Speaker 1: Meaning a light man like this man letting butterfly flapping
Speaker 1: his wing.
Speaker 2: They've down in a forest, man and gonna cause the
Speaker 2: tree fall, letting five thousand miles away.
Speaker 1: Man, nobody see, Nobody else might see. You don't need
Speaker 1: no man like you followed another story and.
Speaker 2: You got back to flect that.
Speaker 1: That's the way man got blackly dag on the panel.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 3: Now you don't better man, I know anyway, Hey guys,
Speaker 3: So this episode is a compilation of two conversations I
Speaker 3: had Mike Ferris at the Coffee and a Mic podcast,
Speaker 3: first one about Abu two months ago, another one more
Speaker 3: recently on issues of generational divide sort of what is
Speaker 3: affecting generations see and then also the war in Iran.
Speaker 1: So the audio is a little scuffed on these. It
Speaker 1: has to do with the interplay between my system and
Speaker 1: then the unique way that Mike records these sort of
Speaker 1: try to remaster it, get it as good as I
Speaker 1: possibly could. But if you're wondering why I sound worse
Speaker 1: than I do right now through my system, that's why.
Speaker 1: But either way, I thought i'd put that out, So
Speaker 1: be sure to check out Mike's work Coffee and Mike
Speaker 1: Podcast very good, high quality stuff. He has a lot
Speaker 1: of interesting guests to put out a lot of content,
Speaker 1: so highly recommend checking out. His podcast will be linked
Speaker 1: in the description. And yeah, these are two interviews I
Speaker 1: thought went particularly well. So without further ado, let's get
Speaker 1: into it.
Speaker 2: Jay, we met last week and I was on your show,
Speaker 2: and now you're on my show. I have to tell you,
Speaker 2: it feels good to be back on this side of
Speaker 2: the mic rather than being a guest.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's hard. I mean I remember I host an
Speaker 1: interview show as well, obviously, and my first couple, first
Speaker 1: couple is probably generous. Outside appearances were rough. It is
Speaker 1: a very different skill set. And you know, if you've
Speaker 1: only run reps on one side of the mic, all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, when you're on the other, it's a
Speaker 1: much different game. You handled yourself well.
Speaker 2: You're lying, Say you're lying. I was awful, don't You
Speaker 2: don't have to sugarcoat it. Go ahead, sorry to me
Speaker 2: to cut you off.
Speaker 1: But one of the really funny things is, and I've
Speaker 1: seen this with other interviewers. I think of my my
Speaker 1: buddy Benjamin Boye in particular, is that your slippery guests,
Speaker 1: we interviewers will kind of judo throw you, you know,
Speaker 1: and so that it becomes like, well, who's interviewing who? Right,
Speaker 1: who's talking more, which again is sort of inside baseball
Speaker 1: stuff for listeners, but it is funny once you notice it.
Speaker 1: You can pick it up that the guys who are
Speaker 1: used to leading the interview tend to default to that
Speaker 1: in their outside appearances. Who knows I'm gonna end up
Speaker 1: doing that right now that I've said.
Speaker 2: This episode is brought to you by Vaulted, launched by
Speaker 2: macilvanny Financial Group, the simplest and most affordable way to
Speaker 2: own physical gold and silver. Physical gold is the only
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Speaker 2: to Vaulted dot blb, vux dot net, Forward slash coffee
Speaker 2: and a mic. Well, it's funny because I'll tell you
Speaker 2: the story. I had a friend of mine who lived
Speaker 2: in Phoenix and he's now moved to Austin, but he
Speaker 2: had been on Joe Rogan a few times and I
Speaker 2: used to have like all this I felt, and maybe
Speaker 2: I don't know if you felt this way, but when
Speaker 2: you started it like this internal pressure of like having
Speaker 2: these notes and doing all this research. And I was
Speaker 2: in La. It was a sixth or seventh episode I
Speaker 2: had done. And my childhood hero is a guy by
Speaker 2: the name of Freddie Roach. I love boxing, so when
Speaker 2: I was a kid, we knew Freddy. Freddie was friends
Speaker 2: with our family. My uncle lived in Vegas, so I
Speaker 2: watched him throughout his whole career, and he eventually be
Speaker 2: if you don't know who he is or people that
Speaker 2: are listening don't know who he is. He became a trainer,
Speaker 2: eventually trained Mickey Rourke who was an actor, still an actor,
Speaker 2: Mike Tyson, Manny Paciao had his own show on HBO
Speaker 2: about his life because he has Parkinson's And so anyway,
Speaker 2: I was prepping for that. I was in La, went
Speaker 2: down to the Wildcard Boxing Gym, which is the Hollywood
Speaker 2: and Vines, a famous boxing gym, one of the most
Speaker 2: famous in the world. And the whole day before I
Speaker 2: was so nervous all these notes, all this is and
Speaker 2: I felt all this pressure. And after that my friend
Speaker 2: who had been on Rogan, I said, does he have
Speaker 2: like a bunch of notes or anything, And He's like, no,
Speaker 2: I didn't see anything, just pad of paper and had
Speaker 2: some stuff written down. And if he got to everything, great,
Speaker 2: and if he didn't get to everything, that was okay too.
Speaker 2: And it changed my whole perspective on how I was
Speaker 2: going to handle this. And I received a compliment on
Speaker 2: I think it was Apple where they said, I feel
Speaker 2: like I'm listening sitting in a coffeehouse listening to two
Speaker 2: people next to me chatting, and I was like, that's
Speaker 2: what I wanted, Like, that's so I do that habit
Speaker 2: when I'm a guest because it's just I don't know,
Speaker 2: it's just natural, just like to just chat. And so
Speaker 2: one thing, one more thing I was gonna add, I'm
Speaker 2: talking more on my show than I am than I
Speaker 2: went up when I was a guest on your show,
Speaker 2: but also as I as I assessed myself as a guest,
Speaker 2: and I'm happy to do that when people. I'm honored
Speaker 2: that people think to me to come on. But I'm
Speaker 2: not a I'm not a well versed research guy. I'm
Speaker 2: not a I'm not someone who specializes like in you
Speaker 2: know history or student of history, or an economist or
Speaker 2: you know, a geopolitical analyst or military veteran, or on
Speaker 2: and on and on. I'm just somebody who's curious, Like
Speaker 2: I could never go toe to toe with you. I
Speaker 2: could never go toe to toe with Will Tanner. I
Speaker 2: mean I learned from watching your show, and I learned
Speaker 2: from speaking to you guys as a host of things.
Speaker 1: I'm just curious about. Yeah, I appreciate the compliment, man,
Speaker 1: I mean, honest, this is a very similar and who
Speaker 1: knows when it happened in my career. I remember the moment.
Speaker 1: I remember where I was, not necessarily the episode, but actually,
Speaker 1: you know, I think I think it was Matt Williamson,
Speaker 1: the Prudentialist, and he told me this. I'd sent him
Speaker 1: an outline for the show and he basically told me
Speaker 1: it was like, dude, it'll be fine, you don't need that.
Speaker 1: And so it was the first one I did with
Speaker 1: no had an idea of what I wanted to talk about,
Speaker 1: but no notes, no bullet points, and it was a
Speaker 1: marked improvement. And it's funny you bring up that idea
Speaker 1: of in two guys talking in a coffee shop, because,
Speaker 1: as I'm sure you're aware, you know, when you're talking
Speaker 1: to someone, especially someone who hasn't done a lot of interviews.
Speaker 1: You sort of give him a little brief upfront, right,
Speaker 1: all right, you know, here's what we're doing. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to do this. This is what we're
Speaker 1: going to do. You know, if you need anything done,
Speaker 1: just let me know. But they're kind of accommodating someone.
Speaker 1: And the line I always use is the illusion I'm
Speaker 1: trying to sell is that you and I are just
Speaker 1: sitting down a bar together just talking, and you an
Speaker 1: audience is kind of listening in. It's the same thing.
Speaker 1: It's conversational. And look, neither you nor I is on
Speaker 1: the cutting edge of podcasting. You know, we came to
Speaker 1: it when it was still established. But I think a
Speaker 1: large part of the success of the medium is, well,
Speaker 1: there's a couple of things, which is one, you know,
Speaker 1: people have commutes, they have a lot of time, and
Speaker 1: you know, it's a good way to imbibe information without
Speaker 1: you know, trying to read a book at seventy miles
Speaker 1: an hour. But also, I think a big part of
Speaker 1: it is that because you can put out, you know,
Speaker 1: really as much as you want and you're not beholden
Speaker 1: to I guess you could say, like the overhead of
Speaker 1: a TV network if you can give a conversation time
Speaker 1: to breathe, you can just have two people talking batting
Speaker 1: an idea back and forth for three hours if you want. Okay,
Speaker 1: fair enough, maybe every idea isn't a three hour idea.
Speaker 1: You compare and contrast that even to talk radio, where
Speaker 1: you know, they're assuming that every person is tuning in
Speaker 1: thirty seconds ago, so you have to state exactly what
Speaker 1: you're talking about every segment, you know, three minutes than
Speaker 1: an ad break over and over and over again. And
Speaker 1: look like I certainly have you know, good memories of
Speaker 1: you know, bumping around country roads with my grandpa and
Speaker 1: you know, listening to Rush Lutenbaugh. But fundamentally it's a
Speaker 1: different thing. It fulfills a different niche. And I think
Speaker 1: really the explosion of podcasting is that it offers something additional, right,
Speaker 1: It offers that space for dialogue and dialectic And one
Speaker 1: of the things that I've found really interesting, one of
Speaker 1: the reasons I found myself on the kind of nominal
Speaker 1: right is that the combination of that medium and that
Speaker 1: general political kind of circle. And I mean that in
Speaker 1: the widest possible sense, is that it's really, in my mind,
Speaker 1: the only place that an actual dialogue and actual conversation
Speaker 1: is happening. When you came on my show, you talked
Speaker 1: about how your work kind of had his genesis in COVID,
Speaker 1: and you saw that theory very clearly that there was
Speaker 1: a large percentage of culture by extension media that was
Speaker 1: locked down couldn't talk at all about this one thing.
Speaker 1: But you know, an alternative media for whatever alternative media means,
Speaker 1: much of it was on podcasts. Well, you could have
Speaker 1: that conversation because it sort of getting you know, Spotify
Speaker 1: or Apple to kick you off, which takes some doing.
Speaker 1: You know, there are some guys I know on there
Speaker 1: where it's like, I'm not saying you should be kicked off,
Speaker 1: but if you were, you you know, we're probably asking
Speaker 1: for it. Right, Like, the latitude is definitely there. It
Speaker 1: enabled this this interesting development of like a real conversation
Speaker 1: and real dialogue. Also, I mean, on the the the
Speaker 1: more kind of metapolitical level. You know, I'm a huge
Speaker 1: fan of the term woke because it's been so bastardized
Speaker 1: to the point where it means everything and nothing. But
Speaker 1: when you look at the kind of hyper aggressive political
Speaker 1: religion that takes up a large part of left wing politics,
Speaker 1: and there is certainly one on the right as well,
Speaker 1: but it's very hard to dissent from that. You know,
Speaker 1: you can disagree on, you know, certain aspects of economic policy,
Speaker 1: but there are certain things you cannot They're kind of sacred,
Speaker 1: they're kind of holy precepts, and that freezes the conversation.
