Podcasts about John Galt

Doing it Cold War style.By kittybeaver, in 5 parts. Listen to the ► Podcast at Explicit Novels. It was difficult for Dirk to pretend he wasn't having sex. Tina's cunt felt so good. He wanted to close his eyes, shut out the rest of the universe, and just experience it."Adjust left," Fact-Tel said. "Left, you malfunctioning flesh machine, left."Dirk made the adjustment while Tina whimpered, "I love it, I love it."Behind them the banging grew louder. There was also the sound of an occasional laugh or a "Whoa, cool." Dirk had to bring Tina to orgasm before the Doopherilians broke into the control room."Now you're drifting down," Fact-Tel said. "Pull up on the interfaces just a tiny bit."Dirk tugged on the steering sticks with all the subtle nuance of a man fucking his hot coworker."Too much!" Fact-Tel cried. "You're wildly off course. Push down and try to do it right this time."Tina's breath came in short, shallow pants. Her ass undulated against Dirk at a faster and faster rate. "Oh baby, yes!"This was harder than Dirk ever thought it would be. He dug his teeth into his lower lip and resisted the urge to thrust. Instead he gently pushed on the steering sticks, which wasn't nearly as satisfying."I'm cumming," Tina moaned, "oh God, I'm cumming."At the same moment the Doopherinians broke through the door and the chair jamming it shut. Dirk could imagine what they saw; his arms stretched across the control panel, his bare ass hanging out, and Tina beneath him writhing with an uncontrolled fury."Stop them!" a silly alien voice shouted."Yes, yes, yes, I'm cumming!" Tina screamed. And then she did.Her back arched and her cunt squeezed his cock in a quick staccato rhythm. Dirk moaned. He was so desperate to cum too. He wouldn't be able to hold it much longer."That's the stuff," a Doopherilian said.Dirk glanced over his shoulder to see the little aliens fall like bowling pins when the orgasm hit them."Earth!" Tina said.He looked back at the view screen to see a blue dot growing bigger behind the yellow dot. They were almost home. He just had to hold it,"Fact-Tel, how much longer?""Two minutes before we hit Earth's atmosphere," the AI answered.Two minutes? Dirk couldn't hold it for another two minutes."Agent Blondell," Fact-Tel continued, "press the green button in the center of the console to initiate speed dampening thrusters. We need to slow the ship down.""Don't slow down," Dirk begged. "I need to cum.""You have to slow down," Fact-Tel said, "or this ship won't land as much as crater.""Pull out before you orgasm," Tina said. "I'm serious, do not ejaculate inside me or we'll have a whole other problem.""Must, sober, up." The Doopherilians were starting to stir. "Must, stop, human.""Oh no." Tina pushed her ass against Dirk, working herself up and down the length of his cock. "I have to orgasm again, but you can't," she said. "Got it?""No." Tears gathered in the corner of Dirk's eyes. His balls felt like they were going to explode."Get back on course!" Fact-Tel shouted. "You're going to hit the moon."How Dirk managed to steer around the moon, he couldn't say. All his concentration was now focused on not cumming. His face, he was sure, had to be a deep shade of red, his balls a bright blue. Every muscle in his body was straining to hold back the inevitable."When you enter the Earth's atmosphere, I'm going to count down from five," Fact-Tel explained. "When I say 'Hit it,' you'll have to pull up on the steering interfaces as hard as you can. You'll be fighting against the planet's gravity and it'll be a rough ride.""Mmmm, yeah." Tina rocked back and forth, working her way toward another orgasm. "That's what Mama likes.""Entering the atmosphere in three, two, "Fact-Tel was cut off abruptly and the whole ship jolted."Oh Fuck Yes!!" Tina screamed as another climax consumed her. The lucky bitch."Five," Fact-Tel started counting down, "Four, "There was no way the Doopherilians would recover from Tina's last orgasm, not before they were safely on Earth. There was no reason for Dirk to hold back any longer."Three, ""I'm going to do it," Dirk growled.Two, ""I'm going to cum.""One," Fact-Tel shouted. "Pull up! Pull up!""Pull out! Pull out!" Tina added.Dirk yanked back on the steering sticks, his cock slipping from Tina. When he shot his load it went airborne, over her head and landed in an arc across the view screen. It was a different kind of Milky Way.The ship hit water and bounced, skipping two or three more times before it came to rest with an impressive splash. Fortunately it stayed afloat. They were back home. Somewhat safe and sound."Fact-Tel." Tina rolled out from underneath Dirk, stood and pulled down her skirt. "Do you have our location?""Affirmative," the AI answered. "Sending rescue team now. Are the Doopherilians still a threat?"Dirk lay collapsed on top of the control panel. His heart pounded and he couldn't catch his breath. He didn't have the energy to pleasure Tina one more time. He almost hoped the Doopherilians would shoot him with their ray gun orbs. At least then he'd have an excuse to lie prone on the ground.He turned his head slightly to see Tina bending over one of the purple aliens. It, like the others, lay on the floor and stared up at nothing."They're no threat," he said. "They're still tripping.""No, they aren't." Tina looked grave. "They aren't breathing. I think they all overdosed.""What?" The jolt from the news gave Dirk enough energy to stand up. "They're dead?""Shit," Fact-Tel muttered as the ship gently bobbed up and down with the rolling waves. "That's a lot of forms I'll have to fill out.""Do you think the Doopherilian King will take this to the Universal Council of Supreme Beings?" Tina asked. "Are we in for another biblical flood?""Probably not," Fact-Tel said. "We'll most likely do what we did when something similar happened with the Martians."Dirk tucked his cock back into his jeans and zipped up his fly. "What was that?""We'll pay the Doopherilians off with opium," the AI explained. "I mean, that is what Earth is known for, best snack foods and narcotics in the galaxy."Dirk didn't mean to laugh, but the whole situation was so absurd he couldn't help it. He expected Tina to scold him for laughing at a tragic event, so it was a surprise to hear her light chuckles mix with his low belly laughs. Their eyes met across the room and the laughter grew between them.Tina got Dirk. She understood him in a way no woman had before. She got his sense of humor, his need to improve the world, his outlook on life. She was the human connection he didn't even know he'd been searching for. And he knew this moment of connection, of shared mirth, was a moment he'd remember for the rest of his life.But eventually, they both fell silent, stared at the death surrounding them and waited for the rescue boat to come.The breeze ruffled through Dirk's hair like the fingers of a lover. He smiled, enjoying the playful caresses along his scalp. He picked up his speed and the wind reciprocated. What had been flirting before was now full on foreplay.That was probably taking the metaphor too far. He was running really fast. It was kind of fun.Not long ago he'd been ashamed of his unique talents. That was when he'd made his living as a male model. The fashion industry prized men with tall, muscular bodies and facial features too bold to be feminine yet still very, very pretty. All of which Dirk Allen had. He also had the ability to run at near the speed of sound, pick up a car with one hand and hardly ever get tired. Those were not useful skills for a man whose job it was to stand still and look good, so he'd kept them hidden.That all changed when he changed his career. Now he was a secret agent in training. Tina, his partner as well as his mentor, said speed and strength and stamina were essential. The fact that he could run faster, lift more and stamina longer meant he had the makings of a legendary secret agent.It was possible, she had told him, that one day he'd be the second best agent in the SWSO. Tina Blondell was the best agent and she planned on keeping that position.At that moment, the position she was keeping was more of a fetal position. Dirk held her in his arms and tried his hardest not to grope her ass or her breasts. It would've been easier if he didn't have to think about where he couldn't touch her and just place his hands where they needed to be so that she wouldn't fall out of his arms.Not that Tina wasn't grope worthy, because she was. Her breasts filled a hand perfectly, with soft flesh to cushion one's fingers and pert nipples to poke one's palm. Her ass was round and bouncy and oh so wholesome. Dirk couldn't look at it without thinking about working the land.But it was inappropriate to think of her that way. They were coworkers and nothing more. Yes, he'd seen enough of Tina to know she wasn't a natural blonde, but that was work related. He had pleasured her orally and she'd given him a hand-job to save lives. For secret agents, the ends justified the means. They were prepared to do whatever it took, with whoever was handy, to protect the world. That's why, nowadays, Dirk made sure he had a condom on him. He'd feel awful if the world fell into the clutches of an evil despot simply because he was afraid of catching something.The jury was still out on whether General Zero was a global despot or simply a municipal annoyance. So much about Zero was a mystery, such as background, motive and preferred pronouns. It was impossible to predict what their next move would be. Tina and Dirk with the help of Fact-Tel, SWSO's mastermind computer, had managed to foil one plot, but Zero had escaped. It looked as though the villain had dodged justice, until now.In the wee hours of the morning, long before Dirk woke up (so like, around 9:30), Fact-Tel had intercepted a series of coded tweets. It'd taken the artificial intelligence nearly an hour to break the encryption but once it had, it presented Tina with the coordinates to Zero's hideout. Soon Dirk and Tina would capture Zero. The city of Middleburg would be safe once again.There was no doubt in Dirk's mind that he and Tina would succeed. How could they not? With his strength and speed and her intelligence they were unstoppable."Stop," Fact-Tel chirped in Dirk's ear. "You're going to run right past it."Dirk was still getting used to the earpiece that connected him to the A.I. at regional headquarters, but he did manage to slow down to a jog without stumbling."Fact-Tel," Tina said as she stirred in Dirk's arms. "Where are we exactly?" She was in the habit of shielding her face against his chest when he ran. The wind tended to dry out her contact lenses."This," Fact-Tel said with a touch of dramatic flair, "is the section of Middleburg known as Old Crap Town.""Of course." She slipped out of Dirk's grasp and looked around, taking in their surroundings. "I should've known by all the abandoned manure factories.""And the smell," Dirk added. "It smells like shit.""How close are we to the coordinates?" Tina asked."Turn left," the A.I. instructed, "about 20 degrees."Dirk put a hand on Tina's arm. "Let me do it," he said. "I'm a trained model. I know how to turn."It was perhaps the most perfect turn of his career. He pivoted on his heels in a smooth yet decisive manner. When he stopped he lifted his chin and struck a pose that showed off his body and, by extension, his clothes at a favorable angle. A tight, blue T-shirt and black jeans never looked so good."So the red, abandoned, poop factory?" Tina asked."Yeah," Fact-Tel confirmed. "The red one."Dirk followed his partner across the street to the massive and dilapidated building, keeping his eyes peeled for any signs of a sniper in the windows or booby traps in the trash scattered along the sidewalk. He'd trained the past few months for just this sort of situation.When they got to the double doors of the red manure factory, Tina reached behind her and pulled her gun from her holster.She owned a lot of guns and a lot of holsters and she had a knack for coordinating them with her outfits. There was a thigh holster for skirts that fell just above the knee. Or there was the back holster for ensembles like the one she was wearing today, gray slacks and a white spaghetti strap tank top. On rare occasions, when she wore a micro mini, she'd tuck her gun into her thigh high boots. That was Dirk's favorite. There was something about that outfit that made him want to surrender to Tina and then defile her. Of course, those sorts of thoughts fell into the inappropriate category, so he never thought them."Draw your weapon, Agent Allen," Tina whispered.

