 All right, everybody. Welcome to your Unbrook show on this. What is it? I don't know what day it is. It's Tuesday. It's Tuesday. And here we go. Sorry, we got, we got, there we go, we got video. It's Tuesday. It's a second show tonight. It's 8pm. I'm a little, I don't know, this last trip, the quick trip for two days to Madrid is kind of, and it's gotten me a little tired, I guess. Tired? Tired is the right word. So jet lagged, little jet lagged, more than usual. So anyway, bear with me. I apologize for that. All right. Tonight, we are talking about demerism. I didn't even know there was such a thing, demerism. I came across this article that I thought was interesting. And with talking about both understand, understand the phenomenon and maybe talk about how to avoid it. Very easy. I think demerism is something in our culture that's very easy to embrace, to become a part of. All right. Let's see. I remind everybody, Super Chat is on. So think about making a, or not making anything, asking a question. I think that's the best way to do it. By the way, thank you, Stephen Hopin. Thank you, Robert Nacer for getting us started with some stickers. But think about asking a question. $20 questions get preference. We've got a $650 goal. And that's great. Also, I want to make another appeal, my usual appeal. For those of you who are not here live watching, doing Super Chat, to consider supporting the Iran Book Show on Patreon or on uranbrookshow.com slash support, also on Subscribestar. Any one of those platforms works. Actually think of all of them, the easiest one for you and the easiest one for me is Patreon. So you might consider doing it there. But if not, PayPal works through my website and so does Subscribestar. So all of those mechanisms, all of those means are available to support the Iran Book Show. We also have a new sponsor who's sponsored an ad for today's show. We'll see if we can get him to sponsor more ads, but partially that depends on how you respond to his ad. So it is down there in the description. So feel free to click on it and you go and investigate the website. I will do a more formal pitch for the business a little later. Let's get a little, a few more people listening live and then we'll make, in about 10 minutes, we'll make the formal pitch for when the actual ad. All right, I think, oh yeah, and one more thing I want to say and that is if you are interested in my public speaking seminar workshop really because hands-on and one-on-one and intense and it'll be a lot of fun, I think. And it'll be, you'll get real feedback from me about your public speaking and your abilities and how to get better and how to improve. It can be anywhere from a PowerPoint presentation to a toast that you make at a wedding, all the way to giving a talk at Ocon or giving a talk in front of 100,000 people. It doesn't really matter. You'll learn the principles that make great speeches, great talks. So sign on up, send me an email if you're interested. I'm thinking of doing one in the U.S. So anybody's interested in a seminar like that, please send me an email and that way I'll create a list of people interested in doing it in the U.S., let's say, and if I get enough people, then we'll do it. And if I get enough people in London, we'll do it in London. Right now I'm trying to get people in London, so Europeans and Brits to come and do it. It's $750 a person, which is a steal because these seminars usually cost about $3,000. And so we're doing one in London. I'm thinking of doing one in the U.S., maybe in Miami, but I need about, I need 10 people to do it in Miami. So if you're interested, sign up, we'll do it. All right. It's Dumerism time. What is Dumerism? I mean, Dumerism is this, it's not a real concept, it's not a real term, but what does it refer to? I found this article on, where was it, Liberal Patriot, who is one of the sub-stacks I follow, and it's called, Why Activists Keep Telling You the World is Ending? Dumerism is just nihilistic chic, nihilistic chic. I like that turning of the phrase, nihilistic chic. Anyway, it's all article about Dumerism, which is quite interesting, I think, because he talks about the motivation. He talks about the incentive. Why people become Dumerism? Why particularly do some people pitch Dumerism? Why are they advocating for it? Why are they pushing it as an ideology? So we're going to talk about that. All right. So what is Dumerism? We'll start with that. According to this article, and I'm quoting from the article, what sets Dumerism apart from normal people who identify problems in American life, often large and significant ones, is their suffocating pessimism, their lack of a positive vision, and their insistence that anybody who has even a shred of optimism about life in America is delusional. Now, that sounds so much like people in my comments on my videos, where I say anything positive about America or anything positive about the world in which we live or the time in which we're living. God, people come out and say, oh, you're on. You don't know what you're talking about. You're delusional. You ate the wrong pill, not the white pill, not the black pill, not the red pill, not the whatever pill it is that makes you delusional. You're detached from reality. You have no clue. How can you even mention the word? How can you even be positive about anything? The world is crumbling. It's ending. So that sentence, right, that their insistence that anyone who has even a shred of optimism about life in America is delusional. That caught my attention because I know exactly what they're talking about. That's exactly how so many people view me. I continue from the article. In the eyes of the Duma, society is not just bad. It's a health scape. Making change is not just difficult. It's impossible. Happiness is not just elusive, but futile. And while this mindset isn't necessarily commonplace, neither is it completely absent for public consciousness, especially among elites. Once survey scientists asked 10,000 young people in 10 countries about their thoughts on climate change and found that over 55% said humanity is doomed, doomed. Here's a tweet from a person like this. This would be somebody more on the left. But as we'll talk about, it can be on the left. It can be on the right. It has no, usually it's on left or right. Usually it comes from a collectivistic place. We'll talk about that. But not always. But here's an example. This is from Taylor Lorenz, who is an influencer some way. Anyway, Taylor says, people are like, quote, why are kids so depressed? It must be their phones. But never mention the fact that we're living in a late-stage capitalist health scape during an ongoing deadly pandemic with record wealth inequality, zero social safety net, or job security, as climate change cooks the world. And then she continues, not to be a doomer, but you have to be delusional to look at life in our country right now and have any amount of hope or optimism. All the people yelling that capitalism is actually going great, and everyone in the U.S. should be cheerful and happy. If you're so content with your life, then why do you go on here getting all worked up? Anyway, life sucks is the basic principle. It's common, again, among people who are active, people who are engaged. And it's been going on forever, right? I mean, do you remember in 2012, the Mayan calendar flipped? Something happened to the Mayan calendar? I don't know. I never investigated. But in 2012, the Mayan calendar flipped, and the world was supposed to end. I think, didn't Mel Gibson do a movie about it? And there was real hysteria. There was real, people were really upset, worried, obsessed by this, right? It was going to be the end of the world. You remember 2000? You remember Y2K? I mean, I remember really smart people. I think numerism usually inflicts smart people. Poor people tend to just get depressed and drink a lot and take drugs and commit suicide. I think it's smart people who obsess about these things and spend a lot of money letting everybody know about them. But I remember Y2K was going to end the world because there was population explosion. We were all going to go dive cancer because of drugs, chemicals in the air and in the, I don't know, plastics in the water or whatever. I think that's still going on. I think that's still a demerit thing. And then what else was there? There was global cooling. And there was just like, I don't know, Christianity predicts Armageddon. The day is going to come. Jesus comes back. The dead rise up. Jesus divides them into those who go to heaven and go to hell. And it's all happening all at once. There's a revelation in the Old Testament about this. Pretty gnolly description. It's depicted by Michelangelo beautifully and amazingly and dramatically in the Sistine Chapel. And every few, at least historically, every few decades, people were convinced this was it. This was it. There's still evangelicals in America today who think it's going to happen. It's the war in Ukraine. It's in Syria. It's ISIS. ISIS was going to bring about the end of the world because something about, I don't know, some prediction about the final battle being in the Middle East. Maybe that's Islam. But anyway, it doesn't matter. Jennifer reminds us there was acid raid. DDT was going to kill all the eagles. And Jesus is coming back, right? I mean, He's coming back and it's going to be dramatic and they're going to be bones and they're going to be, and where are you going to go? Are you going to go to hell or to heaven? You know what happens to Jews in Israel? The evangelicals tell us the Jews in Israel on the day of Atonement, on the day of when Jesus comes back, the Jews in Israel either all convert to Christianity and go to heaven or they stay Jews and they go to hell. I mean, that's how much the evangelicals love the Jews is they know they're going to hell when the day of judgment comes. I mean, human beings are obsessed with this and have been obsessed with this forever. And it is a really good question to ask why I think for, for, for a very long time, a lot of it just had to do with ignorance, not ignorance of any particular thing, but