 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Book Show. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Book Show on this Monday, second show today. Back to kind of a regular schedule. Do you guys like that? And we've got a couple of economic topics today, so we're going to jump in to the economics. Of course, you can use this opportunity. You can use any time during the show, you can ask questions. You can use the super chat. That can't talk. The super chat feature, to do that, please do. We have a goal, $650 for the shows. And of course, you're going to support the show on a monthly basis. Before we get started, two announcements, or three announcements. The first announcement is on Thursday. We're going to have Emmett Smith from the Ironman Institute come to the show, and we're going to talk about stoicism. I know I've gotten a bunch of questions over the months, years about stoicism. No video. Thank you. I've got a bunch of questions over the time about stoicism. And I am not an expert. I know very little about it. Aaron is the expert. Aaron knows a lot about it, so jump in and ask questions. So please come on Thursday. If you're interested in stoicism, the stoic movements in Silicon Valley and the rest of the U.S., all the self-help, stoic books, all of that is something that Aaron is an expert on, and you can ask questions, and we can talk about that. And of course, you can ask him any other questions you want. So we'll have a philosopher on, and you can ask him other questions. So that'll be on Thursday at 8 p.m. East Coast time. That was announcement number one. Number two, a question. For many of you listening, mainly those who are not live right now, but those of you who are not live, I'm curious, seriously, I'm curious. What would it take to get you to become a monthly supporter of the show? What is it that prevents you from becoming a monthly supporter of the show? Other than maybe you don't have the money, which is fine, but you must get some value out of the show because you're listening. So if you regularly listen to the show, why are you not supporting? What would I have to do in order to get you to become a monthly supporter of the show? You can do that if you want to become a monthly member on your own bookshelf.com.slashsupport on Patreon. I'm going to make an effort over the next few weeks, months, to really increase the number of people supporting the show on a monthly basis. I really need to do that, increase the income that comes from that. So for that, I'm just curious from you guys, why not? All right, third issue before we get to the two topics, greed, inflation, and the economic program of the New Right. The other announcement is this. So I have a listener who's sponsored a number of shows, Adam Campbell, who'd like to sponsor a show. You know, sponsor a show is $1,000, and of course any one of you could do that. I'll talk about pretty much any topic that you come up with. But Adam has the money, but doesn't have an idea of what topic would be good for sponsorship, and he's looking for ideas. So what he's proposed is that anybody who would like a specific topic to be discussed on the show and who doesn't have the $1,000 to sponsor it themselves, can put the topic here in the super chat for $20. And what I will do is I will take all the topics that you guys propose at $20, and I will give those to Adam, and he will choose which one he will sponsor and he will pay up the money to do it. So that's a way to potentially, no guarantees, get a topic of your choice covered on the Iran Book Show without you having to pay the large sum of $1,000 in order to have it do it. So Adam has proposed that. That's $20. You have to do $20 or more. Propose a topic for a show, and then Adam will choose one of those. Okay, cool. Those are the topics. I'll repeat them later because people join over time. Not everybody's on right now. Frank says personal finance, $20. Frank doesn't count unless you're willing to put $20 in. Maybe somebody else is willing to put $20 in for Frank to cover that. Michael says you misread my question from the news roundup show earlier. The question is what will comedians make fun of once the entire world is rational but never fully objective? I don't know. I'm not a comedian. What will they make fun of? They will make fun of the random stuff that happens in life, the silly stuff. They'll still make stuff fun of irrationality because it'll still exist. They'll make some stuff out of bad luck. Luck will still exist. There'll be all those kind of things that still happen that are insignificant, trivial, and important that are worth having a laugh at. Yeah. Sorry I misread it, Michael. Alright. Thank you Hopper. $50. That's very generous and I'll get to the question a little later. Alright. Let's see. We're going to talk about greed inflation. Greed inflation is a term that has become quite popular. There was an article, an axiom I think the other day, the other day about how greed inflation has gone from being marginal, something that only people like Elizabeth Warren talked about to now mainstream economics. And indeed what's really happening is that economists now, I mean this has been in the press and in the media, Elizabeth Warren and leftists and so on have been talking about the fact that inflation is caused by corporate greed. It's caused by, quote, excess profits. And, you know, since being kind of a fringe idea of the far left, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and then more recently a bunch of economists have jumped in to kind of work to, quote, justify this supposed theory. And it's becoming more and more prevalent. You're seeing more and more articles. There's a big controversy right now in the UK about greed inflation. That is inflation driven by the greed of the grocery stores. The grocery stores are driving inflation. They're raising prices because they're greedy because they want to make a lot of money. And this is an opportunity for them to make a lot of money. So they're greedy and this is what causes inflation everywhere. And this is what causes inflation in the United States. And, you know, there was the example of all these, all the greed inflation was a big deal around eggs. You remember, eggs were going up in price and up in price and up in price. And the argument was that just egg manufacturers, that's those evil egg, what do you even call? Egg farmers? Egg ranchers? I don't know what you call it. They were just jacking up prices because they could. And people were forced to pay it because how could they survive without eggs? So they had to pay it so they went up. And then you keep looking around and everywhere you see, you see this in all companies. All prices go up and up and up and the margins in all companies go up. It's not like these companies experience rising costs. The cost of labor goes up, the cost of war materials goes up, the cost of producing goes up. And then they have to raise their cost in order to match the rises in costs, which is the way people think inflation works. It raises the way profits work and the way pricing works. The cost of all the inputs goes up and then the businessman calculates a profit margin on that and then that's the price that he puts out there. But that's of course not how prices work. So the whole idea is that greed over the last year and a half has increased dramatically. That companies have seen an opportunity because of supply chain constraints and because of all kinds of shocks the system and people being confused and people being ignorant and people being open to being exploited, they've just raised prices. And evidence of this is obvious. The fact is that the reality is that profit margins for many businesses have gone way up at about the same rate as inflation has gone up. So as inflation has gone up, profit margins have gone up. And some of these people argue that there you go. There's the relationship, correlation is causation and therefore if the grocery store or if the egg farmer or if other parts of the economy, if these evil corporations wanted to kill inflation they could, they just would not increase their profit margin. If