Atlas Shrugged seems to be everywhere today. Randian villains are in the news. Rand remains influential on the right, from the Reagan era to the modern libertarian movement. Perhaps most significantly, entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen who are moving into government with DOGE, have been influenced by Rand, and, fascinatingly, Andreessen only read the novel four years ago. Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal) and I talked about how Atlas Shrugged is in conversation with the great novels of the past, Rand's greats skills of plotting, drama, and character, and what makes Atlas Shrugged a serious novel, not just a vehicle for ideology. Love it or loathe it, Atlas Shrugged is having a moment. Everyone brings a preconception of Ayn Rand, but she has been opposed by the right and the left ever since she first published. Other than Jennifer Burns' biography, academic study has largely declined to notice Rand. But Rand deserves our serious attention, both as a novelist, and as an influence on the modern world. Here are a couple of excerpts.We talk a lot these days about, “how can I be my best self?” That's what Rand is saying. She's saying, actually, it's not about earning money, it's not about being rich. It is about the perfection of the moral life. It's about the pursuit of excellence. It's about the cultivation of virtue. These are the important things. This is what Dagny is doing. When all the entrepreneurs at the end, they're in the happy valley, actually, between them, they have not that much money, right?Also this.What would Ayn Rand think about the influencer economy? Oh, she'd despise it. She would despise it… all these little girls wanting to grow up to be influencers, they're caught in some algorithm, which is awful. Why would you want to spend your life influencing others? Go create something. It's a hard medicine.And.Her aesthetic is very classical, draped. She doesn't wear flowery patterns. She wears draped, clearly close-fitting gowns and gray tailored suits and a minimum of jewelry, though she does have this bracelet chain made of Rearden metal. You don't know when she possibly has time to go shopping, but she's perfectly dressed all the time in the fashion that we would understand as feminist. She wears trousers, she wears suits, but when she goes out, this black velvet cape. I think it's important to see her as that, even though nobody talks about that in terms of this novel, what a heroine she is. I know that when I was reading her as a teenage girl, that's it.TranscriptHenry: Today, I am talking with Hollis Robbins, former dean of the humanities at Utah University and special advisor on the humanities and AI. We are talking about Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Hollis, hello.Hollis Robbins: Hello. I'm really glad to have this conversation with you. We've known each other for some years and follow each other's work. I was trained as a scholar of 19th-century American, Victorian, and African-American literature, mostly novels, and love having conversations with you about big, deep novels. When I suggested that we read this book, I was hoping you would be enthusiastic about it, so I'm really happy to be having this conversation. It's hard to know who's interviewing you or what conversation this is, but for you coming at this middle-aged. Not quite middle-aged, what are you?Henry: I'm middle enough. No. This is not going to be an interview as such. We are going to have a conversation about Atlas Shrugged, and we're going to, as you say, talk about it as a novel. It always gets talked about as an ideology. We are very interested in it as a novel and as two people who love the great novels of the 19th century. I've been excited to do this as well. I think that's why it's going to be good. Why don't we start with, why are we doing this?Hollis: I wanted to gesture to that. You are one of the leading public voices on the importance of reading literature and the importance of reading novels particularly, though I saw today, Matt Yglesias had a blog post about Middlemarch, which I think he just recently read. I can credit you with that, or us, or those of us who are telling people read the big novels.My life trajectory was that I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead before I read Dickens, before I read Jane Austen, before I read Harriet Beecher Stowe or Melville or the Brontës. For me, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead were foundational novels as novels. I wondered what it would be like to talk to somebody whose experience was flipped.Henry: Right, I'm 38 and I'd never read this book. I was coming at it partly having read all those other books, but partly for my whole life, people have said, "Oh, that's really a bad book. That's so badly written. That book is no good." The number one thing I can say to people is this book is fun.Hollis: It's really fun. I was going to say usually what I forget to do in talking about books is give the summary. I'm going to hold up my copy, which is my dog-eared copy from high school, which is hilarious. It's got the tiniest print, which I couldn't possibly read now. No underlining, which is interesting. I read this book before I understood that you were supposed to underline when you liked passages in the book.It was interesting to me. I'd probably read it five or six times in my youth and didn't underline anything. The story is--- You can help me fill in the blanks. For readers who haven't read it, there's this young woman, Dagny Taggart, who's the heiress of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad fortune. She's a woman. This takes place in about, I think, the '40s, '50s. Her older brother, Jim Taggart, is CEO. She's COO, so she's the operations person. It is in some ways the story of her-- It's not quite a bildungsroman. This is the way I tell the story. It's the story of her coming to the realization of how the world works. There's many ways to come at this story. She has multiple boyfriends, which is excellent. Her first boyfriend, his name is Francisco d'Anconia. He's the head of d'Anconia Copper. He too is an heir of this longstanding copper fortune. Her second is a metals magnate, Hank Rearden, who invents this great metal, Rearden metal.Really, it's also the story of the decline of America, and the ways that, in this Randian universe, these villainous group of people who run the country are always taking and extracting from producers. As she's creating and building this great railroad and doing wonderful things and using Rearden metal to do it, something is pulling all the producers out of society, and she's like, "What is going on?"It turns out there's this person, John Galt, who is saying, "I don't like the way the country is run. I don't like this extractive philosophy. I am going to take all the producers and lure them voluntarily to a--" It's a hero's lair. It's not like a James Bond villain lair. It's a hero lair in Colorado called Galt's Gulch. He is John Galt. It ends up being a battle between who is right in a wrong world. Is it the ethical person, Dagny Taggart, who continues to strive and try to be a producer and hold on to her ethics in this corrupt world, or is it somebody saying, "To hell with this. I am going on strike. You guys come with me and let the world collapse." How's that for summary?Henry: No, I think that's great. I couldn't have done a better job. One thing that we can say is that the role of reason, of being a rational person, of making reason the sole arbiter of how you make choices, be they practical, ethical, financial, whatever, that's at the heart of the book, right?Hollis: That's the philosophy. We could go there in a second. I think the plot of the book is that she demonstrates this.Henry: What she has to learn, like what is the big lesson for Dagny, is at the beginning, she hasn't fully understood that the good guys use reason and the bad guys do not, as it were.Hollis: Right. I think that's right. I like thinking about this as a bildungsroman. You said that the book is fun. Her part of the book is fun, but not really fun. The fun part of the book, and you can tell me because every time you kept texting me, "Oh my God, Jim Taggart. Oh my God, Jim Taggart. Oh my God, Jim Taggart."--Henry: These guys are so awful. [laughs]Hollis: They're so awful. The fun parts of the book, the Rand villains are the government entities and the cabals of business leaders who she calls looters and second-handers who run the country and all they do is extract value. Marc Andreessen was on a podcast recently and was all about these Rand villains and these looters. I think, again, to get back to why are we doing this and why are we doing this now, Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged is in the air with the second Trump administration.Henry: Yes. In a way, we're doing this because the question is, is this the novel of the future? Right? What we're seeing is it's very influential on the right. Rand's ideas have long been a libertarian inspiration. Elon Musk's read her. You mentioned Andreessen, Peter Thiel, all these people. It goes back to the Reagan days. People in the Republican Party have been quoting Ayn Rand. Then more broadly, we see all these worries about social collapse today. What happens in the plot of Atlas Shrugged is that society does slowly collapse.Dagny has to realize it's because of these people who are not using their reason and they're nationalizing things and taking resource away from proficient entrepreneurs and stuff. It's all about infrastructure, energy, people doing exploitation in the name of the common good, ineffective political leaders, people covering up lies and misdemeanors, people being accepting of what is obviously criminal behavior because it's in the cause of the greater good. We have free speech, all these topics, energy production. We're seeing this in the headlines. When I was reading this book, I was like, "Oh my God, how did she know?"Hollis: How did she know?Henry: How did she know.Hollis: I think the bildungsroman aspect of this as a novel. It's hard to read it as a novel. I think it's hard. By the way, I have to really I applaud you for not, until you got almost to the end of the book, texting me about this person or that person, or how it's political. I admire you for looking at the book and coming to the book as an expert in novels.What she comes to terms with, and it's a real slowly-- It's not even scales falling from her eyes. She doesn't sit and say, "Oh my God, the world is corrupt." She just is like, "That person's corrupt. I'm not going to deal with them. That person's corrupt. I'm not going to deal with them." She just keeps going, but she doesn't ever accept with a fatalism that she's living in this world where every single person who's in charge is going to let her down.Henry: It's also interesting to me that she doesn't complain.Hollis: No.Henry: Now, that reminded me of I wrote about Margaret Thatcher in my book. She was another big one for however hard it was, however difficult it was, why would you complain? Let's just go to work. A lot of people found her difficult for that reason. When I was reading this, I was like, "Ayn Rand clearly has the same idea. You can nationalize every last inch of the economy. I'm going to get up and go to work and try and beat you. I'm not going to sit around and complain." It's a very stern attitude in a way. She's very strict with herself. I found the book to be-- I know Rand is very atheist, but a very Protestant book.Hollis: Yes, it really is.Henry: Intensely Protestant, yes.Hollis: That's a nice way to think about it. A certain kind of Protestant, a Weberian Protestant.Henry: Sure.Hollis: Not a Southern Baptist Protestant who believes in the absence of reason. I was thinking I was teaching in Mississippi years ago. I was teaching a course on Wordsworth and had to do a unit on Voltaire because you can't really understand Wordsworth unless you understand Voltaire. There was a woman in my class. She was a version of Presbyterian who doesn't believe in reason, believes that in the fall, man lost their reason.Therefore, she asked if she could be excused from class because I was talking about Voltaire and the importance of reason. She said, "This is against my religion. If you believe that man has reason, you are actually going about it wrong, so may I be excused?" Which in all the years I've had people ask for excuses to miss class, that was a memorable one.Henry: That's unique. [laughs]Hollis: It's interesting because, again, I should get back to the novel, the opposition from Rand is as strong on the religious right as it is on the left. In fact, very strong. When Atlas Shrugged came out, William F. Buckley famously had Whittaker Chambers write the review. He hated her. He despised her. He despised the fact that she put reason first.Henry: Yes. I think that's worth emphasizing that some people listening will think, "I'm Rand. These nasty ideas, she's on the right." She's been ideologically described in that way so many times. Deirdre McCloskey in the Literary Review has just in the most recent edition written an absolutely scathing article about Rand. That's libertarian opposition to Rand.McCloskey is saying Hayek is the real thing here and Rand would have hated everything that Hayek did. She got everything wrong. I think the opposition to her, as you say, it's on both sides. One thing that's interesting about this novel is that because she created her own philosophy, which people will have different views on how well that went, but there isn't anyone else like this. All the other people like this are her followers.Hollis: Exactly.Henry: She's outside of the other systems of thought in a way.Hollis: We should talk about Rand. I'm going to quote a little bit from this book on feminist interpretation of Ayn Rand. Let's talk a little bit, if we can, about Dagny as the heroine of a novel, or a hero, because one of the really interesting things about reading Rand at this moment is that she's got one pronoun, he, him, man. She is in this era where man means man and women. That there isn't men and women, he and she, and now it's he, she, and them. She is like, "There's one pronoun." Even she talks about the rights of man or man believes. She means everybody, but she only means man too. It's interesting.I was very much part of the first pronoun wars in the 1980s when women scholars were like, "He and she." Now we're thrown out the window with that binary. Again, we don't need to talk about pronouns, but it's really important to understanding Rand and reading this novel, how much she embraces men and the male pronoun, even while she is using it both ways, and even while her story is led by this woman. She's beautiful. She's beautiful in a very specific way. She's tall, she's slender, she's got great cheekbones, she's got great shoulders, she's got long legs.Her aesthetic is very classical, draped. She doesn't wear flowery patterns. She wears draped, clearly close-fitting gowns and gray tailored suits and a minimum of jewelry, though she does have this bracelet chain made of Rearden metal. You don't know when she possibly has time to go shopping, but she's perfectly dressed all the time in the fashion that we would understand as feminist. She wears trousers, she wears suits, but when she goes out, this black velvet cape. I think it's important to see her as that, even though nobody talks about that in terms of this novel, what a heroine she is. I know that when I was reading her as a teenage girl, that's it.Henry: I want to be Dagny.Hollis: I want to be Dagny. I want to have capes, right?Henry: There's a very important scene, it's not too much of a plot spoiler, where Hank Rearden has invented this new metal. It's very exciting because it's much more efficient and it's much stronger and you can build new bridges for the trains and everything. He makes a bracelet of his new metal. It's a new steel alloy, I think, and gives it to his wife. His wife basically doesn't care.She's not really interested in what it takes to earn the money, she just wants to have the money. You get the strong impression throughout the book that some of the people that Rand is most scathingly disapproving of are wives who don't work. None of those people come out well. When Dagny goes to a party at the Rearden house and she is romantically involved with Hank Rearden, she sees the bracelet.Hollis: She isn't then, right? Isn't she not then?Henry: No, but they have feelings for each otherHollis: Right. Reasonable feelings for each other.Henry: That's right, reasonable feelings, but they're not currently acting on those feelings. She sees the bracelet and she exchanges her, I think, diamonds-Hollis: Diamond bracelet.Henry: -for the Rearden metal bracelet with the wife. It's this wonderful moment where these two opposite ideals of womanhood that Rand is presenting. It's a great moment of heroism for Dagny because she is saying, "Who cares about glittering diamonds when you have a new steel alloy that can make this incredible bridge?" It sounds crazy, but this is 1957. Dagny is very much what you might call one of the new women.Hollis: Right.Henry: I think in some ways, Rand-- I don't like the phrase she's ahead of her time. I've read a lot of 1950s fiction. This is not the typical woman.Hollis: No, this is not Cheever. This is not a bored suburban housewife at a time when the way the '50s are taught, certainly in America, it's like women could work during the war, then they were suburban housewives, there was bored, there were key parties and all sorts of Cheever sorts of things. This is not that. I read this first. I was only 15 years after it was published, I think, in the '60s, early '70s reading it.This, to me, seemed perfectly normal and everything else seemed regressive and strange and whiny. There's a lot to be said for reading this novel first. I think if we can talk a little bit about these set pieces because I think for me reading it as a novel and hearing you talk about it as a novel, that novels, whether we're thinking about-- I want to see if you want to compare her to Dorothea or just to any other Victorian women novel that you can think of. That's the closest, right? Is there anybody that's closest to Dorothea from Middlemarch? Is that there are these set pieces. People think that Rand-- the idea is that she's not a great writer. She is a great writer. She started in Hollywood. Her first book, The Fountainhead, was made into a movie. She understands plotting and keeping the reader's attention. We go forward, we go backwards. There's her relationship with Francisco d'Anconia that we see her now, years after, then we have flashbacks to growing up and how they became lovers.There are big meeting set pieces where everybody's in the room, and we have all the backstories of the people in the room, what is going to happen. There are these big party scenes, as you say. For example, this big, glorious, glamorous party at the Rearden house, Francisco is there. Francisco and Hank Rearden get in a conversation, and she's like, "I want to go see what my old boyfriend is talking to the guy I like about."There are these moments where you're not supposed to come at the book that way in this serious philosophical way. Then later on when there's this wonderful scene where Francisco comes to see Dagny. This is much later. Hank and Dagny are lovers, so he has a key to her apartment. He walks in and everybody sees immediately what's going on. It's as good as any other farce moment of somebody hiding behind a curtain, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: Everything is revealed all at once. She's very good at scenes like that.Henry: Yes, very good. She's very good at high drama. One of the phrases that kept coming back to me was that this book is a melodrama of ideas.Hollis: Yes.Henry: Right? It's not a novel of ideas as such, it's a melodrama of ideas. I think one thing that people who think she's a bad writer will say is it's melodrama, the characters are flat, the prose is not lyrical, all these different things. Whereas when I read it, I was like, "She's so good at melodrama." I feel like, in some ways, it does not feel like a 1950s novel because there's so much excitement about technology, so much feminism, just so many things that I do not associate--Maybe I'm being too English, but I don't read John Cheever, for example, and think, "Oh, he loves the train." Whereas this book is very, very exciting as a story about inventing a new kind of train that goes really fast," which sounds silly, but that's a really Dickensian theme, that's in Middlemarch. Actually, that's what Matt Yglesias was talking about in his excellent piece today. What does feel very 1950s is you've got the Hollywood influence. The dialogue, I think, is not always great, but it is often great.I often would read pages and think, "This would actually be really good in, not an A++ movie, but in a decent crime movie or something. This would be quite good dialogue." There's a comic book aesthetic to it in the way that the scenes play out. Just a lot of these '50s aesthetics actually are present in the book. I'm going to read one paragraph. It's from part one. I think we should read out loud a few bits to give people a sense.Hollis: Yes.Henry: This is when Dagny has built a new train line using grid and metal to make the bridge so that it can go over a valley. I think that's right. The train can do 100 miles an hour. It's this very, very exciting new development. It means that energy can be supplied to factories, and so it's a huge, big deal. This is when she's on the train going at 100 miles an hour and she just can't believe it's happening."Things streaked past a water tank, a tree, a shanty, a grain silo. They had a windshield wiper motion. They were rising, describing a curve, and dropping back. The telegraph wires ran a race with the train, rising and falling from pole to pole, in an even rhythm like the cardiograph record of a steady heartbeat written across the sky. She looked ahead at the haze that melted rail and distance, a haze that could rip apart at any moment to some shape of disaster.""She wondered why she felt safer than she had ever felt in a car behind the engine. Safer here where it seemed as if should an obstacle rise, her breast and the glass shield would be the first to smash against it. She smiled, grasping the answer. It was the security of being first with full sight and full knowledge of one's own course, not the blind sense of being pulled into the unknown by some unknown power ahead."That's not MFA prose or whatever, but it turns the pages. I think she's very good at relating we're on the train and it's going very fast to how Dagny is thinking through the philosophical conundrum that is basically going to drive the whole plot forwards. I was reminded again and again of what Virginia Woolf said about Walter Scott, where she compared Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson. She said that Stevenson had beautiful sentences and dapper little adjectives. It was all jeweled and carefully done. You could marvel over each sentence.She said, "Whereas Scott, it's just page after page and no sentence is beautiful," but she says, "He writes at the level of the page. He's not like Stevenson. He's not writing at the level of the sentence. You have to step into the world." You can say, 'Oh, that wasn't a very good sentence,' but my goodness, the pages keep turning and you're there in the world, right?Hollis: Exactly.Henry: I think she made a really important point there and we just undervalue that so much when we say, oh, so-and-so is not a good writer. What we mean is they're not a Robert Louis Stevenson, they're a Walter Scott. It's like, sure, but Walter Scott was great at what he did. Ayn Rand is in the Walter Scott inheritance in the sense that it's a romance, it's not strictly realistic novel. You have to step into the world. You can't spend your whole time going, "Was that a great sentence? Do I really agree with what she just--" It's like, no, you have to go into this utopian sci-fi universe and you have to keep turning the pages. You get caught up and you go, "Wow, this is this is working for me."Hollis: Let me push back on that-Henry: Yes, good.Hollis: -because I think that was a beautiful passage, one of my favorite passages in this book, which is hard to say because it's a really, really big book. It's a memorable passage because here she is in a place at this moment. She is questioning herself. Isn't she questioning why? Why do I feel safe? Then it strikes her. In this moment, all interior while all this stuff is happening. This whole Rearden metal train bridge set piece is one of the highlights of at least the first half of the book. You come away, even if we've had our entire life up to her, understanding her as a philosophical this woman. How is that different from Dorothea or from Elizabeth Bennet? Yes, Elizabeth Bennet, right?Henry: Oh, no, I agree. My point was purely about prose style, which was to say if you say, "Oh, she writes like a Walter Scott, not like a Robert Louis Stevenson," you're going to deny yourself seeing what you've just said, which is that actually, yes, she has the ability to write philosophical characters.Hollis: When I first read Pride and Prejudice, I read it through the lens of Rand. Now, clearly, these heroines had fewer choices. Dorothea marries Casaubon, I don't know how you pronounce it, because she thinks he's a Randian expert, somebody who's got this grand idea. She's like, "Whoa, I want to be part of this endeavor, the key to all mythologies." Then she's so let down. In the Randian sense, you can see why she would have wanted him.Henry: That's right. I think George Eliot would have strongly disagreed with Rand philosophically. The heroines, as you say, what they're doing in the novel is having to realize that there are social conventions I have to understand and there are things I have to learn how to do, but actually, the key to working all that out is more at the moral philosophical level. This is what happens to Dagny. I think it's on the next page from what I just read. There's another passage where it says that she's in the train and she's enjoying. It's working and she's thrilled that her train is working. She was trying not to think, but she couldn't help herself.She said, "Who made the train. Is it the brute force of muscle? Who can make all the dials and the levers? How is it possible that this thing has even been put together?" Then she starts thinking to herself, "We've got a government who's saying it's wrong to do this, you're taking resources, you're not doing it for the common good." She says, "How can they regard this as evil? How can they believe that this is ignoble to have created this incredible thing?"She says she wants to be able to toss the subject out of the window and let it get shattered somewhere along the track. She wants the thoughts to go past like the telegraph poles, but obviously, she can't. She has this moment of realization that this can't be wrong. This type of human accomplishment can't be against the common good. It can't be considered to be ignoble. I think that is like the Victorian heroines.To me, it was more like Fanny Price, which is that someone turns up into a relatively closed system of ideas and keeps their own counsel for a long time, and has to admit sometimes when they haven't got it right or whatever. Basically, in the end, they are vindicated on fairly straightforward grounds. Dagny comes to realize that, "I was right. I was using my reason. I was working hard. I was being productive. Yes, I was right about that." Fanny, it's more like a Christian insight into good behavior, but I felt the pattern was the same.Hollis: Sure. I'll also bring up Jane Eyre here, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: Jane Eyre, her relationship, there's a lot to be said of both Mr. Darcy and Mr. Rochester with Hank Rearden because Hank Rearden has to come to his sense. He's married. He doesn't like his wife. He doesn't like this whole system that he's in. He wants to be with a woman that's a meeting of the mind, but he's got all this social convention he has to deal with. Rochester has to struggle, and of course, Bertha Mason has to die in that book. He ends up leaving his wife, but too late. If we're going to look at this novel as a novel, we can see that there are these moments that I think have some resonance. I know you don't seem to want to go to the Mr. Darcy part of it.Henry: No. I had also thought about Jane Eyre. My thought was that, obviously, other than being secular because Jane Eyre is very Christian, the difference is that Hank Rearden and Dagny basically agree that we can't conduct our relationship in a way that would be morally compromising to her. They go through this very difficult process of reasoning like, "How can we do this in a good way?"They're a little bit self-sacrificing about it because they don't want to upset the moral balance. Whereas Mr. Rochester, at least for the first part of the book, has an attitude that's more like, "Yes, but she's in the attic. Why does it matter if we get married?" He doesn't really see the problem of morally compromising Jane, and so Jane has to run away.Hollis: Right.Henry: One of the interesting things about Rand, what is different from like Austen and the Brontës and whatever, is that Dagny and Hank are not in opposition before they get together. They have actually this unusual thing in romance and literature, which is that they have a meeting of minds. What gets in the way is that the way their minds agree is contra mundum and the world has made this problem for them.Hollis: I think in a way, that's the central relationship in--Henry: Yes. That was how I read it, yes.Hollis: Yes. The fact as we think about what the complications are in reading this novel as a novel is that here is this great central romance and they've got obstacles. She's got an old boyfriend, he's married. They've got all these things that are classic obstacles to a love story. Rand understands that enough to build it, that that will keep a lot of readers' interest, but then it's like, "That's actually not the point of my book," which is how the second half or the last third of the novel just gets really wiggy." Again, spoiler alert, but Hank is blackmailed to be, as the society is collapsing, as things are collapsing--Henry: We should say that the government has taken over in a nationalizing program by this point.Hollis: Right, because as John Galt is pulling all the thought leaders and the industrialists and all the movers of the world into his lair, things are getting harder and harder and harder, things are getting nationalized. Some of these big meetings in Washington where these horrible people are deciding how to redistribute wealth, again, which is part of the reason somebody like Congressman Paul Ryan would give out copies of Atlas Shrugged to all of his staffers. He's like, "You've got to read this book because we can't go to Washington and be like this. The Trumpian idea is we've got to get rid of people who are covering up and not doing the right thing."They've blackmailed Hank Rearden into giving up Rearden Metal by saying, "We know you've been sleeping with Dagny Taggart." It's a very dramatic point. How is this going to go down?Henry: Right. I think that's interesting. What I loved about the way she handled that romance was that romance is clearly part of what she sees as important to a flourishing life. She has to constantly yoke it to this idea that reason is everything, so human passion has to be conducted on the basis that it's logically reasonable, but that it therefore becomes self-sacrificing. There is something really sad and a little bit tragic about Hank being blackmailed like that, right?Hollis: Yes. I have to say their first road trip together, it's like, "Let's just get out of here and go have a road trip and stay in hotels and have sex and it'll be awesome." That their road trip is like, "Let's go also see some abandoned factories and see what treasures we might find there." To turn this love road trip into also the plot twist that gets them closer to John Galt is a magnificent piece of plot.Henry: Yes. I loved that. I know you want to talk about the big John Galt speech later, but I'm going to quote one line because this all relates to what I think is one of the most central lines of the book. "The damned and the guiltiest among you are the men who had the capacity to know yet chose to blank out reality." A lot of the time, like in Brontë or whatever, there are characters like Rochester's like that. The center of their romance is that they will never do that to each other because that's what they believe philosophically, ethically. It's how they conduct themselves at business. It's how they expect other people to conduct themselves. They will never sacrifice that for each other.That for them is a really high form of love and it's what enables huge mutual respect. Again, it's one of those things I'm amazed-- I used to work in Westminster. I knew I was a bit of a libertarian. I knew lots of Rand adjacent or just very, very Randian people. I thought they were all insane, but that's because no one would ever say this. No one would ever say she took an idea like that and turned it into a huge romance across hundreds of pages. Who else has done that in the novel? I think that's great.Hollis: It really is hard. It really is a hard book. The thing that people say about the book, as you say, and the reason you hadn't read it up until now, is it's like, "Oh, yes, I toyed with Rand as a teenager and then I put that aside." I put away my childish things, right? That's what everybody says on the left, on the right. You have to think about it's actually really hard. My theory would be that people put it away because it's really, really hard, what she tried is hard. Whether she succeeded or not is also hard. As we were just, before we jumped on, talking about Rand's appearance on Johnny Carson, a full half hour segment of him taking her very seriously, this is a woman who clearly succeeded. I recently read Jennifer Burn's biography of her, which is great. Shout out to Jennifer.What I came away with is this is a woman who made her living as a writer, which is hard to do. That is a hard thing to do, is to make your living as a writer, as a woman in the time difference between 1942, The Fountainhead, which was huge, and 57, Atlas Shrugged. She was blogging, she had newsletters, she had a media operation that's really, really impressive. This whole package doesn't really get looked at, she as a novelist. Again, let me also say it was later on when I came to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who is another extraordinary woman novelist in America who wrote this groundbreaking book, which is filled--I particularly want to shout out to George Harris, the slave inventor who carried himself like a Rand hero as a minor character and escapes. His wife is Eliza, who famously runs across the ice flows in a brave Randian heroine escape to freedom where nobody's going to tell them what to do. These women who changed literature in many ways who have a really vexed relationship or a vexed place in academia. Certainly Stowe is studied.Some 20 years ago, I was at an event with the great Elaine Showalter, who was coming out with an anthology of American women writers. I was in the audience and I raised my hand, I said, "Where's Ayn Rand?" She was like, "Ha, ha, ha." Of course, what a question is that? There is no good reason that Ayn Rand should not be studied in academia. There is no good reason. These are influential novels that actually, as we've talked about here, can be talked about in the context of other novels.Henry: I think one relevant comparison is let's say you study English 19th-century literature on a course, a state-of-the-nation novel or the novel of ideas would be included as routine, I think very few people would say, "Oh, those novels are aesthetically excellent. We read them because they're beautifully written, and they're as fun as Dickens." No one's saying that. Some of them are good, some of them are not good. They're important because of what they are and the barrier to saying why Rand is important for what she is because, I think, people believe her ideas are evil, basically.One central idea is she thinks selfishness is good, but I think we've slightly dealt with the fact that Dagny and Hank actually aren't selfish some of the time, and that they are forced by their ethical system into not being selfish. The other thing that people say is that it's all free-market billionaire stuff, basically. I'm going to read out a passage from-- It's a speech by Francisco in the second part. It's a long speech, so I'm not going to read all eight pages. I'm going to read this speech because I think this theme that I'm about to read out, it's a motif, it's again and again and again.Hollis: Is this where he's speaking to Hank or to Dagny?Henry: I think when he's speaking to Dagny and he says this."Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he want. Money will not give him a code of values if he has evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose if he has evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent."The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him with his money replacing his judgment ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered, that no man may be smaller than his money."Hollis: That's a good--Henry: Right? It's a great paragraph. I feel like she says that in dozens of ways throughout the book, and she wants you to be very clear when you leave that this book is not a creed in the name of just make money and have free market capitalism so you can be rich. That paragraph and so many others, it's almost biblical in the way she writes it. She's really hammering the rhythms, and the tones, and the parallels. She's also, I think, trying to appropriate some of the way the Bible talks about money and turn it into her own secular pseudo-Aristotelian idea, right?Hollis: Yes.Henry: We talk a lot these days about, how can I be my best self? That's what Rand is saying. She's saying, actually, it's not about earning money, it's not about being rich. It is about the perfection of the moral life. It's about the pursuit of excellence. It's about the cultivation of virtue. These are the important things. This is what Dagny is doing. When all the entrepreneurs at the end, they're in the happy valley, actually, between them, they have not that much money, right?Hollis: Right.Henry: The book does not end in a rich utopia, it's important to say.Hollis: It's interesting. A couple of things. I want to get this back since we're still in the novel. Let me say when we get to Galt's great speech, which is bizarre. He says a similar thing that I'll bring in now. He says, "The mother who buys milk for her baby instead of a hat is not sacrificing because her values are feeding the baby. The woman who sacrifices the hat to feed her baby, but really wants the hat and is only feeding the baby out of duty is sacrificing." That's bad. She's saying get your values in order. Understand what it is you want and do that thing, but don't do it because somebody says you have to. She says this over and over in many ways, or the book says this.Henry: We should say, that example of the mother is incidental. The point she's always making is you must think this through for yourself, you must not do it because you've been told to do it.Hollis: Right, exactly. To get back to the love story aspects of the book because they don't sit and say they love each other, even all the great romances. It's not like, "I love you. I love you." It's straight to sex or looks and meetings of the minds. It's interesting. We should deal with the fact that from The Fountainhead and a little bit in this book, the sex is a little rapey. It's a difficult thing to talk about. It's certainly one of the reasons that feminists, women writers don't approve of her. In the book, it's consensual. Whatever one wants to think about the ways that people have sex, it is consensual in the book. Also in The Fountainhead.I'm sure I'll get hate mail for even saying that, but in her universe, that's where it is. What's interesting, Francisco as a character is so interesting. He's conflicted, he's charming, he's her first lover. He's utterly good in every way. He ends up without her. Hank is good. Hank goes through his struggles and learning curve about women prioritizing. If you don't like your wife, don't be married to your wife. It's like he goes through his own what are my values and how do I live them.I know you think that this is bizarre, but there's a lot of writing about the relationship of Hank and Francisco because they find themselves in the same room a lot. They happen to have both been Dagny's lovers or ex-lovers, and they really, really like each other. There's a way that that bonding-- Homosexuality does not exist in her novels, whatever, but that's a relationship of two people that really are hot for one another. There is a lot of writing. There are queer readings of Rand that make a lot of that relationship.Again, this isn't my particular lens of criticism, but I do see that the energy, which is why I asked you which speech you were reading because some of Francisco's best speeches are for Hank because he's trying to woo Hank to happy valley. Toward the end when they're all hanging out together in Galt's Gulch, there's clearly a relationship there.Henry: Oh, yes. No, once you pointed out to me, I was like, "That makes sense of so many passages." That's clearly there. What I don't understand is why she did that. I feel like, and this is quite an accomplishment because it's a big novel with a lot of moving parts, everything else is resolved both in terms of the plot, but also in terms of how it fits her philosophical idea. That, I think, is pretty much the only thing where you're left wondering, "Why was that in there? She hasn't made a point about it. They haven't done anything about it." This I don't understand. That's my query.Hollis: Getting ready to have this conversation, I spent a lot of time on some Reddit threads. I ran Atlas Shrugged Reddit threads where there's some fantastic conversations.Henry: Yes, there is.Hollis: One of them is about, how come Francisco didn't end up with anybody? That's just too bad. He's such a great character and he ends up alone. I would say he doesn't end up alone, he ends up with his boyfriend Hank, whatever that looks like. Two guys that believe in the same things, they can have whatever life they want. Go on.Henry: Are you saying that now that they're in the valley, they will be more free to pursue that relationship?Hollis: There's a lot of things that she has said about men's and women's bodies. She said in other places, "I don't think there'll ever be a woman president because why would a woman want to be president? What a woman really wants is a great man, and we can't have a president who's looking for a great man. She has to be a president." She's got a lot of lunacy about women. Whatever. I don't understand. Someplace I've read that she understands male homosexuality, but not female homosexuality. Again, I am not a Rand scholar. Having read and seen some of that in the ether, I see it in the book, and I can see how her novel would invite that analysis.I do want to say, let's spend a few seconds on some of the minor characters. There are some really wonderful minor characters. One of them is Cherryl Taggart, this shop girl that evil Jim Taggart meets one night in a rainstorm, and she's like, "Oh, you're so awesome," and they get married. It's like he's got all this praise for marrying the shop girl. It's a funny Eliza Doolittle situation because she is brought into this very wealthy society, which we have been told and we have been shown is corrupt, is evil, everybody's lying all the time, it's pretentious, Dagny hates it.Here's the Cherryl Taggart who's brought into this. In the beginning, she hates Dagny because she's told by everybody, "Hate Dagny, she's horrible." Then she comes to her own mini understanding of the corruption that we understand because Dagny's shown it in the novel, has shown it to us this entire time. She comes to it and she's like, "Oh my God," and she goes to Dagny. Dagny's so wonderful to her like, "Yes. You had to come to this on your own, I wasn't going to tell you, but you were 100% right." That's the end of her.Henry: Right. When she meets Taggart, there's this really interesting speech she has where she says, "I want to make something of myself and get somewhere." He's like, "What? What do you want to do?" Red flag. "What? Where?" She says, "I don't know, but people do things in this world. I've seen pictures of New York," and she's pointing at like the skyscrapers, right? Whatever. "I know that someone's built that. They didn't sit around and whine, but like the kitchen was filthy and the roof was leaking." She gets very emotional at this point. She says to him, "We were stinking poor and we didn't give a damn. I've dragged myself here, and I'm going to do something."Her story is very sad because she then gets mired in the corruption of Taggart's. He's basically bit lazy and a bit of a thief, and he will throw anyone under the bus for his own self-advancement. He is revealed to be a really sinister guy. I was absolutely hissing about him most of the time. Then, let's just do the plot spoiler and say what happens to Cherryl, right? Because it's important. When she has this realization and Taggart turns on her and reveals himself as this snake, and he's like, "Well, what did you expect, you idiot? This is the way the world is."Hollis: Oh, it's a horrible fight. It's the worst fight.Henry: Right? This is where the melodrama is so good. She goes running out into the streets, and it's the night and there are shadows. She's in the alleyway. Rand, I don't have the page marked, but it's like a noir film. She's so good at that atmosphere. Then it gets a little bit gothic as well. She's running through the street, and she's like, "I've got to go somewhere, anywhere. I'll work. I'll pick up trash. I'll work in a shop. I'll do anything. I've just got to get out of this."Hollis: Go work at the Panda Express. Henry: Yes. She's like, "I've got to get out of this system," because she's realized how morally corrupting it is. By this time, this is very late. Society is in a-- it's like Great Depression style economic collapse by this point. There really isn't a lot that she could do. She literally runs into a social worker and the social-- Rand makes this leering dramatic moment where the social worker reaches out to grab her and Cherryl thinks, "Oh, my God, I'm going to be taken prisoner in. I'm going back into the system," so she jumps off the bridge.This was the moment when I was like, I've had this lurking feeling about how Russian this novel is. At this point, I was like, "That could be a short story by Gogol," right? The way she set that up. That is very often the trap that a Gogol character or maybe a Dostoevsky character finds themselves in, right? That you suddenly see that the world is against you. Maybe you're crazy and paranoid. Maybe you're not. Depends which story we're reading. You run around trying to get out and you realize, "Oh, my God, I'm more trapped than I thought. Actually, maybe there is no way out." Cherryl does not get a lot of pages. She is, as you say, quite a minor character, but she illustrates the whole story so, so well, so dramatically.Hollis: Oh, wow.Henry: When it happens, you just, "Oh, Cherryl, oh, my goodness."Hollis: Thank you for reading that. Yes, you could tell from the very beginning that the seeds of what could have been a really good person were there. Thank you for reading that.Henry: When she died, I went back and I was like, "Oh, my God, I knew it."Hollis: How can you say Rand is a bad writer, right? That is careful, careful plotting, because she's just a shop girl in the rain. You've got this, the gun on the wall in that act. You know she's going to end up being good. Is she going to be rewarded for it? Let me just say, as an aside, I know we don't have time to talk about it here. My field, as I said, is 19th century African American novels, primarily now.This, usually, a woman, enslaved woman, the character who's like, "I can't deal with this," and jumps off a bridge and drowns herself is a fairly common and character. That is the only thing to do. One also sees Rand heroes. Stowe's Dred, for example, is very much, "I would rather live in the woods with a knife and then, be on the plantation and be a slave." When you think about, even the sort of into the 20th century, the Malcolm X figure, that, "I'm going to throw out all of this and be on my own," is very Randian, which I will also say very Byronic, too, Rand didn't invent this figure, but she put it front and center in these novels, and so when you think about how Atlas Shrugged could be brought into a curriculum in a network of other novels, how many of we've discussed so far, she's there, she's influenced by and continues to influence. Let's talk about your favorite minor character, the Wet Nurse.Henry: This is another great death scene.Hollis: Let's say who he is, so the government sends this young man to work at the Rearden Mills to keep an eye on Hank Rearden.Henry: Once they nationalize him, he's the bureaucrat reporting back, and Rearden calls him the Wet Nurse as an insult.Hollis: Right, and his job, he's the Communist Party person that's in every factory to make sure that everything is--Henry: That's right, he's the petty bureaucrat reporting back and making sure everyone's complying.Hollis: He's a young recent college graduate that, Hank, I think, early on, if it's possible even to find the Wet Nurse early scene, you could tell in the beginning, too, he's bright and sparkly right out of college, and this is, it seems like a good job for him. He's like, "Woohoo, I get to be here, and I get to be--" Yes, go ahead.Henry: What happens to him is, similarly to Cherryl, he has a conversion, but his conversion is not away from the corruption of the system he's been in, he is converted by what he sees in the Rearden plant, the hard work, the dedication, the idealism, the deep focus on making the metal, and he starts to see that if we don't make stuff, then all the other arguments downstream of that about how to appropriate, how to redistribute, whatever, are secondary, and so he becomes, he goes native, as it were. He becomes a Reardenite, and then at the end, when there's a crowd storming the place, and this crowd has been sent by the government, it's a fake thing to sort of--Hollis: Also, a very good scene, very dramatic.Henry: She's very good at mobs, very good at mobs, and they kill, they kill the Wet Nurse, they throw him over. He has a couple of speeches in dialogue with Rearden while he's dying, and he says--Hollis: You have to say, they throw him, they leave him on this pile of slag. He crawls up to the street where Rearden happens to be driving by, and car stops, and so that finding the Wet Nurse there and carrying him in his arms, yes.Henry: That's right, it's very dramatic, and then they have this dialogue, and he says, "I'd like to live, Mr. Rearden, God, how I'd like to, not because I'm dying, but because I've just discovered tonight what it means to be alive, and it's funny, do when I discovered it? In the office, when I stuck my neck out, when I told the bastards to go to hell, there's so many things I wish I'd known sooner, but it's no use crying over spilt milk," and then Rearden, he goes, "Listen, kid, said Rearden sternly, I want you to do me a favor." "Now, Mr. Rearden?" "Yes, now." "Of course, Mr. Rearden, if I can," and Rearden says, "You were willing to die to save my mills, will you try and live for me?"I think this is one of those great moments where, okay, maybe this isn't like George Eliot style dialogue, but you could put that straight in a movie, that would work really well, that would be great, right? I can hear Humphrey Bogart saying these things. It would work, wouldn't it?She knows that, and that's why she's doing that, she's got that technique. He's another minor character, and Rand is saying, the system is eating people up. We are setting people up for a spiritual destruction that then leads to physical destruction. This point, again, about it's not just about the material world. It's about your inner life and your own mind.I find it very moving.Hollis: These minor characters are fantastic. Then let's talk a little bit about Eddie Willers, because I think a lot about Eddie Willers. Eddie Willers, the childhood three, there were three young people, we keep going back to this childhood. We have Dagny, Francisco, because their parents were friends, and then Eddie Willers, who's like a neighborhood kid, right?Henry: He's down the street.Hollis: He lives down the street. He's like the neighborhood kid. I don't know about you. We had a neighborhood kid. There's always neighborhood kids, right? You end up spending time with this-- Eddie's just sort of always there. Then when they turn 15, 16, 17, and when there's clearly something going on between Dagny and Francisco, Eddie does take a step back, and he doesn't want to see.There's the class issues, the status issues aren't really-- they're present but not discussed by Rand. Here we have these two children heirs, and they don't say like, "You're not one of us, Eddie, because you're not an heir or an heiress." He's there, and he's got a pretty good position as Dagny's right-hand man in Taggart Transcontinental. We don't know where he went to college. We don't know what he does, but we know that he's super loyal, right?Then when she goes and takes a break for a bit, he steps in to be COO. James is like, "Eddie Willers, how can Eddie Willers be a COO?" She's like, "It's really going to be me, but he's going to be fine." We're not really supposed to identify with Eddie, but Eddie's there. Eddie has, all through the novel, all through the big old novel, Eddie eats lunch in the cafeteria. There's always this one guy he's having lunch with. This is, I don't know, like a Greek chorus thing, I don't quite know, but there's Eddie's conversations with this unknown person in the cafeteria give us a sense, maybe it's a narrator voice, like, "Meanwhile, this is going on in the world." We have these conversations. This guy he's having lunch with asks a lot of questions and starts asking a lot of personal questions about Dagny. Then we have to talk to-- I know we've gone for over an hour and 15 minutes, we've got to talk about Galt's Speech, right? When John Galt, toward the end, takes over the airwaves and gives this big three-hour speech, the big three-hour podcast as I tweeted the other day, Eddie is with Dagny.Henry: He's in the radio studio.Hollis: He's in the studio along with one of John Galt's former professors. We hear this voice. Rand says, or the narrator says, three people in the room recognize that voice. I don't know about you, did you guess that it was Galt before that moment that Eddie was having lunch with in the cafeteria?Henry: No, no, no, I didn't.Hollis: Okay, so you knew at that moment.Henry: That was when I was like, "Oh, Eddie was talking, right?" It took me a minute.Hollis: Okay, were you excited? Was that like a moment? Was that a big reveal?Henry: It was a reveal, but it made me-- Eddie's whole character puzzles me because, to me, he feels like a Watson.Hollis: Yes, that's nice, that's good.Henry: He's met Galt, who's been under their noses the whole time. He's been going through an almost Socratic method with Galt, right? If only he could have paid a little bit more attention, he would have realized what was going on. He doesn't, why is this guy so interested in Dagny, like all these things. Even after Galt's big speech, I don't think Eddie quite takes the lesson. He also comes to a more ambiguous but a bad end.Hollis: Eddie's been right there, the most loyal person. The Reddit threads on Eddie Willers, if anybody's interested, are really interesting.Henry: Yes, they are, they're so good.Hollis: Clearly, Eddie recognizes greatness, and he recognizes production, and he recognizes that Dagny is better than Jim. He recognizes Galt. They've been having these conversations for 12 years in the cafeteria. Every time he goes to the cafeteria, he's like, "Where's my friend, where's my friend?" When his friend disappears, but he also tells Galt a few things about Dagny that are personal and private. When everybody in the world, all the great people in the world, this is a big spoiler, go to Galt's Gulch at the end.Henry: He's not there.Hollis: He doesn't get to go. Is it because of the compromises he made along the way? Rand had the power to reward everybody. Hank's secretary gets to go, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: She's gone throughout the whole thing.Henry: Eddie never thinks for himself. I think that's the-- He's a very, I think, maybe one of the more tragic victims of the whole thing because-- sorry. In a way, because, Cherryl and the Wet Nurse, they try and do the right thing and they end up dying. That's like a more normal tragedy in the sense that they made a mistake. At the moment of realization, they got toppled.Eddie, in a way, is more upsetting because he never makes a mistake and he never has a moment of realization. Rand is, I think this is maybe one of the cruelest parts of the book where she's almost saying, "This guy's never going to think for himself, and he hasn't got a hope." In a novel, if this was like a realistic novel, and she was saying, "Such is the cruelty of the world, what can we do for this person?" That would be one thing. In a novel that's like ending in a utopia or in a sort of utopia, it's one of the points where she's really harsh.Hollis: She's really harsh. I'd love to go and look at her notes at some point in time when I have an idle hour, which I won't, to say like, did she sit around? It's like, "What should I do with Eddie?" To have him die, probably, in the desert with a broken down Taggart transcontinental engine, screaming in terror and crying.Henry: Even at that stage, he can't think for himself and see that the system isn't worth supporting.Hollis: Right. He's just going to be a company man to the end.Henry: It's as cruel as those fables we tell children, like the grasshopper and the ants. He will freeze to death in the winter. There's nothing you can do about it. There are times when she gets really, really tough. I think is why people hate her.Hollis: We were talking about this, about Dickens and minor characters and coming to redemption and Dickens, except Jo. Jo and Jo All Alones, there are people who have redemption and die. Again, I don't know.Henry: There's Cherryl and the Wet Nurse are like Jo. They're tragic victims of the system. She's doing it to say, "Look how bad this is. Look how bad things are." To me, Eddie is more like Mr. Micawber. He's hopeless. It's a little bit comic. It's not a bad thing. Whereas Dickens, at the end, will just say, "Oh, screw the integrity of the plot and the morals. Let's just let Mr. Micawber-- let's find a way out for him." Everyone wants this guy to do well. Rand is like, "No, I'm sticking to my principles. He's dead in the desert, man. He's going to he's going to burn to death." He's like, "Wow, that's okay."Hollis: The funny thing is poor John Galt doesn't even care about him. John Galt has been a bad guy. John Galt is a complicated figure. Let's spend a bit on him.Henry: Before we do that, I actually want to do a very short segment contextualizing her in the 50s because then what you say about Galt will be against this background of what are some of the other ideas in the 50s, right?Hollis: Got it.Henry: I think sometimes the Galt stuff is held up as what's wrong with this novel. When you abstract it and just say it, maybe that's an easier case to make. I think once you understand that this is 1957, she's been writing the book for what, 12 years, I think, or 15 years, the Galt speech takes her 3 years to write, I think. This is, I think the most important label we can give the novel is it's a Cold War novel. She's Russian. What she's doing, in some ways, is saying to America, "This is what will happen to us if we adopt the system of our Cold War enemies." It's like, "This is animal farm, but in America with real people with trains and energy plants and industry, no pigs. This is real life." We've had books like that in our own time. The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver said, that book said, "If the 2008 crash had actually gone really badly wrong and society collapsed, how would it go?" I think that's what she's reacting to. The year before it was published, there was a sociology book called The Organization Man.Hollis: Oh, yes. William Whyte.Henry: A great book. Everyone should read that book. He is worrying, the whole book is basically him saying, "I've surveyed all these people in corporate America. They're losing the Protestant work ethic. They're losing the entrepreneurial spirit. They're losing their individual drive. Instead of wanting to make a name for themselves and invent something and do great things," he says, "they've all got this managerial spirit. All the young men coming from college, they're like, 'Everything's been done. We just need to manage it now.'" He's like, "America is collapsing." Yes, he thinks it's this awful. Obviously, that problem got solved.That, I think, that gives some sense of why, at that moment, is Ayn Rand writing the Galt speech? Because this is the background. We're in the Cold War, and there's this looming sense of the cold, dead hand of bureaucracy and managerialism is. Other people are saying, "Actually, this might be a serious problem."Hollis: I think that's right. Thank you for bringing up Whyte. I think there's so much in the background. There's so much that she's in conversation with. There's so much about this speech, so that when you ask somebody on the street-- Again, let me say this, make the comparison again to Uncle Tom's Cabin, people go through life feeling like they know Uncle Tom's Cabin, Simon Legree, Eliza Crossing the Ice, without having ever read it.Not to name drop a bit, but when I did my annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, this big, huge book, and it got reviewed by John Updike in The New Yorker, and I was like, "This is freaking John Updike." He's like, "I never read it. I never read it." Henry Louis Gates and then whoever this young grad student was, Hollis Robbins, are writing this book, I guess I'll read it. It was interesting to me, when I talk about Uncle Tom's Cabin, "I've never read it," because it's a book you know about without reading. A lot of people know about Atlas Shrugged without having read it. I think Marc Andreessen said-- didn't he say on this podcast that he only recently read it?Henry: I was fascinated by this. He read it four years ago.Hollis: Right, during COVID.Henry: In the bibliography for the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, and I assumed he was one of those people, he was like you, he'd read it as a teenager, it had been informative. No, he came to it very recently. Something's happening with this book, right?Hollis: Huge things are happening, but the people who know about it, there's certain things that you know, you know it's long, you know that the sex is perhaps not what you would have wanted. You know that there's this big, really long thing called John Galt's Speech, and that it's like the whaling chapters in Moby-Dick. People read Moby-Dick, you're like, "Oh, yes, but I skipped all the chapters on cetology." That's the thing that you say, right? The thing that you say is like, "Yes, but I skipped all the John Galt's Speech." I was very interested when we were texting over the last month or so, what you would say when you got to John Galt's Speech. As on cue, one day, I get this text and it's like, "Oh, my God, this speech is really long." I'm like, "Yes, you are the perfect reader."Henry: I was like, "Hollis, this might be where I drop out of the book."Hollis: I'm like, "Yes, you and the world, okay?" This is why you're an excellent reader of this book, because it is a frigging slog. Just because I'm having eye issues these days, I had decided instead of rereading my copy, and I do have a newer copy than this tiny print thing, I decided to listen on audiobook. It was 62 hours or whatever, it was 45 hours, because I listen at 1.4. The speech is awesome listening to it. It, at 1.4, it's not quite 3 hours. It's really good. In the last few days, I was listening to it again, okay? I really wanted to understand somebody who's such a good plotter, and somebody who really understands how to keep people's interest, why are you doing this, Rand? Why are you doing this, Ms. Rand? I love the fact that she's always called Miss. Rand, because Miss., that is a term that we