ignorance of science, ignorance of the causal explanations for why things happen, philosophical ignorance, and, and the ignorance, ignorance that relates to just fear, fear is a dominant emotion that comes from not understanding the world, not knowing why things are happening, not having perspective on time, right? People, people until very recently didn't have a sense of how old the earth was, didn't have a sense of how long human beings have been around. Also, think about living in ancient times where there's no progress. Things do not get better from generation to generation, never mind from decade to decade, we're used to decade to decade, and that fueled kind of this Malay and depression and things, you know, like kind of sucked and it wasn't getting better when it wasn't changing. So you can kind of explain it and understand it in ancient times, what was the point of it all? It seemed like it was all gonna end and human beings kind of, what was the point of being on earth? It seems like in modern times, much more difficult to be pessimistic in a sense of things keep getting better. Every decade we have progress, you know, life is pretty comfortable and good and long relative to the past. We have an understanding of the history. We have an understanding of kind of mankind's been on the planet for, I don't know, 100,000 years or whatever, and other homeod species before that. There's a certain perspective that the modern world should provide us, should provide us. And so it's particularly bewildering, particularly bewildering that this is so common today and it's common across the board. On the left, you have climate change, but it's not just climate change, it's the end of capitalism. It's, you know, late stage capitalism, which is a Marxist term for when capitalism ends and socialism rises. They should actually love late stage capitalism because it means that the socialist revolution is just around the core. Any day now it's going to happen and they will, you know, and ultimately we will get to that socialist utopia. So the left should love it, but they fear it, you know, it's causing all these problems and the disasters. So you've got generally environmentalism with climate change is the big one. And you've got late stage capitalism, this idea that the economies are just going to collapse because of, and there's no safety net and everybody's screwed and life is awful. So that's one, that's kind of the dominant demeritism today on the left. Can you think of other demerit views on the left? You know, I think that's a big one. I mean, there's the other one of, and but this is also on the way that, you know, the fascists are coming. America is this far, this far from being a complete fascist authoritarian state. We're on the verge of it. It's just a matter of questions. And then we have, I don't know, gulags and concentration camps for people who have wrong ideas or have wrong color skin or whatever. So there's also the demeritism with regard to politics. That's actually the demeritism that I'm most inclined towards is political demeritism. On the right, you have the same thing about the left, right? So the right believes the next election, most crucial in all of human history, because if the left wins, it's socialism, 100%, it's not socialism, socialism boy too much, it's communism. The communists are coming. You know, AOC is going to rule. It's going to be woke communism. Woke communism is coming. It's around the corner. It's about to destroy the country. And if you just allow the left to win one more election, that is what's going to happen. We got that in Flight 94. Do you remember Flight 94, which was the famous essay that written by a conservative from the Klayman Institute about how we have to elect Donald Trump because if the left wings, it's the end of the world. That's it. It's finished. So even though Donald Trump is probably going to be a disaster, Flight 93, i.e. by voting for Donald Trump, we might be committing suicide. We might be destroying the country. It's inevitable that the country is going to be destroyed. At least this way, we have a little bit of a chance. We have a fighting chance, a small chance to save the world. And that's why we should vote for Donald Trump. But the right has, so that's one. What else do we have? I mean, certainly communism, war culture is a catastrophizing doomerism on a doom saying on the right. I mean, I'd say that the civilization is just going to end. Trench genders are going to take over everything. Male and female are going to disappear. We're all going to be part of what do you call it, a cult of transgender. Of course, the right is also some on the right, not everybody on the right, of course, is also part of the doomsday scenario of everybody's going to die because of COVID vaccines. The vaccines are killing millions of people, but it's being held as this massive secret, but it's really destroying civilization and killing us all. That's kind of a white-wing catastrophizing doomerism, if you will. And then, of course, there's the libertarian version. Libertarian version is, of course, the dollar is going to collapse. The economy is going to collapse. We're all doomed. There's going to be hyperinflation or there's going to be stag, just destruction of credit and destruction of the economy. And we're all going to be completely gone. I mean, bell gauge chips. You can't turn every conspiracy theory in a doomsday. The whole idea of the doomerism is the world's going to end in some way. People are massive numbers of people are going to die. And there's little we can do about it. That's part of the problem. So libertarians have a version of it, free market libertarians have a version of it. Conservatives have a version of it. And of course, the left is super good at this, really, really good at this. And a lot of the doomerism is focused on the other side. And there was, by the way, there was also doomerism around COVID. During COVID, about we're all going to die. Civilization is going to end. COVID is going to kill us all. Nothing is going to help. We're a triple mask, not a double mask, not a single mask. Triple mask and 95 triple, you know, and cover every, you know, anyway, you know, you get you get the sense, right? So yeah, doomsday gas mask. Yeah, people can wear gas masks. Oh, yes, of course. Well, the left and the right are combined, a joint bipartisanship around artificial intelligence. That's the big one right now, right? That's the big one. AI is going to kill us all. Terminator, I mean, I've literally had people argue with me, people who know who I am, who claim to be kind of influenced by Iran, whatever. We've got, we've got end of the decade 2030. That's it. We're all going to die at that point. The machines are going to kill us. Machines are going to destroy every single one of you unless we do something right now. And that's something means turn off your computers, shut it down, don't rely any AI, AI anywhere. I've got chat GPT on my phone. Oh my God, it's a deadly weapon now. We're all dying. The robots are coming. The killer robots are coming. The killer robots with lasers are coming. All right. So why? Why? And one, I said, in old societies, primitive societies, it's ignorance. And I think ignorance plays a part in modern society as well. It's the same kind of idea behind conspiracy theories. People want explanations for, by the way, the same as religion. People want explanations about why things are happening. People don't understand the world. And they can handle complex or deep explanations. Like if you tell them ideas shape history, that's way over the head. They don't get it. It's hard. What ideas, how do they do it? It can be ideas. It must be a cabal of Jews or something, right? Or it's just all heading towards doom and gloom. It's all heading towards disaster. So they're looking for simple explanations. And it's what religion provides them. It's what cults provide them. It's what, you know, it's what conspiracy theories provide them. And one of the things that this provides is an explanation. It's just, it's a slip, it's downward from here. And it kind of, it also gives importance, in some sense, it gives importance to their lives. You know, and the author of this article mentions this, it kind of provides them with some kind of, you know, my life's important. I'm at the end of times. I get to live and experience the end. It gives them a kind of air of moral superiority. It's virtue signaling. They're smarter than anybody else. They can see the world coming to an end. There's a certain romanticism to it. I mean, romanticism in both sense. I get to live to see the end of times. It's pseudo-intellectual, you know, and it's Christian in its nature, in the sense that, and again, Christian, but that doesn't mean secular, it hasn't been secularized dramatically. Humanity, it was always bound to fall. We've always been a fallen species, man, you know, engaged in the fall from the beginning. And therefore, we're always doomed. It's always doomed. There's no hope. That's just the nature of life, the nature of the world, the nature of reality. The nature of the world is failure because we're such a horrible species. And it gives them a need and concise story, you know, a nuanced and qualified argument. And, you know, you can see why intellectuals, certain intellectuals gravitate towards this. So I think that explains a lot of the emotional appeal on this grand scale of the world is coming to an end. But a lot of it has to do with intellectuals pushing this agenda. I don't think there would be that much demerism out there without people with PhDs at the end of their name, or maybe even MDs at the end of their name, but certainly PhDs at the end of their name, without who are not pushing this stuff, emphasizing this stuff. And here I think part of it is that intellectualism, it's, they appear to be idealistic. They, they, they, again, have the small superiority. But there's also this is a way to get attention. It's a way to increase your public profile. It's a way to get more followers on Twitter. It's a way to get noticed by the media. It's a way to sell a book. It's