they kept their profit margin the way it was in the past, then there would be no inflation because the profit margin has gone up. So all the excess money has gone to the corporations. And part of the justification for this they argue is look, we've always been taught that inflation is caused by wages increases. Wages going up that gives people more money, they can take that money and they can spend more and that drives up cost but the reality is that wages have not gone up anywhere near as much as inflation has gone up, by the way they almost never do. So wages haven't gone up, so businesses don't have to pay their employees more and the cost of chickens hasn't gone up and the cost of feed maybe has gone up somewhat but the cost on the eggs has gone through the roof. Now all of this suggests an ignorance of economics that is truly stunning and what is particularly upsetting and disappointing and I mean even surprising to some extent is the fact that there are some economists, people who are trained in economics that are giving these kind of theories intellectual legitimacy actually supplying the fuel that ignites this, that justifies all this. There are economists out there that actually are promoting this completing out of anti-economic nonsense. Now let's do a little thought experiment here to illustrate this. Let's say that it's true, that put aside competition the fact that businesses have a hard time raising money without colluding collusion against the law and every time they try to prove collusion there is no, they can't find proof of it. Let's say somehow businesses manage to collude and they manage to raise and let's say on chickens, on eggs, on oil they manage to raise the prices significantly on that product. I'll give you an example. There are many periods in time in which all prices go up significantly and indeed profit margins of all companies go up significantly. There's always talk about let's tax those excess profits, let's penalize all companies, they're exploiting us, I mean every single time this happens you get the same talk. So all prices go up because they manage to collude and they drive all prices up. But during those periods how come inflation doesn't go up? That is price inflation, CPI doesn't go up, consumer price inflation doesn't go up. I mean oil prices just went up and by the way oil is used by a lot of other products, it's an input for a lot of other products. And why aren't prices going up when oil goes up? Why isn't there consumer price inflation? And it seems like there should be, right? If it produces a driving inflation then why is it that when producer prices go up inflation doesn't go up? Well because, but it's not even that it's a basket of goods, right? Because inflation doesn't go up at all, right? Oil is a big part of that basket or prices can go through the roof and oil is an input into every other price in the economy and those prices should theoretically go up as well, at least marginally and inflation should tick up yet the empirical numbers don't show that. Why is that? Well because if prices of oil go up and you have a particular budget that you could spend that there's X number of dollars in the economy and people spend, let's say they have to buy oil, they have no choice but to buy oil. So prices go up and people spend more money now on oil. What does that mean for people's other expenditures? What does that mean for people's other expenditures? Well they have to go down. If you only have $100 and you're spending, you know, one day you're spending 20 of it on oil on gasoline, let's say, then you have $80 to spend on other stuff. If now gasoline prices have doubled to 40, you now only have $60 to spend on other stuff. She spent less on other stuff. Which means demand for everything else goes down. Which means as demand goes down, prices will go down. In order to attract more buyers. So while oil might go up, other prices might go down. So what people are confusing is relative price increases versus in a sense economy wide price increases where everything is going up. So you might have a phenomena where, let's say there's a monopoly and the monopolist is raising prices. But then people won't have money to spend on other stuff and other stuff will come down in price and overall inflation won't change. And yes, that means that some producers will have to absorb some of the increased cost of the oil. They'll have to absorb it themselves because otherwise if they raise prices again, demand for their products will collapse even further. And they can't afford that. So when supply, when prices go up, demand goes down. And when demand goes down for something, prices tend to come down that forces prices to come down. So you have different effects going on in different parts of the economy which overall stabilize the total level of prices. So greed inflation is basically a political story that has no economic reality. Yes, profit margins go up during inflation because suddenly consumers have a lot more money than they had before. Inflation in this case, in the case that we all, the will experiencing right now over the last year and a half was caused by the $1.9 trillion stimulus on top of all the other stimuluses during COVID. The Trump stimulus and the Biden stimulus, I don't know, the Fed reserve monetizing all of that and so the huge increase in money and money in people's pockets. And therefore a huge increase in demand without a parallel increase in supply. Indeed, what could argue a decrease in supply because of lockdowns and because of zero COVID in China and because basically there was supply chain problems and everything. All of that is true. She had an increase in money, a decrease in supply. Well, prices have to go up. Now, prices going up means that at least for some businesses during part of this period of time profit margins are going to go up and businessmen are just responding to supply demand that's going on in the marketplace. Indeed, if businessmen had kept prices low then there would have been shortages because demand was high and supply was limited. So when don't you get inflation, you don't get inflation if the amount of money increases and the supply increases, supply and demand match and prices don't go up. But if demand increases and supply stays low or even shrinks, you're going to get increasing prices. And those increases of prices are going to result in some businesses for a period of time actually seeing an increasing profit. But that's a consequence of the fact that you just threw money at consumers and said go spent. That's how inflation works. Basic Econ 101. So there's just no way. There's no evidence ever that there's no evidence that inflation is caused by wage increases. There's no evidence that wage is caused by higher profits. Higher profits are a consequence of inflation. Not the other way around. And they're temporary. They don't last. I'll give you an example. There was a period during the supply chain problems over the last two years when freight costs, the cost of transporting a container across the Pacific Ocean went through the roof because there was incredible demand for containers to ship goods. And there were limited containers and the containers weren't in the right ports and weren't in the right places because of all the insanity of COVID. And therefore what happened was that the people who owned container ships could raise the prices of transportation significantly. That of course, quote, supposedly helped inflation go up, right? But it didn't. Again, it's a relative price. So if there was, if that's the only price that went up, other prices would have to come down because people have limited amount of money, right? But here costs of transporting goods across the Pacific or across the Atlantic went up significantly because there was this again mismatch between supply and demand, huge demand for shipping. And a limited supply. Now, what happened was that the supply increased. More ships came online. A lot of ships that were dry docked, they call it dry docked or put aside or not used during COVID came back on board. The containers got to the right ports. More truckers