«Durante doce años os habéis preguntado: ¿Quién es John Galt? Soy John Galt quien habla. Soy el hombre que ama su vida. Soy el hombre que no sacrifica su amor o sus valores. Soy el hombre que os ha privado de víctimas y de esa forma ha destruido vuestro mundo. Y si queréis saber por qué estáis pereciendo —vosotros, que le teméis al conocimiento— yo soy el hombre que ahora os lo va a decir». Estas fueron las palabras de Ayn Rand y estos son los valores que mueven la vida de Jon Goitia. Kapital es posible gracias a sus colaboradores: ⁠Smartick⁠. El método online de matemáticas y lectura. ¿Quieres el mejor futuro para tus hijos? ¿Crees en la constancia y los buenos hábitos, en el desafío, en que existe un uso responsable de la tecnología? Si tienen entre 4 y 14 años, consigue que dominen los pilares de su educación, en el colegio y como personas: las matemáticas, la comprensión lectora, escribir bien, el pensamiento crítico. Smartick es el método online personalizado, basado en evidencias científicas, con solo 15 minutos al día por programa, que les ayudará a alcanzar su máximo potencial. Sin ayuda de los padres. Además, tendrás siempre disponible a expertos para consultar su evolución. Prueba 7 días gratis Smartick en este enlace y, si contratas, obtén un precio especial añadiendo el cupón KAPITAL. Patrocina Kapital. Toda la información en este link. Índice: 1:40 Go woke, go broke. 4:06 El artículo en El Mundo que cambió su vida. 14:36 Reasignación eficiente de los recursos. 19:25 El Sandero de las viviendas. 23:33 No se puede construir por menos de 250.000. 30:10 El mercado no funciona si el promotor no gana. 37:58 Combatir la demagogia con empatía. 48:33 La inseguridad jurídica encarece los precios. 54:52 Contratos de renta antigua. 1:04:39 Los monopolios de Booking y Airbnb. 1:17:58 Es urgente cambiar la ley. 1:23:38 La mala calidad de las construcciones modernas. 1:26:33 Tenemos el deber moral de mantener la singularidad. 1:32:08 El alegato de Howard Roark. Apuntes: La rebelión del Atlas. Ayn Rand. El manantial. Ayna Rand. Bioshock. Ken Levine. El pisito. Marco Ferreri.