great marketing. And so it's a way to build a brand. And it's a way to make money. It's a way to make money. I mean, if you look at the COVID vaccine hysteria, I mean, there's like a handful of doctors who are pushing this. They've all got newsletters and YouTube channels and, and, and Patreon accounts. And it's funny that they can go on and spot all this nonsense on YouTube. And I mentioned something about COVID and YouTube shuts me down. But they, they figured that fear sells and they make a lot of money, a lot of money. On this. And they use their credentials to make the money and to gain power and to gain, gain a following and to become leaders of movements and to become big shots. And you can see this. And the reality is, I mean, I know this because I watched the reality is that the doom, doom sayers are the ones that have big followings. The doom sayers raise a lot more money. The doom sayers have huge YouTube following. Now it's not only the doom sayers. I'm not suggesting it's the only way, but it certainly is a way to do it. You know, I have the latest, greatest information about how the world is going to end because of climate change. Well, I have the greatest latest information about how the interest rate increases are going to doom the U.S. economy. It's going to collapse. And if you pay me a little bit of money, I might tell you the secret of how to protect yourself. I know how you can protect yourself against vaccines, COVID, the next, you know, pandemic that the Chinese are going to unleash themselves. I mean, that is very appealing for people. People love this stuff. Love this stuff. It's simple, simple to understand, easy. And all these people can take statistics and lie with them very effectively. It's very easy to use statistics to lie. Everybody does it. And again, very easy to do. So there is this financial incentive, power incentive, fame incentive, particularly in a world with social media, for people to exploit other people's weakness, other people's ignorance, other people's fear and expand it and justify it. Now, some people, some people are actually concerned. It's not about feeling morally superior. It's not about just financial gain or gain of you know, prestige. They're actually worried about the climate or they're actually worried about the economy. Other actually worried about AI. I think there are a lot of people today who truly are worried about AI. I don't think Greta is truly worried. I think Greta, I mean, I don't think truly is a good word for Greta. I mean, she's to this extent, just has been conditioned that she can't even think outside of that. So they really care about this stuff. And if they admit that the world is heading in the right direction in any respect, then people might not, you know, in their own mind, it'll cause them to have to doubt and question. And it's not good in terms of other people. So if you're going to make a change, you have to convince people that things are much worse than they really are, so that they act before the two re-rates. So only way to get people excited, the only way to get motivated is to scare the hell out of them. Such a marketing tool. So it's easy to ratchet up doom and gloom when you want to achieve, when you want to get people to act, when you want people to do something. Now, you know, as we know, it's not a particularly effective way, ultimately, one of the reasons I think people turn away from climate change is the catastrophizing. And then they figure out, wait a minute, it's not that bad. You know, so I don't believe anything you say. And therefore throw it all out. I think the climate crisis is definitely one where much of the public opinion has been turned away from climate change because of the catastrophizing. I think that's true of a lot of things. You become desensitized to all the crises of the day, the crisis of the moment. Although again, our TV news, our newspapers make an entire living. Their whole subscription base, their whole readership is based on the consumption of bad news and the relishing of the consumption of bad news. Now, I really think that this demerism kind of, what it does is it has this spiral effect where it's reinforcing. People start down this road and they get depressed because it's depressing because the world's going to hell. And there's nothing they can do about it. They can yell, they can scream, they can go to Twitter. They can accuse people of all kinds of things. They can go on, I don't know, campaigns and they go into the streets or whatever. It doesn't really help. So they get depressed. And depression just by its nature makes you see everything as really negative. And that just reinforces the negativity that you had originally. And this just gets worse and worse and worse. The depression, the demerism feed off of each other and make it much, much, much, much worse and becomes much, much more dramatic of a problem, dramatic of an issue. Sadly, maybe not that all-out demerism, but sadly this catastrophizing, this focus on the negative, the focus on negative news, the worry, the stress about what is going on in the world and the evil that it constitutes and how it's going to affect you and all of that is everywhere. It's all around us and it's very easy to get caught up in it, even when you're trying to resist it, because there is so much negative going on. And there's so many things that could go wrong. Oh, the other one, of course, recently, I mean, this is Jordan Peterson one, nuclear war. I mean, the Russians are going to launch any minute now. The human race is going to be wiped out because Biden sent an extra tank to Ukraine or something. So there's a lot of bad going on. We want explanations. We see things going bad and we assume they're only going to get worse. And it's hard to imagine how to reverse them. Another one, for example, is demographics. Right? The demographics of the world. I mean, human beings are going to be wiped out. They're going to disappear, ultimately, because we're not having enough kids. And if you do the math, at some point, they're just nobody there. Then no human beings left, because we haven't had enough kids. It's hard to imagine how demographics reverse themselves, how people start having more kids suddenly. It's hard to imagine how climate change reverses itself. It's hard to imagine how things get better, how we increase freedom, how the economy starts growing at 4%. It's hard to imagine. So we don't. We don't. And too many people also give up on trying to find the solutions. Trying to find solutions. Yeah, Africa is doing just fine, a population fund. But as they get richer, and of course, the assumption is always that we get richer, because nobody understands where wealth comes from. So the assumption is just time means more wealth. Then as Africa gets richer, they will have fewer and fewer kids. And ultimately, they be in the same demographic spiral as the rest of us. And we'll just spiral down and down and down. And it's just completely irrational, right? If you really think about it, because first of all, is Africa going to get richer? If the demographic spirals down all the way, there are going to be fewer and fewer people. We might not be richer. We might be poorer if we're poor. Maybe we have more kids. Maybe if we're richer, we have more kids. Maybe it turns out that there's an inflection point where once you get so much richer, you actually have more kids, because now it's better to be cheap to have kids. And you can have nannies up the kazoo and make it really, really easy to have kids, right? And what about the AI nannies? The robots can take care of our kids before they shoot them, right? Before they shoot them. So I can imagine lots of scenarios by which the demographics change. They reverse. They shift. Nothing is deterministic when it comes to human beings. But there is... Dumerism does involve a certain determinism. There's a fate. There's an inevitability to it. And of course... So what do you do about it? Is the bottom line, right? I mean, part of it is you got to show people it's just wrong, right? As many bad things that are happening today, there are many, many, many more bad things happening 300 years ago. Even 50 years ago. There was a real threat of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. A real threat. Much of the world, most of the world's population was under the thumb of communism. Mao Zedong Stalin. But even India was socialist. You got 50 years before that. There was colonialism. Everybody tells us that was really, really bad. I mean, before that, there was no AC. I mean, in every period of human history, there have been real challenges, real difficulties. And in every real respect, right now is not in every respect, but certainly in a material respect, in a sense of lack of fear, in a sense that we don't need to fear. What's the right way to phrase this? The safest environment we've ever lived in is right now. The fewer wars, the fewer pollutants, the fewer threats to human life than ever before. And soon we're going to have driverless cars, so we won't have to worry about even car accidents. Think about what we do and how unbelievably safe it is. We fly in the sky to other continents over the ocean. I mean, how risky was traveling across the ocean? Just 120 asked the people on the Titanic. Pretty risky. But look how safe traveling on the ocean has become. But traveling over the ocean has become. How easy it is. I mean, in every aspect, we have so much food, a problem is not any too much, right? People don't starve anymore. They go obese. We have so much tech, the fear is, we're too obsessed by it. But tech that makes our life dramatically easier and if used correctly, dramatically better. One of the reasons we don't have lots of kids is because we know that the kids that we have will survive. We don't have to worry that so many of them will die. And you can go on and on and on about how wonderful the world around us is. But tomorrow it'll get worse. And it might. And it might. I want to talk more about what we can do to prevent demeritism in our own lives primarily. We'll talk about that. But I want to read you this ad for a