Speaker 1: Like you see that when you read these people's work,
Speaker 1: as I do, they're citing thinkers from the sixties, citing
Speaker 1: thinkers from the seventies, the nineties at the latest. It's
Speaker 1: the same canon. It's the same stuff, and it has
Speaker 1: been even on the far fringes of the radical left.
Speaker 1: I mean, look longer than I've been alive, longer than
Speaker 1: my parents have been alive. It's a frozen conversation with
Speaker 1: very hard barriers on it. And you see that in
Speaker 1: you know, kind of modern media, right. I know, you're
Speaker 1: a big movie guy. One of the I think one
Speaker 1: of the main reasons why a lot of modern film
Speaker 1: feels so hollow is they're sort of jousting at windmills.
Speaker 1: You know, they're repeating a cultural critique that may have
Speaker 1: been you know, really insightful, that may have been very subversive,
Speaker 1: and in the Reagan administration. But now it's like a right,
Speaker 1: come on, we've seen this before. There's been no development,
Speaker 1: there's been nothing interesting. And not to say all modern
Speaker 1: films are fad. There's certainly, you know, quite good films
Speaker 1: have come out recently, but nonetheless, you see that kind
Speaker 1: of conversational stagnation as it applies to art as well,
Speaker 1: that you're running over the same tropes over and over
Speaker 1: and over again. And you know, someone could pick up
Speaker 1: their copy of Joseph Campbell and say, oh, well, you know,
Speaker 1: all fiction is ultimately the same story told a thousand times,
Speaker 1: the hero with a thousand faces, And okay, fair enough
Speaker 1: it might be. But that's a very baseline you could
Speaker 1: say archaic if it wasn't so negative. Human narrative, right,
Speaker 1: it's something that people inherently relate to, whereas if it's
Speaker 1: if it's a more political narrative, it's like, well, that
Speaker 1: was a narrative for a time and a place, and
Speaker 1: when that time and place changes. I mean, look, man,
Speaker 1: like if I came on your show and I was,
Speaker 1: you know, raging about you know, Cromwell in the English
Speaker 1: Civil War, like at best, you'd think that was sort
Speaker 1: of eccentric like whatever, who cares right because and look
Speaker 1: like I know there's gonna be someone in the comments
Speaker 1: who's like, well I care quite a bit. Yes, you
Speaker 1: sure you do. But the point is that's not an
Speaker 1: active sort of political disagreement in And that doesn't mean that,
Speaker 1: you know, whether on the left or kind of the
Speaker 1: neocon right, there's politics happening and power happening, but from
Speaker 1: the perspective of you know, people like you and I
Speaker 1: who work in the space of discourse, like what else
Speaker 1: is there to be set And on the right, like
Speaker 1: particularly as we see with media analysis, you see the
Speaker 1: exact same but instead of being stuck in nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: they're stuck in twenty sixteen. You know that there's an
Speaker 1: immense amount of money to be made by you know,
Speaker 1: talking about how XYZ thing is woke and bad and
Speaker 1: we hate it. It was like, yeah, sure, right, it
Speaker 1: probably sucks. But like at a certain point, man, like
Speaker 1: if you're running the same experiment over and over again
Speaker 1: getting the same result, like, hey, but maybe it's on
Speaker 1: you like, stop watching it if it's really at that
Speaker 1: And again you see that same kind of stuck culture,
Speaker 1: not necessarily stuck in the same culture, but how much
Speaker 1: is there to be set on that front? It runs
Speaker 1: out and I think that, you know, it's part of
Speaker 1: the other reason why people were run to this shows
Speaker 1: and others. It's like, Okay, well there's a conversation to
Speaker 1: be had, there's something that's developing. You know, you can
Speaker 1: look back, you know, for cultural analysis at your own
Speaker 1: culture rather than you know, or you do on kind
Speaker 1: of more specific issues. And I think that's really why
Speaker 1: that space in general is I don't know if I
Speaker 1: would say exploding yet, although it's certainly massively risen in prominence,
Speaker 1: but I think it stands to because again it's and
Speaker 1: this is both a blessing and a curse, really the
Speaker 1: only place that a conversation is actively happening.
Speaker 2: You know. I think it's appropriate for this conversation for
Speaker 2: people to understand who Jack Burden is and you know,
Speaker 2: the origin. Why did you start the show? What were
Speaker 2: you doing before?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I've started this podcast in college actually a
Speaker 1: long time ago. It's now been shuttered, But there was
Speaker 1: a discord server you looked pretty young.
Speaker 2: Let me interrupt you. Let me interrupt you. J Yeah,
Speaker 2: you look pretty young. How old are you?
Speaker 1: I am twenty six. Okay, so yeah, not that ya,
Speaker 1: but there was this sort of you know, online message
Speaker 1: board where you could, you know, meet like minded guys.
Speaker 1: It was not political, but it was basically like, Hey,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm in Toledo. Does anyone else want to
Speaker 1: hang it? Right? And I was at the time driving
Speaker 1: back and forth between two different cities like three hours apart.
Speaker 1: Not to get too much into it, but because of
Speaker 1: COVID and other things, that had kind of into a
Speaker 1: snap foo with my education and so I was stuck
Speaker 1: needed a couple of credits to graduate. So I was
Speaker 1: still in school but not very much while also trying
Speaker 1: to hold down a job. So my education was here,
Speaker 1: job was somewhere else, traveling back and forth during the week,
Speaker 1: and so I basically I literally got onto Google Maps,
Speaker 1: like used my phone, drew out the kind of line
Speaker 1: on the route. He's like, hey, I drive this twice
Speaker 1: a week. If anyone's along this line, you know, let's
Speaker 1: meet up for dinner or something, because that's what I'd do.
Speaker 1: I'd get hungry halfway through and pull off. And one
Speaker 1: of my buddies, who's still somewhat active rights under the
Speaker 1: name Paul Fahrenheit he was in college somewhere along that route,
Speaker 1: and he, you know, replied to the messages like, yeah, hey,
Speaker 1: here's where I am. Let's grab dinner. So this guy,
Speaker 1: I don't know him from Adam, Yeah, got to a bar,
Speaker 1: have a burger and we got into like a four
Speaker 1: hour argument slash discussion, just going all over the place.
Speaker 1: And I had been a long term lurker. I'd been
Speaker 1: reading a ton, you know, listening to a ton. It
Speaker 1: kind of you know, watching the conversation, and this is
Speaker 1: my memory of it. It's been a couple of years now.
Speaker 1: Uh So you know, if he tells a different story,
Speaker 1: I don't blame him for it. But he basically was like, hey, man,
Speaker 1: like you've you've got something to say, Like have you
Speaker 1: ever thought about doing anything or making anything? It's like, oh, shoot,
Speaker 1: I'm honestly not really. And you know, from that conversation
Speaker 1: I kind of took, you know, a month off where
Speaker 1: I was basically like, what do I want to do?
Speaker 1: Like I've you know, I've I've written more now, you know,
Speaker 1: in a couple of magazines. I have a sub stack,
Speaker 1: but it's not like my primary form of expression. But
Speaker 1: I you know, I think I'm pretty good at talking
Speaker 1: to people, says, you know what I should do, I
Speaker 1: should have an interview show. So my first EVERTS episode
Speaker 1: zero is uh Me and this guy Paul Fahrenheit, recorded
Speaker 1: in my mom's attic because I didn't have anywhere else
Speaker 1: to do it, and it was a fun conversation. And
Speaker 1: from there it was just sort of that process of like, oh, like,
Speaker 1: you know, I want to talk to that guy, send
Speaker 1: him an email, and it sort of kept up in
Speaker 1: that mode. It's kind of a secondary thing that I did,
Speaker 1: you know, just as a as a hobby. You know,
Speaker 1: I had corporate jobs. I worked in a factory, you know,
Speaker 1: and basically it started to kind of get some traction
Speaker 1: and grow, and you know, I've been been working in
Speaker 1: another company. We had to you know, part ways, and
Speaker 1: so I'm sort of stuck at this crossroads where it's like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I have this thing, it's doing really well, and I
Speaker 1: could go back get.
Speaker 2: A normal job.
Speaker 1: And I was like, you know what, I I think
Speaker 1: there's something to this. I think I can make a
Speaker 1: run of it. And so I just decided, like you
Speaker 1: know what, damn the torpedoes full speed ahead, like let's
Speaker 1: jump in, and so far I've been you know, full
Speaker 1: timer for I have this timer set up on my
Speaker 1: desk to remind me two hundred and forty five days
Speaker 1: or you know, rough six thousand hours if you care
Speaker 1: for that much detail. And yeah, so it's it's my
Speaker 1: full time job. It's what I do. And so that's
Speaker 1: kind of the general origin story as far as you know,
Speaker 1: becoming what I consider like a political dissident or you know,
Speaker 1: someone who's not on the reservation. I really had no
Speaker 1: chance at being normal. I was lucky enough to come
Speaker 1: up through.
Speaker 2: There's no chance of being normal the way you said that,
Speaker 2: the probability I'd be normal was zero.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so I was very very lucky, you know,
Speaker 1: living in a more rural area, public schools weren't so great,
Speaker 1: and so my parents sent me to a classical Christian school.
Speaker 1: You know, it was very much kind of based in
Speaker 1: the Western tradition, and I was lucky enough to have
Speaker 1: several male teachers there who were you kind of ran
Speaker 1: the gamut from. And this is pretty common in homeschooling
Speaker 1: and at schools. They're kind of they don't tend to
Speaker 1: be on you know, the reservation, so to speak. You
Speaker 1: are already selecting for people who have an alternative view
Speaker 1: on education that tends to correlate to you know, other
Speaker 1: alternative views. And I you know, the very good memory
Speaker 1: of my friend George Bagbee, who is a teacher there,
Speaker 1: and you know, he writes, he has his own you know,
Speaker 1: he republishes books, and he's on my show, you know,
Speaker 1: probably every six weeks or so, very very talented historical mind.
Speaker 1: And he was one of my teachers there, and we
Speaker 1: developed a friendship even after I graduated. He was you know,
Speaker 1: even as a young teenager, you know, giving me resources,
Speaker 1: giving me books that were well beyond my ability to comprehend,
Speaker 1: but were things that were you know, showing me an
Speaker 1: alternative view, showing me, you know, they're like, look like
Speaker 1: there's more to human thought, there's more to politics. There's
Speaker 1: more history than just you know what. You can find
Speaker 1: it a Larn's Noble bookstand. And you know, he introduced
Speaker 1: me to you know, figures like Mensis Moldbug before he
Speaker 1: ever came out as Curtis Darbin. I was reading you know,
Speaker 1: Mensus Muldbug at fourteen, which is you know again I
Speaker 1: didn't have a chance. And when you combine that kind
Speaker 1: of you know a certain natural you know, dissonance with
Speaker 1: I'll be honest, a personality which is highly disagreeable. I
Speaker 1: do not like being told what to do. When I
Speaker 1: went to school, and I you know, started at you know,
Speaker 1: college right after the first Trump presidency and sort of
Speaker 1: came into all of the excesses of woke campus politics.