were hired so containers could move more effectively. And ultimately shipping capacity increased significantly. Indeed, it increased so much that right now suppliers increased demand is stable. And what has happened is prices have plummeted, plummeted. Now greed hasn't changed. The ship is still want to make as much money as they can, but they can't because of competition and because of demand. Now to ship some of the cheapest rates you will ever find. It's, you know, some ship is basically, you know, they're starting to shrink the amount of shipping they're willing to do because they lose money and maybe ship the cost of the Pacific because it's so cheap because of competition and because of the increased supply. Same by the way happened with eggs. Egg prices went through the roof, not because of changes in supply and demand, but because of avian flu because birds were dying. Birds died. The supply of eggs shrunk when the supply of eggs shrink and demand is still high. What happens to prices that go up as soon as the bird population recovered as soon as the flu was over and the bird population recovered. What happened to a place of eggs? Crash. Not because greed had changed. Greed was the same. It's because the underlying phenomena changed. The underlying economic phenomena, supply and demand changed and therefore the cost changed. Neither one of those has really an impact on inflation because both of those are relative prices. Both of those are prices of particular goods. And again, if the underlying monetary, the amount of money in the economy is constant, then one price goes up. Another price is going to come down. It's only when the amount of money in the economy, in a simplistic way, the amount of money in the economy goes up in total. That is demand for goods in total goes up. Only then do you get inflation. And that's exactly what happened during COVID and that's exactly what's happened in the post COVID environment. So greed inflation, God, but it's amazing how many of these economists or so-called economists come out of the woodwork to try to do this. And right now in the UK, it's a huge thing. The grocery stores, here's just some quotes from City AM, which is a UK-based publication. Greed inflation, no. Speculation of companies have been exploiting the inflation crisis by lifting prices beyond necessary to beef up profits. A process known as greed inflation has gathered momentum in recent weeks. Greed inflation is not to blame for prices surging in the UK and instead businesses are pushing up prices in response to sewing costs and sewing demand. I added the sewing demand. There's just no basis for this. This is not economics. It's pure politics. It's what the left does constantly. They come up with some bizarre, like a modern monetary theory, some bizarre idea about economics. Some bizarre idea in economics. And then they just repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. And at some point you repeat it so many times and it appears in so many different places. And some economists think, wow, if I get in on this shtick, then I'll get quoted a lot and my value will go up in the marketplace. So some economists chime in and they get quoted and they support these nonsensical theories. And that, you know, accelerates the prevalence of the theory because now economists believe it. Now economists are supporting it. And it keeps growing and growing and growing. And soon enough it just becomes truth. It just becomes acceptable. It just becomes nobody even questions it. Nobody even challenges it. There's no, what, there's an alternative story. And that's what happens in economics all the time. And this is the other phenomena that happens. Most of these, almost all of these, economic misstats are on the left. And they get repeated and repeated and repeated on the left. I mean, for years and years and years, I've been struggling with the left story about, you know, the economic history of the last 50, 60 years, the growth in inequality, the decline of wages, how, you know, most Americans have suffered over the last 30 years from the economy. Reagan was a disaster. Everything, post-Dragan's been a disaster. The 60s and 70s were peak economic performance and all of this. And it's just wrong, but it's the left repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated it. And it's just become, for them, truth. But what I find super interesting is that what happens when the left does this and it repeats it and it gets into academia and academics repeated and economists repeated, by the way, next week I'm doing a debate with God. What is his name? This is just me having one of those brain moments. Anyway, I've debated him twice before on inequality. And I'm debating him in Dallas next week. And he's an economist, well-known economist from the University of Texas in Austin. And we'll be debating in Dallas. We've debated in the past in Austin. We've debated in Chicago. And we'll debate for a third time. Anyway, you know, he tells this story about the economy of the past that is just not true. But it's repeated and repeated and repeated. And economists like him support it. And more economists support it and it gains economic credibility. James Goldworth, sorry, James Goldworth, the son of the famous Goldworth. So this is James Goldworth. So I'm debating James Goldworth. You know, he's a left-of-center economist who's done a lot of research on inequalities. A big believer in inequalities, a problem in destroying America. And we need government intervention to make it better and so on. James Goldworth. Anyway, and he'll be in Dallas. So all of your proposed people, none of them are in Texas. None of them are in University of Texas in Austin. The ones that are not economists. Anyway, you guys are terrible at guessing these things. But so be it. No, he's not the editor of Jacobian. James Goldworth, he's a professor of economics at the University of Texas in Austin. Again, I've debated him three times in different places. I'll debate it two times and I'll debate him again next week. My point is though, that after you get all that support on the left and you get the academia behind it, guess who joins in. Guess who adopts the same story. And this is the bridge to our second topic today. And that is the right. The right that embraces the same story that the left had 10 years ago. Now the right has suddenly discovered it. And now it's the story of the new right. And the right embraces it. And now there's no opposition to the story. The story just gets embedded as truth and both the left and the right embrace it and there's no difference between them. Maybe the left moves even further to the kind of communist, you know, anti-markets, anti-business extreme. But generally the right just absorbs what the left has produced. And it makes complete sense because at the end of the day, economics in the world in which we live, economics is not driven by economics. Economics is driven by more basic philosophical views, primarily views on ethics. And free markets, freedom, liberty cannot be sustained given the morality of altruism. So they abandon it. The right abandons the economy, economics of freedom and liberty. Indeed, right now there is nobody on the right who stands for freedom and liberty from an economic perspective. Nobody. So here's for example, this is, let's see, who's this? This is Michael Lind who has become, thought as a neocon has become a real new right conservative, you know, national conservative, however you want to call it, but a new right conservative who attacks constantly free markets, he attacks globalization, he attacks, quote, neoliberal economics. We'll get to neoliberal in a minute. And what he's saying is he's got a new book out. Where's the book? He's got a new book out and the book is called Hell to Pay. How the suppression of wages is destroying America. And he says, and I'm quoting from a review of the book, Lind's core thesis is that American business, aided and abetted by Republican and Democratic political leaders, as well as assorted, quote, neoliberal economists, have effectively pulverized Americans working class by suppressing their