new sponsor who's sponsoring today's shows. Maybe we'll get them to sponsor more shows, but sponsoring today. This is a company run by an objectivist, a supporter of the show, somebody who once in a while does a super chat, but is definitely a regular supporter of the show and a regular supporter of me, of Iran. As a company, this company is right now, I think in New York, I think they also do this in Miami. It doesn't appear in the ad. But here's the deal. You know how when you want to sell an apartment, you have to stage it. You have to set up the furniture and set it all up nicely. And it has to be clean. And the furniture should be nice. It should be relatively new, and it should look good. Because when you walk into an apartment, if you're going to buy it, you want to be able to imagine what it looks like furnished. And a lot of people don't have that kind of imagination, so it's easier to provide them with something with a real thing. And then they can see exactly how the apartment is laid out. Or what the idea here is, all of that is really expensive, expensive, cumbersome, difficult, and often requires new furniture to come in. And the idea here is that they've done is created modular furniture, furniture that is made of cardboard but looks real. It folds really easily. So it's easy to transport. It's relatively cheap. Not relatively cheap. It is cheap. The product provides a unique, efficient, and affordable way to stage an apartment. It's high quality, beautifully designed, light, very light folding furniture made out of recycled dense cardboard, which is very easy to assemble. They can work with interior designers as well as top product designers. They can create a perfect combination of style and efficiency, and they can create furniture to your liking. You can have the property staged in 48 hours or less, hassle free, and again, very low cost. Now right now, if you click on the link in the description, www.stageandfold.com, stage and fold, they are currently offering the first 14 days of staging completely free of charge. That's an amazing, completely free of charge. Isn't that a good idea? Jennifer says it's a good idea. I think Jennifer's right. No commitment, no hassle. Just go to stageandfold.com. So please go just check out the website. You never know when you'll want to rent an apartment or when you'll want to sell your apartment. You'll need to stage it. And here is a great example, a great way to do it, really cost effectively, really cost effectively. All right. Thank you. Hopefully you guys will buy a lot of this stuff, right? And I'll get a regular sponsor for the show. We'll see how this goes. All right. So I think you guys know that I think that we're in a very difficult place right now in the world. While life is the logic stand, the best that it can be, for many of us, it is also true that things could be a lot better. We all know that. And things seem to be heading in the wrong direction. That is, it seems like the path we're on right now cannot continue forever, whether it's debt, regulations. I don't need to list all the problems that exist out there, the cultural leftism, the subjectivism. If idea shaped the world, the dominant ideas, at least the dominant explicit ideas in the world today are pretty horrible and pretty awful. So at some point, they have to have an impact. And you can stew about that. You can obsess about it. You can worry about it. You can let that dominate your life and take over your life and let it kind of be the thing that dominates and you'll be depressed. And it's all, in many respects, true. And here's Edward saying, we live in Kantian times, but do we? If we really lived in Kantian times, we wouldn't be able to do what we're doing right now, live streaming video. This whole technology wouldn't exist. If we really lived in Kantian times, those skyscrapers would be dooping and fading. And I was in New York recently, and I think I told you, I was impressed by some new beautiful new buildings, skyscrapers that were built recently, impressed by some new modern designs of buildings in different parts of New York. There's a certain vibrancy to it. That's not Kantian times. So yes, Kant is out there. The battle rages. The war rages between us or between the enlightenment values that still, I think, dominate. Otherwise, it would be horrible. And those Kantian ideas. But it's still a battle. And the battle is not being lost. It sometimes feels like we're losing. It suddenly sometimes seems like it's losing. And particularly, if you look at politics and if you look at election season, yeah, wow, does it look like we're losing? But the reality is, the economy still grows, new products still get created, technology advances, innovation still happens. People are using their mind. Crime has jumped up a little, has jumped up, but it's still way below its peaks in the late 80s, early 90s. And it's still way below what it was 150 years ago, 300 years ago, 500 years ago. I mean, our culture in many respects sucks. But on the other hand, we have the internet which allows us to really enjoy culture of the past. Those of us who care about these things. We have ordered our fingertips in a way that we never had before. So I think the focus needs to be that we haven't lost yet. And we don't believe in determinism. We haven't lost as long as we're fighting. As long as we're fighting, as long as we haven't been stopped, as long as we haven't been silenced, as long as we're not dead, we haven't lost. And instead of being depressed about the state of the world and how horrible things are and how depressing things are, the state of the world should motivate you to join the fight, to engage in the fight, to pursue the fight, and to try and win. So don't take losing as obvious, as necessary. Yes, it's sad that the world is not better than it is. It's not sad. It's tragic. It's horrible. But hey, the world's not bad. And part of the reason the world's not bad right now is because we are fighting for it. Not just we, the people in this show, but all kinds of people out there, including people who on other philosophical issues we disagree with thoroughly, the innovators, the scientists, the people who are doing amazing things to make the world a better place to live. That we all enjoy and we all benefit. And it's not a primarily about the politics. It's about day-to-day life. You got to fight for day-to-day sanity. You've got to fight to live a good life. And a big chunk of that, I'm going to say, I'm going to repeat myself because I say this often, a big part of that is knowing what's under your control. You can make your life better still. You can still improve your culture. I mean, we talk about the culture as if there's something out there that's the culture, but you are part of the culture, the community that you create around you. You create a culture around that community. What you do, how you impact it, how you live, how you make choices in your life, the kind of values you pursue will determine the shape of the world around you, will determine the shape of the world you live in. And that's what matters. It's the world you live in. It's your life. That's what counts. And there's a lot in the world around you that's in your control. There's a lot about your life that's in your control and you can make it better, make it beautiful, great friends, great lovers, create a fantastic world for you. Don't let the doomists, doomists, is this such a thing? Don't let those doomers, don't let those catastrophizes take away what is within the scope of your choices. Don't let the bad people out there dominate the world. You dominate the world. Dominate your world, the world around you. At the end of the day, culture society is just a conglomeration of small groups of individuals. And ultimately, it's just a conglomeration of individuals. If individuals, as individuals, we make good choices, we pursue good values, we have a positive attitude about life, we pursue the good, then we're having a positive impact on the culture. We're not letting the culture die. Avoid the catastrophizes, the doomsayers, the news junkies, the politics junkies. They're not the people, they're people who get the headlines. But are they the people who shape the day-to-day lives, the day-to-day culture, if you will, the day-to-day community that we all live within? I don't think so. I don't think so. Because most of those experiences are pretty pleasant. Most of our interactions with other human beings are pretty positive, pretty pleasant, pretty nice. They're not all a bunch of Kantian crazy maniacs. Most people out there are pretty productive. They go to work. They try to take care of their families. They try to take care of themselves to one extent or another. They drive safely. They produce. They work. They make. They create. They trade with you. Not everybody's your enemy. Life lived on a day-to-day basis does not suggest we're all doomed. And to the extent that there are problems, there are strong incentives to solve them. Strongest incentive being life itself. Yeah, I mean, you know, Scott says, what's the harm in your kids having a writer, DEI, compliance statement? A lot of harm. But it's also not, in spite of everything, the end of the world. It's not. It just isn't. You know, we've had to do all kinds of stupid things as kids in order to get into university or to get a job. I had to spend three frigging years in the military. Three years. How many of you spent three years in the military? Not doing fun stuff. Not doing interesting stuff. Not partying. Not studying in school. Three years in the army. Yeah. So the kids have to, you know, fill out a DEI statement. Now, I don't think they should. It's horrible. It's terrible. But is it the worst thing that's ever happened to humanity? Is it the end of the world as we know it? Is it a destruction of their childhood? Does it going to cripple them for the rest of their life and they won't be able to do anything? No. No. Fight it and you should fight it. Don't catastrophize it. Don't turn it into some doom and gloom nonsense because it's not true. Three years in the military, by force, conscription. I