Speaker 1: For instance, you know, just a few anecdotes on this,
Speaker 1: we had a troop of radical vegans who would like
Speaker 1: use hammers to smash out the windows of the dining hall.
Speaker 1: I was like, I hate you people, but more seriously,
Speaker 1: you know, I had sort of hellish orientation. It was
Speaker 1: eight days you know, before we started school, and it's
Speaker 1: burned into my memory. They it was a small liberal
Speaker 1: at school. They broke people down into you know, all
Speaker 1: the men and all the women, and you know, all
Speaker 1: all the guys or whatever. Three hundred of us got
Speaker 1: put in this room with this very stereotypical left wing
Speaker 1: political activist. She was a She's a burly woman, blue hair,
Speaker 1: you know, straight across problem bangs, and you know, like
Speaker 1: out of something out of a comedy sketch. She you
Speaker 1: know said, you know, one in three women on college
Speaker 1: campus will be sexually assaulted. Look to your left, look
Speaker 1: to your right. One of those men is a rapist.
Speaker 1: And you're like, well, okay, man, I'm eighteen, I got
Speaker 1: here forty five minutes ago. This seems a little unfair.
Speaker 1: And so when you combine that kind of you know,
Speaker 1: initial training in non traditional thought, you're dumped into this
Speaker 1: environment where you're seeing the kind of worst excesses of
Speaker 1: again in scare quotes, kind of woke politics. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: this is awful, Like what's the alternative? Because I cannot
Speaker 1: be a part of that, Like they won't and they
Speaker 1: won't accept me in two Like I don't want to
Speaker 1: live in this sort of like constant be like the
Speaker 1: constant cringing shame for what I am. And you know,
Speaker 1: like a lot of people I you know, sort of
Speaker 1: went through you know, what would be referred to as
Speaker 1: kind of like the IDW and the libertarian sphere, and
Speaker 1: in all of those places, I was like, well, it
Speaker 1: feels like this is a halfway. This isn't a true resistance.
Speaker 1: It's sort of a to be honest, kind of a
Speaker 1: cope in between. And that's where I you know, kind
Speaker 1: of came back to my roots and the more what
Speaker 1: you know, sort of drives the report to is the
Speaker 1: dissident right or that kind of synthesis of you know,
Speaker 1: paleo conservatism, you know NRX stuff political realism, And to
Speaker 1: me it comes down to very much that like, well,
Speaker 1: I if we accept that there is some thing wrong,
Speaker 1: if something is not going well, you know, whatever it is.
Speaker 1: You know whyever that's the case, It's like, well, you
Speaker 1: don't want to all yourself to that, you know, that
Speaker 1: kind of force of entropy. And it's so how I
Speaker 1: ended up in the weird political circles I find myself.
Speaker 1: And then that story almost immediately dovetails with you know,
Speaker 1: as I said earlier, I actually started a podcast, and
Speaker 1: look like I very much consider myself to be like
Speaker 1: a second or third tier figure in the sense that
Speaker 1: like you have these people who are kind of first
Speaker 1: order thinkers who are writing and producing new works, and
Speaker 1: you know, then you have people who are great synthesizers
Speaker 1: and analysts, and then you have popularizers, someone who can
Speaker 1: take someone who's written a book and say, all right,
Speaker 1: like explain that in a way that a normal guy
Speaker 1: can understand. And so that's the role I sort of
Speaker 1: see myself in, not to be too grandiose, but that's
Speaker 1: sort of how I view it.
Speaker 2: So when you started this and congratulations, now two hundred
Speaker 2: and sixty five days.
Speaker 1: Uh two six not joking. I actually have a a
Speaker 1: timer on my computer.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: And the reason I have it up is just to
Speaker 1: when I'm being a whiny baby about things, I have
Speaker 1: to look at it and be like, Okay, we haven't
Speaker 1: had a boss for this long, so shut up.
Speaker 2: It's taken alcoholics. Anonymous man, you're gonna have your your
Speaker 2: gold coin. Yeah, but I've got my five year, five
Speaker 2: year cord from Corporate America.
Speaker 1: I've been cleaning for this. But but you know, you
Speaker 1: walk me past an office max or something, and my
Speaker 1: palms get sweaty. I started to get the old itch again.
Speaker 1: He reminded me of something really funny.
Speaker 2: I was. I was visiting a friend in Virginia rest
Speaker 2: in Virginia last summer, and we were walking through this
Speaker 2: outdoor shopping like, you know, those fancy outdoor shopping pick
Speaker 2: got them all over the place, so you have the
Speaker 2: you know, the Lulu lemb Apple store. Nice restaurants. Anyway,
Speaker 2: there was a company I can't remember the name of it,
Speaker 2: but I think it was their corporate office, and they
Speaker 2: had their training room right as you're walking by, with
Speaker 2: the desks and the binders. And I looked at my friend,
Speaker 2: I go, this is probably new orientation training. And for me,
Speaker 2: I just started my third year doing this. I think
Speaker 2: it was last week full time, and I say, I
Speaker 2: said to my friend, I said, you know, there's no
Speaker 2: fucking way I could ever go back to that, like
Speaker 2: and you know, and I kudos some people that can
Speaker 2: do it. I mean, you have to be able to
Speaker 2: roll with it in today's world, in today's climate, when
Speaker 2: you work for companies or corporations, if you're one of
Speaker 2: those people that can put your head down and just
Speaker 2: keep quiet, they don't want to hear about your opinion
Speaker 2: and you know, and follow the rules. God bless you.
Speaker 2: I couldn't do that anymore. And I literally I was like, God,
Speaker 2: you got to come in there Monday morning, your first
Speaker 2: day with this binder and have an HR person tell
Speaker 2: you blah blah blah blah, this this, this, this is awful.
Speaker 2: Like all you're doing is looking at the clock and like, oh,
Speaker 2: what time is lunch? Where am I going for lunch? Well,
Speaker 2: one hundred percent, And you know, one of the other
Speaker 2: things that I think is and this has been There's
Speaker 2: a great piece I can't remember who it was by
Speaker 2: called total Boomer luxury Communism, which is a great name,
Speaker 2: but the point of it is sort of similar to
Speaker 2: I think it's the Michael Savage, I'm confident on the
Speaker 2: last name on in the first one article that came
Speaker 2: out talking about the straits for young men in corporate America.
Speaker 2: It's very, very difficult to get into those corporate jobs.
Speaker 2: And I think that that's another reason why, you know,
Speaker 2: so many people my age are interested in, you know,
Speaker 2: alternative things where that's making money on the internet, you know,
Speaker 2: starting a small business, becoming a tradesman. Is because that
Speaker 2: traditional route of you know, you go to school, you
Speaker 2: get a job, you see need that way is well
Speaker 2: certainly possible, and I know people who are doing it
Speaker 2: is much much more difficult. It's not necessarily the safe
Speaker 2: option anymore. Like for instance, I was talking this came up,
Speaker 2: you know, with an elder at my church, and I
Speaker 2: basically told him I was like, look, man like, in
Speaker 2: my immediate social group, right, the people I see on
Speaker 2: a weekly basis, uh, I know two with benefits out
Speaker 2: of a group of you know fifteen people and they
Speaker 2: have jobs or productive members of society. They're not sitting
Speaker 2: on you know, mom's couch. But you know, that track
Speaker 2: is much much more difficult than you know, whatever used
Speaker 2: to be. And we can go into why it's maybe
Speaker 2: a different discussion, but you know, I think that you
Speaker 2: know that that kind of corporate job, like, if you're
Speaker 2: in it, dude, keep going. I understand it, like you
Speaker 2: got to support your family somehow. But I think for
Speaker 2: you know a lot of guys, that's simply not an option.
Speaker 2: And there's two reactions to that. One which is completely understandable.
Speaker 2: It's just say like, look, I'm getting screwed, and I'm
Speaker 2: going to tell you, yes you are. But there's sort
Speaker 2: of a silver lining to that cloud, which is, well,
Speaker 2: you both need to do something on your own, whatever
Speaker 2: that is. And also you get to like that's kind
Speaker 2: of nice and surely, you know, you get screwed on taxes,
Speaker 2: you don't get benefits, like that's not ideal. But at
Speaker 2: the same time, I think that there is a benefit
Speaker 2: to having that track closed off to you from the beginning,
Speaker 2: because you know, the longer you go down that track,
Speaker 2: the harder it is to jump off of it. And again,
Speaker 2: like I've said, like, there are people for whom you know,
Speaker 2: their corporate job is not that kind of you know,
Speaker 2: miserating experience that you know, I experience that I you know,
Speaker 2: went through and many others did, in which case you know,
Speaker 2: this advice is not for you. But I do think
Speaker 2: that there is sort of a hidden blessing to that,
Speaker 2: both from you know, a kind of personal perspective. You know,
Speaker 2: when you are supporting yourself fully, there's no system. You
Speaker 2: are in a way kind of engaging in what Kazinski
Speaker 2: would call like the power process, in the sense that
Speaker 2: your decisions actually matter to you. It's not kind of
Speaker 2: diffused through a network. It's like, well, you know, if
Speaker 2: you decide to never do another podcast again, you'll run
Speaker 2: out of money, you won't be able to have a house,
Speaker 2: who won't be able to eat, and like, yeah, sure,
Speaker 2: the same thing kind of happens with a real job.
Speaker 2: But like when I talk to many of my friends
Speaker 2: or what few of my friends, I should say, who
Speaker 2: have the kind of you know, big company job, their
Speaker 2: responsibility is very diffused. You know, It's very difficult to say,
Speaker 2: and this is by design, right, who is to blame
Speaker 2: for with me anything. And so as long as you're
Speaker 2: not an astonishingly bad employee, you know, as long as
Speaker 2: you don't you know, come in and you know, stand
Speaker 2: on your boss bosses desks and you know, give them
Speaker 2: both fingers, you can probably pretty much coast, you know.
Speaker 2: And again like they're restructurings and all that, whereas that
Speaker 2: luxury is not afforded to most people who are out
Speaker 2: on their own. And again like there's an element of
Speaker 2: responsibility to that, but as we understand what that responsibility
Speaker 2: comes an immense sense of fulfillment. Right, you're getting to
Speaker 2: affect your own life one.
Speaker 1: Way or another. And you know, Kazinski, perhaps you know,
Speaker 1: most infamous for his performance art, quite an interesting philosopher,
Speaker 1: and you know he talks about that in the industrial
Speaker 1: society and its future that basically, you know, you have
Speaker 1: people who are designed to live, you know, in a
Speaker 1: subsistence setting where every one of your decisions is life
Speaker 1: or death. And you know, he was sort of an
Speaker 1: arco primitivist, so he had a different view of society
Speaker 1: than I do. But fundamentally this peace of analysis stands
Speaker 1: and he says is that as systems get more and
Speaker 1: more complicated. As your individual actions get further and further
Speaker 1: from the inputs that affect your life, get really dissatisfied.