wages. The means by which they have done so, he argues, include demolishing private sector unions and acting right to vote laws, right to work laws, sorry, right to work laws. Establishing operations outside of America to take advantage of lower labor costs, importing low wage migrants into America, using salary bans through a strict collective bargaining agreements, deploying non-compete clauses to prevent employees from taking them into intellectual capital elsewhere, and forcing workers to sign arbitration agreements which prevent them from suing their bosses. And I'm surprised he doesn't have yet non-compete agreements. I mean, this is stunning. This is a list that could have been produced, could have been produced, by Elizabeth Wong or Bernie Sanders or AOC. What Lind is saying is that the economic liberty produced by the deregulations during the Carter and primarily Reagan years has basically resulted in the crushing of the American working class, a crushing of the working class that is a consequence of whatever liberty is allowed and that the solution to it is stronger unions. The solution to it is more government regulation of labor, more government regulation of wages, more government regulation of the workforce for the benefit of the America, quote, worker. That the whole idea that as workers become more productive, their wages will go up, the more they invest themselves, the more capitalists invest in technology, the higher wages go up. He says that's completely false. It's just not true. He rejects the whole theory of free market economics and embraces, embraces wholeheartedly the position the left has held really since the 1950s. That the way to increase labor wages is not through increasing productivity. It's not through increasing efficiency. It's not through increasing economic freedom and liberty and reducing regulations. But the way to increase wages is by giving workers power. The power of the gun, the power of the strike, the power of law to force producers, businesses to support them. And that that is the what increases wages after all. And again, this is the story the left has said over and over and over again. And this is not the right kind of mildly accepting certain leftist ideas. This is the right wholeheartedly embracing leftist ideas in economics. What separates left and right? Cultural issues and only cultural issues. Indeed, from a cultural perspective, the right is not budging. From a cultural perspective, no abortion at the federal level is going to be something that is demanded of every candidate who runs for the Republican Party, for president. At a cultural level, look at what DeSantis is doing in Florida. Going after drag shows, shutting down, going after nightclubs, going after parents' choices with regard to what their children study, what their children are exposed to and are not exposed to. What the right wants is to control the culture, to control our spiritual life. And it used to be that they used to say, well, material life, do what you want to do. But now no, because they realize, or they have come to the conclusion that, I don't think it's a realization they've come to the conclusion that, they can only win politically if they suck up to the working class. They can only win politically if they activate the populists. And therefore, they're willing to completely embrace, they're willing to completely buy into. Leftist ideas about wages, about inequality, about the wall of the working class. They don't, because it's not that they care. This is their path to power. And it's not that they care, because again, I ran and made this observation. The right doesn't care about economics. They didn't deregulate because they cared. They deregulated because they didn't care. They care about controlling your behavior. They care about controlling who you sleep with. They care about controlling what books you read. See the book burnings and book bannings that conservatives all over the country are responsible for. I mean, the left is too, but so are the right. Now, there's so many problems with this. The reality is that union membership is declining throughout the western world, not just in the United States. The reality is that most of that decline is caused by workers realizing that they're interested, better served by negotiating wages and terms themselves. And not by corrupt unions. It comes from workers realizing how corrupt the unions are. It comes from workers realizing that the unions are just the front for the Democratic Party. It comes from lots of reasons why workers don't want unions. It comes from an increased ability to measure the productivity of an individual versus just the productivity of a job, category. And therefore adjust wages to the productivity of the individual. But this decline in unions is across the entire western world, not just in the United States. So more and more workers have realized that unions are not good for them. It's also just not true. Just not true that wages have stagnated or gone down. It's just not true that it used to, you know, in the good old days in those wonderful 50s during the Cold War, you could have a family and you could have one breadwinner and everything was fantastic. And today you need two breadwinners and they barely manage. It's just untrue. And you could find economists and commentator from Scott Winship to Veronica Ruggie to Don Boudreau to Michael Strain to Scott Linsicum to Phil Graham to Robert Eklund, John Ely and many, many, many other economists have shown that this is simply not true. That indeed wages have gone up. Wages for all groups have gone up. Indeed, in more recent years, they've gone up particularly faster for low-income wage owners. And indeed, we have more single, what do we have? We have a conservative complain about this all the time. Lots of single mothers raising kids, even among the middle class and the upper middle class, and the wealthy single parents raising kids. And they manage fine without two breadwinners. And indeed, when you have two breadwinners, they make a lot of money. You don't need three. Quality of life standard for living in the United States has increased significantly over the last 50, 60 years. On average, and by any way you slice it, the middle class has shrunk only because more people became rich. GDP per capita in the United States has gone up significantly. Today, around $80,000 on a purchase price parity compared to other countries by far the wealthiest country in the world. Take out oil countries and take out tax havens like Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, places like that. Far richer than European countries. Asian countries like Japan, far richer than the Chinese on a per capita basis. Wages for blue collar workers, wages for every category of workers have gone up. Again, standard of inequality of life has gone up. Number of jobs in the economy has gone up. Now, it hasn't gone up fast enough. Wages are not going up fast enough. Innovation and progress is not going up fast enough. Economic progress, economic growth is not fast enough. But to argue, the opposite is just untrue. And yeah, sometimes things get worse, you get recessions. And of course, what is the solution of the new right? It's to store worker power in America. It means no more immigration, not skill-based immigration anyway. No more immigration. No more trade. Bring the jobs back, supposedly, as if that's even possible. And then beyond that, strengthen unions, increase unions, and so on. Give the government more power. Centralize more economic planning. Have the government stimulate more economic growth, stimulate more economic growth. How is this different? You might call this cronyism or corporatism. What we should have, Linda argues, is a union between business, labor, and government. Business, labor, and government together, together, should form. He says, organized labor in union-affective form should take part in a new tri-patite government-industry-labor partnership for production and shared prosperity. There's a word term for this. Some people call this corporatism. Some people call this cronyism. I call this fascism. This is what