Few novels of the 1900's are more controversial than Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. That hasn't stopped the sophists from trying to make a statement about it. Rather the opposite. This spoiler free episode of the REDACTED Culture Cast delves into some things you might want to know, or look for when reading Rand's Magnum Opus. Ever heard of Rearden, who is John Galt? Why do these names matter? This isn't a book review, but a primer, to get you started on a journey into Objectivism, the ideas and circumstances of Atlas Shrugged, and how it is one of the best books at challenging the legitimacy of that black pill you might be trying to hawk. Part Dystopian, part Fable, get ready for a roller coaster on blue-green rails. This episode has been sponsored by Obsidian Arms, a manufacturer of tools, parts and firearms, as well as operating as an OEM shop for those looking to bring excellence to the market. Their Minnesota-based shop builds and cuts parts out of U.S.-sourced materials. Their gunsmith tools, custom firearms, and capabilities can be found at www.obsidianarms.comSupport the REDACTED Culture Cast at redactedculture.locals.comSSP and boutique products at redactedllc.comFollow us on Instagram at @redactedllc

Get original articles, extended podcasts, and direct access to Blendr News on our Substack Channel: blendrnews.substack.com - In this episode of "The Blendr Report," Jonathan and Liam discuss: 0:00 Intro 0:42 Trudeau: Climate Policies More Important Than Affordability 4:26 The Different Types of Totalitarian Leaders 6:43 Canada's Electric Vehicle Delusion 10:02 Canada's Democracy Was Assembled by China 14:40 How Does a Trump Presidency Change Canada? 20:30 Trudeau's Bureaucracy Costs $69.5 Billion Annually 23:51 Why Trudeau is Hiring So Many Bureaucrats 26:00 Ayn Rand's ‘Atlas Shrugged' Dystopian Nightmare 28:24 Who is John Galt? Individualism vs. Collectivism? 30:23 Who makes up the Left and Right Wing of Politics? 33:34 How Media Gaslighting Created Mass Psychosis 37:02 Media Narratives vs. Reality 43:35 The View Labels Joe Rogan “Dragon Believer” 49:36 How Propaganda Hijacks People's Brains 52:22 Trump Nominates RFK Jr. as Health Secretary - Follow BLENDR News: Twitter - @BlendrNews Instagram - @blendr.report TikTok - @blendrnews - Follow Jonathan: Instagram - @itsjonathanharvey TikTok - @itsjonathanharvey - Follow Liam: Instagram - @liam.out.loud Twitter - @liam_out_loud YouTube - @liam-out-loud - Subscribe to the BLENDR News Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast or Google Podcast | open.spotify.com/show/54wJHHTrDE3FgFqBUIFrIq?si=3fe4244965d84a31

Yksilöt Suomen pelastus! Henri Österlund #neuvottelija 283. Fenkku Österlund on Accendo Capitalin perustaja ja yksi Samin rahoituskavereita, jotka lähtivät valloittamaan Lontoon Cityä 1990-luvun lopulla. Hän lensi Andorrasta pohtimaan miksi Suomi on niin umpikujassa. Yksi vastaus löytyy yksilön systemaattisesta kahlitsemista. Kollektiivi ajattelee yksilöitä utilitäärisesti osana koneistoa, joilla on tehtävänä lähinnä tuottaa resursseja, erityisesti veroja, julkiselle keskushallinnolle. Se jakaa niitä loismaisilla periaatteillaan. Alle vuosikymmen sitten Suomi oli mielestään päässyt eroon suomettumisesta. Kuitenkin taloudellisesti täysin riskitön Ayn Randin kirjakäännös oli syvän ironisesti yhä liian radikaalia ajattelua suurimmille kustantajillemme. Henri muistuttaa että Samikin oli alle kymmenen vuotta sitten vielä kollektivisti ainakin tässä suhteessa. Voitko sinä objektivisesti ajatella itseäsi ja läheisiäsi muina kuin hyvinvointivaltion osana? Who is John Galt? Liity kanavalle ja nauti eduista: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRI34L9OtDJuZpaWicbNXzg/join #neuvottelija Sami Miettinen

Listening to David Waldman and today's KITM is part of your civic duty, but only part. Now is the time to phone bank, or door knock. Enjoy the foliage, listen to us on your buds. Donald Trump mocked minimum wage earners while cosplaying one at a Potemkin McDonald's, which is weird, as Donald does dislike being seen as one of the little guys. Trump sure isn't the sort to turn down implants though if he saw an advantage, therefore he might be up for a brain implant, even if it was linked to Elon's Bluetooth…  Technocratic government conspirators have wanted to install a utopian one-world government for ages, but all of a sudden that doesn't sound like a bad thing anymore to the rich tech bros out to bitcoin the economy, uber the workforce, and John Galt their incelness. Back in the real world, infants are dying at higher rates following abortion bans in the US. A top Florida health department attorney finally quit his job of threatening TV stations with prosecution if they did not stop airing ads that Ron DeSantis didn't like. According to a Montana park ranger, and several factual records, Senatorial candidate/dick Tim Sheehy shot himself, then incriminated fellow soldiers to make himself sound better. Not too good of a plan, and it didn't work.

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Bienvenue dans un nouvel épisode du Book Club ! Vous le savez, tous les mois, je pars à la recherche d'un livre à vous recommander. Et je suis ravie et enthousiaste car le livre de ce mois de juillet est un chef-d'œuvre, mondialement connu mais peu lu en France. Il s'agit de La Grève de l'auteure américaine Ayn Rand, écrit en 1957.Alors, de quoi parle ce livre ? Comme son titre l'indique, il traite d'une grève, mais c'est bien plus que cela. La Grève est une épopée industrielle et philosophique, une fresque monumentale où se mêlent industrie, philosophie et mystère. Un roman qui nous tient en haleine ! L'histoire se déroule dans une Amérique dystopique en pleine désintégration économique et morale. Dans ce contexte apocalyptique des années 50 aux États-Unis, deux héros, un homme et une femme, luttent contre un système oppressif qui cherche à anéantir l'esprit d'entreprise et l'excellence individuelle.Il s'agit de Dagny Taggart, une femme d'affaires déterminée et inspirante, et Hank Rearden, un industriel visionnaire. Ensemble, ils se lancent dans une quête pour sauver leur entreprise et, plus largement, la société. Dans ce monde dystopique, l'économie s'effondre et les entrepreneurs disparaissent mystérieusement les uns après les autres, créant un climat de confusion et de désespoir.Le secret derrière ces disparitions porte un nom : John Galt. Tout au long du roman, la question obsédante "Qui est John Galt ?" nous tient en haleine.Ce livre est bien plus qu'un simple roman ; c'est un véritable manifeste philosophique. Ayn Rand, philosophe de formation, y célèbre l'esprit humain et la quête du bonheur personnel comme valeur suprême. C'est une lecture provocatrice mais incroyablement inspirante qui offre une réflexion audacieuse sur le rôle de l'individu dans la société, la valeur de la liberté, et les tensions entre collectivisme et individualisme, altruisme et égoïsme. Il est disponible en français sous le titre La Grève et en anglais sous le titre Atlas Shrugged, dans toutes les bonnes librairies.Pour terminer, si ce livre vous tente, n'hésitez pas à me dire sur Instagram sous ma vidéo YouTube. Je suis curieuse de savoir ce que vous en pensez, surtout que ce livre suscite des avis partagés en France ! Le débat est ouvert, mes chers amis. Merci beaucoup et profitez bien de ce nouveau BookClub avec "La Grève".Notes et références du Book-ClubPour retrouver le livre : “La grève” d'Ayn Rand(lien affilié Fnac)1. Faites vous coacher par moi !DEMIAN, un concentré de 10 ans d'expérience d'entrepreneur. Les formations DEMIAN vous apportent des outils et méthodes concrètes pour développer votre projet professionnel. Il s'agit d'un concentré maximal de valeur et d'expérience pour qu'en quelques heures vous gagniez l'équivalent d'années de travail. Découvrez DEMIAN !2. La NewsLa News du vendredi est une mini newsletter pour vous nourrir en plus du podcast. C'est une newsletter très courte, à lire en 5mn top chrono de ce qui m'a marqué dans les dernières semaines : livres à lire, réflexions, applis à télécharger, citations, films ou documentaires à voir etc. Pour la recevoir, il n'y a qu'à s'abonner à la newsletter sur mon site !3. Des conseils concrets sur ma chaîne YouTubeEnvie de lancer votre propre podcast ? De bénéficier de conseils sur quel matériel utiliser ? Ma nouvelle chaîne YouTube est faite pour vous !4.Contactez-moi ! Si le podcast vous plaît, le meilleur moyen de me le dire, ou de me faire vos feed-backs (et ce qui m'aide le plus à le faire connaître) c'est simplement de laisser un avis 5 étoiles ou un commentaire sur l'application iTunes. Ça m'aide vraiment, alors n'hésitez pas :)Pour me poser des questions ou suivre mes tribulations c'est par ici :Sur Instagram @paulinelaigneauSur LinkedIn @pauline LaigneauSur YouTube Pauline LaigneauVous pouvez consulter notre politique de confidentialité sur https://art19.com/privacy ainsi que la notice de confidentialité de la Californie sur https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