Speaker 1: They feel as if, you know, my life is pointless,
Speaker 1: my decisions don't have a huge impact. And again there
Speaker 1: is both a positive and negative to that. You know,
Speaker 1: you can succeed vastly above how you could in a
Speaker 1: you know, kind of salary position, but also you don't
Speaker 1: have that social safety net. And so I guess my
Speaker 1: general perspective on that is like I see you guys
Speaker 1: lamenting that, and I understand it like they have been
Speaker 1: given a raw deal. But I think there's a certain
Speaker 1: advantage as well, which is that like with that comes
Speaker 1: a certain sense of like genuine freedom that you couldn't
Speaker 1: get otherwise. Forgive me if I'm if I'm rambling, Mike, no,
Speaker 1: not at all. Uh do you do you feel in
Speaker 1: your own situation?
Speaker 2: In correct me here? If there's a is there a
Speaker 2: disconnect between people your age and say the boomers because
Speaker 2: and before you answer that not all boomers, before I
Speaker 2: get all the hate in the in the shit, but
Speaker 2: you know, I'm sure there are some that will come
Speaker 2: to you and say, well, that was how life was
Speaker 2: like when I was your age, and I'm so tired
Speaker 2: of hearing that from people. I even have friends, you know,
Speaker 2: my age that have kids that are maybe a little
Speaker 2: bit younger than you. And one is specifically with his
Speaker 2: daughters and he was like, tiny, said, well, get a
Speaker 2: corporate job, you get insurance, blah blah blah blah blah,
Speaker 2: and she don't want to do it, and he goes, well,
Speaker 2: I had to do it. I was like, yeah, but
Speaker 2: the times have changed, and that's where I I try.
Speaker 2: I mean, I can't not your age, so I don't
Speaker 2: I don't understand. I try to be as good of
Speaker 2: a listener as I can be to grasp, you know,
Speaker 2: get a little bit of a grasp what it is
Speaker 2: like for you to in what you're going through. But
Speaker 2: you know, how is there a disconnect between say, my
Speaker 2: parents' age sixties and seventies when they try to speak
Speaker 2: with people like you, oh, one hundred percent. So the
Speaker 2: problem is.
Speaker 1: So there's a conflation often made between the boomer's relative
Speaker 1: wealth and the idea that they had it easy throughout
Speaker 1: their entire life. These are not one and the same. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, the average boomer, I believe has about sixty
Speaker 1: five to seventy percent of their net worth in their home,
Speaker 1: like they have a you know, on paper, they're worth
Speaker 1: a lot, but they don't necessarily have a ton of
Speaker 1: cash in the bank. And if you look at you know,
Speaker 1: those sort of valuations that really shot up in the
Speaker 1: last twenty years. So you have a lot of people
Speaker 1: who you know are doing quite well, but realistically, like
Speaker 1: didn't that is a relatively new thing in their lives.
Speaker 1: I think of my own grandparents who were working in class.
Speaker 1: My grandfather was a mechanic basically, and yeah, sure, like
Speaker 1: if he cashed his house out, he'd have a lot
Speaker 1: of money, but you know, throughout his entire life was
Speaker 1: a working class guy. He made a good job, he
Speaker 1: worked hard, but by no means with your rich man.
Speaker 1: So I get that, and so I understand the reaction
Speaker 1: of like, well, that's not what I saw. But to
Speaker 1: be honest, the problem is, and this is both due
Speaker 1: to currency debasement and many other factors, young people are
Speaker 1: just really poor, man. And they're not necessarily just poor
Speaker 1: when we come when it comes to assets, right, what
Speaker 1: they're actually able to hold, but also compensation is relatively speaking,
Speaker 1: very very down. You can compare this and my Peruvian
Speaker 1: bull on Twitter, Cordo Rios has done some great analysis
Speaker 1: on this, comparing effectively average compensation to gold. It just
Speaker 1: is kind of a broad brush of like, assuming this
Speaker 1: is a relatively constant value, and just on the compensation level,
Speaker 1: it's been disastrous. Every subsequent generation has in real terms
Speaker 1: earned less and at the same time assets, so whether
Speaker 1: that's housing, whether that's you know, automobiles have gone up dramatically,
Speaker 1: so for instance, and it's been a while, so that
Speaker 1: the numbers are going to be slightly and exact. Here
Speaker 1: I did a very simple calculation where I compared average,
Speaker 1: like the true median wage to a certain number of
Speaker 1: different major purchases. Right, So for instance, I chose the
Speaker 1: mid sixties just because it made this relatively convenient. If
Speaker 1: you go slightly further back, it's even more pronounced. But basically,
Speaker 1: you know, a house was about you know, approximately four
Speaker 1: times median wage, okay, whereas now it's about nine. So
Speaker 1: that means it is significantly harder to buy a house.
Speaker 1: Cars are not quite as bad, but they're pretty close.
Speaker 1: Like you have a roughly fifteen percent of median wage
Speaker 1: to buy a used car in the sixties it's now
Speaker 1: about thirty three percent. So even those smaller financially responsible
Speaker 1: decisions are much much harder to make. And this is
Speaker 1: setting aside what I mentioned earlier, which is getting a
Speaker 1: normal job. How relatively difficult is that thanks to the
Speaker 1: wonders of either the borderless labor market, it has gotten
Speaker 1: much harder. We saw this first, you know, generations ago
Speaker 1: hit you know, manufacturing, obviously construction. It is now starting
Speaker 1: to hit those good six figure laptop jobs. You know,
Speaker 1: programming is a great one. And so yeah, things have
Speaker 1: dramatically changed. One of the other ones that I don't
Speaker 1: think a lot of boomers appreciate. And I was talking
Speaker 1: to my grandfather about this. He's a great guy. We
Speaker 1: have an awesome relationship, and he bucks many of the trends.
Speaker 2: He supportive of what is he supportive of what you're doing?
Speaker 1: Yes, I mean kind of. I don't And if you
Speaker 1: listen to this, Grandpa, I'm sorry, I don't one hundred
Speaker 1: percent think he gets it. And not in the content,
Speaker 1: just in the format. Right, it's radio versus digital.
Speaker 2: And my sister, my sister doesn't get it in my view,
Speaker 2: like she she doesn't understand what it like she she
Speaker 2: doesn't understand our world. But but I also I don't
Speaker 2: mean to cut you off, but I also find like
Speaker 2: most people in the in the in the eight to
Speaker 2: five world don't grasp it. Like I had a neighbor
Speaker 2: said to me, He's like, oh, you don't work, so
Speaker 2: and I'm like, and I'm not going to be like say, oh,
Speaker 2: I work all the time. I mean, people don't understand you.
Speaker 2: Do I understand what you go through? I mean somewhat
Speaker 2: because we work all the time.
Speaker 1: Like oh yeah, well, I mean look like like I
Speaker 1: quit my job to work like sixty hours a week
Speaker 1: and you're like, wait a minute, that doesn't doesn't seem
Speaker 1: like that math doesn't add up. The psychological benefits are
Speaker 1: more than just the work. But he can get the
Speaker 1: economic stuff because he lived through it, Like he saw
Speaker 1: normal working class jobs go away. He's seen, you know,
Speaker 1: the cost of these things go up. But there's a
Speaker 1: secondary level that is harder to track, which is the
Speaker 1: complete and total disillusion of culture. Now there's a purely
Speaker 1: demographic element to this generation. See my generation is the
Speaker 1: first majority minority age block, so that's created kind of
Speaker 1: a dissolution of culture. But also on a very fundamental level,
Speaker 1: the relations between the sexes have just exploded, detonated. So
Speaker 1: I'm married, right, So this isn't my experience, but when
Speaker 1: I you know, even my friends, my family members going
Speaker 1: through it. The war between the sexes that previous generations
Speaker 1: spoke about actually exists in generations. And a large part
Speaker 1: of this is there's a huge gap between shall we say,
Speaker 1: stated and revealed preference when it comes to these kind
Speaker 1: of luxury beliefs, right, views about you know, how men
Speaker 1: and women should interact. And so to pick on the
Speaker 1: baby boomers a little bit, if you ask that entire generation,
Speaker 1: which is a number of people, their views on certain things,
Speaker 1: they will tell you one thing. But if you actually
Speaker 1: dig into how they lived their wives, they lived like
Speaker 1: their parents did. Okay, maybe they got one divorce in
Speaker 1: the eighties, but generally that second marriage had a much
Speaker 1: better chance of surviving than a second marriage would nowadays.
Speaker 1: And so, you know, put those progressive values that many
Speaker 1: of them held, well, the next generation may have actually
Speaker 1: put it into effect. And so you see with Generation
Speaker 1: Z and look, our parents are Gen X, they're not boomers.
Speaker 1: Boomers are either our grandparents or aunts and uncles. So
Speaker 1: oftentimes that term boomer is basically just used to mean
Speaker 1: anyone older than me. It's an exact but we were
Speaker 1: largely educated by millennials, in many cases older millennials, some
Speaker 1: gen xers, who took many of those particularly you know,
Speaker 1: feminist or other kind of you know, cultural t wing beliefs,
Speaker 1: and they actually meant them. You know, they didn't just
Speaker 1: say it, they actually did it. And so that same
Speaker 1: experience that I had in college with that rubenesque feminists,
Speaker 1: to use a polite term, guys got just slammed by.
Speaker 1: I was lucky to be in college by the time
Speaker 1: that came around. But if you're twelve, thirteen, fourteen, or
Speaker 1: if you were in a more progressive area where that
Speaker 1: stuff was more you know, acceptable, you've been getting just
Speaker 1: like bombarded with that your entire life. Similarly, like you know,
Speaker 1: in the post Me Too era, right, both on an
Speaker 1: institutional level and also on a cultural level, relations between
Speaker 1: men and women changed dramatically. Certain things that were deemed
Speaker 1: to be appropriate or even you know, within the kind
Speaker 1: of normal scope were not only rendered inappropriate, but you
Speaker 1: could lose your entire life if you hit a trip wire,
Speaker 1: you know, if you and again, you know, I'm a
Speaker 1: religious extremist, so this wasn't my experience. But like, if
Speaker 1: you hook up with a girl and three weeks later
Speaker 1: she doesn't like it, tells the wrong person, your life
Speaker 1: is ruined. You know, you have an article as what
Speaker 1: happened to you know the Duke lacrosse team has happened
Speaker 1: at many at many other institutions. You're now an internationally
Speaker 1: known rapist already a term that you'll probably have to bleep.
Speaker 2: But that happened to say? That word is that bad
Speaker 2: word to say?
Speaker 1: I mean, yes it is, but also like it was
Speaker 1: literally what happened. You know, I'm not an advocate for
Speaker 1: that point is sorry, so you don't know, you don't
Speaker 1: have to.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't bleep it anyway, but like, you know what's funny,
Speaker 2: I'm cutting off for a second. I had my friend
Speaker 2: Mary Bowdenn and don't know if you follow her, Mary
Speaker 2: Tally Bowden, and she we were talking about how when
Speaker 2: she was on Danny Danny Jones's podcast last year with
Speaker 2: Jack Cruz and Kelly Means, and they had to bleep
Speaker 2: out you know, there's certain words they had to bleep
Speaker 2: out for YouTube, which you talk about medical freedom. So
Speaker 2: I don't need to tell you what those words are.