FDR tried to do in the New Deal. Not successfully at all. This is what Mussolini's Italy did. This is what France has spanned it. This is what Vichy France did. And to some extent, this is what some Western European governments did. Now remember, this is coming from the right. This is fascism. The left argues for exactly the same economic fascism. There's no communism and socialism anymore. It's variations of fascism. What they want is greater job security. That's what they want. Now, we know what this results in. This results in poverty. This results in distortion. This results in inefficiency. This results in massive cronyism. This results in decline in wages, decline in availability of jobs, and indeed a decline in job security. America is much richer than Europe partially because Europe has implemented much more elements of this than America has. And look, this is all be tested, all be tried or failed. Doesn't matter. Just like socialism, tried, failed, and left still keeps advocating for it. Doesn't matter. The right will continue to advocate for the same fascist kind of economic policies. Even if it doesn't work, it doesn't matter. But what about AI? Isn't this the ultimate lead disruptor? Isn't this a real threat to jobs? If what you want is job security, what are we going to do about AI? Well, here's the solution from Michael Quenzo. Quenzo is my guess of his name. Again, a prominent writer on the new right. He's writing in Compact Magazine. Compact Magazine is the new magazine of the new right. Here's the title of the article. We must declare jihad against AI. I'll repeat that just in case you missed it. This is the new right. This is the right way. We must declare jihad, jihad, against AI. He basically says AI is a massive threat to employment. AI is a threat to jobs. AI is a threat to job security. AI, therefore, is a massive threat to economic stability, economic, you know, to social stability in the United States. And he too, you know, so he says, you've got to not freeze AI. You've got to fight AI. This is an existential confrontation. Not because AI is going to take over the world and kill us all, but because AI is going to increase productivity and take jobs away and restructure the economy and it's going to create massive uncertainty and massive instability and problems. He says, the guiding assumption that technological progress will always rebound to humanity's long-term benefit can no longer hold. Why? No answer. Instead of worrying about AI spending misinformation or aligning with wrong ideologies, we should acknowledge the degradation of human cognition and creative faculties at the hand of a million convenient applications. Convenient, I like that. This process isn't a matter of prophetic science fiction. It is already underway. AI is destroying humanity. Computers are already doing that. But what's going to happen when we have AI copywriters, AI lawyers, AI accountants, AI programmers, AI engineers, AI architects? He writes, to all the human beings who would be replaced, vague reassurances are made of sustainable and fulfilling partnership between human and the AI. One that would produce greater and better outputs. Human beings would still be needed to guide the robot's action and thought process, or so we are told. However, there can be no real partnership between humans and human-like machines, because the effect over time would be a progressively dilute human acumen and creativity while enhancing the machines. Robots were long associated with displacement of manual menial labor, but AI's recent turn to cognitive and creative labor has redistributed risk towards the managerial elite and creative classes. But he says, and this is going to hood everybody, because it's not going to just take the managerial class. He says, some people say, let them have those jobs. Let AI have those jobs. It's about time the managerial elite suffered a little bit. We the workers have suffered forever. Again, he's taking the workers' side. So he says, rather than let the emergence of AI be the reason for perpetuating class conflict that risks distracting from the real AI threat, notice class conflict. You should not serve instead as an opportunity to forge a new class truce uniting all who stand to lose from the AI revolution against the forces who stand to profit from it. Indeed, the militant Islamic term jihad evokes the likely level of emotional intensity and popular passion that AI can be expected to arise once its effects become fully felt and institutionalized, pointing the possibility of a redrawing of the political map around the cleavage of pro-AI and anti-AI. What would this call for policy-wise? Beyond a certain point, the further dissemination of generative and other advanced job-threatening AI in both white and blue-collar industries would be prohibited through public regulation or kept at an absolute minimum. Ironman wrote a brilliant essay about this in the 60s or 70s. The divine right of stagnation, she called it. These people want to stagnate. These people want to hold you back. These people want to put you back in the cave. Now, we thought this was just the left. And it used to be primarily the left that wanted to stagnate the world, the degrowth movement. Here you have it from the right. My point again, there's no difference. The left and the right are anti-human. They're anti-individual, they're anti-freedom, they're anti-liberty. They're anti-economic growth and prosperity and success. They want to stagnate. In one of my debates, a conservative, not a new right conservative, just a regular conservative says, oh, what we want is just to be able to sit on our poachers and relax. Who the hell wants that? That's life. Front poach conservatism, it's called. Just let us just stagnate. Let us just stay where we are. Don't force us to change. Don't force us to move. Don't force us to progress. Don't force us to improve. Don't force us to challenge ourselves. Don't force us to try something new. Don't force us to get richer. Don't force us to get better. We just want to stay where we are. And of course we know that staying where you are is impossible. We know that the only alternative to growth and progress is decay and death. You either move forward or you move backwards. You either get on living or get on dying. There is no stagnation. There is no standing in place. There is no passive, forward or backward. That's it. Life or death, that's it. And these right-wingers, these right-wingers, want death. And they want you to die. I mean, if they want to stagnate, they can stagnate. But they want you to stagnate. They want to deny you AI. They want to deny you the benefits of technology. They want to deny you the progress that is possible. Right? He says the prohibition would take effect past a certain threshold of technological frontier to be determined by whom, by the political leadership in consultation with experts and stakeholders. Yeah, but we don't want Elizabeth Warren. We want these guys. It's not one guy's opinion. Compass Magazine, I didn't see a single rebuttal article. There's not a single argument for free markets in any of these publications. I challenge any of you to go look at the new right publications, at the articles they put out, at the stuff that they produce, that they send out there to be consumed. Go read them. Do you find me a pro-free market person who's writing in these publications? They don't exist. It's not part of their agenda. And two politicians represent this agenda more than anybody right now. I think the two most dangerous politicians in America today on the right. And that is Josh Hawley. We've talked about him. And the second is a new senator from Ohio, J.D. Vance. And J.D. Vance is really bad, really bad. The size of publication doesn't matter. It's influence. And these people are influential. This is the new right. The size of publication of Jacobian is very small. The size of publication of crazy leftist journals is very small. The size of publication of any journal out there is very small. The neocons who dominated the Republican Party for a long time, their publication at the end of the day was very small. These