"The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or of joy. The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.” Welcome back to another episode of Made You Think! In this episode, we explore the concept of time through the lens of one of the most imaginative books of our time, Einstein's Dreams. The novel portrays Albert Einstein as a young scientist grappling with his dreams as he works on his theory of relativity. This episode promises to spark deep reflection, ignite your curiosity, and challenge your perception of time. We cover a wide range of topics including: The hidden costs of immortality Contemplating a world where every day is a fresh start Why it's easy to forget to appreciate the things you have How death ultimately gives our life meaning Our most obnoxious literary opinions And much more. Please enjoy, and make sure to follow Nat, Neil, and Adil on Twitter and share your thoughts on the episode. Links from the Episode: Mentioned in the Show: Click (4:32) Books Mentioned: Einstein's Dreams Tao Te Ching (1:33) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) The Sovereign Individual (12:59) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) The Fourth Turning (13:01) (Book Episode) Logicomix (22:41) (Book Episode) East of Eden (30:30) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) The Unbearable Lightness of Being (32:11) The First World War (34:50) The Brothers K (34:51) Musashi (34:53) Infinite Jest (37:34) (Book Episode 1) (Book Episode 2) (Nat's Book Notes) Atlas Shrugged (37:58) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) Gödel, Escher, Bach (43:45) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) People Mentioned: Alan Lightman John Steinbeck (18:31) Werner Heisenberg (23:29) Milan Kundera (32:23) David Perell (44:29) Show Topics: (0:00) In today's episode, we're covering Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman. Adil shares his experience going through the book for the 3rd time, noting its unique approach devoid of traditional characters yet filled with intense emotional resonance across the theme of 'time'. (2:43) The stories challenge the way we think about time, with each chapter introducing a unique time variable that initially appears distinct on the surface. However, beneath the surface, these chapters resonate with aspects of our own reality. We list off a few chapters that were top of mind for us. (6:10) Death is what gives life meaning. We explore this concept by diving into one of the short stories where nobody dies. If you know that time is infinite, how would you spend that time?  (8:45) Which chapter(s) of Einstein's Dreams did we connect with the most?  (11:16) We discuss the concept of sleep training, contemplating the ideal scenario where babies would sleep according to their natural rhythms. However, balancing the baby's freedom to sleep spontaneously with the demands of a structured work and life schedule can be a struggle. (12:32) Nat, Neil, and Adil ponder the scenario if everyone were to just live one day. You wouldn't know seasons, and all you'll ever know is what the current day brings. (16:08) Connections between Einstein's Dreams and a previous read on the podcast, The Fourth Turning.  (17:51) Despite not having main characters (aside from Einstein and Besso), this book still manages to drive a lot of emotions. We admire Lightman's ability to write in a soft, empathetic way, while painting the picture for readers very effectively.  (19:59) Were these short stories from the book thoughts that Einstein may have had in real life as he worked towards his theories on time and relativity? (23:45) We touch on a story from the book where every day is truly a fresh start, and there is no knowledge of the past or future.  (26:45) Doing everything as if it's for the first time will give you excitement, but it's also meaningful to act as if you're doing something for the very last time.  (28:25) Einstein's theory of general relativity, and how at the time of this theory, it was still unknown in the world of physics that the world is constantly expanding rather than fixed. (30:27) Though it may not be the longest book, it still hits hard. Nat, Neil, and Adil share their appreciation for Einstein's Dreams being impactful despite the length. It's one of those books that can make you feel a different way each time you read it. (36:47) Shoutout to Jack for the book recommendation on Musashi! If you have any book recommendations that you'd like us to pick up for the show, you can submit them to us here.  (38:55) You can get away with a lot in books, but what about a 35,000 word speech? We talk about John Galt's mighty speech in Atlas Shrugged. So long as you give the readers a reason to finish the book and recommend it to others, you can really do what you want within the pages.  (44:17) That concludes this thought-provoking episode! Next up, we're tackling Martin Gilbert's The First World War. Make sure to give our new Instagram page a follow and shoot us a book recommendation. If you have any recs, please send them our way! If you enjoyed this episode, let us know by leaving a review on iTunes and tell a friend. As always, let us know if you have any book recommendations! You can say hi to us on Twitter @TheRealNeilS, @adilmajid, @nateliason and share your thoughts on this episode. You can now support Made You Think using the Value-for-Value feature of Podcasting 2.0. This means you can directly tip the co-hosts in BTC with minimal transaction fees. To get started, simply download a podcast app (like Fountain or Breez) that supports Value-for-Value and send some BTC to your in-app wallet. You can then use that to support shows who have opted-in, including Made You Think! We'll be going with this direct support model moving forward, rather than ads. Thanks for listening. See you next time!

"We are not makers of history. We are made by history." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr. I've had a personal fascination with history most of my life and it was always a favourite subject in school so I'm pretty excited to chat with David Armstrong, President of the Huron County Historical Society. We will chat about the many ways that we, here in Midwestern Ontario, have been made by our history. We'll discuss the Society and what they do, our Indigenous and European roots, some upcoming historical anniversaries, some must see tourist destinations in our area along Tiger Dunlop, John Galt and were the plans for Guelph and Goderich really mixed up?

Welcome to a journey into the gold markets on today's podcast, where I, alongside a valued member from the John Galt community, dive deep into the glittering realms of gold trading. For the next 50 minutes, we're going to tackle some burning questions, slicing through the noise with sharp insights and fearless forecasts. Whether you're a battle-hardened trader or a curious onlooker ready to dip your toes into the gold rush, strap in. We're set to explore everything from market dynamics to cunning trading strategies, ensuring you walk away with a treasure trove of knowledge. Let the gold games begin! And dear John Galts, line-up, let's do more…⬇️ Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for full episodes ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/HughHendryhttps://hughhendry.substack.com⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leave a five star review and comment on Apple Podcasts!

As we count down to the 200th anniversary of the Canada Company settling Guelph in just three years, you can expect to hear more about how we're honouring our history in Guelph, both pre- and post-settlement. Between that moment John Galt cut down that first tree and this moment listening to this podcast, there's been a whole lot of Guelph history, and one man has published a new collection about some of those lesser known bits that you should definitely know. This week, we're joined by Ed Butts, a local author and historian. Butts has dedicated much of the last decade inspecting all of Guelph's nooks and crannies, looking at all the forgotten tales, the forgotten celebrities, the newsmakers and royals who came to town, and all the times that no one liked what was in the headlines. Butts has taken all this and woven weekly adventures through Royal City history for Guelph Today, and the Guelph Mercury before that. Now, Butt's collected some of those tales in a new booked appropriately called Guelph Stories. From the origin of certain Guelph landmarks, to all the mysterious and still unsolved crimes in Guelph's underbelly; from that time after World War II when Guelph City Council banned midnight movies to Anne Jamison who lived in Guelph between her birth in Ireland and Hollywood fame on the radio, Guelph Stories is 300 pages of local character that money can't buy (although buying a copy of the book will cost you $30).  On this week's podcast, we will go behind the pages, as it were, to talk to Butts about how the book, and the history, came together. He will tell us about how his Guelph Story started, how he seeks out the history he tells and how, sometimes, the history comes to him. We will also talk about how he knows when he's found a good story, and how he separates fact from legend when he's doing research. Also, which local history nerd would win a round of Jeopardy! that focuses on Guelph history? So let's dig into the story behind Guelph Stories on this week's Guelph Politicast! You can get your copy of Guelph Stories at The Bookshelf independent bookstore downtown, and at the gift shop of the Guelph Civic Museum. You can also email Butts about getting your copy by sending your order to edpbutts [at] yahoo.com. You can also stay up-to-date, so to speak, with all of Butt's latest insights into Guelph's rich and varied history by reading his weekly column at Guelph Today. The host for the Guelph Politicast is Podbean. Find more episodes of the Politicast here, or download them on your favourite podcast app at Apple, TuneIn and Spotify. Also, when you subscribe to the Guelph Politicast channel and you will also get an episode of Open Sources Guelph every Monday, and an episode of End Credits every Friday.

Learn more about and follow Michael Oliver: https://www.olivermsa.com/ https://twitter.com/oliver_msa?lang=en   Michael Oliver's Book: The New Libertarianism: Anarcho-Capitalism https://www.amazon.com/The-Libertarianism-Anarcho-Capitalism-Michael-Oliver/dp/1491068620/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1379537216&sr=8-1&keywords=the+new+libertarianism+anarcho-capitalism We The People must stand strong, stay united, resolute, calm, and focus on the mission - God Wins!   We at www.themelkshow.com want to thank all our amazing patriot pals for joining us on this journey, for your support of our work, and for your faith in this biblical transition to greatness. We love what we do and are working hard to keep on top of everything to help this transition along peacefully and with love. Please help us amplify our message: Like, Comment & Share!   The Show's Partners Page: https://themelkshow.com/partners/ Consider Making A Donation: https://themelkshow.com/donate/   Beverly Hills Precious Metals Exchange Buy Gold & Silver https://themelkshow.com/gold/ Speak with Gold Expert Andrew Sorchini…Tell Him Mel K Sent You!   Support Patriots With MyPillow Go to https://www.mypillow.com/melk Use offer code “MelK” to support both MyPillow and The Mel K Show   Mel K Superfoods Supercharge your wellness with Mel K Superfoods Use Code: MELKWELLNESS and Save Over $100 off retail today! www.MelKSuperfoods.com   Healthy Hydration: https://healthyhydration.com/products/mel-k-special-deluxe   Patriot Mobile Support your values, your freedom and the Mel K Show. Switch to Patriot Mobile for Free. Use free activation code MELK https://www.patriotmobile.com/melk/   HempWorx The #1 selling CBD brand. Offering cutting edge products that run the gamut from CBD oils and other hemp products to essential oils in our Mantra Brand, MDC Daily Sprays which are Vitamin and Herb combination sprays/ https://themelkshow.com/my-daily-choice/   Dr. Zelenko Immunity Protocols https://zstacklife.com/MelK   The Wellness Company - Emergency Medical Kits: www.twc.health/pages/melk-prepkit   Dr. Jason Dean and BraveTV bring you the most innovative and cutting edge science in Nutrition with Nano-Particle Detoxification, The Full Moon Parasite Protocol and Clot Shot Defense. https://bravetv.store/?sca_ref=3278505.GWvLbyryzv   Dr. Stella Immanuel, MD. Consult with a renowned healthcare provider! Offering Telehealth Services & Supplements. Use offer code ‘MelK' for 5% Off https://bit.ly/MelKDrStellaMD   Another way to get involved and find ways to become active in the community is to come meet Mel and many amazing truth warriors at our upcoming live in-person speaking events. Together we are unstoppable. We look forward to seeing you. God Wins! https://themelkshow.com/events/   Stop Human Trafficking Bradenton, FL May 4th   Mel K at Women of Washington Bellevue, WA May 8th   Patriot Preparedness Symposium Cronton, Ohio May 10th-11th   ReAwaken America Tour Detroit, MI June 7th & 8th  Remember to mention Mel K for great discounts on all these fun and informative events. See you there! Our Website www.TheMelKShow.com Rumble (Video) - The Mel K Show: https://rumble.com/c/TheMelKShow Twitter: https://twitter.com/MelKShow Twitter (Original): https://twitter.com/originalmelk TRUTH Social: https://truthsocial.com/@themelkshow Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themelkshow/ CloutHub: https://app.clouthub.com/#/users/u/TheMelKShow Mel K Show Video Platform (Subscription): https://www.themelkshow.tv Bitchute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/Iw2kiviwZpwx/ Podbean: https://themelkshow.podbean.com/ Gab: https://gab.com/MelKShow GETTR: https://www.gettr.com/user/themelkshow Locals.com: https://melk.locals.com/ Banned Video: https://banned.video/channel/the-mel-k-show Brighteon: https://www.brighteon.com/channels/themelkshow Odysee: https://odysee.com/@themelkshow:5

If you've ever read the book, Atlas shrugged you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, that's OK. We all feel the weight of the world on our shoulders and this is an experience. I'm going through now that might be helpful. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/benefithackers/message

Mitchell Broderick and Tim Chermak join me to discuss their new company and how they're using it to both promote rational philosophy and upend an industry.

Increíble saber que un juez español está investigando la alta traición de Puigdemont en sus negociaciones con Rusia para recibir ayuda y así desestabilizar a España.También hablo de la fea constumbre de un señor que a cambio de votos te ofrece cambiar el código penal. Pero al final termino con una buena noticia. Telegram Isla difusión: https://t.me/+M46yiWO_BJU2NzkySuscríbete a mi podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/user/vidasenredMi canal en Odysee: https://odysee.com/@vidasenred:8En Pocket Cast: https://pca.st/podcast/38707740-c7a5-012f-7f6b-723c91aeae46Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@juliomm1Consigue mis libros:https://www.amazon.es/dp/179311627Xhttps://amzn.to/3odqWv7

Today on the Ether we have Inter Protocol hosting the Hot Topic series, focused on liquid staking. You'll hear from DCF, Fred Radford.eth, Zaki, Persistence One, John Galt, Mikhil Pandey, NashQ, and more! Recorded on January 24th 2024. Make sure to check out the newest tracks from Finn and the RAC FM gang over at ImaginetheSmell.org! The majority of the music at the end of these spaces can be found streaming over on Spotify, and the rest of the streaming platforms. Check out Project Survival, Virus Diaries, and Plan B wherever you get your music. Thank you to everyone in the community who supports TerraSpaces.

Today on the Ether we have episode 15 of the Cosmos Hub AtomZone. You'll hear from Røbb Stack, jehan, Cryptocito, John Galt, Curious J, Spaydh, and more! Recorded on January 23rd 2024. Make sure to check out the newest tracks from Finn and the RAC FM gang over at ImaginetheSmell.org! The majority of the music at the end of these spaces can be found streaming over on Spotify, and the rest of the streaming platforms. Check out Project Survival, Virus Diaries, and Plan B wherever you get your music. Thank you to everyone in the community who supports TerraSpaces.

Den mehr als 100-minütigen Rant zu Ayn Rand könnt ihr bei Patreon und Steady hören: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/oleundwolfgang Steady: https://steadyhq.com/de/oleundwolfgang/about 1500 Seiten, die bis heute die libertäre und neoliberale Ideologie vieler Unternehmer und Publizisten prägen: In der neuen Folge von „Wohlstand für Alle“-Literatur sprechen wir über „Atlas Shrugged“ („Der freie Mensch“, „Atlas wirf die Welt ab“, „Der Streik – Oder: Wer ist John Galt?“) von Ayn Rand. Dieser Roman handelt von einem Streik der etwas anderen Art: Nicht die Arbeiter legen die Arbeit nieder, sondern die Kapitalisten, und zwar die besonders kreativen und herausragenden. Sie weigern sich, die soziale Politik aus Washington weiter zu unterstützen und nehmen lieber eine zeitweilige Deindustrialisierung in Kauf, bevor sie sich der Politik unterwerfen. Im Mittelpunkt des Romans steht eine Frau und Unternehmerin, die nicht nur zwischen drei Männern hin- und hergerissen ist, sondern lange Zeit versucht, die Welt auf ihren Schultern zu tragen, bis auch sie die Lehren des John Galt leibhaftig erkennt und spürt. Mehr dazu von Ole Nymoen und Wolfgang M. Schmitt in der neuen Folge von „Wohlstand für Alle“-Literatur. Literatur: Ayn Rand: Der freie Mensch. Übersetzt von Michael und Thomas Görden, Thinkum. Jennifer Burns: Goddess of the Market. Ayn Rand and the American Right, Oxford University Press. Ihr könnt uns unterstützen - herzlichen Dank! Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/oleundwolfgang Konto: Wolfgang M. Schmitt, Ole Nymoen Betreff: Wohlstand fuer Alle IBAN: DE67 5745 0120 0130 7996 12 BIC: MALADE51NWD Social Media: Instagram: Unser gemeinsamer Kanal: https://www.instagram.com/oleundwolfgang/ Ole: https://www.instagram.com/ole.nymoen/ Wolfgang: https://www.instagram.com/wolfgangmschmitt/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@oleundwolfgang Twitter: Unser gemeinsamer Kanal: https://twitter.com/OleUndWolfgang Ole: twitter.com/nymoen_ole Wolfgang: twitter.com/SchmittJunior Die gesamte WfA-Literaturliste: https://wohlstand-fuer-alle.netlify.app

Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged in 1957. Her protagonist was John Galt. Sixty-six years later it seems John Galt has come to life in the form of Elon Musk, exemplifying what courage in the face of evil looks like.

00:00 Intro01:11 Recent Talks04:14 World War 313:26 Putin15:14 China19:40 Iran21:17 No base for World War 323:40 Accident25:05 What could lead to World War 3?28:53 Not in next 15 years32:32 Internal Threats34:32 Real Challenge37:49 What We NeedLive Questions:41:15 This makes 60 out of a hundred for a song review. I did the last 20 on what I thought was a live show but it was an applause. I sent you an email with a screenshot when it happened.41:31 Do altruists have to value justice in order to support injustice - to make a worthy sacrifice?42:59 I can see how nationalism and existential crises can bring people together to take life and values more seriously. Look at Israel. Those people love intensely.44:55 What do you think of Mauritius? Does it have potential to be another Singapore? Are there any islands or places that are going to be great to have residency or a place to live in during World War 3? How does South East Asia come into play in WW3?48:41 Great shows! Given that the only way to finally defeat an enemy is to destroy its will to fight, it seems to me that only way to decisively end Islamic terrorism is to demonstrate that Allah is impotent, by destroying the holiest mosques in Mecca and Medina. Thoughts?55:09 I had a prof tell me "Hitler and the Nazi's were copying the American ideal of Manifest Destiny as justification to expand there empire". When people make giant leaps in logic, they have to be dishonest and motivated by evil?55:13 Vivek's absolute asinine and dishonest comments on Ukraine, and his constant kissing up to Trump are pathetic. He has lost my vote. I think DeSantis is the most competent and reasonable choice.57:52 If the uproar driving anti-Israeli sentiment is fundamentally antisemitic, what is driving the pro-Israeli sentiment? This issue brings out passion in people regardless of relations one may have, or not have, with either side1:00:28 What inspired the positive sense of life in the 1800s? How does it differ from what influences today's negative sense of life?1:04:44 How should the US and Israel deal with Qatar?1:05:53 I would have had many things to criticize about the US in 1941 but I would have been 100% pro America in WW2. Equally, one can have criticisms of the policies of the Israeli government, but be 100% pro israel in the conflict.1:08:43 I guess my point is that THIS issue gets people on both sides riled up like no other. If anti-Semitism and anti-oppression explains one side's passion, what explains the other side's? Esp. for people w/ "no skin in the game"?1:11:11 In the future will we be able to genetically engineer geniuses? Will we be able to produce billions of Ayn Rand's?1:12:10 Is Tucker Carlson an anti-semite?1:13:11 Did Biden force the ceasefire? Shameful.1:14:10 It's amazing how effective altruism is as a floating abstraction. It's so automatized in our impulses and emotional lurches.1:14:24 Intellectuals today have become masters of using the most words possible to say absolutely nothing.1:14:53 Is Germany the most intellectual culture in Europe? ironic that German philosophy explicitly seeks to destroy the intellect.1:15:28 It's hard for me to believe all this anti Israel activity is calculated anti semitism. Do most people think about Jews that much?1:16:33 A bit off topic, but do you regard addiction as a disease? It strikes me that low will power/self-esteem isn't a disease.1:19:13 What did you make of Vivek's sexist remarks to Nikki Haley?1:20:48 Do you consider yourself more Howard Roark or John Galt?1:21:32 It's hard to calibrate the nihilism levels in the culture and amongst intellectuals. Maybe they're not fully nihilistic enough to want to tear it all down?1:21:59 Obama's comments literally made me nauseous. He has no boundaries on his narcissism.1:22:27 See pinned comment for timestamps of additional questions1:34:45 OutroShow is Sponsored by The Ayn Rand Institute https://www.aynrand.org/starthereandExpress VPN https://www.expressvpn.com/yaronJoin this channel to get access to perks:https://www.youtube.com/@YaronBrook/joinLike what you hear? Like, share, and subscribe to stay updated on new videos and help promote the Yaron Brook Show: https://bit.ly/3ztPxTxSupport the Show and become a sponsor: https://www.patreon.com/YaronBrookShowOr make a one-time donation: https://bit.ly/2RZOyJJContinue the discussion by following Yaron on Twitter (https://bit.ly/3iMGl6z) and Facebook (https://bit.ly/3vvWDDC )Want to learn more about Ayn Rand and Objectivism? Visit the Ayn Rand Institute: https://bit.ly/35qoEC3#ww3 #hamasattackonisrael #israel #hamas #russia #China #islam #individualism #capitalism ​#Objectivism #AynRand #politics #economyThis show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/3276901/advertisement