Speaker 2: And I said to her, I go, you know, it's
Speaker 2: so funny to me because I grew up as a kid,
Speaker 2: you know, the R rated movies when they would be
Speaker 2: on regular TV, because I grew up in front of
Speaker 2: the television, and so these R rated movies, I couldn't
Speaker 2: watch them on cable because they were uncensored, and they
Speaker 2: would delete the you know, the sex scenes, and then
Speaker 2: all the swearing. They would either mute it or they
Speaker 2: do some lousy dubbing of it. But yet she's on
Speaker 2: a show and they didn't even have her on the
Speaker 2: picture of the thumbnail. They didn't want to have her.
Speaker 2: They didn't want to take a chance of that. And
Speaker 2: then I think, if my memory serves me, he had that.
Speaker 2: Danny Jones had to his production team whatever, had to
Speaker 2: go over with YouTube to make sure it was all
Speaker 2: up and off before they even publish it for the public.
Speaker 2: That's crazy, like genuinely, that's that's crazy. It's incredibly irritating.
Speaker 2: But I know exactly what you mean. I am the
Speaker 2: world's worst editor. So I will, you know, take notes
Speaker 2: on the side of like, oh, I've probably got to
Speaker 2: take that out and invariably forget it.
Speaker 1: And so look, you know, sometimes you are directly quoting someone,
Speaker 1: even someone you would disagree with. It is their words,
Speaker 1: not yours. And still, you know, YouTube or others will
Speaker 1: will sort of punish you for it. It's it's gotten
Speaker 1: worse than the era of AI.
Speaker 2: But have you got have you had any challenges with
Speaker 2: YouTube recently? I h no.
Speaker 1: I Actually my ability to get stuff, to keep stuff
Speaker 1: monetized is almost impressive. Part of it is is developing
Speaker 1: a code of euphemisms to say whatever you want. Like
Speaker 1: if you you could say whatever you want as long
Speaker 1: as you approach it in the right way, and if
Speaker 1: a computer, if you're not basically, if you're not saying
Speaker 1: like slurs, you know, calls to violence, which you know
Speaker 1: I wouldn't do. Anyway, you can get you can talk
Speaker 1: around almost anything. But I did have one actually this
Speaker 1: is crazy. This was for again alternative medical hypotheses, and
Speaker 1: the context. The thing that I got clipped for is
Speaker 1: I was as a joke describing the tinfoil hat stuff,
Speaker 1: you know, like like kind of playing a character for
Speaker 1: a little bit talking to a guy, you know, Eugipius,
Speaker 1: who's a very very talented researcher on this, and I
Speaker 1: was saying something like, oh, yeah, because you're not one
Speaker 1: of those guys that thinks if you take the thing,
Speaker 1: you know, you become a mind's mind chip slave to
Speaker 1: the CEO of Microsoft. Except I used all the real words,
Speaker 1: and when I got dinged for it, they played that
Speaker 1: clip of my voice saying that I was like, well, one,
Speaker 1: I clearly disagree with that. It was a joke. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm hamming it up. But however, the AI on the
Speaker 1: other side did not appreciate that. There's another one which
Speaker 1: was on me. I can't even fight this one where
Speaker 1: I called then Transportation Secretary Pete Boudhage Edge a slur,
Speaker 1: which I thought was funny. YouTube did not. So that's
Speaker 1: my only two. I've managed to skate otherwise, which is
Speaker 1: sort of a miracle. But returning to the kind of
Speaker 1: war between the sexist stuff and so you obviously have
Speaker 1: this kind of you know, rising resentment of feminism or
Speaker 1: kind of social progressive signaling among young men. Also you
Speaker 1: have to remember, like imagine being a teenager going through
Speaker 1: the pandemic, going through George Floyd, going through all of this,
Speaker 1: that's going to produce a reaction, and largely that's been
Speaker 1: facilitated by social media. And at the same time, you
Speaker 1: have almost a perfect mirror image reaching young women, right.
Speaker 1: They are getting the you know, the feminist narrative, they
Speaker 1: are getting you know, the racial justice in scare quotes
Speaker 1: and narratives. And again, like, I've not necessarily experienced a
Speaker 1: ton of this because you know, I'm part of a
Speaker 1: conservative religious community. That's where I met my wife, We've
Speaker 1: known each other forever. But it's hit women incredibly, incredibly hard. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, my wife doesn't vote. She doesn't believe in voting.
Speaker 1: She just doesn't do it right. It's not like I
Speaker 1: told her not to, but even before we were together,
Speaker 1: she just didn't do it. And she will tell the
Speaker 1: story where one of her then friends basically said, you know,
Speaker 1: you're not a woman if you don't vote in this election.
Speaker 1: That was deemed to be sort of synonymous and so
Speaker 1: in much the same way that black doesn't literally mean
Speaker 1: of African descent. So for instance, you know, Joe Biden said,
Speaker 1: if you don't vote for me, he ain't black, and
Speaker 1: people laugh at him because that's obviously not true, but
Speaker 1: that but it will be black is a political identity.
Speaker 1: It means more than just the color of your skin.
Speaker 1: So Clarence Thomas isn't black because and I'm people have
Speaker 1: said this because he doesn't ascribe to that political identity.
Speaker 1: And so for generation Z, largely speaking, man and woman
Speaker 1: have become political identities. Right, there's baggage associated with it.
Speaker 1: And again, social media has enabled many, many things which
Speaker 1: are not explicit political signals to become implicit ones. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, I deleted all of my quote unquote, you know,
Speaker 1: normal social media in twenty twenty because basically it was like,
Speaker 1: I'm just hating everyone that I know because I'm seeing
Speaker 1: there and saying political ramblings. And you know, rationally, there's
Speaker 1: nothing about deleting social media that is a political act.
Speaker 1: But that was a signifier that I was a wrong
Speaker 1: thinker because I didn't want to be seeing the truth,
Speaker 1: which was you know, the mainstream narrative on COVID and
Speaker 1: on George Flood. That was a signifier. You're like, oh, what,
Speaker 1: that's weird. But there are dozens of other things like that,
Speaker 1: like your you know, whatever your vices are, you your
Speaker 1: taste in music, you're like all of these little things
Speaker 1: have become signifiers of you know, these broad political camps.
Speaker 1: And so in addition to you know, this loneliness epidemic
Speaker 1: that we often talk about, there is also this sort
Speaker 1: of political war between the sexes that is horrible. Like
Speaker 1: genuinely it's a bad thing for the human species to
Speaker 1: have taken male and female and turned those into in
Speaker 1: many cases, rival political blocks. And so you certainly, as
Speaker 1: I've said earlier when talking about Generation Z, have the
Speaker 1: economic situation which is dire, like it's really bad for
Speaker 1: any number of reasons. But you also have what you know,
Speaker 1: people kind of derisively referred to as the dating discourse. Right,
Speaker 1: why aren't people pairing up? And you see this both
Speaker 1: in the data on marriages, but even down to you know,
Speaker 1: the number of people who've gone on dates in the
Speaker 1: last year, let alone had sex in the last year.
Speaker 1: It's like, okay, like shure, those aren't great proxies for
Speaker 1: you know, whatever X Y Z thing we want to
Speaker 1: be happening. But at a very fundamental level, men and
Speaker 1: women are not interacting, they're not talking to each other,
Speaker 1: they're not pair bonding. And so I mean, to be honest,
Speaker 1: I think that's behind a lot of it. As well,
Speaker 1: which is that you know, many young men feel locked
Speaker 1: out of you know, economic advancement and also locked out
Speaker 1: of social advancement, right, like I can't meet a girl,
Speaker 1: or you know, I can't meet a girl who's not
Speaker 1: to be honest, kind of crazy. And again that doesn't
Speaker 1: absolve any one person of personal agency, like they need
Speaker 1: your you know, and this is sort of what we
Speaker 1: got into on my show, like you exist in the
Speaker 1: time you do. You need to make certain decisions that
Speaker 1: you know, even if your your hand of cards is
Speaker 1: not particularly good. But I think that that's another big
Speaker 1: part of it. And you see this and oftentimes these
Speaker 1: posts become viral because they are sort of a certain
Speaker 1: amount of confirmation bias, like oh, I hate the boomer
Speaker 1: so much. This is what they say, and who knows
Speaker 1: how you know representative they are. But you'll hear something
Speaker 1: like oh, I don't know why young men aren't just
Speaker 1: you know, approaching a random girl who works at a
Speaker 1: gas station, and it's like, well, we kind of see that.
Speaker 1: And that's a you know, specific example, right, you kind
Speaker 1: of see at once two different things there, which is
Speaker 1: one I would get arrested if I did that, Like genuinely,
Speaker 1: like not I personally, but like that is a very
Speaker 1: real fear that either you know, in the court of
Speaker 1: public opinion. And there are a great number of these
Speaker 1: viral videos of women, you know, recording themselves interacting with
Speaker 1: a guy saying, you know, look at this creep, here's
Speaker 1: his face, or also write the legal, legal repercussions. But
Speaker 1: also it's sort of revealing because it's like, oh, you
Speaker 1: grew up at a time where working at a gas
Speaker 1: station was just a thing that normal people did, Like
Speaker 1: you could be assured that's just some you know, girl
Speaker 1: from like the local college or whatever, working in her
Speaker 1: free time. It's like, and I'm sorry if you're a
Speaker 1: gas station worker listening to this, I'm not trying to
Speaker 1: disparage you, but like now that is like an underclass job,
Speaker 1: mostly for immigrants. So like, even that you know that
Speaker 1: hypothetical situation, it's like you kind of see that perfect
Speaker 1: mix of not only have the relations between the sex
Speaker 1: has changed, but the economics have dramatically changed. And so look,
Speaker 1: I get it, Like some part of this is simply
Speaker 1: a function of you know, getting older, your point of
Speaker 1: reference becomes more and more distant. But I think at
Speaker 1: a very fundamental level. Uh, And I'm ruder to the
Speaker 1: boomers on this show that I normally have been. There's
Speaker 1: a failure to recognize that things may have gotten worse
Speaker 1: in aggregate, even if they have gotten better for you personally.
Speaker 1: And you know, again right like that that incredible increase
Speaker 1: in the relative value of a home, if you're already in,
Speaker 1: that's great for you. You have this massive store of
Speaker 1: equity basically due to currency debasement, and you know a
Speaker 1: few other trends, but still, like, you have this huge asset,
Speaker 1: and it's entirely reasonable for you ton't want to cash
Speaker 1: out collect that value. I get it. But fundamentally the
Speaker 1: interests of young guys like me and people looking to
Speaker 1: cash out and retire are diametrically opposed. I mean, I
Speaker 1: you know, I own a house, so like I was
Speaker 1: able to kind of beat the odds on that due
Speaker 1: to know some factoris you don't need to get into.
