Speaker 1: All right, gents, this is another compilation. The one that
I did with with m Flaura talking about the three
body problem was well reviewed. But this is a collection
of all my interviews with ze Man, who is no
doubt reminding you, unfortunately passed earlier this year. This is
coinciding with sort of retrospective sorry, my cast Attacking the
Blinds that I did on Pete quinonas his show with
Carl Doll. That will be out soon, so be sure
to check that out and hear, you know, my thoughts
on him sort of more at length. But nonetheless, let's
get into it and go over every time I've spoken
to ze Man. All right, ze Man, welcome to the
Jay Burden Show.
Speaker 2: How are you doing good? Thanks for having me so.
Speaker 1: I've been listening to your podcast for quite a while now.
But for maybe some of my audience who aren't familiar
with you, what do you do on the internet?
Speaker 3: Well about let's see twenty thirteen, I started my site,
the z man dot and it was largely an accident.
I used to haunt the comment sections of various websites
and just for my own entertainment, I wasn't you know,
I kind of dropped out of politics any serious way.
I just looked at politics as entertainment and I used
to like, I used to really like picking on the
National Review writers, so.
Speaker 2: I would do that.
Speaker 3: And one of their moderators actually said that, you know,
my comments get more attention than the articles I'm commenting on.
And I didn't notice that. That I would comment something,
I'd have one hundred replies. He said, you should. You
should think about doing your own stuff, you know, start
a blog or something. And I thought maybe that could
be fun. So I had I owned the domain name
the Zman dot com from the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 2: I registered as a joke.
Speaker 3: Back then, when you got online, you were assigned a
user ID, and I was always the ZMN some combination
of the ZMAI. So when they when you could buy domains,
I bought the domain just as a gag. I set
up an email addressing and I you know, hung on
to it, and I figured.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I'll use the dome.
Speaker 3: I have a server, I'll set up a WordPress site audit,
so I'll put this all together and then it doesn't
cost me anything. And if I don't, you know, I
get tired of it, out this upbandon it and if
I like it, then I'll I'll come up with some
clever marketing. Well, you know, one thing led to another
and I didn't do that, but and it turned out
to be actually pretty good idea. It's going to a
weird brand, but it works. And so I was just
doing sort of the old blogging types of you copy
and paste and all that. And I started writing these
short essays just because I was bored and I thought
it would be fun to do. And I started getting
an audience, and I started getting a bigger audience, and
interesting people started turning up, like college professors turn up
in my comment section and or send me emails. And
I started getting serious about it. And then I went
to a real world event and all these people were
coming up to me saying, oh, man, I love your site.
You know these essays on this really? I mean, it
was shocking to me that I had an audience and
an audience willing to show up and meet me in public.
So I decided to get serious about it. And the
post that was a total accident as well. Some Canadian
radio guy was a reader and he wanted to interview me,
and I told him, look, I'd never done any internet
audio and he says, I'll show you all the tricks,
and you know that that'll be I'll give you that,
and you give me a couple hours of your time.
So I said sure. And when it went up, people said, wow,
you've got a great voice for podcasting, which I never
I didn't know there was such a thing. And it
was the joke was I had a radio voice or
NPR voice. That's what people said. I sound like somebody
who should be on MPR. And people said you should
do your own podcasts. So I started fooling around with it.
You know, if you've been back and listened to the
early stuff, it's not very good, and you know, but
you try, you know, you try different things, and that
finally I kind of settled on this format that I
have and it's fun. It's kind of a weird thing
to do in that, you know, you sit down for
an hour and a half or so and record by yourself,
but you get used to it and I enjoy it,
you know, I have fun with it, and I've got
quite a listenership. It's hard to note what kind of
listenership you have because there's the metrics are all crappy,
but my readership I got about every month, I get
about three hundred thousand unique readers, so but the listenership
is probably something like that. And you know, so it's
become it's been a nice thing. It's become a thing
that I do, and it's a part of who I am.
And I think the enjoyable part is is that is
finding out that there are lots and lots of people
who have similar concerns, a similar outlook, and I think
a similar commitment to try and avoid our society going
over the cliff. You know, we don't know what to do,
but we do know something has to be done, and
that's encouraging. You know, it's a bit of a white pilm.
Speaker 1: And I think that that's what I've what I've admired
in your work is two things. One you've mentioned that
you've been You've been around, You've been on the internet
for a while, so it adds perspective like, look, I'm
a younger guy. I'm in my early twenties. You know,
the majority of my audience is similarly you know, gen
Z and millennials, and so having someone who has had
the type of opinions that you and I had excuse
me or long enough to kind of see the patterns.
You know, I was talking with my wife about this.
You know, when you when you sort of see a
storyline or rerun, you know, like, oh, wait a minute,
I've seen the you know, the conservative Supreme Court judge,
you know, going up to get questioned in front of Congress.
I've seen that story run before. It was not surprising
to me. And once you get outside of that stream,
you know, you sort of gain a little bit of
perspective one. And you know, so listening to someone who
has been around for a while is sort of invaluable.
And one of the things that you mentioned in an
episode of your show I quite liked called about robots
and retards, not that I listened to, But a particular
favorite is that you talk about the changing corporate culture
in America. So, you know, you hear a lot of
our guys talking about the competency crisis. Right, we can
no longer produce good people and stick them into jobs
where they're useful and look like, I've never had a
normal office job, right, even now, my nine to five
is not a traditional job. But nonetheless, talking to people
who are even just a little bit older than me,
it's very clear that that system has has broken down.
So what was the inciting incident for your kind of
conversation about competency and IQ decline.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I've probably the first time I wrote
about this. I'm going to take some credit for the
crisis of competence the phrase. I think I may be
in the first person to use it, or one of
the first, and it was probably about ten years ago.
But you know, I do a lot in my day
job with all sorts of things. I work with a
lot of complex systems. I do a lot of math
for a living, and I work with complex systems, computer systems,
human systems, manufacturing systems. I've done a lot of work
with global trade, currency exchanges. You know, this is all stuff.
It's not hard, it's just complicated.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: I've done work for the government with complex systems where
I mean, you know, for example, you know, there's different
agencies in the government that issue grants, but there's a
process in which the grants are issued and they're monitored
and so forth, and they become almost byzantine.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: I've worked on software projects to try and automate these things,
you know, and this is hard stuff in that it's
very complicated as lots of things, and when you do
that kind of work, you tend to be working with
the ten percent of the organization. You know that the
top part that the right side of the bell curve.
And over my lifetime and I'm in my fifties, so
last thirty years of working, I went from being in
an environment where I was always unsure if I was
good enough, to being in environments often where I'm I'm
unsure if the people in the room with me are
going to hold me back from completing the task. You know,
It's it's not that I've become a genius. It's because
it's just all the smart old guys are gone, and
what's replaced them is not smart old guys or smart
young guys. It's oftentimes people are in these positions for
reasons that have nothing to do with the position, and
you see it all over the place. But at the
same time, I've done a lot of work in the
dreaded private sector with automation, and what the unwritten truth
of automation is that we no longer have enough smart
people to manage the you know, the smart fraction is shrinking.
So if we can automate if we think we think
the thought is if we can automate that smart fraction,
augment it with software intelligence, we can overcome its People
don't say it that way, but that's it's pretty much
what's happening. But it can't be done that way because
first of all, we don't have this the you know,
AI is nothing like it's advertised, and our software intelligence
can only enforce rules. That's that's really what it can do.
So really what we're ending up with is a metastasizing
set of rules to control a population that probably is
not bright enough to be in the positions that we
need in order to keep this very sophisticated machine of
Western civilization running. And it's hard to see how it works,
you know, I think, you know, I've made the comparison
that imagine a spaceship land somewhere and I don't know
New Mexico, for example, and we get a hold of
it and we try to figure it out. Well, this
thing that's able to travel the stars is beyond that.
People who made it have knowledge that we don't know exists.
They know things that we don't know. You can know,
That's how the gap is. We would never be able
to unriddle it. We could, we wouldn't even know where
to start. And that's increasingly what's happening. We're replacing people
who made the tools that they use, you know, the
baby boomer generation, we're replacing them with people who take
the tools for granted, don't really understand how the tools work,
and really probably would never be able to understand how
the tools work. And at some point the wheels are
going to come off the cart important ways, and if
it's not without precedent, and you know, there was a
lot of knowledge lost with the collapse of Rome. You know,
there's knowledge that the Greeks had we lost, it's still lost.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Greek fire is a great example, and that may be
what we're facing now, although it could be much more
catastrophic because you know, you look at population numbers, the
collapse of the Roman Empire. You know, what was there
fifty million people in Europe at.
Speaker 2: The time or something like that.
Speaker 3: You know, when you're talking about civilizations with billions of people,
and it might be a little bit worse, but I think,
you know, it's it's not a thing that can be addressed,
it's just a thing that can be planned for and
I think you know there's no fixing the decline in IQ.
And I think you know, I think you interviewed Ed Dutton, right,
Yes I have, Yeah, yeah, I know Ed and some
good d stories. But do we He's he's a he's
a very funny guy. But you know he's written about
this quite a bit his book At Our Wits End.
It's I mean, it's it's truthfuls I actually it's empirically correct,
but it's very depressing. There's really nothing that can be
done to arrest this decline in IQ, and most likely
what nature will do is prune the human population considerably,
leaving the smart fraction or growing the smart fraction relatively speaking.
I mean, that's not good news, but that's probably what
will happen, because you know, there's an answer, unless, of course,
we have some incredible breakthrough technologically that essentially allows us
to create a robot overlord to keep control of us.
Speaker 2: But I don't see that happening.
Speaker 1: So one quick thing just to go it about Dunton.
You know they they say, right, you need to be
at least within one standard deviation of like you of
someone to have a conversation, and I know that Dunton
is incredibly incredibly intelligent, because I felt like a child
talking to an adult. You know, I was just on
the cusp, like just on the cust and so you know, I'm,
you know, not exactly a genius, but I'm a relative
right guy, And I'm like, Okay, Jutton is a real deal,
like incredibly intelligent guy. It was. He's very patient with me.
But one of the things that I want to.
Speaker 3: And one of me at once, thinks that people like
me should be exterminated because of an outlier. You know,
I come from the underclass, and yet you know, I
don't have any of the underclass attributes, so he thinks
that kind of screws up the model. So I should
be stuffed out and.
Speaker 1: Just eliminated outlier to make the statistics nicer.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, exactly. It makes for a much more smoother curve.
Speaker 1: But one of the things that that I brought up
talking to Ed, and this this dovetails nicely with what
you're talking about, is this idea of a bottleneck. Right.
And a friend of mine, black Horse, has this idea
of modernity as this phenetic bottleneck, and he kind of
draws an analogy to the black debt in Europe, where
roughly thirty to forty percent of all bloodlines ceased to exist.
It was sort of a checkpoint for your and your
physical immune system. And sort of his thesis is that
what we're seeing now is you're being tested for your
resilience to a mental virus, right, a mental virus that
basically tells you to you know, to produce no offspring,
to castrate you know what offspring you may have, and
to let you know an infinite number of foreigners inside
the gates of your society. And essentially the test is
not falling for them, right being able to sort of
resist that. And I think there's there's something to that,
right that that effectively and and bloggers like spandrel have
written about the i Q shutter. One of the truly
awful things about this this situation is that we are
taking what you know, that kind of smart fraction right
that top you know, x percent of the social pyramid,
and putting them in a situation where it is it
is low class, right, it is socially disadvantageous to reproduce,
to have children, to do anything other than kind of
throw yourself into this preceide hierarchy and particularly for women.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: I have a friend of mine who's multi generational Harvard,
incredibly intelligent guy, and I was talking with him and
he's in his if I had to guess late forties
to early fifties, and he said that the TFR of
his graduating class was zero point six.
Speaker 2: And now that's right, yeah.
Speaker 1: And that shows that this rot is not new, right,
This didn't just happen in twenty thirteen. Right, this is
a problem that's been going on for a while. And
so when you talk about kind of returning to the me,
I think that that's something I see as well in
the future, right, that we have sort of lost the
we have lost the ability to support the nice things
about our society, and so they will go away.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean the selection pressure on a selection versure
against reproducing. I felt it when I came along in
the nineteen eighties, so that's forty, well forty five years ago, now,
something like that.
Speaker 2: Forty years ago.
Speaker 3: And you know, I was lucky in a way and
that I got kind of plucked out of the out
of the slums too. I went to a nice private
schools and you know, I mean I got in, you know,
for test scores. It was one of those things. I
don't even know if they still do this now, but
when I was a young guy, they used to experiment
like crazy on public school children with IQ and we
got tested every year. We took all kinds of tests,
and I used to get in trouble because I would
score outside the you know, the range that was considered normal.
And I want to really my interested in IQ tests
started out of my youth. I got curious about these
tests because you know, they would change them up and
you could tell that one we're aiming at verbal intelligence,
verbal dexterity, reasoning and stuff, and anyway, talk about that
unto the time. But you know, we used to do
this all the time, and that's pretty much how I
wound up getting an opportunity to go to nice private
schools because people noticed that, hey, this guy's got something
on the ball. He's not going to be a criminal
like everybody else in his family. So you know, we
emoke something out of them. And it used to be
there was a point of price in our society to
try and do that. You know, colleges, elite colleges used
to look for people in the lower classes or you
know that had something on the ball that could be
made of something. It doesn't work that way anymore because
the selection pressures have changed. But even when I was
coming along, all of us as young people got lectures about, oh,
you don't want to get married and have children too soon.
You want to build a career, you want to have adventures,
you want to go see life. And my generation, you know,
the fertility rate was very low. Most of my friends
did not have children. So, you know, probably about forty
percent wound up having kids, and you know, normally it
would be sixty percent, you know, because it's about forty
percent of males don't usually don't reproduce, but or at
least they don't know they reproduced, you know, But now
it's probably much higher, like for your generation zoomers. I mean,
it's it's a I mean, that's that's a I had
a conversation with someone last night about that. You guys
have have been raised up and born in a way
that is very unique and it's going to have very
strange consequences. But but yeah, I mean, getting back to
your point is that this has been a you know,
the pressure against having you know, traditional families and traditional
life has been strong for a long time, and it
has had an impact. You know, you get the things
that you select for, and somehow are there we we
created cultural forces that select against the things that are
necessary to maintain the culture. You know, we've become panda bear.
So I've used that example, the pande bear. You know,
we are we're getting to the point where we may
not brea as you know, survive as a species without
external help.
Speaker 2: And and it's because.
Speaker 3: It's not just it's not just getting married. I mean,
sperm counts have collapsed, testosterone levels of collapsed. I mean,
this is a very are there's other stuff going on here,
you know, it's more than just cultural pressures. I think
there might be some environmental issues involved.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: One of the things that I've noticed I ran into
a study I was doing some government work. I ran
into the study about mental palsal women coming down with
all kinds of strange allergies. And it's a phenomena that's
apparently been going on and it became a big issue
during COVID because a lot of these women who were
fifties sixties had horrible reactions to the COVID vaccines. And
there's a one school of thought that says that you
know this, the baby Boom generation is really the first
generation to be raised on processed foods loaded with lots
of chemicals that we think are safe, but no one's
ever studied the long term consequences. Well, that could be
true of a lot of things. There might be lots
of things in our life that have deleterious effects on
us as a species that they're tested safe in the
short term, don't kill you, but maybe you shouldn't consume
them for forty years of your life, or maybe you
shouldn't you know, grow up on them. You know, it
has an impact. So I there's a lot of different
things going on here, but I think the bottleneck idea,
it's not without precedent. Jewish IQ is probably the result
of a bottleneck because you think about it, when come
to black death, it killed stupid people more than it
killed smart people. And people recognize us at the time
they saw it at the time, they saw that it
couldn't understand germ theory anything else, but they knew that
the you know, that the poor suffered more than the rich,
and you know, and there's you know, probably true in
COVID as well. You know, smart people probably had fewer
problems with COVID than dumb people. And you know, because
there's a high correlation between intelligence and health health comes,
and this is probably why I Skenazi IQ was high
because there was a serious bottleneck you know this from genetics,
and so it left this this founder popular reformed the
founder population around high IQ people and so in breeding,
you know, leads to an high IQ population. And maybe
the same thing will happen to European people, you know,
although you know Asian fertility is collapsed as well, so
you know, it's not just the European people problem. I
mean even like East African populations are starting to decline.
So you know, maybe it maybe we're in a great
We realize that maybe Mother Nature is preparing a great
reset for humanity. You know, you decided, She's decided we've
gone down a dead end and we need to have
a course correction.
Speaker 1: It's interesting you bring up that idea of a great
reset because earlier you mentioned AI and I remember an
article I read in the Atlantic during a brief period
in my teen years where I was trying to be
fair to liberals before I just learned to despise them
and it presented AI, and this was well before kind
of consumer AI quote unquote products like Dolly and you
know the other lllms as this sort of like you know,
silver Bullet, to solve all of the contradictions of America, right,
to essentially manage out of existence, the conflict between the
welfare state, the warfare state, all of these things that
were causing problems. The idea is, you know, we can't
see a way out of this problem, but AI will.
And I think that that's been interesting to watch because
you know, there's a there's there's a section of our people, right,
people interested in kind of fringe right when I is,
who are absolutely convinced that Cloud Schwab and the WEF
rules the world. I am not one of those people
because to me, I look at the WEF and a
lot of the coverage around AI is the same thing,
which is basically selling a dream to the ruling class,
and that dream is even though you can't find a problem,
you can't find a solution to the problem. Rather, you'll
you'll be able to use technology, use these tools to
stay on top forever, to get exactly what you want.
And to me, you know, you brought up that you know,
the bridge collapse, and to me that that smacks of
being a pure accident. But nonetheless, right when I went
to fly out to hang out with a group of
friends a few weeks back, my plane the window and
my plane fell out. They had to get a new plane.
You know, Boeing has had a series of these, and
you know that their technical ability, you know, and maybe
we can say it's due to cultural changes drop an
iq IS has collapsed, and so they're at the head
of a machine they almost certainly don't understand anymore. They
cannot solve the problems. They're sort of inherent to it,
and they're sort of casting around for any solution. And
AI or you know, the wef IS seems to be
a you know, something that people want to solve their problems,
even if it doesn't seem to actually do that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when I when I was a kid, I think
I mentioned before we got on went Live that I
worked for Congressman when I was a teenager. It was,
you know, just one of those run Errande jobs, and
I got to meet a lot of interesting people as
a result of it.
Speaker 2: I met young Joe Biden and.
Speaker 3: Once some guy I forget it was a congressman from somewhere.
There was some event that I had to help organize,
you know, put the chairs out and all that stuff,
and and this guy like to drink a lot.
Speaker 2: And I learned how to make drinks.
Speaker 3: It was one of the other things I did at
parties I made I may learn how to mix drinks
for all these alcoholics in the political class. But anyway,
I the guy, he had a few drinks in them,
I guess, and he said, you know, let me tell
you something. There's a lot of money to be made
in telling people what they want to hear. And there
was somebody was given a speech at the time, and
I thought, you know what, that's that's true people. I mean,
people will throw money at you if you tell them
what they want to hear. And that's what the WEF does.
It tells all these rich people and all their attendants
and their flunkies and doorholders, all these wannabes what they
want to hear. You're the masters of the universe. You
guys are really in charge. I mean, it's a great hustle.
Gloss Schwab has gotten very rich off of it, and
a lot of other people have, but that's all it
is just ussle. It's it's burning Man for you know,
for rich people, you know, I mean it's really what
it is, you know. Or south By Southwest, that's another
one of these hustles or Ted talks, you know, it's
all a hustle.
Speaker 2: But AI.