survived. The whole country survived. It's still surviving in spite of the fact that for three years, every Israeli kid is enslaved, enslaved by the state. That's much worse than DEI. Now, again, I'm not arguing you shouldn't fight DEI. I'm arguing stop catastrophizing it. Stop flipping out. Stop turning your whole life into, oh my God, it's the end because the left is coming and we're all going to die because my kid has to file a DEI statement. There was slavery in this world not that long ago. Get over it. The fact that you want to fight these things doesn't mean you want to buy into the fact that they are the end of the world. And I think part of this demerism is, here's another aspect of it, it's spoiled brats who have never been really challenged in their life. I don't know how many poor people are demerits because they know how bad things can get. And if they're not, then I mean, demeritism, this whole idea conception of demerit comes, I think, in the modern era from a position of influence and not having experiences in life. I've lived through wars. I know what a war is. Americans don't have a clue. I know a war that literally threatens everybody around me. It gives you a little bit of perspective. So I say, go live, go experience life, go experience life, and focus your life on living with the capital L, on really living instead of fearing and worrying about every aspect of the world out there. All right. All right, guys, that's an hour of me talking. Let's go to our questions. Let me scan them to see if there's stuff. Yeah, Andrew says, this is a good question, Andrew says, how does wealth factor into the phenomena? Would both a wealthy country in a poor country catastrophize in different forms? Or is it more of a phenomenon of a sport population under the influence of bad philosophy? I just said sport population. Yes, I think in modern times, in rich countries, it is a phenomenon that is primarily about being spoiled and being under the influence of bad philosophy. I think in poor countries, it is more of a phenomenon of ignorance and worry and anxiety that is part of day-to-day life and then projecting that into the future. But the demeritism is always being there, but it's motivated by different things. I find it ridiculous that relatively wealthy people in the West obsessed with how horrible life is. But that is lack of experience. It's being spoiled, it's being pampered, and it's bad ideas about what life should be, about what life is engaged with, what the goals in life should be. Yeah, I mean, if you believe in Marxist socialist utopia, then capitalism is horrible and it can only lead to doom and gloom. So you need to have the right philosophy, and part of being philosophy is just being objective about life. What is good? What is not? How do I weigh it? What shapes history? It's ideas, they're bad ideas out there, but they're also good ideas. And the good ideas have a weight. You can see that in the fact that good things are happening, and the general respect people have for science, or at least used to, and the general respect people have for technology, those are remnants of the Enlightenment. Indeed, one of the most damaging things about COVID is the extent to which it resulted in people diminishing the importance of science, diminishing the importance of knowledge, diminishing the importance of expertise. Right? That's maybe the biggest lasting horrible effect that COVID has had, culture-wide. And that is terrible because part of the legacy of the Enlightenment is a respect for knowledge and a respect for expertise. Stephen says, it seems irrationalism at the heart of doomurism. Choosing not to think leads to fear. Yes, fear makes a person susceptible to doom-peddling power lusters. The way to avoid it is to educate our kids to think. Absolutely. At the end of the day, all these things are failures of thinking, failures of thinking, which of course involves observing the world, getting understanding of the world. And my point was that there are power lusters out there who use doomurism to accumulate power, to accumulate money, to motivate, to get a base, to get supporters, to get attention. But all, many of us, all our ills are consequence of lack of thinking or bad thinking. And it's why education is the most important field of all. If we can get people to think properly, to think rationally, then nothing is determined. We can change a culture. We can change its ideas. We can change its philosophy. And, you know, when you can't think or when you're thinking is poor, then the dominant emotion has to be fear. Man's way of understanding the world, of understanding reality, the way in which man gains knowledge of the world, is through his reason. It's through his mind. It's through his ability to think, observe, integrate, think. If you abandon your means of survival, if you abandon your means of knowing the world, then everything becomes scary. Everything becomes scary. And you can't overcome it because you've abandoned the means by which to discover truth and you know it, you know you don't understand anything. And in a complex world, in a highly developed technological world, there's a lot going on in the world that you don't understand. And you don't even know how to approach. That is a world completely, fear opens it up to the conspiracy theories and the demerits, the catastrophizes. And I think that the probably the most dominant emotion out there among people is fear. And it's because their reason has been undermined. In that sense, it's all epistemological. If we can get people to think, then they'll gain self-esteem, they'll be successful. They'll attain things. They'll achieve things. And they won't be afraid because they'll know they have the capacity to solve problems. That's another thing is, you know, most of, a lot of us have the confidence that, okay, if the globe's warming, let's figure it out. Let's solve it. It sucks CO2 out of the air. We will, I don't know, sprinkle something in the atmosphere to cool stuff. We will do what we need to do. We'll invest heavily in nuclear. We know there's solutions. And we know that the only path to finding solutions is using your mind, thinking. But once you take away the mind, you take away solutions. You take away solutions. And once you take away solutions, then it's time to be afraid. Time to be afraid. Very afraid, maybe. All right, we've got some nice stickers, Wes. $50. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Vadim. Thank you. Let's see, Antonio, really appreciate it. Let's see, did I miss anybody? Those are the ones I could get. All right, cool. Thanks, Stephen, for the question. Let us see. We're still short of a goal, quite a bit short. So please consider, we've got 92 people watching, you know, 10 bucks from everybody blows the goal away, five bucks from everybody. We do great. So please consider supporting the show, value for value listening, you're gaining something, maybe enjoyment, fun, anger, you upset at me, whatever you're here means you're getting a value. Please consider supporting the show while you're doing that. All right, friend Harper says, I deployed to Southeast Afghanistan, completely changed my perspective on how good we have it in America. Plumbing is amazing. So is air conditioning and the internet. I don't think they have electricity either. They had electricity either. Don't take it for granted. Yes. I mean, one of the ways to not be negative is to not take the world and the life you have for granted, to appreciate how wonderful, the wonderful things you have around you are. Right? Life in the modern world is pretty amazing. Could it be better? Yes. Could it be much better? Yes. Is it sad and tragic that it's not much better? Yes. But is it good? Yeah, you bet you. You bet you. Alex is asking, could the Iron Man University award me a PhD? The Iron Man University is not a degree granting institution. So it could not, but maybe sometime in the future, maybe in the future, the Iron Man University will become a degree granting institution and will be able to award PhDs. But for now, I think the focus of the Iron Man Institute is not on what degree you have, but what is your knowledge? And I think almost all of you, everybody, all of us, not all of you, all of us could benefit from taking classes at the ARU. I mean, there's just some phenomenal stuff. I wish I had the time. You know, I'm teaching in the ARU, but I wish I had the time to be a student at the ARU, because there's so many, like there's a new class on Marxism that Nikos is going to be teaching, which I'm fascinated by because I think a lot of people, including here in the chat and including intellectuals out there that you admire, don't get Marxism. They don't understand it. They don't understand its core principles. And therefore, everybody becomes a Marxist as a consequence. And it's important that we know the enemy. So I would love to take that class. And I think everybody should be taking that class, and you guys should take it like that. Anyway, we'll talk a lot more about ARU next month when I start teaching there. I'll be telling you about how it's going. All right. Andrew says, why did demerits generally direct their fear against capitalism? Oh, I mean, because a lot of that demeritism comes from the idea. It comes from the idea that they're collectivists. It comes from the idea that the ideal is some kind of Marxist utopia. The ideal is some kind of collectivist, beautiful, mythological state. So no matter how much material progress capitalism we make under whatever little bit of capitalism we have, it's not going in the direction of the utopia. It's not creating the kind of world that they would like. And so therefore, they hate capitalism and they have to believe that it's going to be a catastrophe. So even though it keeps improving human life, they can't accept that and they have to promote the idea that it's going to be destructive because it undermines everything that they fundamentally believe about the world. All right. Thank you, Andrew. I mean, the altruism and the collectivism is the primary motivation, primary energizer, the primary