Speaker 1: But like, even setting aside my personal interest, it's like, well,
Speaker 1: you've got a whole bunch of guys who are basically
Speaker 1: trying to get started, who are trying to establish themselves,
Speaker 1: who are up against relatively speaking, a two to three
Speaker 1: x increase in underlying asset valuation where there has been
Speaker 1: not even simply a freezing of average compensation in real terms,
Speaker 1: a decrease. Right, So you're kind of getting screwed on
Speaker 1: both sides of the equation. And it's like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course there's going to be some anger and some
Speaker 1: resentment there. Does that mean that all of that resentment
Speaker 1: is correct in every specific instance. Does it mean that
Speaker 1: it's directed correctly? No, those are separate questions. But if
Speaker 1: we're talking about that disconnect between younger and older people,
Speaker 1: I think that's a large part of it is that
Speaker 1: many older people view the system as having worked fundamentally
Speaker 1: get worked for me, and if you could just put
Speaker 1: your nose to the grindstone, you could replicate what I've done.
Speaker 1: And for many younger people, they feel as if, no,
Speaker 1: I'm being screwed. This system has nothing for me. And
Speaker 1: so if I'm going to achieve what my parents and
Speaker 1: grandparents did through normal means, I'm going to have to
Speaker 1: do something extraordinary. I'm going to have to break out
Speaker 1: of that system one way or another. And again, we're
Speaker 1: talking about fairly large numbers of people, but I think
Speaker 1: that fundamentally is the core of the difference, like is
Speaker 1: this system working or not? And you see that in
Speaker 1: politics as well. A lot has been made of the
Speaker 1: same divide on you know, the political right. This is
Speaker 1: a relatively recent thing. You see it on kind of
Speaker 1: the the the fracture point of Israel, but it applies
Speaker 1: to many other things as well. You know, look at
Speaker 1: the difference between you know, Republican staffers and the people
Speaker 1: they work for. You see this Actually even in the
Speaker 1: kind of legacy GOP press, look at figures like Rod Dreyer,
Speaker 1: David French, they are freaking out about this. They say, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, the young people aren't conservative. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: that's entirely true. They're not because again, like I've said,
Speaker 1: they view the system as being, if not unsalvageable, but
Speaker 1: directly contraar to their interests. See the exact same thing
Speaker 1: on the left, where there is this difference between the
Speaker 1: kind of legacy party, you know, the people who view
Speaker 1: the system is fundamentally working, and those who want to
Speaker 1: burn it down. Momdannie is kind of a perfect example
Speaker 1: of this, even if not him personally, then his supporters
Speaker 1: were basically like, why I don't care that he's a socialist,
Speaker 1: fix it, make it better. I don't think that's a
Speaker 1: great answer, but just look at the pulling from Mark
Speaker 1: Mitchell of Rasmussen on my show not too long ago,
Speaker 1: really really fascinating guy, and he's talking about the kind
Speaker 1: of rise of the burn it down politics. If basically like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm getting screwed, so whatever makes this go away, I'll
Speaker 1: press that button. Like I don't care what it's called,
Speaker 1: I don't care who does it, but fix it somehow
Speaker 1: or at the very least, you know, blow it up,
Speaker 1: and I'll at least have a decent chance then to
Speaker 1: make something happen. And I see a lot of you know,
Speaker 1: understandable angst from older people because they are very worried
Speaker 1: about it. But fundamentally it's like, well, you know, if
Speaker 1: you want to save this system, I don't necessarily, but
Speaker 1: something needs to change because it is becoming less and
Speaker 1: less workable for the next generation. And you know, someone
Speaker 1: might say like, oh, why are you complaining or like
Speaker 1: why are you so upset? It was like, well, to
Speaker 1: be honest, man, like, you know, I'm doing fine, not
Speaker 1: like wealthy by any means, Like, but I was able
Speaker 1: to get married and you know, do some things right,
Speaker 1: but like that's proportionally more and more rare, you know,
Speaker 1: the kind of what was assumed to be baseline things. Again,
Speaker 1: like I think about my grandfather, Like he didn't go
Speaker 1: to college, he got out of the military, worked in McDonald's,
Speaker 1: then got a job as a mechanic, like a very
Speaker 1: normal life, but he was able to his whole life.
Speaker 1: You drive new or almost new cars, have houses, and
Speaker 1: support a family, and like, yeah, sure these weren't like mansions.
Speaker 1: This wasn't some kind of princely affair, but the kind
Speaker 1: of basic, you know, parts of accepting a steak in society,
Speaker 1: we're much more achievable. And if you have guys who
Speaker 1: don't have a steak in society, who don't have anything
Speaker 1: to lose and also don't really have an accessible way
Speaker 1: to get a stake in society, it's like, well, eventually
Speaker 1: you're going to reach a critical mass of people who
Speaker 1: just say like, well, like fuck it, like why not.
Speaker 1: And you know, even if the answer they select on
Speaker 1: is not you know, a great idea. In particular, you
Speaker 1: have to understand that that is a individually you know,
Speaker 1: rational position to arrive at. That's probably much more than
Speaker 1: you wanted on the generational vibe.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, not at all. I I uh,
Speaker 2: what is at the top of your concern right now?
Speaker 2: Then from from the standpoint of you as an individual
Speaker 2: and for your family, what what do you what's at
Speaker 2: the top of your list?
Speaker 1: And is that is that? Is that?
Speaker 2: Is that what you're building your show around right now?
Speaker 2: Having those types of guests because of what you're you know,
Speaker 2: your top priority. Yeah, I mean it's definitely a huge
Speaker 2: part of uh.
Speaker 1: You know, I am sort of a amateur when it
Speaker 1: comes to talking about financing the economy, but it's definitely
Speaker 1: a big part of it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: But use an individual, not not that you're an expert,
Speaker 2: but what's at the top of your mind right now?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, honestly, man, that's a huge part of it.
Speaker 1: I mean another one which is even more basic, uh,
Speaker 1: And you see this kind of ripping through the right
Speaker 1: both in you know, the the UK and America is
Speaker 1: basically like like what's what's the point of this whole thing? Like,
Speaker 1: what's the point of America? What's the point of you know,
Speaker 1: a nation? And so you know, when it comes to
Speaker 1: something like you know, immigration or even the culture war stuff,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, okay, like do I get to have
Speaker 1: a say, like, do I get to you know, have
Speaker 1: a culture that is mine that I am allowed to
Speaker 1: you know, engage in well fundamentally like am I someone
Speaker 1: to be replaced? And so, you know, I think that
Speaker 1: that's a huge part of it, because if the point
Speaker 1: of society is simply to act as kind of a
Speaker 1: nursing home, right like the to you know, give the
Speaker 1: most number of people a sort of maximumly comfortable existence
Speaker 1: right where it's like you have all of these services
Speaker 1: done for you by who it doesn't matter. Well, that
Speaker 1: leads to a very specific, you know, outcome. But also
Speaker 1: again going back to our conversation about the power process,
Speaker 1: that leads to a complete and total erosion of meaning,
Speaker 1: that life becomes pointless and so be briefly mentioned to
Speaker 1: the IDW And you know, Peterson and others have sort
Speaker 1: of a comparatives of themselves, but I think what shot
Speaker 1: them to the kind of strategy or kites was addressing
Speaker 1: that conscious that that crisis of meaning. You have more
Speaker 1: and more people who are lonely, one and more people
Speaker 1: who don't have anything they feel as if they are
Speaker 1: part of, and they feel as if their lives are pointless, right,
Speaker 1: why might I even here? For I don't have a family,
Speaker 1: I don't have fulfilling work, and so a very fundamental
Speaker 1: level right at that crisis of meaning, like one, why
Speaker 1: am I personal here? But two, you know, what is
Speaker 1: the purpose of our nation? I mean that's huge, right,
Speaker 1: And even someone like Peterson will pick on briefly, you know,
Speaker 1: don't have any hate for the man, but that again
Speaker 1: was sort.
Speaker 2: Of a he kind of dropped off. He kind of
Speaker 2: dropped off by the way. Yeah, I mean, look like
Speaker 2: I obviously you had some very severe health issues, you know,
Speaker 2: an addiction to a chemical addiction to benzodiazepine, which, like
Speaker 2: I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies, I don't but
Speaker 2: grudge him that, you.
Speaker 1: Know, he lives.
Speaker 2: He lives here in Phoenix where I'm at, and I was,
Speaker 2: I was, I've been talking about him just in my
Speaker 2: personal life. I'm like, man, that guy just disappeared, and
Speaker 2: his daughter once in a while will pop up. His
Speaker 2: daughter has been all over acts over the last couple
Speaker 2: of days. You've probably have seen with the taste stuff,
Speaker 2: and it's a whole nother story. Some good entertainment on
Speaker 2: these social media platforms. I mean Milo, that guy Milo
Speaker 2: is like the ultimate troll. I mean that guy is
Speaker 2: the godfather of trolling. He actually trolled, not e controlled.
Speaker 2: But he made a comment to my friend Dave Colin
Speaker 2: last night which you haven't seen. It's hilarious, absolutely larious.
Speaker 1: Bilo is hilarious. But I'll be honest, I'm slightly afraid
Speaker 1: of him. Or it's like I don't I wouldn't trust
Speaker 1: that guy as far as like a thrill. Uh So
Speaker 1: I have a sort of like a you know Jane
Speaker 1: Goodall with the chimps, where it's like I'll watch this
Speaker 1: from the bushes with glasses, but I Am not getting involved.
Speaker 2: Uh. Well, they're provocateurs, right, there's a group of moms.
Speaker 2: I mean, Laura Loomer is a provocateur. I've had her on.
Speaker 2: Nick Fuent is a provocateur. Milo is like the maybe
Speaker 2: he's original og a provocateuring. I would say Cantice Owns
Speaker 2: is a provocateur. Who am I missing their Cris Burnet, Well,
Speaker 2: I'd love to actually talk to. But he's another one
Speaker 2: I think is a he's I mean, he's done some
Speaker 2: great work. But there's this group of people that provocateurs.
Speaker 2: That's just what they do.
Speaker 1: Like oh yeah, one of one of those things where
Speaker 1: it's like I can never bring myself to be morally
Speaker 1: outraged by that because it's like, look, man, like if
Speaker 1: you've been on the internet for long enough, it's like
Speaker 1: that role always exists, you know, and like if you
Speaker 1: if you think it's a bad thing, the worst thing
Speaker 1: you can do is give it air because like that's
Speaker 1: what it is, right, It's it's provocation. It's designed to
Speaker 1: get a reaction out of you. And so like even
Speaker 1: if you look at this and I'm like, oh you
Speaker 1: o cancellns, it's a great you know, she's saying crazy
Speaker 1: stuff threat, it's like, okay, sure, you know. I don't
Speaker 1: agree with Candaceellans Uh. I will admit I find her
Speaker 1: ability to sort of play mad libs very entertaining, where
Speaker 1: it's like you can sort of just swap the nouns
Speaker 1: and verbs, where it's like ah, yes, uh. Charlie Kirk's
Speaker 1: ghost astually projected into my third eye and told me
Speaker 1: that he was Catholic. It's not a one hundred percent
Speaker 1: of retelling of something she said recently, but it's pretty close,
Speaker 1: Like I get it. It's entertaining, but if people are
Speaker 1: kind of morally offended by that, it's like it's the
Speaker 1: oldest bit of as on the internet, like don't feed
Speaker 1: the trolls, and at a certain point much you know,
Speaker 1: much like Wolke Media, it's like if you hate it,
Speaker 1: but you won't stop talking about it, like, dude, this
Speaker 1: is kind of on you.
