So environment is meaningless. I mean, human environment, OK, but then you bring in humans and most people use environment to mean that which is not human. But that's just nature. And nature has no value beyond what you or I or anybody else assigns it. Individual human beings assign value and that's the value something has. Now, you could say you guys don't completely appreciate the value of this. It's worth much more than you assess. But that's again, in a human context, only the human context, human life, human flourishing, human success, creates the context by which we have values. Value to whom to a human being for what to live. Value to whom to me for what to make enough money to buy the Ferrari, right? So value always asked for whom to whom and for what. So for example, what is the value of nature? Well, it depends. Some people love to go hiking and, you know, just pristine nature has a value to them in the context of their love of hiking and the spiritual value they get of sitting by a waterfall at the edge of a forest with, you know, whatever, right? And I have, you know, often, you know, really enjoy nature, not too much of it. I have to admit at one time, I used to be a hiker in a camper no more. I like my comforts way too much, way too much to go hiking and camping these days. But, you know, I love a beautiful view. I love to be out in nature. I love to take short hikes. So, you know, I love to do that. And when I was younger, I loved it more. But within reason, I'm only willing to pay so much for that. I certainly love the beach, right? But I love the beach with a nice comfortable chair and an umbrella to keep the shade away, right? So, you know, I love my nature civilized. Like with sand brought in from where sand is soft, not necessarily the local sand that exists there which often can be rough and annoying and obnoxious, right? So, nature is fine, you know? And to the extent that nature supports human life, and much of it does, then great. Then it is a value to those human beings who recognize that it supports human life. It's a value to them. But nature in and of itself has no value to me. And I always say, when people say, whoa, you know, what about this animal, that animal being extinct? Well, if you value that animal, then, you know, buy some of it and get a plot of land and, you know, let it grow there, I don't know. But you can't impose your values on me. You can't impose your love of nature on me. You love nature, pay for it. And nature's there for me, for you, for human beings. So, nature is not an in or be all. The environment is, to the extent that it's nature out there, is to serve us, whether it's to serve our recreation, our entertainment, our pleasure. Wow, Michael, thanks, thanks. Thanks for the support. I will get to your question, I promise. Do that and let me do this. So that's the context. So when I see animals in cities, well, that means that the city has died. The city is gone. And what's more valuable to me? A city or nature, a city, much more valuable. So when people start talking about climate change, I always think, okay, climate change, how does it affect people? Let's say it's true. Let's say climate change is really happening. Well, how does it affect people? And how do we implement solutions that will mitigate the impact it has, just like a virus? How do we implement solutions not by changing our lives, stopping work, stopping all activity? But how do we do things like discover vaccines, find medicines and do testing and all the other stuff that would solve the problems we have? That's what you should do with climate change. But of course, the environmentalists don't see it that way, right? The public is coming to understand. And of course, the government response to the virus is just emboldened, emboldened to the roof, the environmentalists, because I mean, here's a quote. The public is coming to understand that the kind of situation you have to act in a way that looks disproportionate to what the count reality is, because you have to react to where that exponential growth will take you. In other words, disproportionality. I mean, we're basically stopping everything. So if we can do that for a virus, well, certainly we can do that for climate change. We're gonna have to take disproportionate action. And the public has now accepted that we have to take disproportionate action. They have absorbed that, they've recognized that, they've internalized that. And from now on, it'll be easier for us to propose radical change because they've already gone through one crisis and they accepted radical change. How can they oppose radical change in the future? When the consequences of climate change are far worse than the consequences of the virus. And of course, politicians have now recognized that they can get away with such a power grab. So politicians in the future, and none of the environmentalists say this, the fact is the politicians of the future are going to use climate change as a power grab. And this way they can see they can get away with it. We got away with the coronavirus. Let's go for it. Now we've got a long-term excuse. One that doesn't go away. One that sticks with us. One that we can use forever. Because climate change, hey, let's be honest, climate always changes. So this opens up a whole issue of politicians who've now felt, tasted what power is like and what they can get away with. It's gonna be hard to put that genie back in the box. In the box, in the bottle, what box? Now some people are saying, look, this is gonna be good for climate change because here the consequences that they believe are gonna come out of the, people are going to travel less. Yay, they're gonna use Zoom more. Yay, so less pollution. A big one, one that you see over and over again, people saying globalization. Oh, globalization is history. And the consequence of globalization being history is again, a lot less emissions. We're gonna buy local. If we buy local, less shipping, less trucking, less supply chains, less infrastructure, of course, more poverty, lowest standard of living, low quality of life, but they don't care about that. They care about climate change. So they love the fact that globalization is not threatened. And in this sense, no, and I've said this for years now, literally for years, the left and the right are going to come together on this. The environmentalist left and the nationalistic right are going to come together. They both will agree on dramatically curbing, dramatically curbing globalization. Now that is gonna be interesting, right? And scary because if they combine, so you can see that they're hoping that the virus has permanent impact on our lives. We work from home. We work from a distance. We don't travel. We don't want to crowd into airplanes. On the other hand, they're very afraid of the fact that we won't want to crowd into public transportation and will more likely drive our own car. So, you