are small. As compared to, you know, big time, big circulation. J.D. Vance is awful. And again, he too uses the same neoliberal label to those of us who believe in free markets. It's funny because the neoliberal label used to be a label used by the left to attack free markets. And for years, it was a throwaway thing about neolibals. And it was the left always. It was always the left. And now it's coming out of the right. The new right constantly attacks the neolibals as some representatives of, you know, trade and of free markets. Again, right is completely absorbed, the left's views on economics. Now, I don't have time today to get into the J.D. Vance article. I'll leave that for another time. But J.D. Vance and Patrick Deneen and these guys, God, are they bad? And again, it's the same thing. What they really want is power. And they want power not just they want power over your soul and they want power over your body and they want power over economics. And again, it used to be that they'd leave economics alone no more. J.D. Vance recently said there's no difference between public and private, government and private. It's all one thing. Just like what we heard before, what we need is a union of government, labor and business, you know, to create, you know, the progress. Same thing J.D. Vance. He wants, I mean, Vance wants to also control the thinking that, you know, the kind of values, the political beliefs or the cultural beliefs that business leaders have. J.D. Vance is super smart and super dangerous, super dangerous. Vance and Josh Hawley, that is the enemy on the right at least. Alright, that's long enough. Let's turn to questions, long enough and depressing enough. Alright, let me just remind people, I had a couple of announcements earlier. One is, I just wanted to ask people, and this is an honest ask, not trying to pressure anybody. I'm curious, those of you who don't support the show on a multi-basis or do super chat regularly, why, if there's something I could do better, definitely, they would get you to become a supporter of the show. If you have ideas, please email me at www.uronbookshow.com www.uronbookshow.com www.uronbookshow.com You can email me any kind of ideas of what it would take to get you to become a supporter, other than me changing my views. That won't happen. And then the second one is, we've got a supporter, a sponsor who's willing to sponsor a show on a particular topic. But he wants to choose the topic from a selection that you guys basically present, right? So he wants to choose the topic basically, a topic somebody, one of you, proposes. So he'll put up the $1,000 to sponsor the show. What you need to do is with $20, make proposals about what that topic should be. So just do topic suggestion and then send it in. And then what I'll do is I'll take all those topic suggestions and show them to Adam, who's sponsoring it. And he'll choose which one he would like to support for $1,000. But that way you get, hopefully, to get a say in what topics might be in the future. And I'll just copy these proposals over and I'll let you know what Adam chooses once he has made the choice. So Shawzbot says possible topics, workplace and or consumer safety, west versus east. I'm not sure if I understand west versus east, Shawzbot. So maybe you can clarify that one. All right, let's see what other... Here's Andrew says, topic, American exceptionalism to a false. How will the left attack on... Oh, that's the question. Okay, so let's just do the topic. So just suggest a topic. Again, the $20 to suggest the topic you have to put in $20 and at some point we will choose. Let's see. Here's a topic suggestion from Richard. So please, if you've got ideas on something you'd like me to talk about. An extensive topic, right? So here's a topic from Richard, the economic impact of AI and declining working population. That's a great topic. All right, any one of those would work. We've got American exceptionalism. We've got AI and we've got workplace and consumer safety. So those are three, but $20 submit a topic and we'll choose one of them. And Adam will put $1,000 towards sponsoring that particular show. All right, we are just to let you know we're about $300 short of our goal for today, $650. I've decided I'm not going to bug you guys about this. You want to support this? You support it? You don't? I'm just going to remind you once in a while of where we are. I'd like to get to our goals, which is $650 for the evening shows and $250 for the news morning shows. But if we don't, we don't. I'll bug you less about it. Hopefully that's something you will appreciate. But nonetheless, let's try to get to those goals. All right, Michael puts in $100. Thank you, Michael. He says, I was listening to Barack Obama's recent interview in CBS morning. Why can conservative presidents be thoughtful and intellectual like him? Why do they select anti-intellectual buffoons like Bush and Trump? Do you think that will change over the next 30 years? I mean, it's unlikely to change given who the electoral, who elects these people. The reality is that, you know, the reason you get more thoughtful, more intellectual people on the left is because the voters on the left today tend to be wealthier. They tend to be more educated. They tend to be generally smarter than Republicans. So, therefore, you get candidates to reflect the voters and the voters are just more, they're smarter. They might be wrong and they are very wrong. But the reality is they're better educated. They're more articulate. And yeah, Republicans are just not that smart, typically. They're not. No, it doesn't mean every Republican is not smart. It doesn't believe there aren't smart politicians on the right. But generally, Republicans in the last few decades have just not been smart and not been thoughtful and not been intellectual. And they don't appeal to that. You see, you might have somebody like, you might say, you know, I don't know, DeSantis is smart and he probably is smart. But the reality is that if DeSantis wants to win in Florida, he can't present himself as intellectual and smart and thoughtful and considerate. He has to be a bulldog. And he has to go after people and he has to, you know, present things that appeal to his voters. And his voters don't want thoughtful and smart. They don't want intellectual. He just voters want kind of the war. They want Donald Trump. They want what they want. What Republicans want is Donald Trump. They want a bulldog. And they don't want somebody who's particularly thoughtful and smart and intellectual. They want a bulldog. They want somebody who'll just smash. That's a reflection of the electors. I mean, Frank says AOC is a bartender with a college degree from Boston University. Yeah, Boston University is not a bad university. And AOC is, I've said this before, she knows how to handle herself. And I disagree with her on everything she says. Everything she says. But she does it well. She presents herself in a thoughtful, intelligent way. Even though what she says is complete bullocks. Same with Barack Obama, by the way. It's not like Obama is right. No. But he comes across as intellectual and reasonable and thoughtful. And Republicans do not because they're not. They just aren't. And if they are, they're not electable. Let's see what happens to Senator Scott from South Carolina who is relative for a Republican, thoughtful and intellectual and comes across as, you know, educated. And let's see how he does in the Republican party. Probably not that well. Not as well as somebody like Donald Trump. Because that's what the Republicans want. That's what the electoral wants. Do you think it will change over the next 30 years? It better. It better. We need a political party that has both good ideas and is intellectual and thoughtful and smart. Who can appeal to the smart people in this country who don't buy into the left garbage. All right. Harper Campbell for $50. Do you think one of the side effects of a nihilistic culture is to cause people to develop inferiority complexes? Once enough of a population experience a certain level of psychological insecurity, they can unleash atrocities