Speaker 2: Who's the asshole? Who's the asshole here? The person that's
Speaker 2: putting it out there or the one that's watching it. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Not even like, like I said, I'm not morally offended
Speaker 1: by this stuff, I see a great many people who are,
Speaker 1: and it's always like, all right, dude, they maybe just
Speaker 1: don't you know, you don't have to read it. To
Speaker 1: quote uh Tyler the creator some other rapper who said,
Speaker 1: how can you be cyberbully? Just close your eyes.
Speaker 2: It's kind of my take on a lot of that
Speaker 2: as well. It's like, but some of it's so good man,
Speaker 2: like some of it is so insane you can't help.
Speaker 2: But I mean, you know, look, I'm sorry that people
Speaker 2: go through whatever, but like some of the drama, but
Speaker 2: they also create it and they live their lives on
Speaker 2: these platforms, so all of a sudden when it gets exposed,
Speaker 2: what do you expect, Like Elijah Shaeffer, I mean I
Speaker 2: watched that whole thing with him and Sarah Stock and
Speaker 2: Mile Mile again, like, what do you expect?
Speaker 1: I mean, yes, one hundred percent, where it's like you
Speaker 1: sort of live by the sword, by by the sword,
Speaker 1: which is part of the reason why I never talked
Speaker 1: about drama on my show. It's superstitious. But my thought
Speaker 1: is if I don't talk about it, it can't affect me.
Speaker 1: We'll see how that experiment works out.
Speaker 2: So I'm sorry. We were talking about Jordan Peterson. I
Speaker 2: was just saying, how oh no, no, he literally, yeah,
Speaker 2: he lives here. I believe his daughter lives here, and
Speaker 2: the guy just has completely disappeared. Yeah, well, I mean,
Speaker 2: and as far as big issues, I mean, honestly, I
Speaker 2: think that he was fundamentally correct talking about that crisis
Speaker 2: of purpose, crisis of meaning, because again, like for many people,
Speaker 2: they feel as if their lives are completely and totally pointless.
Speaker 2: You know, you see this massive explosion and deaths of despair.
Speaker 2: You know, whether it's it's opioids, whether it's self inflicted,
Speaker 2: you know, a gunshot wound, alcoholism, and that speaks of
Speaker 2: a society that's fundamentally very sick, right, people who feel
Speaker 2: as if there's nothing justifying their existence. And when you
Speaker 2: combine that with this kind of epidemic of loneliness, right,
Speaker 2: we're like, okay, well, something's deeply, deeply wrong. And like
Speaker 2: there's a part of that that's a political or part
Speaker 2: of it, it's spiritual as well. But to me, it's
Speaker 2: sort of a you know, microcosm of a broader crisis
Speaker 2: of meaning across the West, where you have these cultures,
Speaker 2: you have these nations that can't really justify their own
Speaker 2: existence anymore. They believe and many people believe that these
Speaker 2: these nations, these peoples are irredeemably sinful, right, they have
Speaker 2: done something wrong and they don't really deserve to exist anymore.
Speaker 2: And see the same thing with many people, and it's like, well, no,
Speaker 2: I like these things. I like these people. I want
Speaker 2: them to continue to exist. They're a good thing. They're
Speaker 2: forced for good, as someone might say. And so you know,
Speaker 2: if you believe that that project is in crisis, it's like, well, one,
Speaker 2: all right, there's your purpose, Like that's that's a huge
Speaker 2: thing to do, you know, whether that is your literal bloodline,
Speaker 2: you know, your culture, your nation, whatever it is. Like
Speaker 2: that's that's an anecdote to that purposeful purposelessness. But also
Speaker 2: like there're a great number of and this has been
Speaker 2: kind of proven right in the recent DJ files. Right,
Speaker 2: there's a great.
Speaker 1: Deal of like genuine evil in the world. Right, I mean,
Speaker 1: as again as we've seen the Epstein files, perhaps darker
Speaker 1: than we ever could have imagined. And so to me
Speaker 1: it's sort of like, well, there is your anecdote to
Speaker 1: purpose purposelessness. Right, there's all of a sudden, this grand adventure,
Speaker 1: right to to save your people, to save your bloodline,
Speaker 1: all of this. And also right, like there is a
Speaker 1: very there's a clear enemy in that. And so it's
Speaker 1: why do you consider myself in a certain way to
Speaker 1: be kind of a political partisan, not in any way,
Speaker 1: not in any violent sense, of course, but like that
Speaker 1: that is something to throw yourself into, you know, that
Speaker 1: is a thing to dedicate your life to. And again, right,
Speaker 1: this is one of the things that I think is
Speaker 1: very interesting and it doesn't have to be explicitly political.
Speaker 1: In fact, many of the people doing this are not
Speaker 1: political at all, and they're better for it. But one
Speaker 1: of the things that was interesting about the pandemic is
Speaker 1: that it was a massive sorting event. And I noticed
Speaker 1: this in my immediate peer group. I saw it in
Speaker 1: others as well, that it sort of caused a split
Speaker 1: and it was basically who is going to be normal
Speaker 1: and who's going to go along with this? And those
Speaker 1: two populations over time have produced dramatically different results. Right,
Speaker 1: the kind of normal population, which I guess in a
Speaker 1: statistical sense is not it was a dissident thing, but
Speaker 1: historically normal. It's like, okay, well, you know those people
Speaker 1: are doing things people have normally done, right. They you know,
Speaker 1: they're starting families, they're building relationships, they're doing what you
Speaker 1: would expect. And that population who hasn't has sort of,
Speaker 1: to be honest, kind of devolved. They live in this
Speaker 1: sort of extended adolescence, the kind of effectively pointless lives
Speaker 1: of consumption where you know, they may have their hobbies
Speaker 1: and activities, but really not much of consequence is done.
Speaker 1: And I think that that is sort of an expression
Speaker 1: of exactly that what I'm talking about, where it's like
Speaker 1: that dissent, that break from the kind of mainstream norm
Speaker 1: is basically what is required to be a human, not
Speaker 1: in a biological sense, of course, but to do the
Speaker 1: things that mankind is traditionally done, which seems to, again
Speaker 1: going back to our conversation about the power process, have
Speaker 1: that synthesis of accountability and meaning which prevents either implicitly,
Speaker 1: like explicitly, or effectively ending your life. Like okay, sure
Speaker 1: you may not have you know, suck started a shotgun,
Speaker 1: but like if you're you know, an aging you know
Speaker 1: cat lady who does nothing, but you feeder animals, buy
Speaker 1: things on Netflix and or buy things on Amazon and
Speaker 1: watch Netflix, it's like, well, functionally, from a biological perspective,
Speaker 1: you're dead. Like you did not pass through that filter.
Speaker 1: And so maybe I'm speaking vaguely here, Mike, but I
Speaker 1: think that like that is what is to be done,
Speaker 1: and that is sort of that anecdote as person would
Speaker 1: say that anecdote to chaos, that anecdote to meaninglessness, And
Speaker 1: really I see that's what that that is. What's happening
Speaker 1: is that you you have a great number of people
Speaker 1: who are looking for a meaning, looking for a reason
Speaker 1: to exist, and you see this. I think it was
Speaker 1: real clear. Just did a poll about this. One of
Speaker 1: my buddies sent it in talking about how the you know,
Speaker 1: the return to religiosity is being driven by effectively gen
Speaker 1: z men. And you could look at that as basically
Speaker 1: a out like a crying out for meaning, crying out
Speaker 1: for like why am I here? What am I supposed
Speaker 1: to do? And you could look at you know, the
Speaker 1: rise of you know, left wing activism among women, which
Speaker 1: we spoke about earlier, is sort of a zeno religion,
Speaker 1: like a xeno estrogen, right, a molecule that your body
Speaker 1: thinks as a hormone and so it bonds onto it.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, let's put politics aren't really a religion.
Speaker 1: It doesn't have to be to be left wing politics.
Speaker 1: But you know, politics aren't really a religion. They don't
Speaker 1: quite fulfill the same role. They don't do the same
Speaker 1: things for you do much like you know, whatever chemical
Speaker 1: from your shampoo doesn't actually do what estrogen does in
Speaker 1: your body. Well, but it's close enough. Right, You'll latch
Speaker 1: onto that because that does provide you with a narrative
Speaker 1: to tell yourself about the world. Right, I am a
Speaker 1: I am an advocate for this Palestine for a little bit.
Speaker 1: Now it's you know, immigrants, it'll probably be you know,
Speaker 1: some drug dealer who got ventilated by the police in
Speaker 1: three months from now. It cycles through, but again, is
Speaker 1: a a narrative is something to tell about yourself, why
Speaker 1: you exist, what you should do? You know, what is
Speaker 1: your place in the world, and you know fundamentally, and
Speaker 1: it's actually uh, sort of phuitous. We you know, mentioned
Speaker 1: Campbell earlier, because humans are mimetic, right, they tell themselves stories.
Speaker 1: They placed themselves in a narrative. I mean, this is
Speaker 1: why we have such a visceral emotional connection to stories
Speaker 1: that are hundreds, if not thousands of years old. Right,
Speaker 1: Like you read Homer and you're like, Okay, some of
Speaker 1: the language a little archaic. I don't one hundred percent
Speaker 1: understand what's going on, but you're like, all, I get
Speaker 1: this this, but it resonates on a deep kind of
Speaker 1: brainstem level because even if you aren't literally Achilles, so
Speaker 1: like's that's a story I can sink into it. It
Speaker 1: explains I can imagine myself as that, where I can
Speaker 1: relate to that in a certain way. And fundamentally, right,
Speaker 1: there's a large group of people who find themselves with
Speaker 1: either no narrative or a very weak one where it's like, well,
Speaker 1: I guess my narrative is that I am irrevocable, like
Speaker 1: irredeemably sinful because of my you know, my culture, my
Speaker 1: skin color, my religion, whatever. And I guess that that
Speaker 1: just means I'm bad forever. And the one thing I
Speaker 1: can do is sort of empty consumption, you know, hitting
Speaker 1: a certain number of you know, serotonin receptors, and that's
Speaker 1: supposed to give my life purpose and meaning, and very
Speaker 1: clearly that is not working. And so I think what
Speaker 1: you see is people casting around for an answer to that,
Speaker 1: whether that's a literal religion, a zeno religion, there is
Speaker 1: a a great need for that. And one more thing,
Speaker 1: and I'm sorry, I'll get off this soapbox, but you
Speaker 1: oftentimes see older people and conservatives making fun of the
Speaker 1: kind of you know, weird theater kids who post neo pronouns. Right,
Speaker 1: the zs are types on social media. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't even know what that is. Educate, Oh, Neo
Speaker 1: pronouns are all the like really ridiculous, like I'm not
Speaker 1: a he she or I'm not a day. I've made
Speaker 1: up my own like zs aer uh, And they get
Speaker 1: increasingly more fractal and ridiculous, to the point where it's
Speaker 1: like literally no human has ever uttered this combination of syllables.