In case you missed our first conversation or want to re listen, heres the link.  https://ungovernablemisfits.com/podcast/bitcoin-wins-faster-through-collaboration-with-antomousb-copy/   Ben Gunn Returns as Atlas Shrugs Intro Quote: “The Solution to Pollution is Dilution” --Ben Gunn Show Description Our friend and fellow pleb, Ben Gunn returns to the show after a testing couple of years in Bitcoin and the wider world, to share what has worked for him, what hasn't, and his thoughts and plans for the future. This is a fantastic follow-up interview to first episode we did in 2021, which if you haven't heard, you must and is here. In this episode, Max and Ben take a stroll around the park in Amsterdam, Netherlands to catch up on what he's been up to since we last met on his woodland back in simpler times. We kick off by reviewing life in the Fiat Mines, and how things are deteriorating in day to day work and relationships. Red tape, higher costs of getting stuff done, how the average person is affected and how it can't continue forever. We discuss the transformational power of acknowledging negative observations and turning them into positive actions. How there are just some things that we have no ability to influence or control, and that it's okay to switch off the doom vendors and focus on what you can build in reply. Getting fit and staying focussed on what's really important. We address the problem of when it's the right time to quit and where it's best to relocate in an increasingly uncertain world. The attractiveness of new locations such as El Salvador, and how leaving a broken system behind can fix many things, but not everything, and how it's all part of a much bigger cycle. The growing relevance of Atlas Shrugged to the world we're seeing around us, and what we can learn from the novel in today's context. We also announce a new project – a series of future shows that will analyse the book from the perspectives of Bitcoiners and as living people in a world of zombies, and help a new reader get to the end! We finish off talking about the pro's and con's of Bitcoin conferences and podcast business models, the pro's and con's of advertising based income vs Value for Value approach. We talk about the risk shifting behaviour of the dominant podcasts, and the impact on the listener's finances, as well as the overwhelming generosity and support of our own loyal fan base. Key Takeaways: The Fiat Mines are getting harder to work in. Where to focus your attention and turn a negative situation into a positive outcome. Meeting Bitcoiners in real life can be an amazing experience, but you can't trust everyone. Zombies are real and how we should be thinking about that in our real lives. Atlas Shrugged is a book written for our times, and we all should learn who John Galt is. Risk shifting behaviour in Bitcoin Podcasts and Conferences, and what to do about it. Host: Max BitBuyBit Guest: Ben Gunn Nostr - https://njump.me/npub1lt8nn8aaa6qa63wjwj8gz2djf5nlhg3zfd0v6l45v8zhvuyh0p3s5zzt5y Mentions: Bitcoin Q&A, Brother Rabbit, Untapped Growth, Matt Odell, Samourai Wallet, Hodlonaut DC786 Foundation