know, mitigating, too mitigating effects that they are worried about. Then finally, they are urging governments. And I think in Europe, they might be effective, I doubt they'll be effective in the US, but in Europe, they'll be effective. And in the longer term, they'll be effective in the US as well. They're urging government to use stimulus packages to start the process of the Green New Deal, to start massive investing, massive employment in so-called green technologies, in a complete restructuring of American energy production and American industry, which would basically, again, make us super poor, super poor. So, the environmentalists are gonna take every advantage of this and they're gonna use this as opportunity. One of the articles was titled, you know, Nature's Sending Us a Message. This is the United Nations Environmentalism Chief. Nature's Sending Us a Message with the coronavirus epidemic, right? Humanity was placing too much pressure on the natural world with damaging consequences and warn in these warning that failing to take care of the planet meant not taking care of ourselves. Clear warning shot, we are told. So, they're gonna draw the parallels, they're gonna be really aggressive. They're gonna encourage massive sacrifice, massive changes to our world and they're gonna tell people and people I think are gonna buy this. This is all the consequence of pushing the planet too far. There's a reason why suddenly we've had so many pandemics recently. SARS, SARS-2, MERS, H1N1, swine flu, which might have been H1N1 and so on. It's because we're bumping into nature more. No, but it doesn't matter. They will feed off of fear. They will feed off of people's concerns. So, again, the environmentalists will take advantage of this any way they can to bring about even more radical changes, to bring about even more shifts in our lifestyle. And this is just gonna be one of the many pushes the left makes to restructure the American economy, restructure it, the American economy, post-coronavirus, post-coronavirus. Our job, if you choose to accept it, it's to stop that, it's to stop that. It's to fight them, it's to stand up to them. It's to argue for more freedom, more capitalism, more property rights, less concern with so-called environmental issues, not more, less regulations, less interventions. Our agenda should be to show how just like if the globe is actually warming, the private sector, private property, business, the profit motive, are best to deal with it just as they are best to deal with the coronavirus. That government was a massive failure here. The lesson to be learnt from the coronavirus episode from what we're experiencing right now is the failure of central planning, the failure of government, the failure or inability of government to plan or to execute on those plans. So we wanna give them more power if global warming's actually happening. No, we wanna give them less power. We wanna make sure that private enterprise has the right incentives, the right motivations that is motivated by a real profit motive that is focused on the long term. I mean, think about, for example, if climate change is real and there really are threats on climate change, think about our insurance companies could start in a sense pricing that in and changing people's behavior. For example, if the sea levels are going to rise and it doesn't make sense to build homes near the sea, near the ocean, that insurance rates would go through the roof and people would be or insurance just wouldn't pay for homes by the ocean. People would be disincentivized to build near the ocean and homes would move further inland. But of course, what happens today? Today, actually government involvement in the insurance markets actually government forces and actually government provides directly insurance to people in so-called flood zones. The solution is not to stop living, stop producing, stop manufacturing, stop traveling, stop living so that climate change changes. The solution is to free us all up so that the markets can take care of whatever problems actually in reality emerge. And insurance markets, by the way, I think incredibly powerful tool against both so-called environmental catastrophes and viruses. The insurance industry is uniquely focused on long-term risk, that's what it does. It tries to measure those risks, plan for those risks, price those risks. And it does so when it's free. It does so in a non-zero interstate environment which screws up insurance completely, which is a whole different story. When it's free, it does so brilliantly. And I think as finance gets more sophisticated and as markets get more sophisticated, as we get more sophisticated, as we get more attuned to the risks out there, that insurance would only become more and more and more sophisticated. So the solution to any of these so-called problems, environmental problems, virus problems, and so on, is more capitalism, more freedom, more property rights, less regulation primarily in this case of the insurance business, which is a business geared towards what? Reducing risk, predicting risks, forecasting risks, assessing risks, pricing risks, imagine real competition in insurance markets across all areas, from health to property, to business interruption that took into account all these different risks, that's the solution. Not, I mean, you could imagine insurance companies building dykes in certain areas where they had significant exposure, might be an investment worth their while. So whenever faced with a big problem, faced with significant issues that are real, like a virus like maybe certain issues around climate, a solution can never be less freedom. The long-term solution is always more freedom, not less. So the environmentalists are gonna use this. The environmentalists are celebrating some of the consequences of this, of the virus. The failures that we have today are failures of statism. The failures that we have today are failures of government. The failures that we have today are failures of regulations and controls, and the limitations placed on the government, are on markets and limitations placed on science, and limitations placed on technology. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning, any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the stare, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist, Broads. Using the super chat and I noticed yesterday when I appealed for support for the show, many of you stepped forward and actually supported the show for the first time. So I'll do it again, maybe we'll get some more today. If you like what you're hearing, if you appreciate what I'm doing, then I appreciate your support. Those of you who don't yet support the show, please take this opportunity, go to www.uranbrookshow.com slash support or go to www.subscribestar.com, Iranbrookshow, and make a kind of a monthly contribution to keep this going. I'm not sure when the next...