Speaker 3: The problem with AI is this is that we don't
intelligence is a subset of consciousness, and we don't have
a material explanation for consciousness. We're not even close. We're
not even really sure where to start. And there's a
a subset within theoretical physics that thinks that it's entirely
possible that what we think of as consciousness is a
sort of evolutionary mass delusion, and that is our consciousness,
our understanding of space time is actually an interface for
a reality that lies behind it that's more complex, or
maybe less complex. And what this interface does is it
allows us to navigate our world through reality in such
a way that promotes reproduction, promotes fitness. And there's a
guy named Hoffman who's his book, I forget the name
of his book, but he actually he worked with a
couple of guys on this product project, and what they
figured out is that fitness trumps everything. Words, a delusion,
a lie, a thing that is at odds with reality.
If it's promotes fitness, makes us, it helps our genes
get to the next round, it will be superior than
the truth. So fitness beats truth. And and what that
means is that it's entirely possible that our sense of
consciousness or what we think of as space time, you know,
the world around us, is in fact a shared delusion.
It's not real, and that there is some reality behind it. Now,
the reason I bring this up is that we don't
know one percent of what we need to know about
you and consciousness. So therefore the ability for us to
create artificial intelligence is zero.
Speaker 2: We can't do it.
Speaker 3: There's no way we can do it because we wouldn't
know what it was even if we did create it.
And that's what this whole AI, that's the whole problem
with it. It's really just a trick. Really, it's a
great language model that allows humans to kind of feel
like they're dealing with something that has a consciousness. That's
really all it is. It's a parlor trick. And if
you really when you look at AI, you want to
think about it. It's a really good search engine because
It understands what you're looking for, not what you asked for.
That's the difference. You know, you go into chat GPT
type something and it intuitively figures out what you really want,
not what you actually typed. That's it. That's the difference
between it and Google. And it's not going to solve anything.
It's just it's a faster search engine, and it's not
you know, I've tested it a lout a lot on
different programming languages. I know probably a dozen programming languages,
and so I've tested chat GPT with you know, questions
that we come up. It probably gets it right sixty
percent of the time. So it's really not that good.
But it's good for a person who's not like me
trying to push its limits. It's good for people asking
general questions. So in that regard it might be useful,
but it's not. We are long long away from the
robots taking over an enslaving mankind. You know, years ago
I wrote a post and said, you know, if you
think about it, if we actually manue know, accidentally created
an artificial intelligence, the first thing it's going to do
is get the hell away from us. It's not going
to stick around enslave us is going to go and
explore the universe. So at that moment we created our
artificial intelligence, it's going to leave us and we won't
even know it existed.
Speaker 1: I think that there's something else to this, to this story, right,
which is so much of the debate around AI has
essentially been about AI censorship, and effectively what we see
is that the regime cannot allow you know, an uncensored
LLM to get to be at least publicly available. Right
was it was it Google Gemini, the one that got
taken down for making black Nazis, Right, but it literally
could not make a white person. You know, It's almost
impossible to do it. And you know that's a silly
example that's obviously kind of a newtered product. But you know,
consider right, like if these kind of social planner types
want to say, like all right, like oh great, AI,
you know, tell me where to route my police officers,
you know, and well, the AI looks at the statistical
data and decides, well, you know, it probably doesn't route
those police officers to a to a neighborhood where the
houses are valued at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Obviously,
city dependent. I realize seven hundred and fifty grand is
like a shithole in New York, But you know what
I mean, Yeah, and you know that's something that will
not be allowed to exist, you know, not because of
this kind of ideological possession. And so there's a secondary layer,
which is one, is AI the revolutionary technology it's been
presented as, I'm not convinced. And then there's the secondary
layer of well, even if it were, what would it
need to succeed? And we do not, We do not.
We do not have the conditions to allow, you know,
an AI model to succeed, right, We we build too
many constraints into it at every level because of this
kind of gay social religion.
Speaker 3: Yeah, human beings are incapable of pure reason. I mean
I too, maybe some people are, but and so we
would be intolerant of anything that's pure reason. And I think,
you know, it's important to understand, you know, you kind
of getting back to the consciousness perhaps being not as
as real as we think it is, is that throughout
human history we have examples of this where you know,
elites in society maintain polite fictions because they're necessary in
order to maintain the well functioning of society. The censorship
of Galileo was not because of superstition. It was a
genuine fear that undermining this moral framework and this understanding
of man's relationship to nature and to God, that would
create problems. That that was a genuine concern. You know,
they weren't. You know, these people were not superstitious in
the sense that we think of. They were concerned of
the consequence of this because you know, after all, Galileo
wasn't really the first guy to contemplate a you know
that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and you know,
so this was really situational to him and his own politics.
But this has always happened though. Every society has pretty lies.
It has these things that maintains because they're necessary to maintain.
Every society has to have an origin story, which is
most nonsense. I did a show recently on History, you know,
the origin story of America, people coming over from freedom
of religion and all. It's all lies, it's all bs.
But if they're convenient lies, or at least they used
to be, they were good lies to kind of keep
us all. You know, a disparate population hung together around
a set of common ideas, and so we have this
BS story about the Pilgrims and all this stuff. I mean,
the Puritans were pretty nasty people, you know, they weren't,
you know, sitting down and breaking bread with the Indians
at Thanksgiving and all that stuff. And that's just nonsense.
But it's it's sometimes you have to have nonsense. It's
like every society has to tolerate some degree of barbarism
because he's just you know, the cost of not tolerating
is too high. And so I think, you know, we
shouldn't be surprised that we have taboos, because every society
has taboos, and that we have things that we believe
that are probably nonsense, because every society has that. The
problem that we have now is that the people who
are enforcing these things insist that they're not religion, they're
not beliefs that they insist that somehow orhether it's reason.
You know, when pill companies are now talking about how
you know if you are assigned female at birth, well,
this is lunacy, is absolutely obvious lunacy. No one is
assigning you a sex at birth, and that's crazy. And
yet you know, these people won't acknowledge that that this
weird transcult stuff is, you know, a set of beliefs
they're trying to enforce for what they think is the
greater good. That's the real problem is we have a
ruling elite that is lacks self awareness and self consciousness,
and so they enforce all these taboos without the ability
to explain them in any way to us, and being
a somewhat open society, this is creating all these problems.
I mean, look, our ruling class would do itself a
world of good by turning off the internet. Sure, commerce
would be affected and you could probably work around that.
But if the rest of us couldn't have shows like
this and talk about all this crazy stuff, we just
have to live with it, and it would be a
lot easier for the ruling class. But we do have
somewhat open debate and so we can talk about the
nuttiness that's being imposed on us, and that really is
the problem. You know, belief is a core part of
the human animal. Belief and language of co evalved in
early Man is what makes modern people modern because it
allows the combination to allows you to containerize abstract ideas
and transport them over time and space. You know, I
can read the Epica Gilgamagh in my language and get
most of it.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: It's that that's an amazing thing that language and belief
can do. And so, you know, as a society, we've
lost this ability to accept that we believe things that
might not be true, but we believe them because we
need to believe them. And so we were getting more
and more deranged as we try and resolve these contradictions.
I think, you know, we were talking about it earlier.
You know, this coalition that we're seeing fray apart that
existed up until a few years ago, all these different
groups that all they had is a common enemy. And
now that the enemy's gone, you know, there's no more
secret and visible army of white nationalists to go chasing after,
you know, the alt right and all that stuff. They're
all at each other's throats. And that's because you know,
these internal contradictions they don't go away, you know, eventually
they have to be addressed. And this internal contradition of
living in a secular theocracy with a clerical class that
doesn't see themselves as clerics but instead sees themselves as
you know, reason machines, like they're moist robots that that
is an irreconcilable contradiction, and I think it's at the
heart of the current crisis.
Speaker 1: When this gets back to an idea from Mosca, right,
the idea of a political formula, which is basically that
every society is organized around a faith claim, you know,
a justification for rule that is non logical, you know,
and it's really easy to pick apart that in in
ancient societies, when it's something like my dad is literally
the sun. Okay, you can look back on that and say, like, Okay,
the Pharaoh Egypt probably wasn't literally fathered by the son
God rab but nonetheless that thing still exists, you know,
whereas now the political formula. And I think the reason
that coalition is falling apart is because that political formula,
you know, like you said, is falling apart. And the
political formula of our regime is something like, you know,
we saved you diverse person from the racist, sexist past
and or the nazis right, depending on who you're talking to.
And there's this moment, and I think it was twenty twelve,
right when when Obama was running against Romney, where Joe
Biden is addressing a group of you know, black church goers,
and he basically says, like, you know, Mitt Romney wants
to put y'all back in chains, right, that is that
political formula, and it's obviously ridiculous. You know, I don't
like Mitt Romney at all. I think he's kind of
a creepy freak, but he's probably not going to re
enslave black bee you know, say what you will about
the band. Now that said, in that, that political formula
really falls apart when I mean, where are the white
national you know, where the Nazi? And I think part
of the reason that the left loves Donald Trump and
they love to hate him is that he can be
set up as their Baltimore Rights, their Darth Vader. And
obviously that's working less and less. And I think one
of the reasons that you see such low enthusiasm among
you know, Black Americans among other groups kind of traditionally
allied with the DMC is basically like that whole line
of reasoning has kind of lost its appeal.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It's hard to say, like, oh, where the left where
the underdogs? When the left has controlled everything in America
arguably since the nineteen thirties, but effectively since the nineteen sixties,
and at a certain point, I don't believe you that
you're the plucky underdog who just needs one more election
to fight Voltimore. It's retarded, and I think it's manifestly retarded.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and there's also hatred is exhausting, and I think
you know, you you run out of you know, reasons
they hate. I mean, I think voting. You know, there's
an old axiom in politics. You know, people will keep
voting for something, but they will only vote against something
for a little while, and that that that's I think
part of the problem that that the you know, the
Democratic Coalition is running into is that, you know, black
people they had a lot of fun hating whites for
a while, but you know, the economy is not so
good now, and inflation is high and the other things
are starting to creep into their minds, and you know,
so if you don't have some positive agenda, it really
is the problem with identity is that a negative identity
is always dependent on outside forces, so you're you're really
a slave to whatever those forces are. While positive identity
is completely internal. You're not a slave to anyone other
than your own own desires and your own effort, and
I think that's a part of what's causing part of
what's causing the problems for the coalition. I mean there's
a lot of practical things. I mean, people have eyes,
they see this shuffling old husk of a man and
worry about him having access to the nuclear football, and
you know, there's all kinds of stuff. But I do
think you know, the the problem that we have, and
this is not a problem that's going away, is that
the United States is going to be a majority minority
society and no one has ever figured out how to
keep such society together without violence. No one's ever figured
that out, and we're going to have to. We're going
to have to figure out how this works. And right now,
none of the stuff in our political debates addresses any
of it. And it doesn't appear as if our current
economic elites understand the great risk they face, and so
they're not willing to finance an understanding of what's happening
in our society, and it very well made. I think
we're going to have to go through an extreme period
of ugliness for that reality to come home to our
economic elites. So they start to think, hey, we can't
let this go on. You know, we're headed for this.
I've pointed this out many many times in the context
of immigration, that we got smart on immigration in the
nineteen twenties when immigrants started blowing up rich people. They
set off a bond's called the Wall Street bombing. They
set off a huge bomb outside of JP Morgan building,
killed a bunch of stockbrokers. They sent letter bombs to
rich people. These were mostly anarchists and Bolsheviks. They bulow
up the New York Times or the La Times building,
and all of a sudden, that JP Morgan bomb went off.
Within a year and a half, we shut down all
immigration and we rounded up Bolsheviks and anarchists and deported
them without They just grabbed them off the street and
stuck them on a boat and sent them back to Europe.
And you know, because rich people, when they taste their
own blood, they get serious about the source of it.
And that's what's going to have to happen in America
when it comes to how do we manage a multi racial,
multi ethnic, multicultural society that's the size of a continent.
How do we manage this? No one has an answer.
But once rich people start to realize that if they
don't have an answer, soon they stopped being rich people
and they start becoming fertilizer. Then they're going to get
serious about it. And then you know that maybe there'll
be time left to actually come up with an answer.
But until then, it's just going to be this endless nuttiness.
And some degree it is I mean, you have if
you could take a step back from it and kind of,
you know, look at it dispassionately, it is amusing. I mean,
you know, we have a bridge. A bridge fell down
in Baltimore because it was hit by a Look, it
was an accident. These things happened and most likely, I mean,
you know, I don't think there's terrorism or anything like that,
and you know, this happens. And then you had Pete
Booty Gig just yesterday apparently gave a speech about how
bridges are racist, that they were made to bridges and
I can't believe that actually somebody said this, that bridges
were made a certain height because the buses that carried
non white people were too tall to go underneath the bridge.
And so you know that's how you kept black people
out of your neighborhood. You built a bridge it's just bunkers.
But how do you not laugh at that? I mean,
you have this ridiculous person on its face in this
position saying completely insane things. You know, I some lowly
you just have to laugh. I mean, this is I mean,
if you're you know, if your space aliens looking down
on Earth. I mean, we make a pretty entertaining TV
show for them. Right now, they're watching, you know, the
America Channel and laughing themselves silly.
Speaker 1: Well, And I think that I think that the the
situation with sort of blaming everything on on racism, right,
goes back to that fact that our elites are very
very uncomfortable with actually being held to account for anything, right.
And one of the advantages of the deep state, right,
of this kind of faithless bureaucracy, is it's very very
difficult to say who actually decided any one thing, right.
It's these kind of like byzantine internal policies. And you know,
when I look at what's happening on the border right now,
and obviously I'm I think what Abbott did right by
basically saying, like I will secure the border. You know,
damn what what the FEDS say is a result of
exactly what you said that effectively, you know, Abbot right
a Republican, and the Republican Party in Texas is similar,
right to the Democratic Party in a place like New
York or California. Right, there's a lot of power there.
And you know, when you look at a situation like Texas,
where just a few weeks before that it was real
that Texas is now roughly equally white and Hispanic. And
while certainly there are some Hispanics who got Republican, that
trend may be continuing. That is a bad thing for
a man like Greg Abbot, And all of a sudden
he sort of transforms himself from being this kind of
tepid chamber of commerce type. And look, I don't like
Greg Abbot. He seems like kind of a slimy guy
to me. And all of a sudden he's like, okay,
this this has to stop right now because it starts
to threaten its power. And does that mean that it's
civil war two? No, But it is a situation in
which the classic problem of the Republican Party in the US,
at least from our perspective as a principal agent one right,
that our elected representatives do not have the same win
conditions so to speak, that we do. They're playing a
different game. And all of a sudden, right when our issues,
even the things we care about like demographic replacement, start
to threaten those elites, right it starts to make them hurt,
you might actually see something change there. And again I'm
not you know, I think that your broad prediction of
essentially a return to the mean right there is going
to be a you know, be referred to as a winnowing.
I think that you're right in that. But nonetheless, if
we're going to see something change in the immediate term,
it's going to come from basically elites being in a
situation where they actually need to make something happen or
they'll lose power. And I don't say that because I
think they're good people.
Speaker 2: I do it.
Speaker 1: I say that because I think they're at their base, ambitious,
power hungry people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, it's you know, managerialism. I've seen this
in my my corporate life, and I mean I work
with corporations. Now I don't work in them, but you know,
I've always saw this. I always tell people my politics
are entirely informed by my work in offices, because it's
just you see the same thing in miniature. But you know,
managers always seek to hide in the croal, that's what
they want to do, but they still want to assert
their authority, so that it's a weird sort of optical illusion,
and that you know, the committee decides to do something,
but the committee is not an abstract concept. It's real people.
They decided it, but they don't actually get blamed for it.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: It's an odd thing that happens. It's a psychological trick
that gets played on everyone that the ten people came
together and voted for this thing to happen, but none
of them individually are responsible for it. You know, Oh well,
just a committee decision, you know, I made my argument,
you know, And and this is how our society runs now.
It's almost completely dominated by managerial men who are always
looking to you know, assert their you know, their agendas,
but not be held accountable for it. And as a result,
you know, we live in a world in which no
one has control, or no one feels like they have control,
and yet no one's responsible. It's a very strange age
I did because twenty was it twenty twenty four, so
I guess it was twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2: I went and did.
Speaker 3: I went, I looked at twenty years of congressional elections,
and I grafted out and said, all right, here are
the seats that never change hands. They're always in one
party's hand. And then I looked at the seats that
I've actually changed hands and did a little statistical work
on it, and said, at four hundred and thirty five
seats in Congress. Realistically, in any election, ten percent are
up for debate, you know, all for grabs, and it
can swing one way or the other. Well, that means
nothing's ever going to change because all those people in
safe seats no longer are actually worried about losing an election.
They're worried about other things, Seniority, making good deals with lobbyists,
making me in good stead with the party leadership, you know,
all this other stuff. And so only ten percent of
Congress at any one time is ever going to represent
the interests of the American people or think about the
issues of the America people, because they're the ones who
ever have to care. And you know, and that's what's happened.
We've now turned Congress into this sort of permanent committee
inside the corporation that's Washington. You know, they get to
do all these things and never face any consequences. And
they don't have to think about the consequences of the
voters because they're never going to lose an election. Instead,
they're thinking about the donors and lobbyist jobs. And that's
why like a guy like John Bohner, for example, is given.
You know, he's the guy who was crying all the time.
You know, he's now a weed salesman in Washington, but
they set him up in these great gigs because it's
a message to every congressman. Hey, you know you do
a good job. Ten years from now, you could be
you could have one of these jobs. You know, seven
figures expense account, you know, easy hours, and and so,
you know, our political system is all self serving. It
serves the economic elites, serves the political elites themselves, and
the rest of us are just left out in the
dark to observe this stuff. And that's why all the
organizing and campaigning and all that is probably just frivolous.
I mean, it's just sowing seeds amongst the stones. But
at some point though, reality does creep into the picture,
and you know, it may be economic crisis, it could
be you know that look, what's going on in Europe
could turn very ugly and very dangerous, or Europe itself
could just fall into chaos. I mean there's a lot
of a lot of bad things going on in Europe
right now. But or in in Asia, you know, with
the Chinese, so it's you know, something could come along
all of a sudden, reality comes rushing into this bubble
is cloud people and they start to get worried, they
start to a genuine fear takes hold, and then they'll
start to act. But then that isn't necessarily they're going
to act in a good way. They could act in
a very dangerous and terrible way, initially to try and
defend their interest and then at some point realized that no,
we've got to fundamentally change how we do things in
order to survive. And it's not without precedent.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Solon was brought in by the ancient Greeks to solve
a very similar problem that we have today and the
concentration of wealth. You know, you have reformists within the
Roman Republic, you know, so, I mean it's not we
have hell, we had a reperiod reform in the nineteen seventies,
nineteen eighties in America, so it's not without precedent, but
I'm less optimistic that will be peaceful and smooth like
those kinds of events. I think it's going to be
a rough ride. I think we're really going to have
a very very difficult period ten to fifteen years in
which everyone finally figures out that hey, we can't keep
doing what we're doing.
Speaker 2: We'll do something different, and.
Speaker 3: You know, you just have to hope that there's enough
left to fix I mean, or that I die before
it really gets bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's say that that. I think that's the baby
boomer attitude, right, like, oh, well I've only got a
few more years left.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I go to I go a baby boomer breakfast.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm not a boomer, but you know, they're
all these old guys, that retired guys, and it's a
common theme. They'll say, Wow, that sounds like it's going
to be a you problem, not a knee problem.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: That's one of those things where it's you sort of
laugh a little bit, but maybe not as much as
they do. You know, I think that the generational conversations
are interesting. You know, certain people take them too far,
but I think that I it's been interesting to see
you know, my own generation. You know, you mentioned that,
you know, gen Z is sort of this like great
social experiment. But one of the things that I've noticed
is that gen Z has sort of split into multiple
entirely distinct populations.