intellectual content that they have. And capitalism challenges that and capitalism's success challenges it. So they have to say, oh, it's succeeding because it's going to fall even bigger. Any success is only going to lead to a bigger decline, a bigger failure. It has to be bad. Otherwise, everything I believe in is wrong. That's not good. Right. That's the way they think. All right. I'm just going to encourage you again to ask questions, use the super chat to do that or just support the show with a sticker. We're still $400 short of our goal. It's a lot of money. So we're going to need a lot of questions or we're going to need some big sticker or a lot of stickers. Either way, we're not going to get the endless you, you, you, you, yes, you contributed and help out. So please consider doing that. And yeah, I mean, this show has to be funded somehow. And this is one of the major ways that it is funded. All right. I will get to all the questions, but I do them in order. So I first do the $20 questions, you want your question answered quickly. I start with the $20 questions, and then I go to the lower denominations, the $5 and $10. I've got a lot of $5 and $10 questions. So you're just going to have to wait your turn. Again, while we I've got a lot of $5, $10 questions, I have very few $20 questions. So please consider doing some $20 questions. All right. Dawn asks, if Trump is indeed the nominee for the GOP and actually has a chance to win, how can we not be doom and gloom? I fear the very essence of America is at stake your thoughts. I mean, I agree with you, but the reality is that we somehow survive four years of Trump. I think we'll survive it again. We'll be worse than we are today, but we're going to be worse no matter who gets elected with Trump. Some very basic fundamental concepts are going to be undermined. It is the world in which we live. Trump is a consequence of the people who are going to elect him consequence of the ideas that dominate our culture, the attitude that dominates our culture. A lot of that attitude is around catastrophizing, which he encourages. But the reality is that it doesn't mean the end of the world. It probably doesn't mean imminent authoritarianism, although it might. But even if there's authoritarianism, that's awful. That's horrible, horrible. You can still live. You're likely to survive it. The economy will probably do okay. I mean, with certain horrors that he will inflict like tariffs and he probably will deregulate in other areas and will have a managed economy and will stagnate. We won't collapse, I don't think. Maybe his tariffs will be the thing that drives us into a great depression. And we might go into a great depression. We might go into a great depression. But you know, people survive that as well. So I'm not saying you have to be realistic. Trump will be an unmitigated disaster, a real disaster to free speech, a real disaster to just to life and economic disaster, depending on how much you can actually get done. And I think this time he'll get a lot more done than last time because this time he's coming in prepared. He's got a whole intellectual army that has been working for him. When he first came into office, there was no America first. I mean, for his perspective, there was no MAGA cadre from which to pull to put in all the different departments. This time there is. This time he's got them prepped. This time the think tanks, these organizations, there are people ready to fill in the regulatory. Last time, most of the regulatory positions were filled by relatively free market people. This time it won't be because those aren't the MAGA people. The MAGA people he will draw on this time are central planners. The MAGA people he will draw on this time are regulators. The MAGA people he will draw on this time are people who believe that government should be used to further their so-called conservative goals. His second term will be a lot worse than his first term. And yet, it will be worse than what I just said. And I know you guys are going to start talking Trump up and you're going to say, oh, it won't be too bad. And he's better than Biden. He's better than this to justify you voting for him. And that's fine. But it's going to be terrible. And his plans are already being articulated. And in the past, he didn't have his own swamp people, not many. He's going to have more of them. He's going to replace the swamp with his people. And it's going to be ugly, very ugly. Okay, what am I going to do about it? I'm going to sit now and be depressed. I'm going to think about all the horrible things that may happen, all the negativity. I'm going to really spend a lot of time thinking about how awful life is going to be. So I don't know. I've got 30 years left to live. And I'm going to spend the next few precious years thinking about how horrible life is going to be under Trump. Screw it. Screw it. Why would I do that? So you might want to think, okay, how do I predict myself? How do I predict myself from economic problems? How do I predict myself from Trump doing this? How do I look for a different country to move to? I don't know. Whatever it is you want to do. But the focus, your orientation, your focus should be how to make your life the best life that it can be given the circumstances. You cannot control the circumstances. You can, like I do, fight against Trump. But that's not going to help. We're too small, too few of us. I can't even convince somebody like Scott, who's on here every single day not to vote for Trump. How am I going to convince the millions and millions and millions of people out there who support Trump not to vote for him? That's a given. They're going to vote for him. Whether he wins or loses is not going to depend on me. So I'm not going to get, you know, I'm just going to, I'm going to find ways to live my life no matter what happens to the world, to America. It's sad. It's sad that the world's in decline. It's sad that America is going to be a lot worse off. It's tragic that somebody like Trump can get elected. I will survive it. I will find a way to enjoy life in spite of it. I will not let a, you know, a bastard like Trump, a bastard is too nice of a wood, or a senile nothing like Biden destroyed my capacity to enjoy my life. Again, the main thing is focus on the things you have control of, focus on things you can do to make your life better, focus on things that you could do to improve your life and make your life as good as it can be. And the politics, the politics you have no control of. I mean, look at all the nonsense they're doing every day in Washington, DC. I can comment on it. I can report on it. But the impact I have on it is insignificant. All right. I don't know what's going on with you guys. Somebody has to step up and get us to our goal because it's going to be difficult to justify doing as many shows as I do if we can't make the numbers. If we can't make the numbers. All right, that doodle bunny. Everything outside of America sucks. And America kind of sucks at this point. What should one do? I don't know. What do you mean by everything outside of America sucks? What do you mean by America sucks in what regard and what respect? I don't know. You know, I travel all over the world and I find lots of beauty and lots of amazing things to do. Wages in the U.S. are rising. You can find a good job in the United States. There's a massive labor shortage. If you're skilled at anything, you should be doing fantastically well economically right now. What? You know, again, yeah, things are difficult, certain things are bad. But you know, I don't know. There's a lot of work out there. But you probably will not encounter it in your life. There's so many good things that you can do can be done. And so he's making fun of Mexican burritos. But the reality is that Mexico is its economy in spite of having a socialist in power is doing relatively well. The job's there. Yeah, Finn Hopper wants to say, oh, stop it. He says, are we in check for the monthly goal? We're a little behind on the monthly goal. We're a little behind because a lot of our daily goals are not, if we're asking seriously about it, are not being met. That is, so the monthly goal would mean reaching our daily goal pretty much every single time or most times. And it's, you know, it's not the monthly goal we're stretching to get to the monthly goal. We're behind. We're behind. So yeah, so there have been some really good days, really good morning shows where we got $500 and it's like one, I think evening show where we got to $1,000. But there have been others where we haven't made the target at all. So I'm not just pitching this. For example, to be on a monthly goal right now, we need to be at $450 for today. So not $650, but $650 gives us a little bit of cushion just in case tomorrow we don't make it. So to get to be on track with the monthly goal, we'd have to be at $450 today. We're at, you know, close to 300. We're not quite at $450. So, but we need to get viewership numbers up. We need to get more people watching live. That's the only way to really get the numbers up. And we need to get some of those whales back. I don't know what happened to our whales, our whales. Some of our whales at least have disappeared. They've gone swimming deep in the ocean. Now, you know, there's still, a lot of people are still listening afterwards. It's just that the fewer people in the live shows, the numbers for total viewership is not declined. Anyway, again, you know, with, with as many people as watching today, you know, two, three, four bucks from everybody would get us the way we need to be. So it's not, it's not science fiction to get there. Stephen Oppers says, well, the Trump administration, what much worse if he has a Republican Congress? Yes and no. I mean, wow, yes. But the challenge is going to be that if he doesn't have a Republican Congress, he's going to be inspired and motivated to use executive orders to push the Constitution, to challenge the Supreme Court to overturn him, to really push it, right? Push it. So that is also a challenge that he tried to take the reins of control and then we could get constitutional