In today's episode of the IC-DISC Show, we chat with Jerry Vaughn, founder and president of J Gault, a company revolutionizing business financing. Jerry explains how J Gault enables Main Street businesses to reap corporate credit opportunities by leveraging their EINs and NOT having to provide a personal guarantee. He shares insightful stories of entrepreneurs who, thanks to J Gault, secured lower interest rates and increased funding despite lacking revenue history or business plans. As Jerry describes, J Gault's approach prepares companies for economic uncertainty while ensuring they emerge stronger. Whether you're an entrepreneur looking to scale up or a small business owner pursuing growth, this discussion with Jerry Vaughn illuminates the transformative potential available by accessing business credit innovatively.   SHOW HIGHLIGHTS The episode features a conversation with Jerry Vaughn, the founder and president of J Galt, a company revolutionizing business financing. Jerry explains how Main Street companies can leverage their Employer Identification Numbers (EINs) to build corporate credit and access competitive rates. Real-life examples, such as Randy, a contractor from North Carolina, and a real estate investor from Texas, demonstrate how J Galt has helped transform businesses by improving their funding. Jerry emphasizes that J Galt's approach is not just about securing funding, but also preparing businesses for unpredictable events and ensuring their resilience. One of the major benefits of J Gault's approach is allowing smaller companies to avoid personal guarantees when accessing corporate credit opportunities. The company offers a membership program that provides lifetime support, including cash flow management services, business valuation assistance, and exit strategy planning. There are rules for "fundability" that businesses need to adhere to, such as having a business bank account, a registered phone number, a website, and a corporate email address. Building company credit on the EIN number and avoiding personal guarantees is a secret to accessing cash flow, according to Jerry. Jerry mentions that the mission of J Gault goes beyond merely selling—it's about serving and educating entrepreneurs and small business owners. The episode emphasizes that just because a business is labeled small doesn't mean it has to stay that way. With the right financing strategies, businesses can scale and grow. LINKSShow Notes Be a Guest About IC-DISC Alliance About J.Galt Finance Suite GUEST Jerry VaughnAbout Jerry TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) David: Hi, this is David Spray and welcome to another episode of the IC-DISC show. I had a great guest on today, jerry Vaughn, who's the founder and president of J Gault, and for those of you who are big and Rand fans, you may recognize that name. It's inspired by the character John Gault from the book Atlas Shrug by Ayn Rand. So J Gault is a disruptor in the business financing world and basically they allow main street companies privately held, closely held, small to medium sized companies to get access to the same corporate credit opportunities that large public companies have. And one of the biggest benefits of this approach is it allows smaller companies to get rid of the personal guarantee. I know for many of my clients that's one of their big frustrations is they really don't want to be personally guaranteeing business credit, business debt. Oftentimes it's because their spouse isn't keen on using their house as collateral for a business loan. So it's a great episode. We talk about a variety of different things some stories about customers of theirs. They have a membership program and it's really a great service that I find to be really intriguing. So I hope you enjoy the episode as much as I did. Good morning, jerry. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today? Jerry: I'm doing fantastic, David. I appreciate you having me on today. David: Well, my pleasure. So where are you calling in from today? What part of the world are you in? Jerry: A big metropolis of Indianapolis, Indiana. David: Ah well, one of your suburbs, I think, has the most roundabouts of any city in the country, carmel. Jerry: Yes, Carmel. Carmel in California and Carmel in Indiana just like the candy you would eat. David: Sure, have you been through any of those famous Carmel roundabouts? Jerry: Actually, where I live, carmel Fisher's, nobleville it's the city sister city is a roundabout. Yes, I actually like them. At first I was like what is this? But actually it moves traffic and sufficient as long as the people in front of you know understand. David: Yeah, I actually heard a podcast with the mayor of Carmel, because something like Carmel accounts for more than 50% of all the roundabouts in the US. It's a crazy number. And he was talking about all the benefits and he said the only drawback. He said there's a few times during the day, like peak traffic times, where it's arguably a little less efficient. But he said the other 23 and a half hours a day it's far more efficient because you never have to wait for a stoplight. And he talked to me have you ever been driving in the middle of the night and you come up to a stoplight and there's no traffic within a mile any direction? But technically you're supposed to wait for the lights to turn. Jerry: That is correct technically. David: Technically correct, I find. If it's three o'clock in the morning, I ask myself have I had any drinks this evening? And if I have, then I'm going to wait for the lights to turn. If I hadn't had any drinks that night, then how much trouble can I get into? Jerry: That is exactly right. I do the same thing. I'm like, well, there's nobody anywhere, you sit there and it feels like it's been 10 minutes, probably been a couple. But I'm like, really, why am I sitting here to stoplight? David: I know so are you a native of Indiana? Jerry: I am. I was actually born in Hoopston, illinois, but we grew up in a western city in Indiana, so almost to the border. But I've grown up as a Hoosier most of my life, okay. David: Nice Bye, folks, and fun Bye. Get into your business. So the name of the company resonated with me immediately because there's a character in one of my all-time favorite books by the name of John Galt and there's a famous phrase from the book called who is John Galt? Now, is this just coincidence, this JGalt, or is there any connection? Jerry: Well, I'm glad that you brought that up because it doesn't stand for Jerry Galt, I can tell you that. So we couldn't use John Galt because it's obviously patent and has a huge following. But it is off the premise of the book Atlas Shrugged by Anne Rand. So who is John Galt? The whole story of the government takeover, small business and controls and regulations and all of that and that fish, you know book that was written by a Russian immigrant that understood communism, came over. She saw it in the 1940s and she said what is going on? I'm saying the same stuff right here. So she wrote that fictional book in the 50s, as you know. But it's kind of a big deal and it's coming out and there's a big following and people get it. But yeah, you're exactly right, it is John Galt. David: So it's probably actually not a bad filtering process, because I find that there's three types of people in the world. There's people who've read Atlas Shrugged and think it's one of the greatest artistic works of all time. There's folks who've read it and think she's the devil and it's the worst thing ever written. And then there's folks who've never heard of it. So I find that people tend to follow one of three camps. There's not many people that are like yeah, I think I read it, I think I vaguely remember something about it. So it's probably a good self-selection process, right? Because the people who read it and think it's the most evil book ever written probably aren't the mindset of your ideal customer. Jerry: I'm guessing it's pretty close right, but it's surprising on how many people know, even myself. As we name the company, you know your particular activation system in your head, just like when we buy a car. Right then, after we buy a car, you start driving around like man. Look at all the people that bought the car I have this is great following my lead. Now, they were already there. I see who is John Galt stickers on the back of bumpers and on the back of their windshield. I've just it blows me away. But you're exactly right. Most of the entrepreneurs, because we are working only with main street business owners. Okay, small and medium-sized companies, not the wall street companies. So those are the people we're serving and most of them all of us that own businesses and have done that get the challenges and the works and we're just trying to do the best we can to serve the communities and then build a profitable and a great company with our services or products. David: Sure no, I like it. So her book, the Fountainhead, I have a slight preference for, like I mean they're my two favorite books, you know fictional books ever written, for sure. But I have a slight preference for the Fountainhead but only because the individualistic aspect. I assume you've read the Fountainhead too yes the individualistic aspect of the Fountainhead just resonates a little more. There's a great line in there where work has to sell an architectural commission to a committee and the committee all wanted to make changes to it and his sponsors, like they're minor, go for it. As you, you know, recall, he like can't do it. But he had a great line in there where he was talking, I think, to his, his buddy, his Irish construction buddy, explaining why he didn't get it and he said you know, I've never sold a project to a committee and that really resonated because that's how I've always been in my career. It's like you know, if I meet the entrepreneur and I have a conversation and it's a fit, good things happen. But when it's a committee, I don't seem to have much, much luck. Jerry: I'm glad you brought up this. One of my favorite things and that's when I you know it's amazing, it's. I agree with you. Both those books are in my top favorite fictional books ever written. But I think there's a lot of great content, especially for the entrepreneur, of what you have to do. I mean, if you're not a disruptor, if you kind of stay under a ceiling and you're like, hey, I'm not going to change where you work, I don't know what your thoughts are, but I kind of say that if you're an entrepreneur, a successful entrepreneur, normally you're kind of a freak. Right, you're looked at as a freak in the industry and I think that's well put on the committee. I'm not here to appease the committees, I'm here to disrupt the industry on how Main Street and business owners will get funding, not just through how the traditional style is. So that's not our company. So I think the whole Atlas shrugged and Fountainhead there, even though they're fictional books, there's a lot of great content and, I think, some kind of rules of engagement for the entrepreneur. David: Yeah, I was just before this. I had a call with a colleague and he really had very little familiarity with Ann Rahn's work and early heard of it, so he had just bought the audible for Fountainhead. So I'd recommend you start with Fountainhead, so we'll see how that goes. Jerry: That's excellent. David: So talk to me. So what are you guys doing to help those you know privately held, closely held you call them Main Street businesses. You know what's kind of your sweet spot, revenue wise? I get it's probably a broad one, but like for us, like 90% of our clients have revenues between 10 million and 100 million like what's your sort of sweet spot where most of your clients fall in? Jerry: I'd say 250,000 to 450 million a year. David: What if you had to narrow it down a little bit? Go ahead. Jerry: Your sweet spot today, david, is probably somewhere in that. I'm going to say 10 to 25 million is our sweet spot. You get to the 100 and 250 million dollar companies. They do have a lot of cash flow and they've got profits and they've got, you know, banks that give them lines of credit even though they're personally guaranteed. So it's a little harder to get in the door. But we're getting in the door with those now and they're seeing what's going on. But our sweet spot today would be that 10 to 25 million. David: Okay, that is helpful. And the reason I narrowed you down here is because our audience who CPAs and attorneys who have clients, when you say 250,000 to 450 million, it doesn't quite resonate. When you say 10 to 25, now all of a sudden they can think of their clients, or in the 10 to 25 range. So talk to me and you kind of touched on it talk to me about this whole personal guarantee thing and there's probably, I'm guessing, some history behind it. So what's the story? And talk to me about this personal guarantee thing. Jerry: Yeah. So when we say we're disruptors and I just want to make sure that your audience understands you know the 250 to 450. When you look at your EIN that tax number that you get from the IRS that's just like your SSN to building personal credit. Your EIN can build company credit. Your company has its own credit score and its own report and so does your personal social security number. So when you give that broad scope just for your audience, you get someone that's just starting out with a startup or they're cranking out 20,000 a month. It just gets hard to try to get funding without why bank revenue statements, tax returns, business plans, revenue looking at your personal credit just to try to get the operating budget to be able to run your company and then to grow and scale and seize opportunities to grow and scale, because we all know as entrepreneurs that when you have an opportunity in front of it, it's not like you can plan and then just hit exactly when it happens. When you need to seize an opportunity, you don't have 60 to 90 days to qualify for it. So we look at what Jay Galt's main premise is and our advantage and really how we impact that entrepreneur in the world is what we do is we focus on the EIN and to build credit on that. It's actually very simple. Has nothing to do with revenue, has nothing to do with what your financials, your tax returns or how long you've been in business. It's just about taking that tax number and making it fundable so you can get access to corporate vending and lending, and your rates are typically 0 to 5%. I mean, we're getting people vehicle and equipment loans at 1.9%. Corporate credit cards are 0% on three to 12 month terms, right, not just on balance transfers. So that's the power. That's how your Wal-Mart's and Googles and Amazons and your Apples of the world are able to do what you and I, david, have no problem with paying interest, as long as it's a positive arbitrage. What we can't do is pay 30% to 50% in interest when we're only making 25% to 35% in money. So how you flip the script is you got to get access and get your company fundable so you can get access to banks' monies to leverage that at better rates in terms, so you can grow in scale without going into what Debt risk or paying too much in interest where it's not a profitable proposition. We see that every day and I know you do, david, right. People get in these small little bridge loans and if they don't get them paid off they'll come out or close on your mortgage. David: And then the other aspect of it then is when the underwriting is done on the company's EIN, there's less of a need for personal guarantee right, because they're under the business Right Typically that doesn't even come into play your credit score, your personal inquiries or what your credit score looks like. Jerry: That has nothing to do with building company credit is vanilla. It doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman, you're a Democrat or Republican, what your religion is, because it's a tax number. There's no bias on that number. Where that can come into play on your personal credit, right when you walk into a bank. But it doesn't have that when you're looking at a company's index, because a company is not a man or a woman or a Democrat or Republican or a certain type of it. It's where your Social Security is tied to an individual. Your EIN, that tax number, is tied to the company. David: Okay, Well, that sounds good and is the motivation for your customers trying to get rid of the personal guarantee or trying to get better interest rates on borrowing. Jerry: Most of the time they get tired of the personal guarantee business. Right, you're married, you're watched like you're not putting the house on the line, right, exactly so if you want money, they always have you check a box and do a little initial where, hey, we're going to give you the money because we believe in you and you believe in your business. We just need you to check the box and this is just a what. This is just a normality. But if something would happen we know that's going to happen. If something would happen, you understand the banks right. Since we're giving you money is we'll have access to your 401ks, your kids college funds, your second home, your cars, your current home, your family's living underneath. That's just a technicality. So a lot of them want to get out of the personal guarantee business or they don't grow in scale because they don't want to risk tying up their personal assets to leverage to their company's funding. So that's the first thing. But getting corporate capital on your EIN, you're going to get 10, 20, 30, a hundred times the amount of money on your company. Then you're ever going to get on your SSN because you're only going to stretch that personal credit bubble so far, because then they're looking at underwriting risk on you personally. They look at the company's revenue, but the company has nothing to do with it. If you don't have a corporate credit. They're always going to look at your EIN first, but there's usually nothing there, so they always revert what Back to revenue bank statements, underwriting risk, ar balances, invoicing. So there's a lot that goes into that. So you can see how complex that gets and how it can. What limit you on getting and seizing opportunities and then, more importantly, getting better rates in terms of run the operation, so you can leverage the bank's money because, david, you and I get this right. I'd rather use the bank's money than my money. I'd rather take my money and put it in vehicles that does what with my money. David: No, that really makes a lot of sense. So what's the disruption you're doing is basically bringing this Wall Street credit access to Main Street businesses. Is that? Jerry: education Right. First thing we do is I was asking an owner. I said, hey, what's your personal credit score? And they always answer right, 720. What's your company's credit score? What do you think I get most of the time? David: Right, no idea what are you talking about. Jerry: Right. So we have a seven step blueprint, but we're all about education. We're not here to sell anything, we're here to serve. So, just like in the whole Atlas Shrug with J Galt, john Galt, right, we're here to serve and connect with people and give them education on things that they don't know. It's not the CPAs or the accounting firms fall. It's not the bankers, it's not the tax attorneys. That's not their job of what they do. What J Galt does is we do the same thing. People understand personal credit. They just don't understand company credit and how easy it is to get there. There's just a secret set of rules. So our job is to educate you on the seven step blueprint of how you can get your company fundable, so you, as the owner, can survive storms. Right, you don't have to worry about the four things that can take the legs out of a business economy. You and I do. We have control over economy, david. Nope, how about inflation? Nope, does that impact us? Sure, sure it does. How about a government regulation? David: No control, almost no control, I mean in theory. If you're part of a lobbying group, you know you might fit very little. And what's the fourth one? Jerry: Yeah, but then you're going to have to have some capital to have some of these lobbyists for it, right, they're not free, sure. And then the second thing is just a you ever. I don't know if you've ever experienced one of these at all, david, but you ever heard of a pandemic? David: I think I have. I think we had one of those like a hundred years ago. I heard about it 1918, I think we had one. Yeah, I think it was, if we had anything close. Jerry: I know you and I have never experienced one of those lately right. But, even on that it's a cripple of business. Some it's a lot of businesses actually did a really great job. Sure, a lot that it really affected there's over. You know, 60% of businesses haven't even made it back to pre-pandemic revenues today because they raise the prices, inflation's there. I mean you've got a lot of things going against you. So how do you survive that and how do you get through those things? How do you prepare for the storms and survive the storms? And it's really about if it makes sense for the business on you moving forward and getting to the goals or solving the challenges, but it's really about getting fundability on your company. That's the answer to that question or challenge. It's the most vexing problem with small and medium-sized businesses today is getting cash blow. David: Okay. So I love stories. I think they educate well. Do you have a story or two of, like, a client of yours that you could talk about anonymously and maybe kind of set up what their scenario was before they met you? What's their scenario like now that you can be mined? Jerry: Yes, we have a guy that's in the contracting business out of North Carolina. We'll call him Randy, okay, but he came to us and we actually approached him and we had a conversation. But he's been in business for almost eight years doing well, has access to his local Chevy dealer, his local bank, where he deposits his money, and his credit score wasn't bad. He said, oh, I know how to do this. I have a Dun and Bradstreet number, right, that's the largest credit bureau, like TransUnion is on our consumer side, Dun and Bradstreet is on the business credit side because there's business credit reporting agencies and there's personal credit reporting agencies, right? Well, personal credit reporting agencies nothing to do with your company. It's the business credit reporting agencies to have everything to do with your company. So that's another tip that I'll give your viewers out there and listeners today. Right, Okay, so, but with Randy as we were having the conversation, with Randy as we were having the conversation, David, he understood it, but he really didn't, because where he was going and putting his deposits in, he just thought this the way it was and he actually was doing pretty well. He had a credit line recommendation about 67,000 on his company. We ran his company credit report After four months and just getting his EIN fundable the same Chevy dealer that he's been buying his vehicles for the last eight years. He's been getting anywhere between a nine and 15% rate. Wow, After four months, with Jay Galdin focusing on his company EIN that tax number he would walk into the same Chevy dealer and got his lowest vehicle right About a $51,000 van for 1.9% interest rate. Wow, and that's impactful. He looked at me and he goes Jerry, I can buy five of these vans now instead of just one at a time, right, Because that interest rate is so impactful. So it's just about he's still going to pay interest, but 9% or 1 or 2%, which one's better for a company, right? So that's one success story. And that was just after four months of it's all intentional work. It doesn't take a lot, by the way, just so if you're asking. It only takes two to three hours a month to do this. I didn't say a day or a week per month, but it's like going to the gym, David. I mean, you're a healthy guy, right? You can sign up for a membership just because we're paying for a membership to the gym. Do we get six pack abs and do we get a healthy heart just because we pay a membership for a gym? David: Unfortunately not. Jerry: Or is there a thing you just take three pills a day and you can get physically healthy there? David: you go, that's what I'm looking for. Yeah, that's what we're selling today. Jerry: We're living an immediate gratification world, right, we want food today. We got DoorDash. We want same day shipping. We want our stuff today, and that's the world we live in. But to get access to that it does take the hustle and muscle. It doesn't take a lot, but you're going to have to do the work. It's just like taking a walk every day for 30 minutes is so good for our health and our heart and it's hard for us to find time to schedule it. But just like this, you have to put in the work if you're going to get your company f*****g and funded right. So that's one story. Second story is we have a real estate investor guy down in Texas and he's been in business for over 20 years. I mean he's a Texan, I mean you know Texas, I mean it's the Republic of Texas, I mean it's his own country. I mean you know what I'm saying there, right? I do, I do. I know you have some clients down there as well. So when I look at Texas, this guy had really a big ego, been doing a great job, very successful. He has over 105 properties, okay. So he's a big deal, okay. I'm not going to mention his revenue because some of my taggamer I was just saying, here he is. So he came to us and he couldn't get funded and he thought our program was full of it. Right, he says this is just sounds too good to be true. I don't. I've been doing this. I've got bankers, I've got a fractional CFO, I've got this figured out. I don't see your help. So then we got into asking about personal credit and company credit as company's credit score and he thought he had a good company credit score. So we ran the report, went through it. Here's the thing he had some blemishes, but here was the big problem on fundability. He'd been in business for 20 years and moved to a lot of different locations and it filled out a lot of paperwork. We're all busy. When you're an entrepreneur and you've got a hundred and over a hundred properties, I mean you're busy. Sure, you've got a lot of stuff going on. So he would have filled out the Dunn and Bradstreet and he put WM period with the secretary of state. He was listed as William. Well, you and I know that WM, period and William mean the same thing as humans, right, right, your cross references WM period and William. What does it say? A mismatch and it's an automatic decline. He also didn't have his phone number. Listen to this, folks your phone number can't be a cell phone number. It has to be a landline or a VoIP service. Now, the VoIPs can be what. It can be transferred to your cell phone number David, let me ask you a question When's the last time you use 411 or your area code in 5551212 to look up a business number 30 years, do you know? If your business landline or void number is not registered with 411 National Directory, it's an automatic decline for corporate funding. David: I did not know that. Jerry: So that's another secret rule. So this is some education that David and I are providing to just things like that Having a website or landing page, having a corporate email address. Your number has to be listed. You have to have a business bank account. There's just a little thing. And why is that, folks? Over 80% of small businesses fail in the first five years because of cashflow. Well, if you don't look like a real company, you don't have a phone number, you don't have the business bank account, merchant services, you don't have a corporate email it's a PO box. You can't use a PO box. Well, I have a UPS store, david. It's a fancy PO box. It's still a place where you don't live and they can't access you. So a home address can be used, even though I don't recommend it, because now they'll know where your family lives and lives the whole entire world. But you can do things and get systems and processes put in place. It's all about fundability. On the company, no different than you are personally, it's just a lot easier to get personal credit because there's over 4 million people using it to finance their lifestyle. However, on businesses, they tell us that we can be protected from lawsuits as a limited liability corporation and we'll get funding. Here's the only problem. We never signed up for the credit bureaus that report our business payments so we can build fundability with the corporate vendors and vendors, right? No one told us that. So when you go to deposit your money in the bank, david, what happens? They try to get you money. They look at you and they just said, hey, here's a business credit card, we can get you a line of credit, but we just need you to do what with it personally. Gary, you got to get it fundable and you got to find lenders and vendors that report. And this Texan okay that once we got his name right, got his phone number listed and he had a couple of blemishes that he wasn't aware of we were able to get him all of these commercial real estate loans with no guarantors, not leveraging his other properties. He was able to get corporate millions of dollars in corporate in less than a year, all on his company now, which is a couple of fundability rules and a couple of secrets that he wasn't available on how to turn his company in standing on his own two legs financially just by the fundability rules, the corporate credit bureaus and using vendors to report in the lining up so he can get access to the same things he was doing now, but he was personally guaranteeing everything leveraging his other properties or his name to continue to grow his real estate company. David: Yeah, and I imagine does that also mean that in theory, if he wanted to, if each project if he wanted to have as a separate entity, he could avoid that cross collateralization issue. Yes, because that's the other problem I understand there is that all 105 of those properties are all cross collateralized. So if he has one project that somehow just goes belly up or property that it risks the other 104 properties Correct. Jerry: And if you get it on your company, then it doesn't put that into play, because when you're using personal credit, they're always going to leverage those. Because you are, you're putting those other properties as a the guarantee against the loan for that new property. If it does go belly up or doesn't do as well as you thought, that happens, right. When you're in real estate, I mean, most time you have wins but there are losses. You don't have to put your other properties in jeopardy. Do those things on corporate credit. It's no different than if you guys remember Donald Trump, right? He opened up that huge casino, used $3 billion of the bank's money and then after two years it failed. I don't think Donald Trump wants anything to fail. He doesn't invest in things that are going to fail Just didn't work out because of economy, location and where the world was at the time. Well, he was able to walk away from that. Did it affect his personal credit? Nope. Did he have to give up any of his personal assets in that deal? I doubt it. No. Two weeks later, he bought a golf resort in Doral, florida, right, sure? So, without affecting anything with that. So that's the power of corporations. No different than I'll tell you another story. Remember Home Depot and Lowe's and LA Fitness? Right, those are all Wall Street corporations, right? Stock L's stock owned, and all of that During the pandemic. They were able to be open. You can only have 50 people in the store right, they were able to do that. But what about the local hardware guy in town? They had to be shut down. The local mom and pop fitness place? They had to be shut down. So there's a difference and that's why we talk about this. Jay Galt, we're here to give the power and advantage back to the main street business owners by building fundability so their corporation has the cash flow, the access because this is all about getting ready access, cash and capital for you to take on those storms, to survive those storms and to grow and scale. Walmart, sam Walton, would not have been the world's largest retailer if he didn't figure out corporate credit. He would still be in Benton, arkansas if that was the case. So now, obviously, then he went stock, went public as an IPO, so that made it a moral difference for him to get there. But he would have never got to that position if he wasn't able to scale that. Take advantage of the back in the 80s. Remember when he took down Kmart? Right, but it was through cash capital, corporate funding that allowed him to do the advertising and get belly up and take on the big giant. Now he's the big giant. So just consider that that just because you're labeled a small business owner doesn't mean you have to be small. What if you wanted to franchise? What if you wanted to grow and scale? What if you wanted to buy your own property and land and build your own manufacturing facility, get bigger into the corporate real estate market, be a truck driver and become a regional or national player? If those are things that you want to do and you just have an access, you're having problems accessing cash flow. The secret is building company credit on the tax number, that EIN number and getting out of the personal guarantee in the personal inquiry game. David: No, it makes sense so well. Thank you for those several stories. That illustrates it. So how does Jay Galt come into the picture? What's your role in helping these companies other than education? I'm sure there's more to it than that. How does your service work? Jerry: We're a SaaS company, which stands for Software as a Service. We have a robust platform that has seven-step blueprint inside of it that walks you step by step. But, more importantly, we have a white glove concierge service, kind of a do-it-for-you. But there's certain things you have to do. We can't use your bank lines of credit, your credit cards, and you don't want me to do that in your business, but we help you fix blemishes where to go to fix them. So we provide a coaching service that goes behind the SaaS platform so you're successful in your journey. So imagine getting a dedicated coach. They're not out of the Philippines or India. That's great for customer service. I think All of our credit analysts and our finance analysts. We have a whole back office advising team that helps our members. So we are a membership. There's a one-time fee that you would pay and when you come into that you get lifetime support from Galt through our SaaS product, the Getting Business Credit. So you have access to all of the corporate lenders and vendors that actually report. And our secret sauce is we won't work with your Put-Em-In Our Business Finance Suite unless they report to the credit bureaus. That'll help you for a robot, mobile and credit and if they don't show us the underwriting guidelines, because it's important to know what boxes must be checked before you apply for a loan, because in the corporate vending and lending world, if you get denied, you have to wait six to 12 months before you can reapply and that can really slow down momentum when you try to grow a business. So you don't have. That's not how consumer credit works, but that's how corporate credit works. So we have that. We also help with cash flow management. We really define ourselves as cash flow management experts getting you access and leveraging banks money at better rates and terms, understanding cash flow so you don't get into what expense or debt trouble, and then giving you a business valuation. David, this is the power. 98% of small business owners have never had a business valuation or appraisal done. So they're in the head and heart. They know what their company's worth, but you'll know exactly what it's worth, how to ensure it properly and where to invest your time. You'll get clear, sound facts about your company so you can invest your dollars and your time in the right parts to continue to grow the asset that you're building and properly protecting it, allowing you to do what Plan for an exit strategy and those are typically $10,000 on average. We provide that every year to our members with JGault. So we're really here with our three columns of getting corporate financing, access to lenders and vendors that report, understanding your cash flow management as you grow in scale, and then having your business valuation so you know the value, where to invest in it and to plan and know exactly if you want to sell it, when is the time to restructure, when is the time to sell it or if you're passing it down to one of your kids to run. Eventually you want to make it a generational company. Now you'll have corporate credit belt where they can walk into the seat, you can ride off into your retirement years and know that the corporate funding is going to be there for generations to come. So the legacy you can leave behind by building that company we passed on to generations, your kids, the grandkids and so forth and so on. David: No, it sounds great. So what should people do? Is their next step? If they're interested in learning more, Go to the website. What's kind of your first entry point for potential new customers? Jerry: I would highly recommend that you do that. David, I'm fine with you sharing my for your audience. It depends on how big that audience is my personal but I would go to jgaltio. That's J-G-A-L-T. No period, Just jgaltio and then you can check out our services and what we do and if there's more questions, there's a place where you can connect and have a private consultation if this is something you want to talk more about. David: Okay, that sounds great and that's jgaltio. Jerry: Yes. David: Okay, what is we're wrapping up here? Is there anything? I didn't ask you that you wish I had asked you? Jerry: Wow, that's a great question. You did a great job. I mean, obviously I can understand why you have a successful podcast out there, david. Well, you're too nice. Oh, no worries, I mean, you've been doing this a long time. The only thing that I would share with American entrepreneurs out there today is we're really passionate, and just me as an owner, my goal is not to sell something. I have four companies. The only reason why Cole and my partner and I started jgalt was to serve and educate. But there's more than education. It's all about impact. So if there's something where you're wanting to grow an asset and you want to get there, we're here to have an intelligent conversation, a consultation, if you will, about where you're at, where you're wanting to go, and about 80% you didn't ask this. So does everybody want jgalt? Of course we're going to think everybody needs jgalt right, it's our company. Same thing with yours, david. I'm sure you feel the same way. If you're exporting products, you will find a better guy right Outside the country. So we're really great at what we do. But only about 80% of the companies we talk to every week take advantage of jgalt services, because it's not for everyone. So there are depends on where you're at and what you're trying to accomplish. That's why we're kind of looking at ourselves as the doctors of business credit. It doesn't make sense for everyone. It may not make sense today, or it may not make sense at all If you're just have a side hustle or something in your house that you're just doing is just to make some additional income to pay off debt or something like that. We're truly looking at companies that are looking to grow and scale and really be disruptors, like us, in the product or the services that they're offering across the United States. David: Well, thank you for adding to that. So, as we wrap up, that's Jerry Vaughn with jgaltio Jerry, this has really been fun and I think there's a lot of great value that your company provides for small to medium size privately held companies. So I really appreciate you taking time to come on the show and share some information. Jerry: Yeah, you're very welcome. It was a pleasure to be on it, david, so thank you so much again for having me on my pleasure.

Episode #41 Mathilde Berger-Perrin est consultante éditoriale et contributrice à divers titres de presse parmi lesquels Contrepoints. Philosophe de formation, elle a récemment fait paraître un essai aux éditions Michalon : « Ayn Rand, l'égoïsme comme héroïsme ». Elle représente également le courant qualifié de "féminisme libéral". Cet entretien a été enregistré à Paris le 19 septembre 2023. Préparation et réalisation par Pierre Schweitzer pour Contrepoints. Vous pouvez soutenir ce travail par un don ⁠https://www.contrepoints.org/aider-contrepoints⁠  Programme :  Introduction - 0:00 Présentation de l'invitée - 1:59 Pourquoi avoir choisi d'écrire sur Ayn Rand ? - 8:57 Une vocation précoce de romancière et de femme libre - 11:24 La fuite aux Etats-Unis et le rêve américain - 13:06 La Source Vive - 18:19 La Grève (Atlas Shrugged) - 26:29 Who is John Galt ? - 32:15 L'objectivisme : une philosophie randienne ? - 33:47 Les limites de la logique d'Ayn Rand - 43:01 Une adoratrice du Dieu Dollar ? - 46:53 Notre droit d'inventaire sur Ayn Rand - 49:07 Une inspiration pour la jeunesse anxieuse du XXIème siècle ? - 51:23 Références suggérées : « Ayn Rand, l'égoïsme comme héroïsme » (l'essai de notre invitée) https://www.amazon.fr/Ayn-Rand-Légoïsme-comme-héroïsme/dp/234700221X Ayn Rand (notice Wikibéral) https://www.wikiberal.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand Le discours d'Howard Roark dans la Source Vive http://aperto-libro.blogspot.com/2007/10/le-discours-dhoward-roark.html « Voir Succession avec Ayn Rand : les Roy, anti-héros du capitalisme » (Contrepoints, juin 2023) https://www.contrepoints.org/2023/06/19/458319-voir-succession-avec-ayn-rand-les-roy-anti-heros-du-capitalisme  « Ayn Rand : un cauchemar pour collectivistes et déconstructivistes » (Alain Laurent dans Contrepoints) https://www.contrepoints.org/2023/06/21/458489-ayn-rand-un-cauchemar-pour-collectivistes-et-deconstructivistes  Pour nous suivre :  ⁠http://www.contrepoints.org⁠  Twitter Contrepoints ⁠https://twitter.com/Contrepoints⁠  Twitter Pierre Schweitzer ⁠https://twitter.com/Schweitzer_P⁠   Facebook - Contrepoints ⁠https://www.facebook.com/Contrepoints⁠ Youtube - Contrepoints ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@ContrepointsFR⁠

If you want an answer to that question, you're going to be disappointed, just like most of the people in Atlas Shrugged. Kurt and Isaac discuss the good, the bad and the selfish with our guest, economist Todd Smoldon, in part one of our two-part series about Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand.

The Titanic Five ask “Who is John Galt?” Reviews - The Bear S2, Black Mirror S6 E2 and 3 Wildkat Wrestling News Cis Elon Musk vs Mark Zuckerberg Putin on the Nukes with Chef Test Tube Dinner /live channel/ https://nrr.mixlr.com/ /all past shows available at/ Google Podcasts​: https://bit.ly/3vL6KY8 Apple Podcasts​: https://goo.gl/SvRBJB SoundCloud​: https://soundcloud.com/not-real-radio Stitcher​: https://goo.gl/zrf7XZ

In which Robert and Amy celebrate where we've been and where we're at ... and think about where we're headed. Modern miracles & amazing times! Also, admiring aircraft & innovation, appreciating waitstaff and service providers, and meditations on meditation.