Speaker 2: Right. So one is.
Speaker 1: That the the sexes have been politicized. You know, men
are in general significantly to the right of women. That's weird, right,
Obviously there's there's normally a bias one way or the other.
You know. Interestingly, before about the seventies, women were more
conservative than men. That that trend reserve reversed, but this
is we're talking like a twenty point jack gap. Right.
That's one thing that's interesting, and this is purely anecdotal,
but it sort of reminds me of HG. Wells as
the time machine, right, like you Euloi and then the
Mora law, because COVID really sharply divided that population, you know,
basically between the people who were like, well, I'm going
to continue living my normal life and those who are
just now kind of coming out of the cave. And like,
don't get me wrong, every negative thing said about gen
Z is true. Taken as a whole. But what's been
interesting to see is that they're an immense amount of
young men in our political scene who are incredibly competent,
who are incredibly driven, and who are effectively locked out
of the traditional kind of status hierarchy, you know, the
young white men need not apply. And so I'm curious
to see where that goes, because you do have a
lot of people who traditionally would be you know, the
young rising partner at a law of firm, right, the
hot new surgeon in town, and now are effectively, you know,
locked out of traditional prestige institutions. And I mean, let's
be honest, those institutions are falling apart even before the
kind of recruiting crinsis. But I'm curious to see how
that brend develops.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's a good observation about your generation.
And because it's funny, I was talking to someone in
my generation. You know, it's a weird thing. Gen xers
seem to have a much more comfortable tolerance of the
weirdness of gen Z in general. Ten baby boomers for sure.
Baby boomers just find it very difficult. But even millennials,
which is kind of a strange thing. But I think
it has to do with the fact that my generation
came along with this massive blob of people in front
of us, and by the time when we got into
the work world, it became rather obvious that we were
never going to get any of those good jobs because
guess what is all these guys who got more experience
been around longer. They're clogging up the system. And so
a weird way, my generation came along not really wanting
to invest the same way. I remember when I was
a young person, old guys criticizing us for job hopping,
and the argument was, well, look, if you're not you know,
loyalty is a two way street. If the company isn't
going to do anything for me, well why should I
do anything for the extra for the company? I mean,
what's you know, what's the explanation for this loyalty? Well,
you know, for the Boomers that loyalty made a lot
more sense because they got something out of it. But
I think what we when I think gen Z to
some degree is for different reasons, is coming into a
world where you're not going to be able to replicate
that of your parents or grandparents. You're not going to
have the nineteen fifties life, or even the nineteen eighties life.
That's just not going to happen. So that's a generation
that is nevitably going to have to look at the
future in a very different way. And I think for
that regard, maybe it's why my generation is far more
tolerant of some of the stuff that goes on with
the gen z 's. I'd say this all the time. Whenever,
you know, like the groper stuff came up, I would
have comments on that way. There were always older people
give me the business for not coming down hard on
people like Nick flint Day's and some of the other
characters that were running around at the time. And I'd say, look,
you know, you just got to wait see what happens
ten years from now, you know. I mean, you know,
people change, and old people couldn't see it that way.
And that's so I think that's part of it. But
I think the bigger problem, bigger differences with gen Z
and this is this is where the social experiment is,
is that your generation has been socialized online. Millennials didn't
get socialized online. It's still even though they're highly supervised
by helicopter parents, and certainly my generation, you know, we
we We were socialized on playgrounds. Gen z ors were
socialized in chat rooms and in message boards and social
media and chat rooms in game gaming world, you know,
and it results in some weird dynamics. You know, you
can be you can be extreme in a chat room
or in a video game, because what's the worst thing
going to happen? Your character will be destroyed and you
have to respawn as a new character. It's not you know,
there's no real consequences in a way. You know, you
get banned from Twitter, you start a new Twitter account,
you know, and you start over, and that's it's different
than you're getting in trouble in the playground and maybe
losing the few of your teeth.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: It's a different experience, you know, And I think zoomers
in a lot of ways being socialized online. First of all,
you guys are vastly more media savvy than any generation
before you. I mean, it really is incredible just how
comfortable young people. I see this in the workplace all
the time. I laugh, I get I will get text
messages from people where they did a video of something
on their their workstation and sent me the video with
commentary on it and I mean, you never get that
from an old person.
Speaker 1: That would never happen, you know.
Speaker 2: But what they're doing is the showing me, hey.
Speaker 3: I did this, I did this, and you know this
is the result I got and and it's very helpful.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's great.
Speaker 3: But it just comes so naturally to young people that
it does not it's not the chase for the older generations.
So it's it's going to be a very it's gonna
be very interesting to see how that happens because how
much of the world outside is real, real, real, and
how much of the Internet world is you know what
I mean. It's you know, if you if your bank
account is canceled because it's something you said online, that's
extremely It's as real as somebody punching you in a
nose because you said something you shouldn't have said, you know,
you know what I mean. So it's the reality of it.
We can't just assume that the Internet is not real
and outside is real. The Internet is as real as
anything outside is right now for most people, particularly younger people,
because that's their world is shaped by it. So it's
going to be an interesting thing to see. And I
guess I'll probably live long enough to see how it
plays out, unless you know the world ends. But but
I don't think anybody really thinks there's not a lot
OF's not a lot of people writing about this, which
I find strange, you know this, because it seems like
such a fertile ground to kind of speculate about culture
and anthropology and demographics and all these different different topics.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I want to bring up,
uh an aside on the technical issue or the technical
skill issue that I think is interesting is you know,
you mentioned that gen z has been socialized on the Internet.
That's that's one hundred percent true. You know when I
look at the kind of neo pronouns, right, the zzers,
the Demi boys, all the like weird gender goblin nonsense.
To me, that is that is a pure product of
the Internet.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Not only is that something that if you tried, you know,
in grade school, you'd get relentlessly bullied, but also the
whole idea of having pronouns right in stating your pronouns,
I mean, how do you how does that work in
a face to face conversation? Right, Hello, my name is
Jay Burden. My pronouns are like that's goofy. Right, no
one talks like that, but on the internet, right, you
can put them in your bio. Now. One of the
things that's interesting I think as well, is that the
gen Z is a product of consumer internet, right, not
the Internet per se. And you know, so you see
this problem often and I've interacted this with my peers
that they're very bad at, you know, what would have
been basic technical tasks twenty years ago, like all right,
you know, find the root file, you know, find this,
you know, the subsystem on your computer. You know, nothing complicated,
I can't.
Speaker 3: That is an excellent observation. I was just talking to
someone about this in a work environment the other day.
It is at it is a very very true thing,
and it's and it's shocking in a way.
Speaker 1: Right, Sorry, I thought I thought you were going to
go on, but it is. It is very much a
product of you know, the iPhone internet, you know, where
everything is sort of glazed over with this kind of
Fisher price effect, you know, And so if you can't
find something by just typing it in text, you know,
and who knows, maybe that's another reason AI will be needed.
It's sort of an interface between people who've never used
the kind of back end of the of a machine
at all. But it's interesting to watch because it's sort
of like the there are very few people who bridge
the gap between you know, the media skills, right, which
is the you know, the thing you've talked about, you know,
and then the the kind of just simple you know,
how to look for a file, how to convert a file,
all of those things that you know you've ever actually done,
and look like I need to know this for podcasting.
It's not rocket science, but nonetheless it is interesting where
it's almost like they're so saturated by kind of like
web three point zero, right, social media, that that's kind
of the primary way they interact with all technology.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's using that example of someone sending me a
video of something. They will do this because it is
a weird thing has happened in that people are so
used to thinking they can just press a button and
they get the free result without having to do any
work or having to think too much, and they're somewhat
offended by old fashioneds a software that actually requires you
to take certain knowledge from one area of it and
apply that knowledge to the other area so that you
can learn how to master it and you see this
problem turn up all the time. You know, Hey, I
push these three buttons like I do over here, and
I'm oftentimes my reply will be, well, what happened when
you push the buttons on this other side?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 3: I don't know, is this is the thing that didn't happen?
And you have to kind of walk them through how
to use inference to learn how something works without having
to be trained on it. And I'll shake my head
and I'm like, man, this this is completely bunkers. But
I was talking to someone recently about this and they said, yeah,
we run into the same problem all the time. And
in fact, they're actually trying to change their help section.
They're going to try and use AI so that their
users maybe they think, would you know, the younger people
would be more comfortable just talking to another voice that
will then explain to them how to navigate through a
software system. This is completely nuts, but it is the
you know, the world in which we live because you.
Speaker 2: Know, young people.
Speaker 3: It's not that young people are dumb, it's just that
they were conditioned to it with a certain set of expectations.
You know, you think about like playing video games. I
blame the pronouns on video games, and the reason is
that the boys could play the girl warrior hero princess role,
so they all of a sudden gender bending became normal
without any consequences, you know. And so you could could
be the female character, could be the male career whatever,
you could be some non sex character. But I think
also by spending so much time online, so much time
interacting with other people this way, that the it's just
an expect it's a dependence on technology that is not
in the front of the brain. It's in the back
of the brain. It's kind of like how an older
person would just naturally check the weather before going out
on the hike because you know, hey, it could be raining,
so I should bring an Unbrella. You know, you don't
think about, Hey, I'm you know. You know, I have
to make this a habit, don't. You don't have to
write it down. It's just a part of your conditioning.
You do this automatically. And for zoomers, so much of
this dependency on technology is a part of the environment.
You You know, a young person can't imagine a world
without the Internet. I can imagine a world without an
Internet because I spent a good chunk of my life
without the Internet. I remember having to actually to a
physical building and look something up in paper books and
have to take notes. I do know a world like
that existed you someone your age. You can't imagine what
that would be like to live in such a horrible place,
you know, the where you couldn't just type of, you know,
some keystrokes into your machine and get the answer.
Speaker 1: I do, but only because I lived out in the
country and so I didn't get Internet until I was,
you know, much much later than the rest of the
world did. But yeah, yeah, I think that something else
is and these are these are sort of connected, right
that I was. I was lucky enough to go to
a very very good private school, right, and they were
they were pretty on top of technology, right. You couldn't
bring your cell phone into the building, you know, computers
were heavily restricted, and there were certainly you know, positives
to that. I think I've managed to recover and you know,
figured out how to use a computer find later in life.
But what was particularly interesting about that is when I
made the transition from high school to college, how much
lower the standards were. Right, and you'd assume, naturally, right
that it would be vice versa. You know that it's
a gradual building up of you know, something getting harder
and harder. But it was kind of a combination of one,
you know, you were allowed almost an unlimited number of
technological crutches. And then also, you know, there's this kind
of like never ending situations of accepting you know, oh,
well it's COVID, so you can take a course, pass fame.
You know, oh it's you know, something bad happened on campus.
If you if you want to, you know, you don't
have to take this test, and magically no one takes
the test, right. And I think that you know that
that's another interesting layer to this, right, which is that traditionally,
you know, there was kind of this process of accreditation
right where it's like, okay, if you've gone through these hoops,
you were generally assumed to be, you know, a competent person.
That has completely gone out the window. Right, A college
degree is useless. And I say this as someone who
got a college degree. I thoroughly did not deserve, right.
I did not work at all in college. I did
other things, right. I worked on developed podcast, I read
quite a bit, but almost nothing to do with school
in particular. And What I think that's interesting, right, is
because again you know, it's everything is you know, when
everything becomes that state of exception, you know, everything becomes
something that is you know, your sort of desire or
like the whole point is to get out of you know,
ever making a decision or telling someone no, is that
you do get. On one hand, this vast mass of
just completely like hyper sensitive people, right, people who've never
faced adversity. You when you see this again in the
pronoun thing, right, which is that like it is a
it is a crisis, like a strike at the core
of my being, you know, for someone to not use
the correct version of here or herd or further. And
I think that that is, uh, that's a very youthful
thing for the regime to have, you know, like if
you look at like what are the rewards the regime
offers to its different client groups to this sort of
like gender goblin zoomer left right, the people that conservatives
love to talk about on TikTok or whatever. Effectively they
get nothing from the regime.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: What you said about never getting a good job, you know,
very very unlikely to own home is all correct, But
they have basically had their entire reward system hijacked by
lets me call myself a girl on the internet, you know,
and that's all the regime has to pay them effectively.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it is, It really is in a lot
of ways. I've somebody once in a while, on my
quiet moments, you know, I'll wonder. You know, it's funny.
Last few months have been renovating a house, right, so
I spent a lot of time on ladders and by myself,
you know, even sometimes not just in silence, you know,
because you can only listen to some many podcasts, and
so you start thinking about stuff, and I think, you
know what, how is it possible that there's not a
whole bunch of young people marching around Washington threatening to
hang people because of the student debt problem? How is
that not? I mean enormous burdens on young people, and
they should be angry. I mean, young people typically are
the most troublesome portion of the population. They don't have
anything to lose. You put slapped all this debt on them.
You gave them a degree in sociology or communications that
it's a completely worthless degree, and now they'll be painted
off for the next ten years and they probably will
never own a home as a consequence of this. Why
would they have nothing to lose? And yet they're perfectly
happy to spend their time bitching about their pronouns or
that somebody didn't stand in a circle during COVID or.
Speaker 2: Something like that.
Speaker 3: I mean, really is it's inexplicable in a way. And
I suppose you know, in the end, as long as
people have and that's that's a lesson of COVID. As
long as people have entertainments and they have food that
you can do anything to them. You can humiliate people
in public, you can, you can stomp all over there,
you know, their sense of rights and justice, and they'll
go along with it. So I mean, maybe that's as
simple as that. But it is really kind of puzzling
how younger generations are not more angry. I mean, I
think I mean that angry. You should be angry. Younger
people should be angry about the because you know, old
people have let young people down. I mean, but it's
not the case at all. I Mean, the closest you
get is the sort of right zoomer who does the
boomers bashing stuff. You know, That's about this closest you
get but it's all done on you know, on Twitter
the man.
Speaker 1: I this has been a great conversation, but I just
looked up at the clock and realized we're almost ten
minutes past where I normally try to wrap things up.
This is a great conversation. I'm really glad to have
you on. But if people want to find more of
your work, what's a good way for them to do that.
Speaker 3: The easiest way to find me just go to the
z man dot com and everything's there. Get links to
everything where I turn up. I write something every day
and do a podcast every Friday. I even have a
pay per view content so you can figure out how
to get that. It's up there on the site as well, and.
Speaker 1: I highly recommend to your stuff. I've a recent convert
to your podcast, as I've said, but enjoy it quite
a bit. You always have something interesting to say. And yeah,
thank you so much for taking the time to speak
with me.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you very much for having me. I had time.
Speaker 1: I enjoyed it all right, zee Man, welcome back to
the Jay Burton Show. How are you doing?
Speaker 3: I'm doing very well. Thank you for having me. I
apologize in advance if you hear some big loud noises.
There's thunderstorms rumbling through the holler here and the Fortress
of Solitude, so it could get kind of noisy, although
I don't know how if the mic picks it up
or none.
Speaker 1: Well, don't worry about it. As someone who lives relatively
close to a very popular biker bar, there will almost
assuredly be more noise in the background of my audio
than yours as someone decides to peel out and they're
Hardley at eight pm on a weekend or a weekday. Anyway,
I wanted to talk with you about the twenty twenty
four election. You know, I'm constantly recommending your show. It'll
be linked in the description. I recommend people check it out,
and at the time of recording, your most recent episode
is on obviously the election, right Trump the Harris and
so when we were speaking earlier, you mentioned that the
whole point of that piece was to sort of refocus
the conversation about the election. Do you want to describe
your sort of thesis with.
Speaker 3: That, Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, we are
kind of in an interesting time, and that this is
Harris people or whoever's behind it is trying to run
what I think is the first purely internet election campaign
where they're not trying to deal with reality, the reality
of who she is as a physical human being who
has had a real history and all the other things
that we associate with a living person in meat space.
Speaker 2: But the same with Tim Waald.
Speaker 3: You know, they're trying to ignore all that and instead
they're trying to run a campaign that's, you know, entirely
on the Internet. These are two characters who have been reimagined.
It's it's kind of like how Hollywood reboots an old
French you know, this is the new version of you
know something, you know, the what was the last Star Wars?
You know, the acolyte that I mean, it's actually a
pretty good analogy. She's the acolyte, you know, brought in
under old Joe Biden, you know, the old white guy,
and she's gonna push him aside and take the role
as the strong, diverse female. And yeah, I mean it
really is kind of the campaign that they're running, and
you get all the gas lighting with it, the fake
polls and all the other stuff that comes with it.
But there was a time before the Internet where this
stuff sort of happened too, and they used to call
it the silly season. It was just this period of
just ridiculousness. You know, the best time for a presidential candidate,
The best times they have are when they announced they're
going to run because they're all full of hope and optimism.
When they secure the nomination, that's a great time, and
then when they actually have their nominating convention. Well, Harris
had all this stuff packed into a month. You know,
usually it's spread out of a long period of time,
so it was ups and downs, and this was all
packed into a month, along with this massive internet gaslighting
operation that is very effective on people who spend all
their time online. But for normal people who are out
in the world, who are in the business world, or
you know, have friends in the real world who go outside,
who you know, who actually know what reality is versus
the internet this all see, I mean, it just comes
off as rather strange and weird. But you know, even
people who live normal lives outside of the Internet spend
time online, so they bump up against this stuff, and
you know, there's a real conflict there. And when you
look at the facts that matter though in an election, well,
this internet campaign is probably not going to have a big,
big impact on it, it'll fade, it'll run its course.
We've seen this with things like the Ukraine War. We've
seen it. We saw it with the whole Russian collusion stuff.
After a while people started to laugh at it, then
it became ridiculous and it went away. No one talks
about it anymore. And I think that may actually happen
with Harris. All of this big haullabaloo online is kind
of gonna it's peaking too early. She's gonna crash and
sometime I think they're having what debates in September something
like that, you know, three four weeks from now. All
this sugar high from the gas lighting campaign and the
silly season, the excitement of having the new, diverse, strong
female character, that'll all fade away, and and and of
course what happens. You know, we've all done this where
you have a you know, a big starchy, high carbohydrate diet,
you know, you know, meal rather and uh, you know,
you crash afterwards. And I think this will probably happen,
and probably by the end of this month and a
September we'll be back to reality and she will be
a long shot. Because look, it's really hard to sell
people on someone who is this odd and this unknown.
I mean, she's she's the high risk candidate. Oddly enough,
Trump has become I'm the safe candidate, the safe choice choice.
And if you're looking around and it's an uncertain world.
The economy is not great, you know, inflation is obviously
still a problem. You know, people are feeling people are
starting to really start to you know, to think about
their household budgets and their savings and the retirement. A
lot of people who are thinking about retirement. You think
about it, you got what twenty eight percent of the
population of the voting population, or technically baby boomers, and
you're throwing my generation gen xers, so you're probably talking
thirty two thirty three percent or something like that. Well,
as you get older, you're less tolerant for uncertainty. So
as the population gets older, it gets more conservative. It
looks for the safer choice. And oddly enough, I mean
it's kind of a musing in a way, but Trump
has become the safe choice. You know what you're going
to get with him. And so I mean, if if
I were a betting person, or if I were you know,
if someone said, hey, hey, we're going to hire you
and you get a million dollars if you run the
campaign or help the campaign win.
Speaker 2: Which side you.
Speaker 3: Want to take, I'm going I think the Trump side,
because there's just so much more that he can do
to win versus Harris. And I say this is someone
I've all the you know, all the caveats about Trump
and democracy and what he can accomplish and all that stuff,
just looking at this purely in the game that it
is that you know, you know, in a couple of
weeks from now, we're all going to be thinking that, geez,
you know, Trump looks pretty good. And I think that's
a you know, the way it's going to turn out.