like the Holocaust. I mean, I don't know how much of these things is driven by psychology. And I don't know enough about psychology to tell you what leads to, you know, the kind of psychological insecurity. But there's no question. I don't think it's a side effect of nihilism. I think it's a side effect. The same thing that causes the nihilism. Well, a cultural nihilism. Yes, there's no question that a culture, put aside the nihilism, a culture of cynicism, a culture that, and this is the key, a culture that undermines reason, a culture that undermines your mind, a culture that undermines, you know, truth and the ability to achieve truth and right and wrong and objectivity. Is a culture that undermines the individual's mind and the individual's confidence in his own mind and the individual's confidence in his own ability to know what's right and what's wrong, what's true and what's false. Such a culture produces low self-esteem. Such a culture produces people who are psychologically insecure. And such a culture and people with low self-esteem and psychologically insecure who be taught that their reason is invalid are going to seek comfort in tribes. Two tribes combined with a low self-esteem, combined with everything else, will lead, can lead to atrocities like the Holocaust. But it's a complex sequence and it doesn't have to lead to those atrocities. It could lead to all kinds of other atrocities, including just the suicide of the culture. So it all starts with undermining reason, undermining the individual's mind and telling him he's impotent. And that breeds low self-esteem, which breeds tribalism, which breeds, together with altruism, breeds collectivism and destruction. All right. Daniel, I assume that Michael Sandel and Sam Harris on Metacracy is a topic for a whole show, right? And that's your idea for sponsorship. Let me know. I assume that's right. Let me know if I'm wrong and you just want me to comment on it right now. What did I just do? All right. Let's see. James says, all the way talks about is transgenderism, pornography and abortion. Dennis Pagan recently said, pornography perverts the natural end of sexuality and is a slow poison to marriage. Is there a smidgen of truth to this? I mean, this show is a smidgen of truth to this. I don't think it has anything to do with marriage. But I do think that it is that it is poison to the individual consumes too much of it or takes it too seriously or doesn't know how to deal with it. It is poison to young people who learn about sex and perceive sex to be what it is presented to be in pornography that is pure materialistic, mechanistic action. I think that is all bad for the human psyche. I think people being addicted to pornography be consuming too much of it. People using pornography replace real intimacy in sex and relationships. I think it increases the number of incels and men going their own way and all that bullshit. But it also increases, again, the cause of the low self-esteem in the culture and among boys and men a fear of sex because you have to pay yourself to those guys. So, yes. I think it is poison. Is it poison to a marriage? It depends. It can be a booster marriage. If your marriage is based on something good and on positives then pornography can be a tool to experiment with regard to sex to learn new things that you couldn't imagine. Just like buying a book of the Kamasutra is kind of interesting. And there is a period when you are young where it is kind of fun to try all those positions out. Some of them are impossible at least for anybody with my kind of dexterity. But it is, again, it is trying and discovering and learning more about sex and about what you like and what you don't like and what your partner likes and what you don't like and what moves you and what doesn't move you. Pornography can serve that function. I am not anti-pornography in that sense. I am anti-replacing real sex and replacing real intimacy, replacing real relationship. Once you have that real relationship porn does not have to be poisoned. But for people who have weak relationships, yeah, sure. Lots of things can be poisoned to a marriage when you have a weak relationship. And I don't see pornography as a negative necessarily in that context. James says, Jordan Peterson said, IQ is the single best predictive income which makes sense to me. Host power and ability to deal with abstractions is required for high income careers Why do you reject this? Well, to a logic stand, well, first, I'm not an expert on this but my reading of the data and I think I got this from God, what's his name? The obnoxious statistician. My understanding is that it's not a good predictive income. Then indeed, it's a good predictor of some broad measures of success but not of income. And indeed, IQ and income are not related. But I don't know. I don't know enough of the empirical evidence. But look, I just don't think IQ captures everything people think it captures. I think intelligence is not captured by one number. I don't think it's easy. It's easy. It's easy to make that. Nassim Taleb, thank you, Andrew. This comes out in Nassim Taleb. I think what it seems like IQ captures is it captures the extremes. It tells you that if you have an IQ of 70, you're probably not going to have a lot of money. If you have an IQ of 150, you're going to do better. But it doesn't capture where the differences between most, where most of us are. I don't know, between 100 and 130. It doesn't capture much of the differences there. And once you take out the outliers, once you take out the extremes, the fat tails, there's not a lot of explanatory power there. Now, I'm not a statistician like Nassim Taleb is. I don't trust Jordan Peterson. Is there a relationship between income and intelligence broadly understood? Yes. But I don't think IQ captures intelligence. And I don't think it's the terministic in that sense. And I think it's much, much more important to think about, what you do with the intelligence that you have than the sheer, let's call it, horsepower you might have. And that horsepower can be deployed to different ways and different means for different purposes. That's what matters. So you find a lot of people who are definitely relatively simple, who might be not school high in an IQ test, but have a certain skill set to see opportunities in a marketplace. And, you know, opportunities in a marketplace, and who are willing to work super hard and maybe have a skill around choosing good partners or choosing good employees, who become unbelievable successes in business. And who are not that intelligent, smart, based on the conventional measure of smart, probably don't have high IQs. And you, on the other hand, find people who are super smart, who are complete losers, have no idea what to do in life, have no idea how to pursue it, can't relate to other people, and are complete failures. I just think it's what you do with what you have that matters, including how wealthy you become. Scott, have you, Ed, well-done story of philosophy, and if you have, do you think it's any good? Yes, I think it's quite good. It's a good summary. You know, I'm sure professional philosophers say, but generally, I think it's a great introduction. You know, and you're going to learn a lot from it. It's one of the better, I think, summaries of the history of philosophy, the story of philosophy you have. And I would definitely, if you're interested in the history of philosophy, I would definitely read Wolderrand's story of philosophy. Adam says, he says he's joining late-night shift, the sponsorship discussion is. I've already got four sponsorship ideas. Charles Budd has one, maybe two. Andrew Traeger has one, Richard Cunningham added one, and Daniel has one. So I can either send them to you, Adam, offline, or we can accumulate more in the next few shows. Or you can choose from these four. I can read them out to you right now, and you can choose them on the spot. So you can tell me in the chat here how you would like to proceed. Xruana says, leftists vote at the ballot. Us engineers vote with our feet. Go to Florida and ask Venezuela their profession. The Republicans are