crisis. It's hard to tell, but I certainly, if Trump wins, I certainly hope the Democrats will hold on to the Senate. But who knows? I think the one issue that plays to Democrats when it comes to the Senate and the House is abortion. And they would win, you know, and the challenge is that they've got Biden running for president. Biden is like super unpopular, more unpopular than Trump. And that's why Trump has a chance of beating him. Vadim comes in and kind of saves the day. Thank you, Vadim. Really, really appreciate it. Vadim says, thank you, Ron, again for answering my question from the last show. Happy to answer your questions and really appreciate all the support you're providing the last couple of days. So thank you. Or was it this morning? I can't even, I think it was yesterday. That little money, the only way to avoid demeritism and have life not completely suck is to become affluent. The wealth can shield you from misery. Yeah, I mean, making money is an important part, a way to shield yourself, not from the psychology of demeritism. There are plenty of rich people who have that psychology. But to shield you from risk, to shield you from damage when bad things happen. So making money is important. And having a good career and having a good profession and focusing on your work and doing a good job and trying to earn a good living, these are all real values, real values that matter. Dutubani, objectivism isn't really breaking through. It's just seeping in. Yeah, it takes time. Ideas don't break through. I mean, radical ideas, new ideas, ideas that change the world. All right, one more for Dutubani. Perfect time for this show. You caught me in a demeritism mood. Perhaps you can cure my cynicism as I release my negative energy through Super Chat. Well, hopefully I said a few positive things that will have an impact on you. Go do something fun. Go do something fun. Hey, I'm with good friends who are not going to complain all day and talk about politics all day. Go watch a great movie. Go for a job. Go look at some skyscrapers. Go do something fun. That'll get you out of the demeritism. Liam says, talent is a gift, but consistency is the only way to unlock it. Yeah, but I'm not your talent. I don't know how much talent is a gift. It's also hard work. It's more than consistency. And we have certain inclinations, but there's a lot of work that goes into turning those inclinations into talent. Darius, demeritism, populism and socialism attracted because they appeal to real emotional frustration. Logic takes longer to learn. It's harder to sell and often invalidating to people's experiences. Yes, you're absolutely right. I mean, this goes back to thinking, thinking, logic, rationality, being of reason. It requires effort and work and it's challenging. Most people or a lot of people are guided by emotions. And the more they're guided by emotions, the less they trust their reason, the more open they are to demerits and generally negative ideas. Liam, what do you think are likely results of another Trump presidency? What are the worst case scenarios? Well, the worst case scenarios is he basically starts using the government to pursue certain agenda items. I mean, he talked about it just a few days ago. What did he talk about? Oh, the FCC withdrawing broadcasting license from NBC because NBC did something he doesn't like. I mean, the government shouldn't have those licenses to begin with, but to start policing those licenses based on content, an absolute disaster. He has talked about, seriously talked about, 10% tariff on all imports, all imports, all countries. I mean, that will devastate the US economy. It's a 10% tax, a new 10% tax that you didn't have before, right? And so reduce your standard of living quality of life by 10%. On top of that, it will raise the cost of living. It will reduce the quality of the stuff that you have. It will increase shortages where we just don't have the things that we need. It will, and of course, there'll be retaliation from other countries, which will make people in the export businesses struggle. I mean, Trump could bring about that feared dollar collapse, that fear that the dollar's going to collapse, could be a consequence of a Trump presidency because his economic policy would be so bad. The whole Buy American is such a bad idea and devastating for the dollar. You know, and the other thing is he'll just, I mean, this is the biggest danger of Trump. He just promotes ugliness. Ugliness in the way we think, in the way we behave, in the way we deal with one another. He is a destroyer of the American sense of life. Talk about fear. He's a fear mongra. He lives off of fear. He loves to encourage you to feel fear. He's much worse than the Democrats. I mean, not a little worse than the Democrats, much worse than the Democrats, to some extent because he's supposed to be the alternative to the Democrats. He's supposed to be better than Democrats. He's supposed to be from the right. So, yeah, I mean, I think that Trump is the worst. I can't think of anybody worse than Trump in terms of people who could get elected. And it tells you so much about the world in which we live that Republicans have a real opportunity to elect somebody in his place. And they refuse to do so. So, I don't want to hear anybody tell me they hate Trump, but they voted for him anyway. It's not believable anymore. They're voting for him because they love him, because they adore him, because they're completely enamored with him. And that culture personality is very dangerous. And again, another step on the way to authoritarianism. Mark says, recently finished the Fountainhead. I love Rand's message. How can I try to square Rand's objectivism into my personal faith as a Christian? I know this is kind of blasphemous to ask of you because I hate modern religion. I hate modern religion versus old religion. I don't like religion, period. Look, I don't have an answer to that. I mean, I appreciate the challenge that you face. I think what Rand does is she's challenging your Christianity. I think what you should really do what you should really do is be open to that challenge and really thoroughly think through why you're a Christian and whether Christianity makes any sense, ancient or modern. I think you should really do some soul searching. That's what Rand is encouraging you to do, to do some real soul searching. At the end of the day, you're not going to be able to square Rand's objectivism into your personal faith as a Christian, because Rand rejects faith. Objectivism rejects the idea of faith. So you might be inspired by certain ideas in Rand. You might find certain ideas worthwhile, and you can try to integrate those specific ideas into your Christianity, but that will not be integrating objectivism into Christianity because objectivism cannot be integrated into Christianity. Just the specific ideas, some specific ideas, you might be able to do so in your personal life, not intellectually, but for you. But really, I urge you to really use this opportunity to think about whether religion is really crucial to your life, whether it's consistent with everything else you seem to admire and seem to want to hold on to. What was it about the found head that you liked so much? What is it about Rand's message that appeals to you so much? Are they really consistent with Christianity and what is more important to you? And what is consistent with reality? That's the ultimate judge, reality. So good luck, Mark. I hope you stick around this show. Maybe over time, we can encourage you and help you drop Christianity. Whoops, what did I do there? All right, friend Harper. Thank you, friend Harper, $100. Really appreciate that. Can you please review a Japanese song called Shock? All right, we're back to Songs by Yuko Ando and maybe two more that are the same song, but by different artists. I'm not sure what that means. One is a piano cover, and the other is in English. Just the one is fine. But if so, I will send you links to that too. Yeah, you can send me links to that too, so I can watch them. It might be interesting. All right, I'm copying, pasting onto my review list. All right, all we have now is music. I've got an album to review. They will be giants, and they might be giants. And now a song by Yuko Ando for friend Harper. So those are the two that I have. Oh, Scott, you said in 2019 the world was on fire and things were as bad as they'd been in your adult life. Was that due to more than just Trump being president? A big part of it was Trump being president. And I think 2019 really, the other aspect of it was China was clearly moving away from the trend that it became real that China had moved away from the trend that I was positive about in the previous years where I thought it was moving towards more freedom. Clearly, China and the United States were moving towards conflict. I think that's only gotten worse since then. I'm trying to project back to it so much has happened since 2019, including, and of course, I was right because we got COVID right after that, right? What else was going on in 2019? I mean, I think that who knows what would have happened if not for COVID. COVID kind of threw everything out. But in 2019, it looked like we were heading towards a recession. Again, I think COVID kind of threw everything out the window. It looks like we're heading to a recession right now. So maybe my humorism expects us to self in, I always see recession around the corner. What else? But a lot of it was just was Trump. And of course, think about it while, and I can't remember saying that 2019, but in 2020, the world really was on fire and COVID hit. And it was an unmitigated disaster and we're still living through the consequences of that. And Trump massively mishandled it, massively mishandled it, more than any other leader in the Western world, because he was the leader of the Western world. And he completely blew it. The only person who blew it more than Trump was Xi in China. Yeah, I mean, Trump was a big cause of it. And I still think that Trump was a disaster for this country, and we are still living the consequence of it. I think the political polarization that we have today, again, COVID and kind of the BLM and all of that, I think were Trump inspired, if nothing else, COVID was Trump caused in a sense of the response. And, you know, the return of central planning, the return of the president as quote CEO, there's just no end to the things that Trump, Trump changed America. He changed America. And America has never been the same sense. And it's not likely to be the same for a long, long time. You need a real shift, a real shift. Frank says, with a panic of 1893 and the Great Depression types of demeritism, no, I mean, they were real events. And they didn't end the world. And the panic of 1893 is nothing as compared to the Great Depression. So I wouldn't put them in the same sentence. But no, they're not demeritism. Demeritism is not bad things happening. Demeritism is the obsession about the fact that the world is going to end, that things are so bad that there's no reversing course. And the obsession about it and the constant obsession around it. All right, let's see. Megan, I struggle with anxiety. How do I turn worries into opportunities? God, you know, I'm not a psychologist. And, you know, I think that there was good psychology today. I think cognitive behavioral therapy is probably good and probably good, particularly for a question like that. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, the way to deal with anxiety is partially to try to figure out the cause of it, to try to figure out its origins and where it comes from. And the way to turn it into opportunity is to act, is to go out into the world and change it and change it in the sense of clearly articulate for yourself your values, clearly identify them and articulate them for yourself. And then actively pursue them and achieve them. You know, the more passive you are, the more anxious you will become. The more active you are, the more engaged you are, the more in the world you are, the more value laden and your actions are. I think that ultimately that helps alleviate the anxiety, but I don't know that there's any way around doing the hard work of introspection, of talking with a therapist or doing the work yourself, trying to figure out what's causing this anxiety, and trying to undo the causes, trying to fix the source. Emiliano, if dictatorships are rational and therefore do not work, how do you explain the success case of Singapore? First of all, I think it's, you know, there's a sense in which it's a fluke, it's a sense in which you got a dictator who was relatively benevolent, that's a one in a gazillion, and his benevolent expressed itself in his willingness, if you will, or his even eagerness to allow freedom in significant number of realms within his dictatorship. And that's why it's not exactly yet. So in the economic sphere, for the most part, Singapore is free. They don't try to manipulate prices, they don't have price controls, you know, the exception of real estate, they don't have price controls, they don't try to manipulate markets, they let people produce what they want, they let people go into whatever profession they want, they don't own the means of production, they don't regulate very strictly. Dubai is not evidence of anything. Dubai is evidence of if you get lucky and your country happens to be on top of a bunch of oil and natural gas, or it's the one depot where all the oil and natural gas has to flow through and not to get to a port where it can be exported. Dubai is an expression of luck. Singapore is an expression of good policy. And most of that policy is focused on, in Singapore, focused on economic liberty, economic freedom. And you know, Singapore scores number one in the world in economic freedom, number one. So in spite of being a dictatorship, it's allowed for that economic freedom. It's avoided and resisted central planning. And that's where most dictators can't resist it. And it hasn't been replicated. Apollo Zeus, your favorite book, not Atlas Shuggle Found Head on Bookshelf. It's Victor who goes 93. 93. Highly recommend, everybody read, Victor who goes 93. Apollo Zeus says, ask the question of Gina Golan. Last time she was on about OCD, I didn't get an answer because time was limited. Can you get back to her please? You're finding new ways every show to encourage me to have Gina back on? Propa says, I know somebody who won't move out of his parents' house because he worries about imminent economic collapse and the cost of living. Is this rational as a demeritism as an excuse? It's demeritism as an excuse. The guy's afraid. He's afraid to live by himself and he's using these economic arguments as rationalizations in order to justify it. Get a good job. Move to a cheap city where you don't have to, where the cost of living is not high. It's just the cost of living wages have gone up. So while the cost of living has gone up, so have wages, there's no excuse. Just give excuses not to go out there and try and achieve and succeed in life. It's all possible. It's up to you to do. And passivity and fear are the enemies of happiness, enemies of success, enemies of prosperity. Who are your upcoming guests? The only one I have for sure is not this week, but next week, it's Harry Binswanger. So Harry Binswanger will be on next Thursday. I don't have a guest for this Thursday. So we're going to wing it this Thursday. Jason Rines and Mike Maza would be good guests. Yes, that's a good idea. I should try getting them on. So my assistant is not working on the schedule through the end of the year. Hopefully we'll get a bunch of people on. All right, we are $36 short of our goal. So somebody wants to come in and put $36 down. That would be very cool. But we did well today. Only being only $36 short is a pretty good outcome. So thank you. Thank you to everybody. In particular, thank you to Vadim, who put in $200. It got us a long way for Harpo put in $100 for a song review. And really, for all the superchatters, you all kind of slowly chipped away and chipped away and chipped away at the goal. And we got, we came very, very close to make it. There's still an opportunity somebody could step in and make it. But anyway, it's been great. So thank you, everybody. All right, next show is tomorrow morning for the news. And of course, we'll continue that through the week. And we'll have a show on Thursday evening. And on Saturday afternoon at three will be our AMA. Ask me anything. Ask me anything will be on Don Regif says, Have you read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari? I recommend his books. I really, really do not like Yuval Noah Harari. I think he's terrible. He is a, he's a determinist. He is, he is, what do you call it? He's a materialist. He's a materialist. He, he, he, he, he, God, his section in, in, in, in Sapiens on, on the founding fathers on the Declaration of Dependence on his, on his analysis of the Declaration of Dependence is one of the most horrible philosophical things I've ever read. He gets what human beings are about wrong. He gets the reason human beings are successful wrong. I can't think of anything he's right on other than he has a, a theory which is wrong, but then he presents the entire human history in a very superficial, quick way that seems to be consistent with this theory, but he's terrible. So I mean, I recommend people read him because he's, he's one of the most influential intellectuals in the world. I did a few shows on him where I critiqued, I critiqued the video or Ted talk that he gave. I've critiqued some other things that he's done. It's just, you know, I don't know the one, what you like about his books, but I find him really superficial and, and, and, and just wrong, wrong, wrong on, on, he can't, he can't conceive of, of what, of abstractions and what abstractions mean, even though he uses them all the time and, and what they denote. But I would definitely read, just, just read the section. We talked about the Declaration of Independence. And then where do I have, I have a whole section where I analyze that. I think in one of my interviews with, with, oh God, what's your name? The, the, the Guatemalan who lives in Mexico, female, very pretty, um, who is very popular in South America. God, how do I not remember her name? She did an interview with me and, uh, where we talked about Yuval Naurari and we went over that one section of his book and it's just disgraceful. Gloria Alvarez, thank you, Gloria Alvarez. Wow, I can't remember, I forgot Gloria's name. Anyway, Gloria Alvarez and I, I, so I, I, I, um, at least that portion of his book, but the rest of the book is, I mean, a lot of the book is terrible. Again, he's a determinist and, and, and he doesn't understand where concepts come from. He doesn't understand concept formation. He doesn't understand how, how real concepts are. He thinks to be real. It has to be a thing out there in the world. So his whole epistemology is wrong. And his determinism undermines everything that he does. Sorry. And he says, so can we Latin Americans imitate Singapore? They always tell me the same thing when I talk about freedom. Um, unlikely, right? You've tried dictators over and over and over again. You've tried dictators and they do a terrible job. What you haven't tried is freedom. Right? That's the one thing you have not tried is actual capitalism, protection of individual rights, liberty, freedom, a government that protects individual rights. That you haven't tried. That's what you need to try. That's what Latin America needs. Doesn't need more dictators. It doesn't need the fluke of finding somebody like who ran Singapore. Again, Singapore is small. It's easier to manage small than big. Um, it's, it's a very, it was at least at the beginning pretty homogeneous. It's not anymore. Uh, you know, you'll let your, your, your South American companies are not homogeneous at all. Anyway, no, try freedom, try liberty. All right, everybody, have a great night. I will see you all tomorrow morning. Uh, and, um, yeah, uh, thank you. We reached that goal. Thanks for all you guys, uh, drawn there for chipping in and getting us over the threshold right at the end there. Thanks guys. Talk to you tomorrow. Bye.