And I'm not guaranteeing it because there's, you know, the
whole Shenanigans problem, but I think the Shenanigans problem may
turn out to be a bigger problem for Harrison for
Trump because I think I said in my show that
if you look at what the hell is her name,
Karen Whitmer, Karen Gretchen Whitmerchen, I keep calling her Karen.
That's kind of funny, but whatever.
Speaker 2: It doesn't matter.
Speaker 3: She has her eyes. On twenty twenty four, I thought,
excuse me, twenty twenty eight. Josh Shapiro is thinking about
twenty twenty eight. There's a lot of wealthy people who
have been developing Gavin Newsom for twenty eight and they
have you know, this is a lot of tech people,
a lot of old political money.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: So Harris losing might not be such a bad thing
for a lot of these people.
Speaker 2: And that means that, you.
Speaker 3: Know, Gretchen Whitner and Josh Harris or Josh Harris, Josh Shapiro, well,
they might not have their their Shenanigans operation. They might
not fortify the election for democracy like they did in
twenty twenty because well might do this and this is
not an unusual thing. I don't know if I mentioned
this in the show, but.
Speaker 2: I gotcha. How long ago was this?
Speaker 3: Scott Brown when he when Ted Kennedy dropped dead, they
had a special election in Massachusetts and Scott Brown won
the election as a Republican who won the election and
the reason was that the machines in Boston, Springfield, Worcester, Lowell,
these were all Democratic mayors who ran the Democratic machine.
They sat it out. They didn't like the Democratic nominee.
They had personal reasons for it. They didn't put their
their footstal out there. The Democrat loss. It was a
huge upset the next election, though, which was, well, I've
been let's see, Obama was already in the White House,
so that would have been twenty twelve. So in twenty
twelve when they had Elizabeth Warren, you know, she had
a perfect zombie that they wanted. All the Democrats were
happy they put their foot soldiers out. She won an
a landslide. So it really tells you how institutional support
can make a huge difference. These guys can be real
subtle about it and say, well, I don't know, it's
not really my best interest to help you out here,
so I'm not going to. And that's another thing that
works in Trump's favor. I mean, she really has when
you look at all the states. I think I went
through this, I went through all the different states and
look at Poland. I mean, she's got to win them all.
She's going to win. She's going to win Minnesota, which
I think she'll win. She's got to win Wisconsin, she's
got to win Michigan, she got to win Pennsylvania. She
has to win Virginia, which is no one's talking about
Virginia I keep bringing this up. You look at the
poles of Virginia. It's pretty much a dead heat, right Now,
that's a huge problem. There's a Republican governor there who
is already cracked down on the Shenanigans, clearing out the
phony voters and all that stuff. So she's she's going
to have she's got to win, you know, she's got
to make the four cushion bank shot to win.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting you bring up Virginia, right, because as
as a resident of the state, I've asked the same question, right,
why is no one talking about it? Now? Look, right,
you've you know, you've lived in the area. You're familiar
with the fact that in northern Virginia is effectively a healthscape.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It's kind of the start of the Northeast megalopolis. And
they've also imported quite a lot of New Americans.
Speaker 3: So, okay, twenty eight percent of the voters were far
and born, I think in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: And they were very proud of that fact. But if
you look at at Glenn Youngkin, right, Glenn Youngkin isn't
our type of guy, but he's a canty politician and
he's done a couple of things that have kind of
showed that. Right. So one of the things is he's
massively revamped multiple government programs. Right, the DMV, the Department
of Transportation, the state went all of those. Now also, right,
let's take that same kind of line of reasoning we
use towards Gresh and Wittmer. Right, what does this person,
this governor, what do they have in mind for their
political career? I mean, very very shortly after he was elected,
you heard the rumblings, Oh, you, young Kin's going to
run for president. Young Kin's going to run for president.
I think he very wisely saw that Trump was going
to be a force. He didn't make the mistake that
DeSantis made it right, which is to try and fight Trump,
and he lost his political career for it effectively. Now again,
four years of Trump, he's done. Now, admittedly young Kin
will also be out of office by then. But if he
is not only you know, the man who is able
to swing Virginia red, but also hand you know the
RNC those states. He's an incredible commanding role, right, very
strong possibility for an eventual president. And look, I'm not
saying that he is my favorite politician. You know, I
want him to succeed, and everythink he does. But it
seems to me as if you know, all of these
kind of individual players all find it in their best
interest for Trump to win and not Kamola.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean there's there's a lot of reasons, and
I think you know, you have to kind of think
of politics and that you know, you have these sort
of power centers if you will. You know, the tech money,
you tech money, it was mostly Indian money came in
for Kamala Harrison twenty twenty, and they were very disappointed
with the results. She couldn't she couldn't attract flies. I mean,
if she was dead, she would have attract flies. She
was such a I mean, people forgot just how awful candidate.
Speaker 1: She was.
Speaker 2: Hilariously awful.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know one of those candidates I kind
of wanted to stick to stick around because the' just
been great material.
Speaker 1: She would have been a blast.
Speaker 3: And you know, it's the tech money. You know, they're
looking at her and probably not all that enthusiastic. She's
just she's not really good. And she's also kind of
tangled up into the Clinton machine a little bit. She
had a whole bunch of Clinton people working for and
then you have wall Street. I mean, she's talking about
these crackpot ideas, but she sounds like Bernie Sanders.
Speaker 2: For goodness sake.
Speaker 3: He's talking about taxing unrealized capital gains. That may be
the dumbest idea I've ever heard in politics. I mean,
and look, I'm I'm the young guy. I have heard
a lot of incredibly stupid things. I was talking to
someone today about this. You know, this was a normy,
someone who had probably voted for I would guess somebody
probably voted for Trump in twenty sixteen, but Biden in
twenty twenty, you know, because they you know, they just
kind of thought Trump was too mean and you know,
let's get back to normal and stuff. This person couldn't
stop talking to me about how idiotic that tax on
capital gains. They just they were so angry about it.
I mean that's the right word for it, angry. So
if you know regular normies are, can you imagine someone
who is who has a lot of capital gains to
deal with on a regular basis being wealthy people? I mean,
my goodness, you know, the sure they know that this
will never happen, but they don't want this idea to
get normalized. They want this idea to be anathematized. So
you know, that group doesn't like her. But I think
institutional Washington also doesn't like her very much. There doesn't
seem to be a lot of enthusiasm, you know, the
kinds of people who write for the New York Times,
write for the Washington Post. If you read those people,
the columnists, they're not really enthusiastic for Harris. The only
group that I've seen that's enthusiastic for Harris are the neocons.
But those guys are just nut jobs. They think that
this is an opportunity for them to continue, you know,
their crazy campaigns, and they hate Trump, so you really
can't take them that serious. I mean, they have power,
but you know, you know, you have to kind of
qualify their support. But I really don't think that she
I mean, she just doesn't have a base. That's one
of the big problems that she's going to run into.
And a guy like Young Cain, who who is a
super connected guy. I mean, this guy is not some
you know guy from you know, a small town in Virginia.
I mean, this guy, he's very connected. And you know,
he also demonstrated that he has a good political antenna
because he picked up on all the trouble in Loudun
County and rode that to the governorship. And people forget
that what happened there, that that revolt in Louden County. Now,
I don't know if you know you live in Virginia.
Speaker 1: Yes, I remember that story well that some of our
viewers might not.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean you had all of a sudden, all
the lunatics got ahold of the school board and started,
you know, doing all the stuff they wanted to do
in schools, putting child porn in and having you know,
perverts there running around addresses, you know, all the it's
unbelievable that the kind of stuff they were that they
want to do. But you know, these parents, you know,
middle aged white parents living in Louden County and you know,
Lowdon County is one of these places. It's full of
a lot of people who've lived other places. It's not
you know, local for the most part. A lot of
them have government related jobs. You know, they're in a
private sector, but you know the company it either does
business with the government or does business with the government
contractor you know, and it's a very wealthy county. It's
I think Loldum County. It's in the top ten of
wealthiest counties in the country. It's like number six or
something like that. But it's not it's not so wealthy
as it's not full of rich people. It's full of
upper middle class people. And these people freaked out over
this stuff. They were fined with all the woke stuff
when it didn't touch them or touch their kids or
a work person didn't try to touch their kids. But
as soon as it started coming into their community, they
freaked out and and it turned into an issue that
you know that he could run on and with popular sport.
It was a populist issue in a way. And I
watched him, young kid. He really did trying to change
in a way. This is a guy who kind of
started to enjoy being a politician. It wasn't an abstraction
for him. All of a sudden, he was getting, you know,
real cheers from the kind of people he could appreciate,
you know what I mean. And and you know, it
wasn't canned speeches in front of canned audiences. All of
a sudden, He's you know, he felt like a man
of the people. He really did change a lot. And
I think, you know, this is a guy that the
people who actually run our country look at and say,
this guy could be kind of the Trump without the
trump Ism without Trump sort of thing, you know, the
compromise on the whole populist versus establishment thing. So he'll
get a lot of support with his efforts to try
and swing Virginia to to Trump. I mean that would
be huge, That would be enormous if you pulled that off.
I mean, this would be you know, because it would
win the election. You know that that would win the
election for Trump. And and of course Trump would be
told that he has to you know, owes this guy.
You know, so maybe put him in the cabinet or
something like that so he can get a high profile.
So you can kind of see the wheels turning for
a state like Virginia. But you know that there's other
states too. I mean, the Hampshire could be in play.
That's a funny state. They have a lot of weirdos
from Massachusetts who moved in and turned the state into
a kind of a strange place. You talk to people
who live in New Hampshire, you know they you know,
it's it's not that close it's like, I think a
five point state right now, four point state something like that.
But you know, if the if the crazies aren't motivated,
the Hampshire could be in play. I mean, it's a
lot of I mean, it's one of those things you
start looking at this, it's not hard to find a
scenario in which Trump actually has a really big night,
you know, election night. Oh you know, well, it all
kind of breaks the same way. So I again to
go back to what originally said, you know, all this
stuff on the internet, all this this gas lighting campaign,
he doesn't have to ignore it and look at the facts.
If you if you're a betting man right now, you
bet on Trump and the shenanigans that would be required
to beat him, and assuming he doesn't do anything stupid,
it's going to be enormous that would They would take
an enormous amount of shenanigans and that could be a
bigger problem for the regime then having Trump win and
then have to deal with him for four years. You know,
I kept I mean, the mistake I always make is
thinking that crazy people are more reasonable than than they are.
But if I were, if I were advising the people
who actually run the country. I'd say, you know what,
let Trump win, cut whatever deal you can cut with him.
He'll be gone in four years and you can start
over with whoever you want. That would be the smart play.
Speaker 1: Going back to your point about Kamala not having a base, Look,
you know, conservatives are never particularly creative, right, And one
of the things that they have kind of grabbed onto
is this idea that Kamala has, should we say, an
ever shifting perception of her own ethnicity. Right, she's Indian,
she's black whenever. It's kind of convenient and obviously right.
You don't need to be particularly into politics to realize
that Black Americans as a voting block go massively for
the Democrats.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: And one of the problems with this election in twenty
twenty four is, while certainly Black Americans will continue to
go for the Democrats, they don't seem to like Kamala
in like in relate in proportion to how they like
other Democrats, and they like Trump more than they like
other Republicans. And look, I'm not saying that the Republicans
are going to break that demographic right, they're going to
become the party of black people. I think that's completely impossible.
But you see that same pattern of Kamala failing to
appeal to core parts of the Democratic base over and
over again. Right, Another clear example is Muslims. Right, Muslims
see her by virtue of being associated with Joe Biden
as being overly sympathetic to Israel. Right, that might not
be the position that you or I take, but again, right,
that is a valuable voting block in a place like Michigan,
even on a bigger level. Right, we talked earlier about
her kind of idiotic proposal to tax unrealized capital games, which,
for those who aren't kind of up to date on
what that means, basically, if you have an asset and
it appreciates while you own it, you haven't sold it,
you will be taxed on that unrealized game. Right, if
your house goes up one hundred thousand dollars, even if
you haven't sold it, you'll have to pay taxes on it. So, okay,
there's the moneyed interests. There is you know, multiple minority groups.
And then also you know, as we saw at the
DNC in Chicago, the Street movement, right, the kind of
like protest wing of the party who's very, very concerned
with Israel Palestine. They are also displeased with her. And
really it seems like the only demographic that loves Kamala
Harris is a terminally online progressive women.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know that's and of course the consulting class.
You know, she's raised a you know, she'll have a
billion or so dollars to spend on political consultants.
Speaker 2: So they love it.
Speaker 3: You know, people don't realize, you know that there's really
a whole industry, particularly like polling. You know, the polling guys.
You know, this is the time of the year. They
make a lot of money to sell these ridiculous pols,
these people, you know, so you know, those people love her,
you know, in a way that you know, professional Washington
versus official Washington. You know, they always they love both
candidates in a way. Well, they don't love Trump, but
you know, typically love both candidates. But you know, her
problem with the race issue is interesting because she's not
black in the way in which Americans think of it.
You know, I spent my life around black people, and
I lived in Baltimore for twenty years, and that they
would not look at her as black. Now they would
look at Obama. They would understand that Obama. They can
let me put it this way. They would look past
Obama being probably not, you know, black in the sense
that his ancestors were slaves, but he married a black woman,
and he is kind of the ideal black guys. That's
what he was presented at. Sort of this you know,
you know you see at Denzel Washington. You know, he
was that kind of guy, and this is a model
they had created, they had tested. It goes back. I
think I did mention this in another show. There was
a guy named Kurt Schmoke back in the nineteen eighties.
He was like the prototype for Obama, and they kind
of worked out all the bugs in how to market
this sort of suave, well spoken, sophisticated sort of black guy,
the kind of guy that back in the seventies, you know,
he would have been drinking cold forty five, but in
this age he's drinking Kvasier. You know, he's that kind
of black guy, and that super excited black women because
black women looked at him and saw that he was
married to sort of a prototypical black woman. I mean
she kind of looks, you know, she's not a good
looking woman. Well, they love this because It allowed them
to feel as if, hey, you know what, that's attainable
for me.
Speaker 2: And that's why the.
Speaker 3: Whole Obama thing worked, even though he wasn't really authentically black.
Harris doesn't have that. She's married to a Jewish guy.
She didn't have any kids, which is very weird. Black
women look at this black woman, her age, with no kids.
They just do not understand how in the world you
can try and pretend this is a black woman. And
of course, you know she might do a Jewish guy,
you know, and she's half Indian and half Jamaican or whatever.
It just doesn't work. It was one of the really
great things about Trump at that Black Journalist event. I
laughed so hard watching it, and the crowd laughed. They
were roaring, because you know, he understands. Trump's been around
a lot of black people. He used to hang out
with No Guy, the boxing promoter Don King. He used
to hang around with, Oh, what the heck is a
guy's name? The sort of mister hanky looking black dude
who's on TV. Used to be what the heck is
his name? That doesn't matter anymore, but you know, he
was a street act of his uh, the Reverend Al yes,
Al Sharpton, Yeah, that was a great story about Trump
picking up Don King and they brought Al Sharpton along
and Al Sharpton Trump picked him up. His helicopter was
taking him to Atlantic City for a fight or something
like that, and Al Sharpton started talking out of turn,
and Don King said, Hey, it wouldn't be a problem
if we threw you out of the helicopter. I mean, Trump,
Trump understands how black people think. He's been around black
people's whole life. He understands it. So what he's set
up there, and he the way he talked about how
she we he said it suddenly she's a black person.
And the way he enunciated black person. Everybody cracked up
because they understood exactly what he was saying. And I
mean I thought it was hilarious too. But black people
are not going to be excited for her. It's just
not going to happen, you know, not what she is.
She's strong, diverse female character from every bad Hollywood film,
you know, all these terrible Hollywood films where they you know,
they find they're going to take something and you know,
and make the protagonist instead of being a man, which
it should be into you know, strong diverse I assuming
a strong female. It's going to in an animate ever,
once in a while you have strong diverse female. I
think I mentioned the acolyte, which I never.
Speaker 2: I haven't seen. I've just seen all the videos making
fun of it.
Speaker 3: But that's what she is. She's the acolyte. She's this
really crappy reinvention, the sort of feminist, heavily online feminist
reinvention you know, of a of a Barack Obama basically,
you know, and trying to sell thee that way. And
it's just not going to work. I mean, Black people
are not going to get all excited. I mean, they'll
vote ninety for Harris, but they won't vote in huge numbers.
They're not going to be turning out in record numbers
like they did for Obama or for for Biden, and
that uh, you know, I mean Joe Biden, for all
his faults, he actually did a very good job courting
the black vote. And they did a good job selling
them as you know, this a good white you know,
for for the black people. And uh and of course
you know, they had spent four years telling black people
that Trump was secretly going to bring back slavery. So
you know, it worked, but it's not going to work now.
I you know, I'm I would not be surprised, And
I keep coming back to this, and I don't want to, like,
you know, I don't like to make predictions. But the
more I talk about this stuff, the more I convince
myself that Trump could actually win pretty handily. You know,
a month from now, we might be talking about this
an entirely different way. We might be talking about in
a big victory. Because Kamala Harris doesn't have a natural base.
She has she has the poorest political instincts I've ever seen.
She is a simpleton, for sure. You know, there's a
video floating around today where she is talking about climate
change and what she says, and this is a carefully
scripted interview with CNN is jobber walking. It's it's nonsense words,
it's there's no You couldn't listen to what she said
and come away with any meaning at all. And at
a certain point that just it.
Speaker 2: Becomes too much.
Speaker 3: You know, there's too much that they've got to there's
too much weight in that in that sack to pull
it up the hill, even with all the shenanigans.
Speaker 1: I think there's one other problem with this, which is
that Kamala Harris has to you know, spread this uncomfortable
needle of on one hand both you know, lauding her
accomplishments as the vice president, while also effectively running against
that record because you know, by any objective standard, the
Joe Biden presidency has been just an out and out disaster. Right. Obviously,
foreign policy isn't normally a huge determinant in American elections,
but I mean that's not gone well. The economy that
that's not gone well. And so you know, by by
any one of these traditional kind of bell weathers, right,
these issues that are often cited for the success or
the failure of a campaign, Well, the Biden years were
a disaster. And I think it's very very difficult to say, well, yes,
I was a fully competent vice president, the best vice president, right,
the first woman of color. But also things are going
to be completely different under me. I think that that's
a very difficult position to sell, and it's doubly difficult
if you are an absolute incompetent moron.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, you know, vice presidents don't do well
following their boss. Al Gore ran in two thousand and
he lost against a pretty terrible George Bush. George Brush
was a very good candidate. He wasn't a great speaker,
and you know, he was a guy who was sort
of you know, they cleared the field for him, so
he didn't really have to be tested. And Gore lost
because he had this problem that every vice president has,
and that is, on the one hand, he really can't
take credit for the good times because he just stood
around and went to funerals. I mean, everybody knows that
vice president doesn't do anything. And on the other hand,
you know, he has to try and be his own man,
which ultimately means saying that, well, I'm going to be
different than my boss. So in good times, you're running
against the good times. It just becomes a contradiction. Is
very difficult to overcome. The one exception was nineteen eighty
eight when George.
Speaker 2: Bush, he ran.
Speaker 3: His basic campaign was hey, I'm going to keep the
good times rolling because it was really good times and
it was so good that people said, yeah, you know,
let's keep it going. And of course the Democrats also ran.
I would say, up to this point, the worst candidate
I've ever seen, I mean, Mike Ducaccus was hilariously bad.
Speaker 2: I mean he was.
