On a classic ID the Future episode for Labor Day weekend, we celebrate the human creative capacity, and analyze a blockbuster movie. Host Robert Crowther talks with Rachel Adams about Thanos, the arch-villain from Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War, and a couple of real-life thinkers, Eric Pianka and Paul Ehrlich. They share the villain’s view that the world would be a better place with far fewer humans. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Thanos, Pianka, and Ehrlich appear to share a materialistic view of the human person, one that ignores the inherent dignity and worth of every individual as well as humanity’s capacity to generate solutions and new resources through creative labor, growing the resource pie. Thanks to this, life is not a zero-sum game. The human species is, as Julian Simon put it in his excellent book, the ultimate resource.