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