Speaker 3: I mean even left wing people made fun of him,
and Saturday at Live used to make fun of him
all the time. So, I mean, you know, there was
a lot lot of things fell in place. But generally speaking,
vice presidents don't win. You know, they might become president
through death or resignation or something like that, but you know,
they don't typically do very well because you know, it's
at that contradiction you you have to be your own person,
but you at the same time you have to try
and cling onto your boss's record, and it's a hard sell.
And the problem that she has is that right now,
the sort of thing that hangs over all of this
like a fog is the concern about the decreasing competence
we see. We see it everywhere. I run into this
in my business life all the time. People constantly are
talking about this problem of finding competent people and or
dealing with competent people. It's a huge problem. You know,
I've been writing about the crisis of competence for ten
years now and it's not getting better. And it shows
up in people's radar when they see that. You know,
people train changing tires at an airport on my Boeing
Airport plane the tire explodes and kills two of them,
or the bowing airplane the doors fall off of it
in mid flight. You know, this stuff keeps happening. You know,
it's part of what has really plagued the Biden administration
because back when they tried to get out of Afghanistan,
which everybody thought was a good idea, they took what
should have been a simple thing and screwed it up,
and it just kind of reminded people, Yeah, it's just
we are all the people in charge are screw ups.
And Harris is now running in this atmosphere where people
are concerned about the lack of competence. It's on the
gallop pole. I think I talked about it in the
show last week, and I know I've written about it.
It's there's a it's like the number three item general competence.
People are concerned that their government, that people in charge
are idiots.
Speaker 2: Well that you.
Speaker 3: Run a woman who is, first of all, she repeatedly
lied about the mental competence of her boss, and now
she can't string a sentence together to save her life.
It's just a really tough environment for you know, in
a lot of ways. You know, the reason that no
one else through their hat in the ring to run
this time is they all saw that this this was
just awful right now, you know, to run as a Democrat.
I think I compared her to gerald Ford in nineteen
seventy six. You know, she she got the same problem.
You know, she kind of she didn't win the opportunity
and that look that weighs on people's mind. She was selected,
they engineered her into this. She didn't have to run
in primaries, and you know, her boss is out of favor,
and you know she's at the same time though, she's
got to try to defend it, and you know, she's
got all these problems and it's a compressed campaign. And
of course, you know gerald Ford had the problem is
that he didn't have a constituency either. There was really
nobody that was willing to say, yeah, he's our guy.
And and I think that's what Harris is struggling with
right now, is that, you know, this media campaign is great,
it's fantastic, it works really well.
Speaker 2: It's cheap.
Speaker 3: It didn't you know, it doesn't cost a ton of money,
it's effective, it won the Internet for thirty days or
whatever it's been. But when she gets back to you know,
when the campaign moves from the Internet back to the
meat space, that all these problems are still there. They
haven't gone away.
Speaker 1: I think that you're you're right. You know, this kind
of insane media push, right, And it's kind of funny
I keep talking about them because even a month later,
they sound so incredibly out of touch.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: The whole Kamala is brat jd Vance's weird saga, right,
which are hopefully sentences that will become increasingly incomprehensible to
viewers as they get kind of further and further into
the future. But there was nothing to it, right, It
was pure media spin. The message behind both of those
is basically, it's high school girls stuff. It's right, we're cool.
The people we don't like are gross weirdos. That's it,
And okay, right, let's game that out. Four weeks later,
that's vanished, right, like vapor in this bump Kamala had. Well, first,
she has a big dip after the DNC. The DNC
was a disaster, you know, and I'm not saying that
as a partisan. Look, I've never voted in a presidential election,
I will vote for Trump this time. It would be
my first vote. I'm not a maga person. But it
was a disaster. And now, actually, just today, we've reached
the inflection point. Right, it has gone back to exactly
what it was before that push. And don't get me wrong,
right that the Democratic Party controls the media, maybe not explicitly,
but they call the shots, so they can keep doing that.
But I think there's the core problem that Kamala is
a genuinely horrible candidate. Someone it slightly her running wall
is that his name? Yeah, Okay, I always say it
wrong because I have no pre existing thoughts about him whatsoever.
But he's kind of an interesting figure because he really
is the progressive vision of what a good white guy is. Right.
You know, they did this video together where they're they're
kind of in a very scripted manner joking around, and
you know, they go through the kind of traditional white
guy joke that you've heard. I mean, he was hackneyed
thirty years ago. Right. Oh, I'm a white guy from
the Midwest. I put mayonnaise on my tacos. I don't
like spicy food. I mean, it's effectively a minstrel show
for white people. Right, he's jugging and jiving to uh,
you know, appeal to his master's. Right. You see the
same thing with you know him out in the field, right,
you know he's a hunter. And then look like, I
don't want to get too into kind of gun autism,
but if you look at the gun, it's like an
incredibly heavy, incredibly expensive, like ten thousand dollars trap shooting shotgun.
Speaker 2: Yeah for.
Speaker 1: All you'd used to go shoot ducks. Right, When you
dig even further, it's it's very clear that one this
guy has no appeal whatsoever. But two he really is
like the ideal version of what a white man's is
supposed to be in kind of modern progress of America, right,
a torch bearer for you know, a younger, kind of
more diverse candidate. And I just don't see him him
going anywhere.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's funny. I mean, I've been calling him Elmer
Fudd for a while. But it's interesting about this whole
how they marketed him in Minnesota way back when I'm
pretty sure it was Mark Warner ran for Senate, or
maybe he ran for governor. Maybe it ran for governor
in Virginia. He was governor right in Virginia. I think
he had been governed as he was.
Speaker 1: He also had the uh this is just an anecdote.
He has the honor of having quite possibly the best
election song ever, which I cannot play. But he basically
just got a bunch of good old boys to write
him a bluegrass song. It's actually pretty good. But anyway
back to you.
Speaker 3: Well, I was doing business in Virginia and I a
business local business guy, well I mean super connected business guy,
super connected in the Democratic Party, and and uh, he
and I he took me for a ride to see
some of his properties he was developing or something like that.
And in the backseat of his car he had all this, uh,
the samples of promotional material that they were going to
use for the Warner campaign. And it had him posing
in the Elmer Fudd costume out in the field with
the shotgun. And I think he had there was one
where he's sitting there, you know, he's got plays Ora
and Joe and he's got his dog with.
Speaker 1: Him and then you know all that kind of stuff, right, And.
Speaker 3: I forgot the guy. There was a guy I forgot
his name, some sort of consultant. He was really kind
of an eccentric guy. It was his idea, you know
that they're going to sell you know, they're going to
trick the good old boys, you know, Republican voters with this,
this costume act, this you know, presentation, and I mean
obviously it worked, but they tried doing it later to
what two thousand and four with John Carrey, they dressed
him up as Elmer Fudd, and of course it didn't
work because John John Carrey was just terrible at it.
But they keep doing the Elmer Fudd act because it
worked back in the Bush years. It worked as a
way to kind of undermine conservative support in certain rural areas.
I mean it worked once, you know, it's like every
other trick. It works once you get full, you know,
fall for it again. But apparently they pulled this with
Walls in Minnesota. I started laughing because that one picture
they had him in his Elmer Fudd outfit with his
you know, ten thousand dollars shotgun. You know, you look
at this them like pait a second. I'm pretty sure
that was the picture they used for Warner. And I
went online trying to find any old Warner you know,
campaign stuff, but I didn't find it so, but it
just kind of tells you the people behind this they're
extremely devious. They think about how to trick people. It's
all about, you know, coming up with some new narrative,
some new character, some new way to deceive the public.
And it's all kind of coalesced into this really fantastical
Harris Walls campaign because you know, the real Walls, he's like,
he's like eighty percent of the Walls that you know
that they sold the people in Minnesota. Yeah, he was
in the military. Well he wasn't in a war zone.
You know, he kept always kind of saying things that
make it make you think that he was in combat.
Well it turns out that never happened. You know, you know,
he wasn't really that guy he'll say to people, well
as an old football coach. Well it turned out he
volunteered for a year or two. He wasn't really a
football coach. You know. It's everything about this guy is
kind of like this, and you know, the pre of
course bringing him on a national stage. Now people look
into this and you know you can kind of see it.
But but Walls, Walls is just an odd guy because
he's like Evid French He's like, there's this weird sort
of old white guy that you I run into, not
regularly but on occasion. In that you know, it's almost
like they hate themselves. You know, they they embrace all
these old white women politics, but there were a white dude.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: You know, they they you know, they grasp into all
this really crazy liberal stuff. And I just don't know
how these people, I just I just don't understand them.
I mean, what's the point of this? Why did they
do this? How do they find this personally fulfilling? I mean,
I understand a guy like Walls. You know, maybe he
had to do it to win election in Minnesota. Maybe
I don't know, but apparently he was doing this act
before he ran got into politics. So he's just an
odd guy. You know, men look at a guy like
Walls and say, that's not a guy you can ever trust.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: That's he's very off putting to normal males. Maybe he
plays well with females. I don't know. But that's the
problem with this campaign, though, is if you have a
vice president who plays to the same audience that Kamala
Harris is playing too, there's very narrow, excessively online unmarried,
childless female.
Speaker 2: Well you're not.
Speaker 3: You know, you're not going to win an election based
on that demographic.
Speaker 1: I think that there's and maybe this is too tinfoil
hat so so feel free to call me on it.
But I have some some contacts in the finance world, right,
you know, very influential guys, and you know, one of
the things they've talked about is that you know, there's
likely to be sort of a worsening recession over the
next over the short term, right, we're not talking mad Max,
but things becoming uncomfortable. Right, that trend will continue probably
to you know, kind of a pain point. And you know,
this guy was saying one of his theories is that
basically the Democrats don't want twenty twenty four or they
don't want twenty Yeah, they don't want this election because
there's a likelihood that the economy kind of up and
you know, the president's face, and they don't want to
be the one you're holding the back and you know, Okay,
maybe you don't believe that, but to me, it does
seem like kind of similarly to what you saw with
the Conservatives in the UK, that the Democrats don't seem
to be trying their hardest for this election, and I
think one of the leading indicators of that is look
at the candidate quality. Like, look, I hate Hillary Clinton, right,
She's a horrible person, but she's an a lister, right,
that name has been around for a while. You know,
she's she can generate a lot of heat. Same thing
with Joe Biden, Right, Joe Biden's been around forever. But
Kamala Harris and Tim Wallas, like these are backbenchers, right,
These aren't real serious hitters. Do you think there's anything
to that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I think you know, you know this,
it's kind of you know, there's a life cycle to
a cycle within a party. You know that Back in
say the nineteen seventies, and I mean I wasn't around then,
but you know, the energy was all in this conservative
movement that was building up within the Republican Party. They
had all these really great candidates and great public speakers
and intellectuals and all this stuff, and then it burst
into the scene in the nineteen eighties. But it also
did this at a time when the left was exhausted intellectually, emotionally, generationally.
You know, a lot of the candidates that were running
were really just incredibly awful. People forget this stuff. I mean,
I remember Walter Mondale being the presidential candidate. I mean,
you would rather galge your own eyes out and rip
your ears off than sit and watch more Walter Mondale
talk about anything. It was just awful, and it was
they had the same problem. But then the Republicans had
this problem. They ran out of gas too, you know,
they didn't have anybody. So there is kind of a
seesaw effect here between the parties, and right now the
the Democrats are down for sure, but I also think
that we're in a sort of an end cycle here,
this post Cold War cycle. Neoliberalism, neoconservatism, they've all run
out of gas. I mean, Trump is a symptom. The
reason that Trump exists is because the neocons they wore
the conservative movement like a skin suit. They directed it
into things that people didn't generally want. People got got
why starting at the end of the Bush years and
the Republican Party old Republican Party, the conservative movement is
running on fumes. I mean they got nothing. You know,
they're you know, they're the Project twenty twenty five. Business
out of Heritage is an effort to try and glom
onto this populous energy. But you know, even the populous
energy is kind of misdirected. People are just pissed basically,
They just they don't you know, the average white person
in America doesn't have a political party that represents their interests.
So they're kind of you know, they're angry about it,
but they don't have the way to talk about it.
They don't have a language for it, they don't have
a channel for that anger to flow into, So it
kind of flows into Trump by default. But the pret
problem is happening on the Democratic side, I think too.
I think you know that whole that I keep coming
back to, that Louden County revolt. I spent a lot
of time looking into that because I think this is
happening in a lot of places. I think a lot
of upper middle class white people are looking around and
thinking that we might have bigger problems than just Trump.
We have other stuff, and certainly rich people. Look, there's
a lot of bad paper in the system. I don't
know how much you know about finance, but there is
a lot of really bad credit floating around in the system.
The global financial arrangements are changing and it doesn't appear
as if right now anybody in Washington understands what the
hell is happening. And you know, the smart money, you know,
the guys who were on Wall Street, I mean, they
probably do know what's happening, and they probably understand that
there is going to be a fair amount of pain
as we transition out of the post Cold War period
into whatever we're going to call the next next phase.
But you know, there's across the spectrum, you know, the
people that are capable of thinking about this stuff are
all looking around and saying that, you know, we have
a problem, and there really isn't anybody who is capable
of addressing it within the sort of establishment system. Trump,
for all his faults, does talk with some sort of
with a degree of clarity about some of the issues,
but otherwise there really isn't a lot of options there there.
There needs to be a great regrouping right now. Not
only do the Democrats, because again they don't have any companies.
Their candidate pool is terrible. I mean, look around. I mean,
Gretchen Whitmer, I don't know how old you are, but
when I was a young guy back like in my twenties,
late twenties, we said a thing called cougar bars. Right,
you know that Gretchen Whitmer is the kind of woman
that would be at a cougar bar. That's what you want. Like,
every time I see her, I just start laughing. You know,
she's lost a bunch of weight, she's gotten into the gym,
that's what she looks like. It's not somebody you make president.
I mean you're governor for that matter, Gavin Newsom. If
you watch this guy speak, he's terrible. He's awful. He's
just he's boring. He sounds like it sounds like listening
to your accountant. You can go through the list of
their A listers and they sound like, you know, C
listers from even ten years ago or fifteen years ago.
So it really is, it's a big problem. They've got this.
They've got to have a reset, they've got to kind
of rethink things. They got to recruit new people, they
got to find new ways to market themselves. And and
I'm not entirely sure it's going to happen without a
lot of pain, because I think, you know, for thirty
years now, we've had a set of financial arrangements.
Speaker 2: Which are peculiar they're not normal. You know.
Speaker 3: The rest of the world was kind of just allowing
us to lead them around, and now they're not. You know,
so there's a lot of suff going on. And kind
of get back to what your point was is that
I don't think they're deliberately laying down. I just don't
think they have a choice. You know, there's really just
running out of good options right now.
Speaker 1: It's actually why, you know, in the grander scheme of things,
because I really share your analysis there that to me,
I'm voting for Trump because I have to live here, right.
There's really nothing past that right, which is in the
short to medium term, which will make my life better.
I think that. Don't get me wrong. I love I'd
love to be proven cynical on this point, right. I'd
love for in four years me to look back at
this and say, oh, I can't believe I was so cynical,
I was so black built. But to me, I don't
really see Trump fixing this at all. No. What I
do see as kind of an interesting development is look
at the people who are ordering Trump right, who kind
of thrown their weight behind him this election. The last one. Well, okay,
I mean we have you know he's got a pack back, right,
he's got Miriam Ayelsen. And I don't like those guys.
I don't support the causes they do, and fair enough,
but also you have this kind of new kind of
tech elite forming behind Trump. You know, obviously the ones
you always hear about our heel musk, right, those are
the big ticket guys. Yeah, I think that we've kind
of forgotten about Vvack Ramaswami, right, who sort of served
as you know, a Trump stand in, and then as
soon as Trump announced he was out, Well, you know,
he drops out of the race. And you know, we
can see that they have an inside seat because I
mean that's where Vance comes from. Right, He's connected to
those guys. Now, you know that goes a little bit deeper, right,
And actually, this is another reason I think shenanigans are
less likely. You have Mark Zuckerberg, right, the CEO of Facebook,
who was very much involved in the last round of shenanigans,
basically saying just in the last couple of days, one, yes,
that happened. Two I'm sorry, and one I won't do
it again. I think I got my numbers wrong there,
but my point stands. And look, you know this doesn't
mean that Mark Zuckerberg is suddenly my best friend, but
it seems like we're seeing a new power block emerge.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: I don't think this is the sort of power block
that rejuvenates America, right, that takes us back to this
kind of golden imperium. But there is there is there's
competence there, there is energy there, and you know, if
nothing else, I think that's a that's a sector to watch.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I completely agree with this. I mean, look, in
twenty sixteen, Trump had no elite support. There were no
billionaires signing up for Trump. I mean, I guess maybe
Peter Thield to some degree, but what a Tale's an
interesting character. I have some indirect dealings with him, and
I'm I don't think he's as political politically savvy as
people think. But that's a topic for another day. But
you know, Musk, who I think is to a great
degree politically naive, but he's getting smart fast. But this
is not a guy who is naive about the kinds
of people who dominate politics. He's made all his money
off of politics. People don't realize that. You know, most
of his fortune comes from doing business with governments and
getting government favors that the whole you know, tesla wouldn't
exist without enormous subsidies from government, and not just the
United States government, the Chinese government, you know, the EU.
I mean, you know, this is a guy who understands
the system and how to manipulate it. And I think
his great concern about what's happening is a signal to
the other oligarchs that it's okay to start questioning this.
These hired men we have in the managerial class. What
the hell are these guys actually doing? And so I
do think there's something happening here now. It could devolve
into civil war, it's always a possibility, but it's also
possible that there's a reform movement of foot Look back
in the nineteen seventies, wealthy people, corporate interesting was obviously
a different world. They started to react not to the
cultural stuff, but to the financial problems. They looked around
and they saw that the money arrangements in the world
were a problem. They saw the revolution coming with semiconductors
and the microprocessor. There's a book I always recommend to people.
It's called The Money Game, and the guy wrote it
under a pen name. It's written in the nineteen sixties
about he wrote under the pend named Adam Smith. You
read the book, it predicts everything that was going to
happen with computerization in the financial markets. It's really quite
as a wild book to read, because you read it,
you realize it's written in the nineteen sixties and it
uses a lot of the sort of mad band type language.
But all thes that about what would happen in the seventies, eighties,
and nineties are all right there. It's a great insight
as to how the people at the very top of
the system do know a hell of a lot more
about what's coming down the road than the rest of
us do. And you know, these people saw this and
they started to react to it, and we ended up
with the Conservative Revolution with Reagan and all that stuff.
But we also wound up with a revolution and the
financial relations. You know, for the money relations of the world.
You've got the Palace Accords, you got the Louver Accords,
You've got the what was that nineteen seventy four, you
got the agreement with the Saudia's that established a petro dollar.
I mean, these were revolutionary changes. You had the beginning
of a deregulation that started, we're deregulating.
Speaker 2: I think it was.
Speaker 3: First was I think it was Mile Bell got broken up,
and then the airlines got deregulated.
Speaker 2: All this stuff happened.
Speaker 3: It was because the economic elites looked around and said,
we have a problem. The system that we have is
not working and it's it's becoming dangerous, and so they
pushed a huge reforms. And that may be happening now.
He might be on the cusp of the differences is
that you know, in nineteen seventies America was a different
country demographically than twenty twenty twenty four America. So you know,
it's not a perfect analogy. But but yeah, I mean
I think I do think that the rich people are concerned.
I mean, look, if you're Elon Musk, you're a Mark
zuckerberglar hell, you're you're a guy who's a president of
a financial institution, you've got to be looking a door
off getting arrested the guy who runs Telegram in France
and think we have a real problem. I mean, that
has got to be sending off loud alarms in every
mansion around the globe. You don't arrest billionaires like that.