Today on the BetterWealth Podcast, we have two special guests who are the creators of John Galt Mortgage Company. This company is committed to promoting economic liberty, entrepreneurship, and financial independence as moral issues. Their unique business model involves using their marketing budget to promote these ideals, with the mortgage company serving as a for-profit vessel for funding. This approach flips the traditional business model on its head, where the business exists to pay for marketing instead of marketing to grow the business. I believe that JGMC will be the future of the mortgage industry, and listeners have the exclusive opportunity to hear about it for the first time on this podcast.Learn More About JGMC - https://www.johngaltmortgage.com

Youtube Link: https://youtube.com/live/LOuRzIKvYgM

Today on the Ether we have the Stride & Interchain Security AMA. You'll hear from John Galt, Stake&Relax Validator, Thyborg, Ian, søi2studio, luisqa, Blocks United Validator, and more! Recorded on April 14th 2023. If you enjoy the music at the end of the episodes, you can find the albums streaming on Spotify, and the rest of your favorite streaming platforms. Check out Project Survival, Virus Diaries, and Plan B wherever you get your music. Thank you to everyone in the community who supports TerraSpaces.

The Paradox of Selflessness: How Wokeism and Trumpism Betray Rational Self-Interest In this episode of Rational Egoist, host Michael Liebowitz and guest Robert Tracinski, Senior fellow at the Atlas Society and author of "Who is John Galt, Anyway? A Pocket Guide to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged," explore the challenges of civil discourse in the age of wokeism and Trumpism. Drawing on their expertise in rational egoism, Liebowitz and Tracinski discuss the paradox of selflessness as it manifests in these two irrational beliefs. Wokeism promotes a collectivist mindset that seeks to suppress individual thinking and expression, while Trumpism emphasizes a cult of personality that values loyalty to the leader over rational self-interest. Liebowitz and Tracinski argue that both of these ideologies betray the true spirit of rational self-interest, which requires individuals to pursue their own goals and values in cooperation with others, without sacrificing their own well-being to the demands of the collective or the authority of the leader. The conversation also touches on the challenges of engaging in civil discourse in the era of social media and the importance of protecting individual rights and freedoms in order to build a more prosperous and just society for all. Ultimately, Liebowitz and Tracinski make the case that a rational egoist approach, based on the pursuit of rational self-interest, is the key to achieving true progress and prosperity in society, and that the irrational beliefs of wokeism and Trumpism are holding us back from achieving our full potential as individuals and as a society. Michael Liebowitz is a philosopher, political activist, and host of the Rational Egoist podcast. He is a passionate advocate for the philosophy of Objectivism, as developed by Ayn Rand, and has dedicated his life to promoting its principles of rational self-interest, individualism, and reason. In addition to his work as a podcast host, Liebowitz is also a prominent spokesperson for the Libertarian Party in the United States, and has been involved in a number of political campaigns advocating for individual rights and freedoms. Liebowitz's life story is a testament to the transformative power of Objectivism. After spending 25 years in prison, he was able to turn his life around by embracing the principles of rational self-interest and morality espoused by Ayn Rand. He has since become an influential voice in the libertarian and Objectivist communities, using his own experience to inspire others to live their lives in accordance with reason, individualism, and self-interest. Liebowitz is also the co-author of "Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Correction Encourages Crime," a book that explores the ways in which misguided societal attitudes towards punishment and rehabilitation have led to a rise in crime and recidivism. In addition to his work in politics and philosophy, Liebowitz is a regular guest on the Todd Feinburg show at WTIC, where he provides expert commentary on a range of political and social issues.

Today on the Ether we have the Cavern Protocol AMA hosted by Dr. Doscoin with Orbital Command. You'll hear from JGnft, Rebel DeFi, Deebs DeFi, John Galt, Zion, LunaV, MadMan, and more! Recorded on January 17th 2023. If you enjoy the music at the end of the episodes, you can find the albums streaming on Spotify, and the rest of your favorite streaming platforms. Check out Project Survival, Virus Diaries, and Plan B wherever you get your music. Thank you to everyone in the community who supports TerraSpaces.

El proyecto Kapital nació para mejorar la cultura financiera de este país. Así que cuando Laura compartió que estaba organizando un curso de finanzas personales para sus hijos no dudé en escribirle. Cubrimos en este episodio todas las temáticas relevantes: la generación de ingresos, la gestión de los gastos, la importancia del ahorro, el pago de los impuestos, la selección de las inversiones y los peligros del crédito. El camino al éxito pasa por capitalizarte y proteger tu flujo de caja positivo. Índice: 0.32. El síndrome del impostor entre las mujeres. 8.52. El dinero es un medio para alcanzar tus fines. 14.35. Nuevas fuentes de ingresos, no solo el salario. 24.58. Ahorrar para tomar tus propias decisiones. 35.31. Nuestros abuelos no gastaban lo que no tenían. 47.30. Traduce todos los precios en horas de tu trabajo. 57.03. Los que salen ganando con la baja cultura financiera. 1.00.56. El concepto del riesgo moral. 1.03.50. ¿Quién es John Galt? 1.19.20. Leer novelas para tomar mejores decisiones. 1.25.27. El emprendedor se hace, no nace. 1.36.39. Los mayores no gastan el tiempo en tonterías. Apuntes: La rebelión de Atlas. Ayn Rand. El manantial. Ayn Rand. Padre rico, padre pobre. Robert Kiyosaki. Lean in. Sheryl Sandberg. El maestro y Margarita. Mijaíl Bulgakov. Un caballero en Moscú. Amor Towles. El castillo. Franz Kafka. Ana Karénina. Lev Tolstói.

Today on the Ether we have Stride hosting a discussion on stOSMO. You'll hear from RoboMcGobo, aidan0x.stride, Vishal Talasani, John Galt, Dev, sunnya97.icns, larry.cosmos, Jacob Gadikian, Carter L. Woetzel, and more! Recorded on December 14th 2022. If you enjoy the music at the end of the episodes, you can find the albums streaming on Spotify, and the rest of your favorite streaming platforms. Check out Project Survival, Virus Diaries, and Plan B wherever you get your music. Thank you to everyone in the community who supports TerraSpaces.

OUTLINE of today's show with TIMECODESWho is sabotaging power plants all over America?2:25Over 3,000 "warm banks" open in UK to cope with fuel poverty4:39Fuel prices more than double in EU, supply chain issues cause Orlando airport to tell airlines they can't refuel10:09"Mr. Fusion" is announced by government as people are seeing the future of ZERO FUEL18:26Human vs Robots: The battle reaches a turning point.24:13Humans in the year 2025 could be ageless bionic hybrids with downloadable brains as they transform into Elon Musk style cyborgs.28:01Zoltan Istvan, Transhumanist Party, (who I've interviewed) and his "John Galt communism"31:45Musk's offer "join or be killed by AI"35:03"Expert" pronouncement: In 100 years there's an 80 or 90% chance that we'll have achieved the goal of no aging or slower aging.42:57Base editing, genetic treatment, to cure cancer44:22A possible cancer cure that did NOT involve genetic editing46:59We keep putting all of our faith in science, not in God48:50The genetic base editing that is being touted as a cancer cure — how does it work?54:21"The 15 Minute Smart City" popping up all over the world — How are the sheep willing to walk so blindly into this technocratic enslavement?58:25Beware of a new, very bad "conservative" idea (like the old Constitutional Convention push) — "Common Good Conservatism"1:10:48Shark Week is just too white and Algebra is just difficult says "academics"1:27:38Listener Mail:.1:34:40Vaccine holocaust 2nd anniversary.1:41:38Walgreens & CVS will pay $10.7 Billion in multi-state settlements over opioid. Are victims of the Trump shot paying attention?1:47:35Zelensky seen sitting on a mall's lap asking for another $50 billion.1:52:02Pharmacist Liz James on a new referral service, BlessedByHisBlood.com, to let people find blood donors who have not been vaccinated.1:54:50Blessed by His Blood is a cooperative. Every member will be an owner.1:59:33Biblical citizenship is not something that is common in the US.2:07:40The attack on raw milk and food in general2:15:39How does Blessed By His Blood work and what stage is it in?2:28:38As a poll of 33 countries shows, in every country the majority believe we're well on the way to World War 3. We need to assert a moral understanding of war, our Christian beliefs over and above the Machiavellian cynicism of geopolitics.2:39:50Taylor, Texas bans Christians from Christmas parade.2:48:05Neal McDonough is a Christian actor who became typecast as a villain in order to avoid kissing or sex scenes.2:55:15If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughZelle: @DavidKnightShow@protonmail.comCash App at:  $davidknightshowBTC to:  bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Mail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silver

OUTLINE of today's show with TIMECODESWho is sabotaging power plants all over America?2:25Over 3,000 "warm banks" open in UK to cope with fuel poverty4:39Fuel prices more than double in EU, supply chain issues cause Orlando airport to tell airlines they can't refuel10:09"Mr. Fusion" is announced by government as people are seeing the future of ZERO FUEL18:26Human vs Robots: The battle reaches a turning point.24:13Humans in the year 2025 could be ageless bionic hybrids with downloadable brains as they transform into Elon Musk style cyborgs.28:01Zoltan Istvan, Transhumanist Party, (who I've interviewed) and his "John Galt communism"31:45Musk's offer "join or be killed by AI"35:03"Expert" pronouncement: In 100 years there's an 80 or 90% chance that we'll have achieved the goal of no aging or slower aging.42:57Base editing, genetic treatment, to cure cancer44:22A possible cancer cure that did NOT involve genetic editing46:59We keep putting all of our faith in science, not in God48:50The genetic base editing that is being touted as a cancer cure — how does it work?54:21"The 15 Minute Smart City" popping up all over the world — How are the sheep willing to walk so blindly into this technocratic enslavement?58:25Beware of a new, very bad "conservative" idea (like the old Constitutional Convention push) — "Common Good Conservatism"1:10:48Shark Week is just too white and Algebra is just difficult says "academics"1:27:38Listener Mail:.1:34:40Vaccine holocaust 2nd anniversary.1:41:38Walgreens & CVS will pay $10.7 Billion in multi-state settlements over opioid. Are victims of the Trump shot paying attention?1:47:35Zelensky seen sitting on a mall's lap asking for another $50 billion.1:52:02Pharmacist Liz James on a new referral service, BlessedByHisBlood.com, to let people find blood donors who have not been vaccinated.1:54:50Blessed by His Blood is a cooperative. Every member will be an owner.1:59:33Biblical citizenship is not something that is common in the US.2:07:40The attack on raw milk and food in general2:15:39How does Blessed By His Blood work and what stage is it in?2:28:38As a poll of 33 countries shows, in every country the majority believe we're well on the way to World War 3. We need to assert a moral understanding of war, our Christian beliefs over and above the Machiavellian cynicism of geopolitics.2:39:50Taylor, Texas bans Christians from Christmas parade.2:48:05Neal McDonough is a Christian actor who became typecast as a villain in order to avoid kissing or sex scenes.2:55:15If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughZelle: @DavidKnightShow@protonmail.comCash App at:  $davidknightshowBTC to:  bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Mail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silver

Tread Perilously's month of prestige fantasy series dreams of The Sandman and the episode called "The Doll's House." While taking a census of the Dreaming, Lucienne hears tell of a Dream Vortex that could threaten the whole of the domain and the waking world. Morpheus is already aware of the problem and learns it is focused on a human woman named Rose Walker. For her part, Rose is grieving the recent death of her mother, looking for her estranged brother, and on a flight to England to meet Unity Kincaid, who has her own reasons for finding Rose and her brother. Will all these confluences matter or is it more of Desire's petty scheming? Erik and Justin immediately get lost talking about the original Watchmen and the Sandman comics. Erik recalls some of his comic book origins. An explanation of the Endless leads in strange directions. Accents are criticized. Justin finds fault with the actors playing Rose and Lyta. He also offers an odd alternative casting choice for Gilbert. John Galt turns out to be the truest nightmare. Yet more Andor discussion occurs. The pair introduce new rules for talking to certain writers. Philosophies are discussed and Gerd Shockley begins a startling transformation.

Today on the Ether we have part 1 of a 2 part Y-Foundry DAO space discussing their pivot to liquid staking and bAssets. You'll hear from Ray Raspberry, MadMan, John Galt, JGnft, CryptoCents, and more! Recorded on November 6th 2022. If you enjoy the music at the end of the episodes, you can find the albums streaming on Spotify, and the rest of your favorite streaming platforms. Check out Project Survival, Virus Diaries, and Plan B wherever you get your music. Thank you to everyone in the community who supports TerraSpaces.

Today on the Ether we have part 2 of a 2 part Y-Foundry DAO space discussing their pivot to liquid staking and bAssets. You'll hear from Ray Raspberry, MadMan, John Galt, JGnft, CryptoCents, and more! Recorded on November 6th 2022. If you enjoy the music at the end of the episodes, you can find the albums streaming on Spotify, and the rest of your favorite streaming platforms. Check out Project Survival, Virus Diaries, and Plan B wherever you get your music. Thank you to everyone in the community who supports TerraSpaces.

Today on the Ether we have the Shade Protocol partnership space with Stride. You'll hear from Melch18, Carter L. Woetzel, Fisco, John Galt, and more! Recorded on October 5th 2022. If you enjoy the music at the end of the episodes, you can find the albums streaming on Spotify, and the rest of your favorite streaming platforms. Check out Project Survival, Virus Diaries, and Plan B wherever you get your music. Thank you to everyone in the community who supports TerraSpaces.

So now we learn that Atlas Shrugged was actually written as the playbook for how the "Corporation" was going to actually take it all away? Who is John Galt?

Today on the Ether we have the Shade Protocol end of the month FAQ. You'll hear from Carter L. Woetzel,

If you like these podcasts, it's time to join our email list. It's quite possible that the censorship hammer will soon fall on us here. Join our email list to get Special reports and updates: https://dougcasey.substack.com/about Connect with us on Telegram: https://t.me/dougcasey Training video mentioned: https://twitter.com/repthomasmassie/s... Chapters: 00:00:00 Intro 0:55 Europe gas prices leading to a John Galt moment? 6:16 IRS agents the new secret police? 9:40 Republicans under scrutiny 12:10 Viewer Q&A any currencies worth saving? 13:16 What should a young family do with their mortgage? 14:48 Why Doug doesn't give stock picks 16:46 Reflection from Phil Donahue predictions 19:08 Risk of a Civil war 22:00 Failure in Afghanistan the turning point? 23:41 Who does Doug think is the REAL wealthiest person in the world? 26:38 Which countries will suffer the most?? 28:30 Is there a country that will not be affected? 29:48 Can you move money out of the USA? NO 31:05 When the EU falls apart what will be adopted instead of the Euro 32:06 Focus on personal food or resources? 35:05 Why does Doug not fly Private? 37:15 Will Doug write an autobiography? 39:01 What stage is society in today? 40:28 German libertarian jailed 44:40 Book: Network states

Join us as we welcome Cosmic Marauder AKA Jerry, AKA Cosmic Marauder to have a little BDI fun! We talk John Galt and trafficking victims changing identities, eating bugs and fake meat, and a follow up on baby formula shortage, among other things. Enjoy! Cosmic Marauder (America Unhinged) americaunhinged.buzzsprout.com https://www.youtube.com/c/AmericaUnhingedRadio   Shayn (Inquiries of Our Reality)  https://linktr.ee/inquiriesofourrealitypodcast   And me https://linktr.ee/TheBigDumbPodcast  

Today on the Ether we have Cosmocast hosted by Everstake. You'll hear from Cosmonaut Jay J, Cosmos Airdrops, John Galt, Tendermint Timmy, and more! Recorded on August 16th 2022. If you enjoy the music at the end of the episodes, you can find the albums streaming on Spotify, and the rest of your favorite streaming platforms. Check out Project Survival, Virus Diaries, and Plan B wherever you get your music. Thank you to everyone in the community who supports TerraSpaces.

Today on the Ether we have the Sei Network AMA hosted by Dr. Doscoin and Rebel DeFi of Orbital Command. You'll hear from deedle, auroraautonoa, cyson.eth, John Galt, Cephii, Grøver, and more! Recorded on August 9th 2022. If you enjoy the music at the end of the episodes, you can find the albums streaming on Spotify, and the rest of your favorite streaming platforms. Check out Project Survival, Virus Diaries, and Plan B wherever you get your music. Thank you to everyone in the community who supports TerraSpaces.

In this virtual keynote, Yaron discusses the innovations and opportunities that make our times a success. The rebellion of Atlas, the famous novel by Ayn Rand, is the story of a man who says that he will stop the engine of the world, and he does. As we do so, the world begins to deteriorate, factories close, lights go out, trains stop, and all those goods and services that make our lives abundant, rich and entertaining become scarce. In the midst of a great crisis, with a mixture of despair and hopelessness, people begin to wonder Who is John Galt? At this AynRandCon'21, we will answer the question.This conference analyzes who is the engine of the world and why in Latin America we punish those who produce so much. We saw how the producers themselves unintentionally promote their own punishment. We explain why entrepreneurs need philosophy and embrace a new morality. We discuss how to stop this direct path to Rise of Atlas and how best to get the world's engine running again. We project the future that we could have if we can remove the chains that hold it back. Finally, we show a possible way to achieve the future we dream of. To see the entire conference go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJi_DFR77SI&t=1552s.This Keynote was part of the ARCon-LA hosted by Ayn Rand Center Latin America on December 4, 2021.Like what you hear? Like, share, and subscribe to stay updated on new videos and help promote the Yaron Brook Show: https://bit.ly/3ztPxTxBecome a sponsor to get exclusive access and help create more videos like this: https://bit.ly/2TCEqHcOr make a one-time donation: https://bit.ly/2RZOyJJContinue the discussion by following Yaron on Twitter (https://bit.ly/3iMGl6z) and Facebook (https://bit.ly/3vvWDDC )Want to learn more about Ayn Rand and Objectivism? Visit the Ayn Rand Institute: https://bit.ly/35qoEC3

Ken Davis clarifies his position on red light cameras. Ben riffs. And Monroe Anderson returns to say "finally"! As in President Biden is finally getting around to telling the truth about MAGA. Which is...they're insane. Also, Benji Hall returns. You know him as Benji the Bookie--astute bball analyst. Here he puts on his political analyst hat as he describes his two-week experiment with Truth--Trump's version of Twitter. Yes, Benji downloaded the app. Let's just say if there's any truth on Truth, it's accidental. Benji did some trolling as "John Galt". For instance, on Mother's Day, Donnie Jr, aka Baby Trump, "truthed": "Happy birthing person's day." To which Benji responded: "It must be a sad day to remember all the aborted sibblings you never met." Which I believe the Truthers took down. So much for free speech.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.