socialists in slow motion. Yeah, my fear is that they're not in slow motion anymore, that it used to be slow motion, now they're accelerating, and they're just as much interventionist as the left is if they gain the kind of political power that they want. This is the new right, the kind of traditional conservatives who are slow motion guys. But the new right, which is much more about power and speed and having influence. And I think they want control. They want power. They want to run the economy. They want to be in control of every aspect of the economy and every aspect ultimately of your life. All right, we are still about $270 short of our goal of $650 dollars for the show. Noel says, first show that gets live in a while moved from one province to another. About these forest fires in western Canada, did you know how they get prevented in the future? Good to see you back at home. You know, I don't know. I'm not sure about Canada. I know a little bit about forest fires in California. And the forest fires in California to a lot of extent were problems with the kind of clearing a brush that was not allowed that the environmentalists on the one hand, you know, you prevent fires. On the other hand, you don't clear the brush because you're intervening with nature. So you're creating more and more fuel. So when the fire does come, it's unbelievably destructive. So they used to do in the old days, they used to clear a brush. They used to do preventive fires. They used to prevent bigger fires. They used to do forest management. And environmentalists, forest management has become, per se, it's become, you know, anti the environment. David calls it good forest husbandry. Husbandry is the technical term. And so good forest husbandry is lacking because the environmentalists don't believe in it. And that's what's really needed. Now, my guess is that that's true in Canada. But it was suddenly the case in California. Probably also true in Canada and western Canada where the fires are happening. You need to manage the forest. You need to do what human beings do. And they manage the environment. They don't just leave the environment up to nature. When you do, this is what you get. All right, that was the last $20 question which is still $270 behind. So, no more $5, $10 questions. From now on, just $20 questions or more. $100 questions, $200 questions. Somebody could do $250 and really get us all the way to our goal pretty quickly. I do owe a couple of movie reviews because I was going to say I do do movie reviews. For $500, I do TV show reviews for $250. I know I've been super, super slow on these. So I'm going to get better in the weeks to come. I'm going to get a lot better on the movie and show reviews. So as hopefully to encourage more of you to do those reviews. There's also a short story review that I have to do. But I'm going to catch up on everything in the weeks to come. All right. Let's see. Justin says, Did you see the Stassel interview of Vivek Ramaswami? Perhaps a topic for Adam. Yeah, that would be a good topic too is to analyze that video. I have not seen it. I saw that they did the interview and I assume it's good because my guess is that Stassel steered the conversation to topics where they would agree on or that at least they would bring out the better things about Vivek. They probably didn't talk about bombing the cartels in Mexico. But yeah, Vivek has a lot of good stuff going for him and some really bad stuff at the same time. He's trying to appeal to Trump voters, which is where he goes off track. Andrew says, can you go back to my $20 question? Which is that? Yeah, I'm not sure what that was. Sorry, Andrew. I'm not sure what it was. All right. James, in a brief flash between two eternal, is life a brief flash between two eternal darknesses? No, that seems so dark. No, I mean life is what it is. It's 80, 100 years of whatever you make of it. And it's not that brief if you're living it if you're excited about it, if you're thrilled by it. It's not that brief. And the darknesses are not eternal darknesses. They're just non-existent. There is no existence before you're born and after you're born. It's just there's nothing there. It's not darkness. It's not like this perception of death as being in darkness. No, it's just not life. It's just you are not there. Universe from your perspective doesn't exist. And so there's no like eternal darkness sounds so ominous, but there's nothing ominous about it. It's just non-existent. It's just not there. The only thing that matters is life. The before and after don't matter. Liam says, was Hobbes an enlightenment figure? Was he pro-reason? I don't think so. I don't think you'd count Hobbes. I think you'd count Hobbes as pre-enlightenment. He is asking a lot of good questions. He's bringing up a lot of good issues. And in that sense, maybe his questions are part of the enlightenment. Certainly his answers are not pro-enlightenment answers. He's not advocate for reason, for individual reasons certainly. Yeah, Jennifer says you won't know you're dead. And just like you didn't know you went to life before you were alive. So both are irrelevant. They make no difference. The only thing that makes a difference is life. And making it the best that it can be. And as long as it can be. Clark says, I often hear the phrase, life is too short to hold onto grudges. In reality, it's not like too short not to hold onto grudges. Yeah. And what is that? I mean, it depends what you mean by grudge. If a grudge means I made a valuation of a person. He's no good. I don't want to have anything to do with him. Then you should definitely hold onto that because those evaluations are, your life depends on them. It's the virtue of justice. If the grudge means you're going to constantly dwell on it and worry about it and consumed with hatred and distress about this person and it won't let you actually live your life, then yeah, life's too short for it. But no, grudges in the sense of a negative evaluation of another person is a part of justice and you should absolutely hold onto it. Your life depends on it. You don't want to forget about a bad person and re-engage with that bad person and therefore suffer. Part of living is to eliminate that kind of suffering. Clark has never put keys to your happiness in someone else's pocket. Absolutely. You want to be completely dependent and you can't. It's not never. You can't put keys to your happiness in someone else's pocket. Your happiness is dependent on you. The choices you make. Michael says, I can understand child support. But alimony seems ridiculous. It's a punishment for marriage not working out. I can't imagine being forced to pay someone not in my life anymore. Well, you signed a contract. So the whole issue is a contractual issue. First of all, you don't have to get married. But if you get married, part of that contract in law today involves alimony. Now, I think in a rational society, you would structure the contract maybe in a variety of different other ways. But the idea basically is that in marriage, you're joining together to have a life together. And that involves certain division of labor within the marriage that has economic implications. And for example, if one party stays home and the other party works or one party goes to school and the other party works in order to fund the schooling and all kinds of combinations like that, then it could mean that because of this relationship, one party has been able to advance the economic interest in ways that the other party has not and places the other party in a disadvantageous post-divorce. It makes complete sense that you negotiate this in advance and that you find a ways to mitigate that so that I think the marriage works better if both parties feel secure that if the marriage falls apart, the investment they made in the marriage doesn't disappear. So it's a contractual issue. And you can do a prenup to decide how to do that contract. There's a variety of different ways to construct it. One second. All right. I need to stop the show. I will be on tomorrow. I'll keep the questions. I'll answer them in a future show. I apologize, but I have to go.