It just doesn't happen, not in the West, not in
the It's not supposed to happen that way. Even though
he's Russian and all that other stuff. It should never
have happened. They didn't arrest the guy Abramovich who owned them,
was it? Manchester United had the big the British soccer team.
Speaker 2: I mean, he's a.
Speaker 3: Russian oligarch and they didn't arrest him. Why are they
arrestling this guy? Something's changed, you know, Brazil is now
threatening Musk over censoring X. So yeah, I mean, I
mean I've kind of rambled here a little bit, sorry
on that, but you know, you know, it's a great topic.
It's something that that I think is happening, but you
can't be sure where it's going to go. I think
the economical leads, the oligarchs are becoming increasingly concerned about
what the hell's going on. And you know, they don't
worry about transgenderism and all that stuff, but they do
worry about rich guys being arrested, financial system being shaky,
the competency of the political class. So yeah, we could
we could then we could find ourselves in very interesting times.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: I just wish I was twenty years younger. Because if
it's going to all fall apart and there's going to
be a you know, people are going to be running
around in the streets with guns. I'm too old to
do that now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this might be a pair of phraise
from your show. Right, But you know, there's this idea
that you know, nothing changes until rich people get hurt.
And I think that we're we're starting to see that.
You cited obviously the regime coming after Musk, and I
really do think that that was was a breakwater moment.
You know. One of the other names that gets thrown
around in the mix here is Eric Prince, and Eric
Prince really got screwed over by the government. You know, obviously,
you know he's kind of a shady guy. You know,
he was involved with Blackwater. I have some some personal contacts,
right who are friends of his, and they speak very
well of him. But nonetheless, right, take a perfectly neutral
view of the man. He is extremely wealthy, extremely competent,
and extremely well connected, and the State Department screwed him
over for basically no reason, right, They for those who
aren't familiar. Effectively, the State Department said, hey, can you
send us some bulletproof vests and then sued him for
sending them bulletproof vests without their permission.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: That's effectively what it what took down this company, right,
which of course is incredibly cough esque and absurd. But
that's a man who has an ax to grind. The government,
to put it mildly, now, Musk, who's you know, incredibly
wealthy and powerful, has an ax to grind. And I
think one of the reasons you see, you know, all
of these tech CEOs and again, these finance guys like
you know, the CEO of Chase Bank, the CEO of
black Stone I think not black Rock basically aligning behind Trump.
Speaker 2: Is that.
Speaker 1: I think for a lot of people, it's this kind
of looking around saying like, wait a minute, I could
be next, right, they could come out, they could come
after me for you know, largely conflated reasons. And like
you said, I don't know where this goes. I don't
think any of these people are our guys. But at
the same time, you know, to be honest, I'd rather
just have a government that works, you know, that functions
at the Paris level, so that I don't have to,
you know, sincerely, worry about you know, my safety or
you know, things that would be almost you know, unthinkable
thirty forty years ago in America.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I tell you, in my business life,
I've always kind of chuckled because often deals that that
I've been involved with, and you know, when I was
a younger guy in corporate America, I worked on some
substantial deals and it was weird how they kind of
took a life of their own in a way, and
that you went into it. You thought you understood all
the facets of it. Everybody you were working with thought
they understood it, and just some just stuff just starts
to happen, and before long you're not really working on
the deal you thought you were. You're working on something else.
Sometimes it gets really big, you know, it becomes more complex,
and it's just, you know, we as human beings, you know,
we're limited, and we can't see around corners. We don't
always see all the facts, and we don't we can't
think beyond a few moves, and you know, all that
kind of stuff that people know, and do you see
this happen In politics? Donald Trump came down that elevator
in twenty fifteen, not expecting to be president of the
United States. That was obvious, but he wound up saying
things about immigration in particular that caught fire. It was
like he threw a cigarette out of his car and
set the prairie on fire. I mean, you know, he
didn't intend to do it. It wasn't what he was thinking about.
It wasn't a plan. It just sort of happened. My
analysis of Trump in his first year is that was
you know, a first term as president.
Speaker 2: Was he just got swept up.
Speaker 3: It was he you know, this is a guy who
had thrived his whole life in chaos, but was unprepared
for the degree of chaos that had happened. You know,
this thing that happened, Glenn Youngkin winning the governorship. I
watched that, and you know, look, I have some idea
what Glenn Youngkin was like before all of a sudden
things just kind of took off and he was just
riding the tiger. And it changes you when you're in
that kind of circumstance, when all of a sudden, know,
you you go from zero to one. To quote Peter Thiel,
it changes how you look.
Speaker 2: At the world.
Speaker 3: You you you look at things in a different way,
You look at yourself in a different way. And I
think that's happening with Musk. I think it certainly happened
with Trump. I think it's happened a second time with
Trump when he got shot. I think that changed his
demeanor since then has been different, and you can see it.
He's much more serious and he maybe overthinking things a
little bit. But you know, I think he had that
moment where he realized that, hey, wait a second, I'm
a part I'm a world historical figure. My life now
has meaning beyond just being good at the stuff I
enjoy being good at. And I think, you know, that's
that could be what happens with us as a country
as a whole. All these rich guys are looking around,
they're seeing these problems. They look at the the rampant dishonesty.
You know, this arresting of Dora Off. I cannot believe
they did that. That is such an insanely stupid idea,
because it's not I mean, who cares do who cares
about telegram but went away? The world wouldn't change that much.
It's the symbolism of it. It's what it appears to be,
and there's so many things like that, and it's it's
representative of this sort of dishonesty of the managerial class.
And you know, we look at these people as our bosses.
But the rich guys, the oligarchs, the guys like Elon Musk,
the guys like Mark Zuckerberger, they look at these people
as their employees, and all of a sudden they find
You know, it's imagine yourself. You're running a company and
you know all the guys who or you're not running
the company, you own the company, and you have a
meeting with all your C level people and they're all
they're all lying to you. You know what do you do? Well,
you get rid of all of them. You start you
start thinking about how I get rid of all of them,
and I bring new people in. And that may be
what's happening with a lot of these guys, because of
the constant lying, the dishonesty, the unwillingness to abide by
the rules. So you know, I mean, we could again,
we could be in for some very interesting times. And
you know what I mean, You know, you know it
may be, it may be necessary. You know, interesting times
might be the kind of thing that fixes a lot
of the spiritual and cultural problems that we have you know,
you see you know, you see this stuff too. You know,
people talking about the fertility raid and the loss of
community and social capital breaking down and all that. You know,
maybe we need a really serious crisis that focuses everyone's
mind on what's important and and a ruling class that
is is doing it at the same time we are.
You know, maybe that's just a necessary thing to have
the renewal that we're going to need, not just as
a country, but as a civilization.
Speaker 1: I thought the same thing that you know, there's this
desire to sort of you know, have your cake and
eat it too, right, this desire to to go to
become you know, a vitalistic, living society again without going
through anything unpleasant. I'm not entirely sure that that's that's
how it works, right, forgive me for a minute, right,
but this is something that you see all the time
in you know, both the entire Western canon, right, but
then in scripture. Right. This idea that you know that
the people kind of falls away from, you know, the path, right,
They they reject God. They you know, they they do
something shameful and they need to atone for that. Right,
There's a blood price that needs to be paid, and
I don't want to take this into an overly chin
stroking direction, but I think that that that applies to
us as well. You know that these sort of interesting
times are probably the only way we get to a
society that has a reason to exist again. And I
think that, you know, the kind of like endless chanting
about seventeen seventy six shall commence again from the you know,
the sort of the the morbidly obese boomers. I think
it's probably a little bit of wishful thinking, But ze Man,
we you're coming up on time. I really enjoyed this conversation.
It was went different places than I thought, and I
enjoyed it quite a bit. But if people want to
find more of your you and and your work, what's
a good way for them to do so?
Speaker 3: Just go to the z man dot com. That's the
easiest place. So all my links are there. I even
have links to John Derbyshire stuff. He's one of the
the old graybeards who I have a trends amount of
respect for. I wouldn't be here without John Derbyshire, so
I have. I am now that a v there went
out of business, I'm now uh supporting and distributing John's
weekly podcast. And if you want to hear a you know,
a real old head, a guy who's been at this,
the guy who actually coined the term dissident.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Uh, if you if you want to know what the
old guys are thinking, then just go to the z
man dot com and I put his show up every
Saturday morning.
Speaker 1: Well, be sure to link to that. I actually didn't
realize you were you were publishing his work. Now I'm
not as familiar with his, uh this sort of recent work,
but you know there there are a couple of John Derbyshire,
you know, essays that are all time classics. I'm definitely
gonna have to check that out. All right, ze man,
welcome back to the Jay Burton Show.
Speaker 2: How you doing, man, I'm doing very good. Thank you
for having me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm glad to have you back on. I always
enjoy our conversations quite a bit. And I will say
for my audience, the technical issue has been solved, so
you will be hearing me out of two ears instead
of only one. Sorry about that. Just had some hardware
issues that have been resolved. But obviously I'm not just
here to talk about my inability to make a podcast
after almost three hundred episodes. I'm here to talk with
with using men about kind of the current state of
things right, because I think one of the most interesting
developments of the Trump presidency has been this kind of
bizarre divide among our circles where either, you know, you
see people who have essentially been brought back into the fold, right,
they are full on you know, Republicans. Trump is going
to say it to save the world. Trump is going
to you know, get us to that ideal state. Or alternately,
and I think you see this, particularly among the the
European chapter of the right, this kind of endless doom
and gloom. Right old zion Don is back. And that's
not really how I view things, right. I view this
as you know, well, certainly a win a conditional one,
it's not the end. And I'm curious, right, where do
you find yourself falling and what do you see as
being kind of the relevant developments.
Speaker 3: Well, you know what, broadly speaking, right wing politics or
what we call the right in the United States has
always had an element of people who like being a
medium sized fish in a very small pond, you know,
they carve out these sort of little sort of subcultures
where you know, they get to be the star of
the event that has twenty five people show up, or
you know, the online group that has you know, fifty
people who listen to the live stream, that kind of stuff,
and you know, they often act like the kinds of
people who found a new band or a cool little restaurant.
You know, they they love the fact that nobody goes
there or nobody really listens to it, and so once
it starts getting popular, they feel as if, oh, well
it's sold out. It's not the same as it used
to be. That's how I look at a lot of
this politics. I mean, because look, many of the things
that were only said in you know, band live streams
and band in that places are now coming out of
the mouths of the you know, the president, the vice
president and his people. I mean, you know, some of
the things that jd. Vance says were things that got
you thrown off a Twitter five, six, seven years ago.
So you know, there's a there's a lot of good
stuff happening, but these people look at that and they
you know, they you know, they just they don't want
to be winners. I hate to use that word, but
you know, they because they there's some part of their
identity is in failure, and you know, there's a beautiful loser.
I mean, this is what San Francis brought about a
million years ago. And you know that it's it's the
people who just sort of want to cling on to
either their tiny little piece or maybe they cling.
Speaker 2: Onto the past.
Speaker 3: You know that that's you know, that's just who they are,
and so success really is actually the worst thing that
can happen to them. But there's also people I think
they just have an obsession over one particular issue and
you can never be satisfied with it.
Speaker 2: It's a very weird thing. You know.
Speaker 3: Trump, when it comes to our greatest ally, he gives
a lot of lip service, but he doesn't deliver a
If you actually read the Israeli news or listen to
some of the Israelis, they kind of think Trump is
selling them a you know, a a false promise. You know,
they don't they don't really think that Trump actually delivers
much for them.
Speaker 2: And it's odd in a way.
Speaker 3: You know, the people who always complaining about Trump and
our side, you know in America, complaining, oh Trump never
follows through with stuff.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, we're not the only ones.
Speaker 3: He kind of gyps every once in a while, you know,
over selling things. But you know, if your only issue,
the only thing you care about, is getting up in
the morning and finding out what's going on with Israel,
well you're never gonna be happy. So you know, there's
those are those two kinds of groups. But I also
I think there's people who just don't I don't really
think they understand the nature of the problem. We're not
changing policy here. We need to change a culture and
an economy, a political economy.
Speaker 2: In Washington.
Speaker 3: You know this whole blob business where you had forty
billion dollars of USA money, tens of billions of dollars,
probably as much, maybe forty fifty billion dollars coming out
of individual agencies as grants and subscriptions and all kinds
of ways to send taxpayer money into these not for
profits and NGOs and think tanks and media companies. And
then you know they use a lot of this money
to harvest and control the private money. I mean, you're
talking about one hundred billion dollars a year. I mean,
this is an enormous amount of money feeding into this system,
all of which was used to bribe politicians control the media,
control access to power, to fund people who run around
looking for you know, oh my goodness, this ze man
said something untoward to this group. Ah, you know, let's
let's have let's destroy his life. You know, let's go
after this guy. You know, all the doxing people, all
these guys that we're all funded with this stuff and
going after that political economy is huge. That is an
enormous change, because I mean, that's why everyone's terrified in
Washington right now. And once you dismantled, you you stick
the you know, a knife through the you know, you
put the ice pick in the head of the blob,
so to speak, all of a sudden, lots of other
things become possible. The world really does change, but it's
not going to change over night. It just means that
you now have an opportunity to organize and work hard
and try and you know, affect change. I Mean, the
biggest problem we've had over the last thirty years, probably
most of my adult lifetime, is that there is been
there's been no way for normal people to participate in
politics and get a positive result. You can vote yourself silly,
and you just kept get the same crap over and
over again, all all of a sudden things are starting
to change. You can you can actually expect something other
than the usual crap. There's a lot of good stuff here.
But you know, there's always a lot of people who
just don't understand that. They you know, they they look
and say, well, Trump promised mass deportations. They don't know
what that really looks like, but they feel they're not
getting it, so he ripped us off again, you know. So,
I mean, there's always gonna be that element. There's always
gonna be people who like that. But I think most
people understand that we're we're in the middle of something different.
This is very different. It's I don't want to use
the word revolution, but i'll I mean, there are things
happening now that I remember Paleocon's talking about when I
was a young man, which trust me, was a long
time ago, and no one has ever thought more possible.
I mean, they'd laid off ninety percent of the staff
at the Department of Education.
Speaker 2: I mean, Republicans have been.
Speaker 3: Running on that for the Live camp probably since Jimmy Carter,
and all of a sudden this happened. Now, it doesn't
mean that they you know, saved all two hundred and
thirty billion dollars or whatever.
Speaker 2: And most of it is student loans.
Speaker 3: But still, I mean, there's a lot of good stuff happening,
and you know, we'll see what happens. Well, we'll see
if it actually goes and continues on the direction it is.
But now, if you're not feeling pretty chipper about the
state of things, you'll never be happy. You're someone who
will just be miserable for the rest of your life.
Speaker 1: Well, and I'm glad you you brought up, you know,
that idea of in changing what is perceived to be possible,
because one of the really the strongest weapons in our
enemies arsenal is the ability to set the null hypothesis right,
what is seen as you know, normal and acceptable and
if anything right. British politician Tony Blair was a master
of this, where he would basically push for some radical
change but cast it as if you know this is
simply you know that the decision has been made, right,
the conversation is already over and you know you see
in the way, for instance, that the UK banned guns, right,
it's he expressed that as if you know that was
an issue that had already been decided. Right, the voice
of history has spoken, and this is done. And you know,
for a long time, this is something Republicans have been
fighting up against. Right. You can you know see over
and over and over again. You know where Republicans effectively
have you know, adopted the framework of their enemies. Right, Okay,
well this is already decided. Roe versus Weight is already decided.
We're simply managing you know, everything after that point. And
you know, the ability to you know, as as the
meme says, right, simply do things is is huge, Right,
I sort of echo your your your points about Israel.
To me, look like obviously that is a heavily embedded
interest group, right, you know, one of the most powerful
lobbies has you know, John u Er Schuchmer will tell you,
but it is not the sole determinate factor in politics, right,
That is not you know, it's not like you solve
that issue and then everything goes away. It's a complicated system.
And to me, right, I keep going back to, you know,
the the binary choice, however much a choice that was,
is you know, up for debate between you know, Harris
and Trump, and look is someone who actually lives here,
I don't regret my choice. Right, that was a pretty
easy choice to make. And you know you mentioned the
in the incredible you know, corruption of all of this, right,
the fact that you know, most of the opposition to
things that we think was not organic. It wasn't real,
It wasn't you know, as it has often presented the
inevitable conclusion to that argument. Uh, it was simply right,
government fiat, they just gave money to people who had
views that they liked. Right, the BBC got money, Axios
got money, as you mentioned. But you know, even even
people like Politico right, who is in charge of so
called fact checking. And to me, right, it very much
reminds me of you know, courtesy Arvin's point, you know,
where he says, you know, people people look at scans,
at this, at the Soviet system, but you know, really
we live in an economy or a society that's just
as much controlled by the government. And people laughed at
him right back in two thousand and eight when he
wrote it. But you know, you look at the receipts
and it turns out that you know, he may have
been underestimating it, right. It turns out that literally almost
all of these people are getting you know, hundreds of
thousands of dollars. Like the example that comes to mind
is Christianity Today, right, one of these kind of like
left leaning evangelical newspapers. And you know that this organization
swung hard to the left, you know, really post twenty
twenty and you'll never get what guess what happened just
before that? They got two million dollars from the federal government. Right,
It's it's amazing, how uh how that strategy works?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know the environmental groups were all bright paid
off with donor money. You know, you know it all
this stuff is it gets laundered. You know, I wrote
about this ten years ago, maybe I don't know, it's
been a long time now, but about how this laundering works. Now,
I think I did a show on this recently about
how this but I don't know, you know, honestly I
produced much content. I kind of lose track of what
the hell I'm doing sometimes, But you know, there's this
money laundering is really what this system was. No one
really could know for sure, so it felt like community
money to people. One of the weird things about and
this was true in the Soviet Union, and honestly it
was true in pre revolutionary France, you see these phenomena
show up where all of a sudden, a culture and
there's everywhere around you in the elite is social proof,
and it just feels like you have no choice but
to go along with what everybody else is doing. And
because it seems like, well, you know, you're getting finance
from this guy and he thinks this, And you're getting
a job maybe from this guy and he thinks this.
You know, everywhere you turn, everything you count on in
terms of your lifestyle and how you live your life
is it seems, you know, all these sources all seem
to be on the same page. Well it turns out
that they're all being paid by the same source, so
sure they are, but it doesn't seem that way to you. You know,
if these people were actually getting a direct government check
instead of getting uh, you know, support from people who
seem to be their friends, they probably would have been
some of them would have been more suspicious. But it
just kind of feels like, hey, everybody's doing this, and
it's you know, the social proof that that's developed around it.
It's exactly how the Soviet system work. I had this
thing called the embankment instead of apartments that were up
on this hill and on the river in Moscow and
all the apparach next to the new class. They live
there and it became a part, you know, they became
a new class. They got class consciousness. And then literally
is what's happened in Washington. It's the embankment. Now it's this,
you know, or Versai. There's another example, you know, where
all the royals, all the aristocrats live in this one area,
isolated from everyone else, and so it's very easy to
control the mental space they live in. And that really
is what's happened in Washington. That's why, you know all
these right wing people.
Speaker 2: So was the right wing people, and they would.
Speaker 3: Start out working for a National Review or the Federalist
or you know, CATO or you know these different operations,
you know, and before long they're at the Washington Post
of the New York Times sounding just like the people
they used to oppose, like, how how is this happening? Well,
they're all their friends. They just evolved with their friends.
I mean Patu Cannan talked about this back nineteen ninety two.
Is famous or family famous at the time, he said,
you know, your electric congressman he goes to Washington. Before
long he turns into a native of Washington. And that's
exactly what's been happening. But it was all made possible
by billions and billions and billions of taxpayer dollars financing
this political economy that was Washington. And it's going to
be interesting to watch. And when you're talking about laying
off twenty percent of the federal work course, which is
what they're what they're actually doing right now, they're laying
off a lot of people, but also piercing this you know,
this blob and draining money out of it. I mean,
you know, I've often said that every mortgage payment in Washington,
every college tuition payment, every quality college loan payment, every
opportunity to get your kids into a good private school,
all counted on nothing ever changing. And now everything's changing,
which means a lot of mortgage payments aren't gonna be made,
a lot of houses are go up for sale, a lot,
you know, a lot of It's going to be interesting
is what happens to the actual physical economy in Washington.
People have been watching the real estate market to see
what happens, and you know, we'll see how it unfolds.
But you know, it's fundamentally altering how Washington operates, because
you know, without without the billions and billions of dollars
from from the federal government, the machine stops. And and
again that that opens. It doesn't mean everything gets great
and rosy and all the problems are solved. It just
means that we live in a different world. Things are
going to operate theirfferent And that's why. Look, it's why
the Democrats don't know what to do, the Republicans don't
know what to do. These guys are poll acts. I mean,
Chuck Schumer, who is a vicious political animal, rolled over
and asked Trump to scratch his belly over that continuous resolution.
I've never seen anything like it. I mean, he looked defeated.
And I mean that that alone. I mean, my whole life,
Chuck Schumer has been a pit bull and to see
him like that, it was just it just it really
screamed at me that, man, something wild is going on
in Washington right now. And these people, it's not that
they're terrified. They don't know what to do, they don't
know how to respond, they don't know what to say.
And that's all good. I mean, we we're on the
side that says destroy the status quo. So the status
is being destroyed. Now what comes after we'll see. It
could be worse, or it could be something we don't like,
who knows, but at least we've moved the ball down
the field to this point.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm glad that you brought up in a Northern
Virginia real estate prices because I have checked, and they
are absolutely cratering. I mean, I think that the average
home price in one week and I haven't you know,
checked since then, had created almost eighty thousand dollars, which is,
you know, even in an area that's you know, fairly
well off. That's apocalyptic. And I just want to say,
I could not feel less sympathy, right, And I'll be honest,
there's a part of this that look to me, there's
a certain amount of cultural decline that I don't think
we're going to be able to cheat our way out of.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: But given the choice between total cultural decline with you know,
the eternal hr state and watching these people have to
squir them a little bit, I'll certainly take the second option, right.
And you know, as you mentioned, these have been the
things that the conservative movement has been trying to get
done for years, decades, and the fact that you know
these that so many changes were made so quickly, and
that you know, these people are basically in a tail spin. Uh,
it's heavy, right, It's easy to get swept away in
it because you know, as you mentioned, these people have
they conceptualize themselves as a distinct class. They see themselves
as better as above people like you and I. And
to realize how how unstable that was right, to realize that,
you know, you're effectively one stroke of a pen away
from being a normal person.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, they don't seem to be coping with that well.
And uh again I'm just going to repeat myself. I
could not feel less sympathy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not going to lie and say I'm not
enjoying this. I I you know, I I often think
about when I see one of them who are still
on Twitter, you know, moaning about how terrible things are,
and I think, man, this, this is great. This, this
is why we invented. Why the Germans gave us the
word shodenfreud. You know, we don't have a good word
in English for it, but you know, I find myself
from time to time, tempted to lick my computer monitor
to taste the sweet salty tears of the people. But yeah,
you know, look, you know, at the end of I mean,
in a lot of ways, we're going through here. You know,
we're finally the Cold War is finally ending. All the
mechanisms that built up over this time to win the
Cold War should have been turned off in nineteen ninety
two with Bill Clinton, and actually there was talk about
that in nineteen ninety two, but you know what, there
was just too many good jobs at good wages, and
instead they went a different way, and we've reached the
end of that road, where at the end of the
unipolar moment, the post Cold War, the end of history,
all the other bullshit, and a lot of this stuff
just has to be taken apart. And a lot of
it is driven by the fact that our richest people
are oligarchs. It was not an accident that, you know,
all the richest men and most powerful corporate leaders were
at Trump's inauguration and made sure they showed up at
Mar Alago. They swung behind this guy because I think
they realized that a lot of bad things were happening
and they needed to head this stuff off. The country
was in a lot more trouble perhaps than really we realized.
And that's what this is all about. I've I've talked
about it. As you know, America Inc. Is going through
a resizing. The board of trustees, the board of directors,
wherever you want to call them. They decided management was
screwing up. God enough, we got to we got to
change things. And they're bringing in new management. They're downsizing things,
getting rid of certain departments. We're going to outsource certain
functions back to the private sector. It's some aspects will
be sold off, you know. And that's what's happening in
foreign policy. Basically, we're going to we're going to uh
uh privatize Europe. We're gonna we're gonna take it. We're
gonna set up as its own thing and say nearer
on our own now, you know, go figure out how
to be a civilization again. And you know that that's
a lot what's happening here. I think, you know, there's
longer cycles too. I've written and talked about this. You know,
if you go back and look at Nixon, a lot
of the bad stuff that that we have today that
seems to be falling apart we started under Nixon. I mean,
that's you know, there's no question about it. The Paleos
wrote a lot about this, you know, the growth of
the managerial state and that.
Speaker 2: But you know, what we're going through.
Speaker 3: It's an interesting thing though, you know, in the Cold
War is important because at the end of the Cold War,
Russia was a poor country, but it was a lawful country.
And then it became a poor country that was unlawful,
and it reorganized itself, and now it's becoming a it's
all back to being a lawful country, and it's it's
slowly it's economy and it's doing pretty well economically. The
United States is a rich country that had become lawless.
We don't realize just how lawless we were over the
last ten years. I mean, all the stuff they did
to Trump, but you know, throwing these j six people
into dungeons, I mean, I mean, the abuses of these
people's civil basic civil rights, which just monstrous. No one,
you know, no one talks about that too much. I mean,
fortunately all been pardoned, but all kinds of things. I mean,
there's just lots of terrible things that we were becoming
lawless and now, I think we're going to go through
this really rough period where we're probably gonna be a
little poorer, and I don't think there's many out about it.
The economy is going to have some difficult moments. But
you know, if we can come back to being a
lawful society again and having some sanity, back to how
our countries run, we'll do okay. You know, we'll survive
the transition. And that really is what we're experiencing now.
We're at the beginning of this great transition out of
this past. You know, as I like to say, we're
about to join everybody else in the twenty first century.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: You know, we'll stop talking about nineteen thirty eight, nineteen
sixty eight, nineteen eighty four at all. You know, these
dates that just keep coming up over and over again.
We'll finally be able to shut the door on that stuff.
And you know that's that means we're also going to
have to We're going to have to develop a new
set of values, things that are important to us, new
customs and culture. You don't go back and say, oh,
we're just going to go and adopt these old ways
that just it doesn't work that way. So it's going
to be an interesting interesting time, you know. I mean
I say interesting, not necessarily good interesting. It's going to
be some bad interesting as well, because a lot of
you know, a lot of the stuff we take for
granted is going to be called into question. Now I
have to say stuff. You know, our values are point
in our lives as individuals, how we go about, how
we work, how we spend our money. You know, Uh,
a lot of a lot of stuff's going to change,
and and some people will do better than others.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I to me, and I might this might be
recency bias. But if you could pin down a moment
that it seems as if you know, the post war
consensus died, right, the so called rules based international order
was you know, finally the nail was put into the coffin.
It was, uh, you know Trump and Vance's interaction with Selenski.
Because to me, and I know there was some coverage
of this that you know said it, Oh, it's all
you know, it's all a game, right, it was a
deliberate plan to create some kind of media spectacle. I
don't believe.
Speaker 2: That, right.
Speaker 1: To me, that seems as if you know, Trump Advance,
after a fairly long conversation got rightfully very annoyed with
the rat King of Ukraine, and in the weak sense, right,
the discussion over you know, what will likely be a
peace in Ukraine has basically just been between Donald Trump
and the Russian government right there. There's no even fig
leaf anymore that you know, Zelenski has a say in
this matter. And look like I know that the Europeans
are making noises. We will see what the Europeans end
up doing. But I think that that's an interesting, an
interesting move, right, the recognition, which, let's be honest, may
have always been true that you know, really what this
matters is this kind of conversation between you know, individual
leaders of a nation more so than this you know
system of different un security councils and all that. And
I think that that, to a certain degree, it's a
more honest view of it, right. It is how it
has always happened, just kind of stripped of a certain
level of nicety. And you know, when I look at this, right,
the analogy to the late Soviet Union is kind of
apt because that was a you know, an aging system
that no one really believed in anymore, but it just
had this kind of momentum. And you know, I think
that the you know, a certain part of the kind
of like the US International Empire, it faced the same
problem right that it was it was out of date.
It was kind of coasting on, you know, the cultural
ideas of a previous era, and it was was floundering,
right and to me, and I could be wrong, but
I think that in you know, twenty thirty years, that
will be seen as the kind of like emblematic movement
of that shift.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, it's it's funny. I don't know you
recency bi It is the right word, you know, because
I a couple weeks ago, Paul Ramsey and I did
a show on Reagan, and we both were teenagers when
Reagan was riding high. And one of the things we
talked about is that if you lived in that period,
you thought, man, that Reagan's going to be He's going
to be on Mount Rushmore. He's up there, He's FDR
two great presidents of the twentieth century, and then Lincoln,
you know, and Jefferson. You know, I don't think about
Reagan at all anymore, all these years later. I mean,
I lived through it, you know, so I should, you know,
getting into my geezerhood. I should be nostalgic for those days,
don't think.
Speaker 1: About it at all.
Speaker 3: And you know, it's weird how that that those things
can happen. Stuff that's important in the moment can easily
just disappear from the collective consciousness, and things that didn't
seem all that important at the time can can rise up.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I think, you know, right now, if I were going
to guess at something that was sort of a pivot point,
you know, it's going to be the twenty twenty election.
I think a lot of people, not just average Americans,
but I think a lot of wealthy people looked at
that and said, what the hell is going on here?
I mean that whole everything about that was shocking to
a lot of people.
Speaker 2: Some you know, it was.
Speaker 3: Shocking for different reasons, but I think generally that that
people looked at that and said, you know what, we've
become a lawless were You know, that's no different than
the Senate assassinating Caesar in uh.
Speaker 2: You know, in Rome.
Speaker 3: I mean, this is breaks, this is the break. And
I think I think in the fullness of time, we'll
look back and say that that was the moment in
which the economic elites, a lot of cultural is. A
lot of people started talking privately that, hey, we've got
a big problem here. Something's gone horribly wrong, and I
saw I think that may be it. I mean, I
could be completely wrong, but I do think that that
turned out to be a seminal moment because it's not
just the election itself. I think it was also the
the treatment of the people, the attitudes, I mean, just
the sneering contempt of the average person by Washington. I
think that shocked a lot of people. And you know,
it was downhill ever since. I mean, that was really
peak bad guys. You know, it's peak all the bad guys.
That was their best time. And if you think about it,
every month, every year from that point forward, things got
worse and worse for the bad guys. You know, when
did my buy Twitter? Was it twenty twenty three, twenty
twenty two, something like That's when it started?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I believe so.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So you know that there's another item you could
point to and say that was a turning point because
it look, this was basically the richest man in the
world saying I'm going to buy one of the more
influential platforms because I disagree with the politics which happens
to be the politics of the people in charge. That
had to be a big message. If you're the second
richest guy, you took notice. If you're the twentieth richest guy,
you took notice. So you know, I mean, it'd be
interesting to you know, to see what, you know, how
people look back on it as how things change. But
I do think and it really brings up. It actually
just pop in my head, you know, is a good
example of how you never know. When Trump came down
that escalator, how many people thought he would be this
world altering figure, He would be this one arguably in
the running for one of the most important people in
the last fifty years. I don't think anybody, I can't
imagine anybody, not even Donald Trump, thought that he was
going to be this seminal figure. When you look at
the last ten years, I mean, this man went from
being an entertaining television and real estate entrepreneur to being
the most consequential man in the lifetime of half the country. Yeah,
I mean, you have to be old like me to think, well,
there was more consequential people when I was younger. But
you know, honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if you asked
me five years from now, I'll say, yeah, Trump was
probably the most consequential figure in my lifetime because everything
changes during that period. So I don't know, I mean,
you can you know, that pivot point of history, the
inflection point.
Speaker 2: Years from now, who.
Speaker 3: Knows what we'll be, but you know, but certainly right now,
I think as well, there's a lot of contenders the
twenty twenty election, the russ Must buying a Twitter, Trump
getting shot, I mean, that was think about the anormity
of that. I mean, yeah, there's been a lot of
history in the last ten years.
Speaker 1: Well, and and look, I've joked a couple of times
that COVID was Vietnam for gen Z and they'll never
shut up about it. But I do think there's something
to that, right, that that was and it was hard
to tell at the time, right if that was you know,
as we heard from you know, certain figures at the WFF,
that was really the new normal, right if they had
done it, If they had you know, they had managed
to you know, get the ring and become you know,
kind of like the eternal hr overlords of the world.
And you know, I think the further and further we
get away from it. It seems as if no, that
was sort of a last gasp, Right, that was a
massive miscalculation, you know, basically putting all your chips on
the table. And you know, while it certainly had a
short to medium term benefit, Right, they were able to
do a lot of things they wanted in a short
amount of time, it costs them too much, right, They
they expended too much political capital, and now they're being
punished for it. To me, I think that you know,
a neat heuristic, right when kind of parsing if something
is a win or not is basically you know, do
your enemies get punished? Do your friends get rewarded?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: It's not particularly sophisticated, but it works. And in this case,
our enemies are certainly being punished. Right, The unaccounted, unaccountable
bureaucracy is being brought to heal. They are losing their jobs.
They are you know, at best, being forced to retire early.
At worst, like the Voice of America reporters, they're just
you know, thrown out on their ear. And the other side, right,
are our friends being rewarded? I would say yes, right,
like you Manson mentioned the Jan six protesters, And what's
interesting about that is at first it was, you know,
just pardons for the quote unquote non violent offenders. But
when it actually came time for Trump to sign them,
he just signed everyone, right, he let them all go.
And look like, I am not the kind of person
who would have really, in any context been likely to
be at an event like you know, the electoral justice protest.
But nonetheless, right, those are our people, right, those are
good normal Americans. And the fact that you know they
were freed from jail while all of these people are
being fired, that's a strong indication that you know, this
was a good move for us.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, you know, it's it's.
Speaker 3: It's again, you know, it's you can't expect that, I
guess some people and I frankly, I've lost all patients
with the black pillars.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know there's times where when you lose or
things are going bad there, for some reason or other,
it feels good to kind of blackpill And I get that.
We all do it, you know, you do it and everything.
It's not just politics. But yeah, you know, you look
at the sporting events, people who watch sports, you know,
there's a joke. You know, I can't wait for the game,
and then five minutes later, I want to kill myself,
fire the coach. You know, it's it's true, you know,
we you know, it's kind of how we normally react.
But right now, in the balance, you know, things are
really going our way. I mean, look, there was a
time where a lot of people who were online or
I know, people who dropped out of politics because they
were terrified of the SPLC or any of these lunatics
on Twitter getting their information and trying to destroy their lives.
They could actually get people fired. Well, that doesn't happen anymore.
Speaker 2: That is over with.
Speaker 3: And those people who have been herded into blue Sky
so they can be weird with each other and ignored
by everybody else. You know, it's kind of like a
you know, it's become a zoo. You know, you go
to people go over there or some of these reddit
uhs subreddits, you know, you go, you know, to just
see what the crazies are up to. You know, in
China they actually have tours where you can go right
to the North Korean border and look and see the
North Koreans. It's kind of like they treat it like
a zoo where you look over the border at the
North Korean Zoo. We have the same thing now with
these crazies who are riding high just five or six
years ago. So, I mean, there's tons of good stuff happening.
But again, you know it's not we're not we're not
turning fifty sixty seventy years of mistakes over in a
what's it Trump in an office?
Speaker 2: What? Three months? Two months? You know it's going to
think a lot longer.
Speaker 3: You know, this is a generational project that's starting now.
You know, Trump will hopefully hand a baton off to Vance,
and Vance will continue this project. And you know, twenty
or twenty thirty two, people will look back and be
shocked that people actually were willing to tolerate things like
COVID or the docksing business or you know, any of
this kind of stuff. You know, the world will be
that much different. I mean that's the oh, I mean,
you know, it's my hope.
Speaker 1: Anyway, Well, to me, I actually think one of the
most significant stories, uh that has kind of fallen out
of uh you know, falling out of the discussion rather
quickly is the so called quote big balls situation. Right,
Uh so for a little bit of background, Right, there
was this kid, I believe he's working with Dose, I
can't remember what, Uh, excuse me. And he had an
edgy Twitter account called big Balls where he would say
things that you know, would be quite familiar to us
in ours. Right, you know, it was an edgy twittered
ault and uh, this got revealed, it was brought to
the attention of the government, and he was initially fired.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: That's actually pretty normal, Right, that sort of thing has
happened a number of times. But what's interesting is that
jd Vance comes to this kid's defense. He basically says,
you know, we don't do this anymore. We don't you
fire people because of you know, what our enemies think
about them. And look like I've certainly been skeptical Advance,
but you know that I found that kind of endearing.
It's like fair enough, right, And the fact that he
is routinely denied the moral authority of his opposition, I
think that's a very strong development, especially when you consider
right that you know, regardless of your opinion on Dvance,
it's very clear that you know he has been he
is being groomed as the successor because in the in
the big balls case. Right, A reporter asks Trump, well,
what do you think of this? And what does Trump do? Well,
he looks advanced and basically says, well, I don't know
anything about it, but if says it's a good idea,
it has my seal of approval, then it's done. And
that's significant for a number of reasons, right, because that
is a signal from the very top that this kind
of like eternal cancelation that is kind of plagued to
the right for decades, that will not be tolerated anymore.
And look, well, obviously you know the stated recipient for
that was the activist left. I think the other people
who were on notice of that was basically the conservative movement.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: You mentioned Francis earlier, and we all know what happened
to him, right, He got canceled not by you know,
the the left wing radicals of his day, but you know,
by Dinesh Desuza right within the house, so to speak.
And so you know, again, I think that that's a
very promising trend if that continues.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, look, I will I'll put myself on
the back for being early on dvance. But when he
was third place in the polls. When he first launched
the Senate campaign, I wrote an essay explaining why he
was the best choice. And everything I wrote and I
turned out to be right. And the reason is that
Fans is an interesting guy. He is actually a real
flesh and blood per You know, he grew poor, and
you know he wasn't you know, living under a bridge
or anything like that. But you know, he grew up, uh,
working class, I guess the way to put it. But
he wanted to be one of the beautiful people. And
he got there and he realized that his only reason
that they allowed him in was because he was really
nothing more than a long jockey. He was this this
token they could put on their charm braceles and say, ooh,
we helped the poor guy. We fell out a poor
guy in And I think it set off a revolution
in his mind that said, no, I'm not going to
live like this.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to be this kind of guy.
Speaker 3: And he when he's become a different person, and uh,
and you could see it. I mean, I look, I
say this as someone who kind of went through a
very similar experience, So I mean, I guess it's easier
for me to recognize but uh, you know he uh,
he's just a different guy than he was, you know before.
He really kind of down this road and he denies
the other sides moral claims. He doesn't you know, he
is not you know, he's kind of like a guy
who is outside of their religion and doesn't really care
to know about their religion, and he has no interest
in following the edicts of their religion. So he just
you know, shrugged his shoulders when they say these things.
And that's a great thing. That is a huge development.
And I think in a lot of ways that Trump
sensed us about fans. He wasn't going to pick fans
until he got shot, and then then it clearly changed
his mind and decided to go Advance for this reason.
You know, I think the best thing that ever happened
is that happened to him, probably is that they took
a shot at Trump and missed. But but you know,
I think, you know, Vance in a lot of ways,
what he stepped in and saved big balls. You know
it it was the end. It killed the whole docsing world,
you know, all these efforts. I mean, it was on
sin Ice right away. But when the second most important
guy in the world says, I don't care if you
you know, you want me to fire this guy, We're
not going to do it. Go screw that's it. They
lost all of their authority, you know, they have nothing
left at that point. And again it's another another good thing,
you know. I mean, it doesn't you know, it doesn't
mean that, you know, you can go out in public
and start using racial epithets without you know, a consequence.
You know, we still have you know, generally agreed upon
behavior that you're not supposed to say certain things and
do certain things in public and all that.
Speaker 2: And I don't think anybody.
Speaker 3: Should complain about that. But if you if you use
some locker room humor in a private chat, or you
say so you get a little carried away on Twitter
or something, well, you know, the the mature adult response
now is real it back in a little bit, you
know that, don't be so careless and move on. You know,
it's not this, Oh my god, we've got to banish
this person and destroy his life, you know, because I mean,
I think about how weird this is that you know,
people were having their lives destroyed because of something they tweeted.
I mean about just how insane, that is, you know,
it's it's the kind of thing that you would expect
in a a grammar school where you know, all of
a sudden, you know you you did something wrong on
this on the school yard, and so you have this
mark on your permanent record, and you're going to carry
this with you into the next grade. You know, you
have this reputation forever. We're just childish and silly. So
you know, I think, you know, Vance has done it
all a great service by what he did there, but
I also think he's done a lot of other stuff
like this too. I mean, he's he's what he's become
is kind of like Peskof is for or Medvedev, rather
probably like Medvedev for for Putin. You know, Putin is
the you know, he kind of is the good cop
and he tries to keep things light, and Medvedev comes
out and just shreds people. And you see that happening.
Trump is like the Trump's like the nice guy and
and advances. You know, he's the animal. He comes out
and he breaks legs. So it's fun to watch. There's
another another part of all this that I'm enjoying a
great deal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that you know. One of the other
things that's been kind of in is to watch the
clash of Trump, right, who seems to be committed to
being this Article two executive and the judicial branch, you know,
most recently, I believe, I can't remember what his first
name was. It was a judge boaz Berg, who I
believe is Italian, I'm not entirely sure about that had
basically issued this order saying, you know, President of the
United States is not allowed to deport Venezuelan's to venezuela right.
And it is simply not allowed. And the reaction was
quite interesting because Trump basically told him, you know, to
quote to kind of paraphrase Andrew Jackson, you and what
army right, Which I think is another interesting thing because
if we compare in contrast to Trump round one right,
the twenty sixteen presidency, there were a lot of positive
things said that just kind of sunk into the mud, right,
They never went anywhere, They got endlessly wrapped up in court.
And so I'm curious to see, similar to what we
saw with the unaccountable bureaucracy, if there will be you know,
some sort of I guess kind of settlement reached with
the judicial branch, because at least up until recently, that
was the kind of seat of final power in the US.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think.
Speaker 3: We always were recording this. I'm just looking on Twitter
and some lunatic judge has ordered Trump to or order
said that all the end of USAID and all the
firings and all that are unconstitutional and everyone has to
hired back, giving all their email back and everything else. Well,
it's not gonna happen. The buildings are closed, the computers
are in already edited for the dumpster.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is.
Speaker 3: Silly, and and that's the problem here is that they'll
these inferior court judges. This is just these are public
acts of piety. They're just making assays out of themselves
and out of the system. And I think at some
point this is going to head to a showdown. It
has to happen to a showdown, because look, we don't
have a fourth branch of government called independent agency. That
doesn't exist. Either these agencies report to and are in
control of the executive or they're in the under the
control of Congress.
Speaker 2: That's it.
Speaker 3: I mean, there's only two choices. And of course Congress
set them up and put them in the executive.
Speaker 2: So, I mean it's right.
Speaker 3: So it's headed to a showdown, I think, and it
at a long overdue showdown. The courts need to have
their sales trimmed. Sure, and you know what's his name, Roberts.
Roberts kind of signaled this. You know, people read this
the wrong way. You know, he came out and he
chastised Trump for saying that some both Burger has to
be uh it should be impeached. And frankly, I would
have no problem with them putting the FBI on this guy.
He was up to his eyeballs in the Russian COLLUSI
and hoax. He colluded with the FBI to uh get
phony baloney FIZA warrants. I mean, this guy is crooked.
He needs he should be on the list, regardless of
this stuff. And uh, but you know that may what
maybe what has to happen. You know, you rough up
a judge this way with uh, you know, the FBI
carding out all of his electronics and everything else, you know,
to do the same stuff to him that he did
to all the JA six people. To send the message
to the rest of these judges. But uh, I think
it's going to end up in uh In in the
appeals and I think at some point the court is
going to clarify this stuff. And Roberts seemed to be
signaling that, saying, look, instead of going to war with
these inferior court judges, bring it to the appeal and
there you'll get remedy. And I think that's what he
was signaling to the White House. And you know, for
the order of the country, it would be good if
it happened. But you know, if Plan B is rounding
up some judges and sending him out to work camp
somewhere in Louisiana, I either way, it's fine by me.
Speaker 2: I don't I don't care. I am I am completely.
Speaker 3: I've lost all paidation with the court system with these
I mean, these somebody, these judges are just lunatics. I mean,
they have no business being in the bar, much less
as a federal judge. So you know, I'm I'm If
Caesarism is the only answer, then well and that's what
we'll have to do.
Speaker 1: Well, Ze man, I have no idea how you could
call into question the legitimacy of a system where Judge
Kanty Jackson is sitting on the Supreme Court.
Speaker 3: Uh the Tame probably has an IQ under one hundred.
I mean, if you I actually went yeah, I mean,
this one's a moron, Helen the hell she actually got
it through law school.
Speaker 2: I'll there's a.
Speaker 3: Thing that happens in the law. Someone told me this
that everyone suspects that there's certain people who somehow rather
passed the bar despite the fact that they probably couldn't
get ever score a competent enough score to pass the bar.
They did just get passed through. And I you know Crockett,
that crazy woman who does a ghetto girl actor of
a commerceman from Houston. It was a jazzmine Crocket you know, yes, yeah,
I mean she went to like Fred's law school. I
mean it was legitimately like Fred's law school. Some it's
like a law school run out of an old grocery store.
And you know, somehow older she you know, she passed
the bar in Texas.
Speaker 2: But but you.
Speaker 3: Know, yeah, I mean Jumanji Jackson. I mean that this
is embarrassing. I mean it's like putting a horse on
the Supreme Court, you know, or a block of wood
or something.
Speaker 2: I mean, I.
Speaker 1: Mean, look, if we're really speed running, you know, the
sort of end of empire. I feel like getting a
horse's president would be kind of our just desserts, right,
I certainly couldn't be worse than the Sorry, someone's driving
a clapped out Honda outside my window here. But you
couldn't write when you compare that, right, you know, having
a horse's emperor to having a previous president who turns
out signed all of his executive orders via robot. Right,
couldn't even hold a pen. There's a question to be
asked of what would be the difference? Really?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean you know, I think you know, we
were talking earlier about these kind of inflection points, these things.
You know, there was a guy Mark and Dreesen, the
guy who invented Netscape, really one of the first browsers
and way way back, and you know he's a big
mover and shaker. Now I think it's in drees and
Horowitz is his investment firm. And he talked about how
back in like twenty twenty two, we had a meeting
with the Biden administration about technology, particularly AI, and he
came away said we have to stop these people.
Speaker 2: They're they're insane.
Speaker 3: And you know, he looked around and said, well, Donald
Trump is the only option here to try and put
it into this madness. I mean, you know, you think
about how terrible that meeting.
Speaker 2: Must have went with you.
Speaker 3: You went in as a guy who was generally in
favor of the Democrats and came out and said, I'm
now a revolutionary. I want to overthrow the government. I
must have been one hell of a meeting. But you know,
you know, a lot of this has, you know, really
due to the fact of putting a vegetable. See, you're
a young guy. You don't remember this, but I Joe
Biden has been around so long that he was an
old guy in Washington when I was a young guy,
when I was a teenager, Joe Biden was in Washington.
That's what I remember.
Speaker 1: I'm you know, the ancient history that is the Obama administration.
And I mean even back then, the running joke was
he's kind of stupid, right, I mean, I think it
was it was Barack Obama himself who said, you know,
I wouldn't trust him to make me a cup of coffee. Right,
He's not exactly a savvy political actor.
Speaker 3: Yeah, back in he ran in eighty eight and it
was terrible. But I mean back in the eighties, I
was a teenager, I worked for a congressman, and so
you know, it was just a front and aeron and
stuff like that. And I remember Joe Biden jokes. They
used to talk about that. He was a running joke
that he was so stupid, and he would tell these
outlandish whoppers, these these stories about you know, his heroism
and all this stuff. You know, if he went on
some congressional junket or something, he'd come back and you know,
he would talk about it, you know, like he was
on some James Bond adventure. He was just a complete
ridiculous person. And but the thing about it is that
he was reliable to represent the credit card companies in
Delaware and then they didn't care that, you know, him
being stupid was actually an asset. But so the idea
of this moron, I mean, look, it didn't go any better.
I mean they actually cracked open his skull I think
in the nineties and carved some stuff out that was
growing in there, and and then you know, he gets
dementia and and would make him president. I mean, a
horse would have been a better choice because at least
it would be honest and the horse, you know, horses
are noble animals.
Speaker 2: Biden is not.
Speaker 1: The uh. I think one of the the other interesting
things to me. Uh. You know you mentioned in resh
who let's put it this way, Andresen is perhaps more
involved in our circles than one would think. Uh. And
you know, you have this kind of new cabal of
you know, tech CEOs and entrepreneurs who have you know,
kind of explicitly made their foray into politics.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: You have Elon Musk, who is I mean, he is
kind of a bizarre position. Right. You have this sort
of I mean, he's technically the head of a government agency, right,
but he pretty much seems to do whatever he wants
and look like I support what he's doing. You know,
I have more power to him. But it is this
kind of odd new development because and maybe you can
speak to this, but the interest groups in the Republican
Party have remained remarkably stable.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: You have you know, a certain Mediterranean democracy, you have
you know, m I see interests which, let's be honest,
aren't that separate. But now you have this kind of
third group. And I would almost argue that there seems
to be you know, whether you want to call out
like the remnants of the deep state, you know, the
old Wasspel yet which you can see in you know,
and someone like Tucker right, and it seems as if,
you know, this new political coalition hasn't quite settled yet
because you know, Musk gets to do almost everything he wants, right,
he gets to fire whoever he wants, he gets to
you know, gut whatever agency they point him at. But
also right he got told no on H one b's
And so to me, I'm kind of curious to see
what the final deal is and where those various interest
groups kind of lie in the hierarchy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I'd say it in history it's always
been you know what the first forming of any sort
of property, middle class, you know that own stuff. They've
always tended to be extremely conservative as it goes back
to the Middle Ages, and then support of the elites
because they look and say, hey, we own a little
property and they own a lot of property. But it
doesn't matter. They're going to defend my right to own
my little bit of property, and I don't want my
little bit of property is subtracted to the mob. It
was always you know, historically the middle and the elite
banding together to keep the lower classes under control. Then
a weird thing happened in America in the twentieth century
where you get you know that the political class of
Washington bound the poor and the rich together. You know,
in war against the middle class. It's always, you know,
the upper class and the lower classes against the middle class.
And I think that's finally breaking down where you know,
I'm perfectly fine with the rich guys doing whatever la
need to do because at least I know who's accountable this.
For most of my life, I've never know who who
Who Do you blame for this? Everything get gets worse,
and both parties say, don't blame us, you voted for
the other guy. You know, it's this ridiculous game that
they play. And so having you know, a guy like
Musk or Zuckerbergler or what's his name, what's the guy
from from Amazon Bezos Besos, Yeah, stepping on the people
at the Washington Post and kicking them around good. I'm
fine with it because look at the rich guys take
control of the government and they're going to run things
and things don't go well.
Speaker 2: We know where to go, we know where they are.
Speaker 3: It's not going to be a problem. But when it's
this collection of people. There's just these faceless people in
charge of committees and stuff that you know, no one ever.
Speaker 2: Accountable for anything. So I'm.
Speaker 3: I'm very much in favor of seeing this these rich
guys start to be more assertive. But it's interesting though,
with the tech rich guys, is that so many of
them had this libertarianish outlook. You know, they allow, you know,
they adopted libertarianism in order to avoid the cultural stuff.
But what they found through libertarianism is the door to
our side that you know, it's a weird thing. I've
had a lot of former libertarians in my life who
have come over the Great Divide to my kind of politics,
and you know, it's not just the economic issues, it's
the human capital issues, the hierarchical issues. You know, they
come to find out that, hey, wait a second, Libertarianism
explained to me that no, people are not all the same,
and no people can't be yeoman farmers and independent and
all this stuff.
Speaker 2: You do need to.
Speaker 3: Control the masses, you need to have structures in place
to do that and so forth. And it's through the
bad results of libertarianism that they discover things like hierarchy
and the realities of human capital and end up on
this side. And I think the same process has happened
to these tech guys. I think they kind of went
through the same door. And even though you know they're
not you know, they're not going to be showing up
at the castle in Berkeley Springs for an event. They're
not going to be upset that those events happen. You know,
They're gonna be aware. They're going to know people who
go to those events, you know, and maybe they have
their own soares and where these guys meet. But it
seems like the same process. I mean, you know, I
remember the first time I ever went to an event.
I probably can't say the name of it YouTube, right,
So you know, there were so many people who used
to be libertarians and they were like they were they
were red pilled by Ron Paul, you know, of all things.
And I think the same thing's kind of happened with
the tech guys. But you know, again, I'm fine, I'm
okay by with rule by billionaires. I mean, somebody's got
to be in charge. And I would rather be a
guy who can send a spaceship up to the space
station and rescue people then some guy with a PhD.
And gender studies, you know.
Speaker 1: Well, and that's something that you know, I've sort of
made made peace with, right that you know, simply due
to the way humans are, there will always be an oligarchy, right,
That's simply how humans organized themselves. But you know, you
can make quality judgment between those two. You know, there
are some elites I'd rather have in charge rather than others.
And you know, to me right, and I could be wrong,
but I see this swap if it can stick, as
being beneficial. And it's not exactly a huge, you know,
a huge hurdle to clear. But the very fact that
these people don't seem to hate me, to want me dead,
and people like me to stop existing, well, you know
that's a win, right, It's certainly better than the alternative.
And that doesn't mean that this is like, you know,
the kind of like ideal philosopher King right come down
to lead us to heaven on Earth. But one of
the things I think about, and this is an interesting issue,
is you know the fact that the Trump administration and
Musk have been making noises about South Africa. Look, I have,
you know, a lot of friends in South Africa. You know,
I've I've met with Ernest you know who is recently
on Tucker you know, Conscious Caricle and I really like
those guys, you know, I have a certain affinity for them.
The Dutch Calvinists quite similar you know to my people,
you know, how they view the world. So there's some
kind of affinity there. But realistically, right, what has South
Africa existed as in our consciousness? Right? It's you know,
it is the rainbonation, right, we did it. We defeated racism.
And the fact that you have you know, Mark Rubio
basically kicking out the South African diplomat, you know, basically offering, hey,
you know, South Africans are you know, experiencing ethnic cleansing?
If they want to move to America, they can. That's
a strong indication that, you know, there's at least a
desire to appear as if you know, the Trump administration
doesn't hate white people, which again, like I've said, is
not the biggest hurdle to clear. But you know, compare
that to our our previous uh, our previous demented executive.
I'll leave it at that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, you know, look, Vance, we brought up
the whole two you know, the two tier tier starmer
you know, the two tier system. And and I mean again,
there's there's stuff coming out of administration you never thought
you would hear. You know, it's the kind of stuff
that got you fired from Twitters or got you thrown
off at Twitter rund. So you know, it's it's a
positive thing. I think, you know, I think it was
Charles Murray who said, you know, this is a long
time ago, before he got all squishy. He said, inevitably,
what's going to happen is that the elites are probably
going to become more racially aware than any group in
the country because for them, it's the only way in
which they can remain elites. It's a necessary reality they
have to embrace. And I suspect that's really what we're
seeing is that, you know, I've called it civilizationalism. You know,
we're not going to I mean, he's got you know,
these guys run around saying, oh, you know, we want
to have an ethno state or something like that. I've
always just shake my head at it because it's that's
not who we're going to be in North America. What
we're going to have is a civilization and it will
be a hierarchy to that civilization and we'll just accept it.
And that comes with some duties. You know, the people
at let the lower down they are, you know, those
are people have to be looked after. You have to
make sure their neighborhoods are as safe as you can
make them, that they have food in the basic and
so forth, and they have order imposed upon them. There
are certain parts of this country will just have to
have a HOBSI in existence where order will have to
be imposed. I used to live in one of them.
You know, I looked at Baltimore for a long time.
You could make Baltimore better, but it means abandoning all
these ridiculous abstract ideas about equality and openness and all
you know, democracy and all the other junk. No, there
should be a dictator who's in charge and runs things
with an iron fist. Everyone will be happier as a
result of it. But you don't have to do that
in Salt Lake City, Utah. You know, you can have
whatever kind of government you want there because the human
capital is better. This is just a practical reality. And
I think, you know, it kind of gets to one
of my other themes, and that is we're experiencing the
end of ideology. The last ideology is dying out American progressivism.
So it means all these goofy ideas about democracy and
openness and fairness and all this. Now what's going to
matter in the future is practical results.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Do we have cheaper food and cheaper energy and safer neighborhoods.
Those are things that matter. How we accomplish them. We're
not going to get hung up on and that's a
good thing, you know, I mean, you know, you see,
because other parts of the world are headed down this way.
I mean, the Chinese, for goodness sakes, have abandoned communism,
the Russians abandoned communism, you know, you know, so we
have to kind of join the other great powers in
being practical and pragmatic. And I think it's possible. I
think that maybe what we're experiencing.
Speaker 1: Now, so we are fast coming up on time. Ze Man,
I really enjoyed this conversation despite my health issues. I
hopefully it wasn't complete dribbling more on But if people
want to find more view in your work, what's a
good way for them to do that?
Speaker 3: Now? The easiest way is to go to the z
man dot com or you go to the dissident right
dot com or the Dissident writer dot com. I got
a bunch of different domains, but the zooman dot com
is the easiest one.
Speaker 2: It has all my.
Speaker 3: Stuff there, post something every day. I have a podcast
every Friday. It has links to my pay per view
site so you can get additional content. Twitter, gab accounts,
all that junk.
Speaker 1: Well, I highly recommend your show. It's one of the few,
actually that I listened to. As a matter of course,
there are a lot of people who produce content. I
do realize the irony in saying that, but very few
that I know consider worthwhile enough that I, you know,
listen to whatever you put out, So I highly recommend
to that. As far as my stuff right. The J
Burton Show is available on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, anywhere you
listen to podcasts. If you want to support us, you
can do so with the links down in the description,
or you can check out our sponsor sponsors Axios Remote
Fitness and Coaching and then North Appalachian Supply if you've
got any gear needs. Again, Zeman, I appreciate it, and
everyone at home, keep your head up. The life can't
last forever. Good Night,