Speaker 1: But I guess if I don't say that, you're going
Speaker 1: to report me to HR? Who am I joking? None
Speaker 1: of these people at jobs? But uh, in that right,
Speaker 1: there is something on its face completely and totally ridiculous,
Speaker 1: like you called yourself a demi boy and you dress
Speaker 1: like a kid from a nineties Siers catalog? Like what
Speaker 1: is that? And it is like it is ridiculous on
Speaker 1: its face, But from my perspective, what that is is
Speaker 1: it's a desire for meeting. It's a desire for identity.
Speaker 1: What am I? I don't feel as if there's any
Speaker 1: answer to that question, So I guess I will just
Speaker 1: have to construct for myself this you kind of cobbled together,
Speaker 1: you know, brand affiliations and personal aesthetic and pronoun to
Speaker 1: create some sort of identity for myself. And it's sort
Speaker 1: of tragic because historically that is not where people derive
Speaker 1: their identity from. It was, you know, from their their nation,
Speaker 1: their people, the institutions they surrounded themselves with. And this
Speaker 1: is sort of elegantly explained in you know, in Putnam's
Speaker 1: Bowling Alone. Right, the death of these sort of civic institutions,
Speaker 1: these places where people made friends, met their spouse, derived
Speaker 1: a sense of purpose from right, These institutions required something
Speaker 1: of you know, their members and so general. Later, it's
Speaker 1: it's no shock that people are searching for identity and
Speaker 1: many of them come up with really retarded ones like
Speaker 1: yet sure, where you can laugh at them and should.
Speaker 1: But that speaks to that kind of wider crisis that
Speaker 1: you see in all the other examples I've mentioned. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's kind of my I guess, rambling and organized
Speaker 1: thoughts on it, Like.
Speaker 2: You know, you talking about twenty twenty and that that
Speaker 2: divider and that's what you know, you look at that
Speaker 2: period where there was a clear line right between what
Speaker 2: people thought certain that you know, they were absolutists on
Speaker 2: both sides, right, but also now as we've gone six years,
Speaker 2: six years later, especially on the right, where I thought
Speaker 2: in my own experience, you know, being objective is what
Speaker 2: you know, what we should have taken from that from
Speaker 2: that time period of what you know, questioning everything. And
Speaker 2: I say when I say objective, I mean questioning everything
Speaker 2: and asking you know, you know why, and not being
Speaker 2: afraid to speak. But you know, it's like on the
Speaker 2: left is still I don't know if he knows the
Speaker 2: left or right. Kevin Diana's got me thinking differently now
Speaker 2: after I talk to him the other day.
Speaker 1: You know, he said, dude, isn't he He's so smart?
Speaker 2: Man?
Speaker 1: I think Kevin's like the coolest guy in the world.
Speaker 2: So smart. It's first time I ever spoke with him before.
Speaker 2: I mean, I've had Jared Taylor on a few times
Speaker 2: and Peter and Lydia Brimlow over a Vedre and but yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean the guy talk about I mean he asked,
Speaker 2: he said, you should come on identity politics. I'm like, man,
Speaker 2: I don't. That's a way out of my league. You
Speaker 2: guys are all the way out of my league. Like
Speaker 2: I'm like a club fighter going in the ring with
Speaker 2: like Manny paciol And you know, I don't have the
Speaker 2: handspeed or the footwork to keep up with you guys.
Speaker 2: But but but anyway, you know this this idea of
Speaker 2: being an absolutist, and now I'm the further on the right.
Speaker 2: It's like there's more dividers, more dividers, Middle East, huge divider,
Speaker 2: right Maga versus people asking questions, huge divider. So it's
Speaker 2: like it's being cut and cut and cut and cut.
Speaker 2: And the only conclusion I can come from that to
Speaker 2: come take from that because I get heat up both sides,
Speaker 2: as probably you do as well. Because I think I'm objective.
Speaker 2: Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you know, you might get a
Speaker 2: sense maybe I'm not. Maybe I'm totally you know, biased
Speaker 2: in my own absolutist world. But uh, I feel like
Speaker 2: if you are an absolutist and you're you're you're you're
Speaker 2: in a cult where you think you just this is
Speaker 2: the way it is, this is the way it's going
Speaker 2: to be, and I don't know, I I mean, that's
Speaker 2: not what I want. I kind of went off on
Speaker 2: my own rant. There, No, no, not at all. So
Speaker 2: I think that.
Speaker 1: This is sort of a function of of massive scale.
Speaker 1: There's a great equip from Urban where he says success
Speaker 1: is having your own ideas explained to you by the
Speaker 1: stupidest person you've ever met. And all right, it's it's
Speaker 1: kind of funny, right, But obviously with anything you know,
Speaker 1: as an idea becomes more and more popular, it sort
Speaker 1: of becomes a parody of itself. You see this actually,
Speaker 1: and well, boy, am I going to make the Catholics
Speaker 1: mad with this one. But you kind of see this
Speaker 1: with the Catholic Church right where it's like, if you're
Speaker 1: one hundred and thirty IQ artist and you want to
Speaker 1: get really into you know, stimistic law and all that
Speaker 1: you can't that exists, you can deep dive into that,
Speaker 1: and that's Catholicism. But also Catholicism is like you know,
Speaker 1: when like a Mexican lady like lights a candle with
Speaker 1: a picture of Saint on it and that's about as
Speaker 1: much as she gets from it. I'm not trying to
Speaker 1: pick on Mexicans, but you know what I mean, there's
Speaker 1: that simple, kind of peasant version of it. And okay,
Speaker 1: that's one thing for the Church. But you see the
Speaker 1: same thing with any idea, right that you know, there's
Speaker 1: this sort of you know, vanguard whatever form it takes
Speaker 1: that you know, is interrogating ideas has a nuanced version
Speaker 1: of it, and when you know, expanded to you know,
Speaker 1: a mass, it gets necessarily dumbed downed and turned into
Speaker 1: a series of slogans. Right, it becomes a meme. Right,
Speaker 1: that kind of infectious idea which has almost no place
Speaker 1: for nuance. There's there's it is catchy and spreadable and short. Right,
Speaker 1: it's the difference between you know, oh, you know, Nietzsche
Speaker 1: was like the nihilism. Man, you did nothing, God is dead,
Speaker 1: you know, nothing matters that that kind of like quick,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of thumbnail view versus like, you know,
Speaker 1: actually reading about the distinction between you know, the apolony
Speaker 1: and the dynasy and or whatever, you know, the kind
Speaker 1: of real meat of it.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 1: That's kind of the attitude I always take towards kind
Speaker 1: of any feedback or comments or anything. I'm still quite small,
Speaker 1: so I'm relatively speaking, still within my own bumble bubble
Speaker 1: excuse me. But every once in a while something gets
Speaker 1: picked up and it kind of goes outside of that.
Speaker 1: And so you have people you know backing you, sloganeering
Speaker 1: at you. And that's always the thing you have to remember,
Speaker 1: which is like, look like most people don't understand the
Speaker 1: most complicated version of an idea, right, they get the
Speaker 1: kind of quick and dirty version, and they you know,
Speaker 1: they go with that, and that being you know, incorrect
Speaker 1: or incomplete doesn't discredit the kind of core of it.
Speaker 1: You saw this ten years ago with all the like
Speaker 1: SJW destroyed content right where it's like, well, I can
Speaker 1: debate a you know, eighteen year old college freshman. It's like,
Speaker 1: sure you can, man, But like, dude, I could find
Speaker 1: you know, an eighteen year college freshman.
Speaker 2: That's an old act. Now, man, that's just old.
Speaker 1: Like, so you see that same thing where it's like
Speaker 1: you're attacking the lowest version of a meme, the lowest
Speaker 1: version of an idea because it's it's cheap, right, it's
Speaker 1: easy to do. You're crushing cans, right to take up
Speaker 1: a boxing now.
Speaker 2: And clicks and clicks, you get to clicks, and yeah.
Speaker 1: One hundred percent there's money in it. But to me,
Speaker 1: I think that a large function of that kind of
Speaker 1: like totalizing instinct. It's coming from that, right, It's coming
Speaker 1: from you know, you're getting the lowest resolution idea. And
Speaker 1: you know also, I mean I think that fundamentally any
Speaker 1: system of belief becomes totalizing because it is making a
Speaker 1: claim about the nature of reality, right, a very fundamental claim.
Speaker 1: And so within one broad you know, kind of meta
Speaker 1: political claim, you can have conversations on you know, the
Speaker 1: merits of something.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So for instance, like if if you and I are
Speaker 1: both you know, Christians, we can you know go to
Speaker 1: the Bible and you know, quote it back and forth,
Speaker 1: although that even gets messy, like if you and I
Speaker 1: are both Lutherans or both you know, Baptist or whatever,
Speaker 1: we have a common frame of reference. But and this
Speaker 1: is part of the reason why I think these like
Speaker 1: religion debates are so mindendingly agonizing, as it's like, okay, well,
Speaker 1: if I'm quoting the Bible and your quote like the
Speaker 1: bog of a geta or whatever, we can't have a
Speaker 1: discussion there because fundamentally we're all operating off of these different,
Speaker 1: ultimately unprovable claims about the nature of reality, right like
Speaker 1: I can't prove to you physically that Christ raised from
Speaker 1: the dead, and you can't prove to me as this
Speaker 1: hypothetical Hindu I don't know enough about Hinduism to even
Speaker 1: know what claim they would make cowser sacred. We'll go
Speaker 1: with that, right, that is fundamentally improvable. And so what
Speaker 1: I think again with that kind of totalizing instinct, is
Speaker 1: that politics is fractured to the place where that common
Speaker 1: ground has gone away. They're operating under fundamentally different metapolitical
Speaker 1: narratives and what is the purpose of life, even down
Speaker 1: to something like what is a man? What is a woman?
Speaker 1: And so without that common ground, you it's Hindus and Christians, right,
Speaker 1: They're they're working on fundamentally different you know, axioms, and
Speaker 1: so that I think that's a big part of the
Speaker 1: reason why debate culture has kind of died out, you know,
Speaker 1: like you still see some of it, but it's really
Speaker 1: not anywhere near the kind of high cultural prominence it
Speaker 1: used to be, because, to be honest, it seems as
Speaker 1: if many people have realized that it's ultimately futile. And
Speaker 1: also you see this in politics as well, right, Like
Speaker 1: people are more and more, even on the legislative level,
Speaker 1: abandoning the pretense of appealing to everybody, right, abandoning the
Speaker 1: pretense of like, oh, well, you know, my opponent across
Speaker 1: the stage for me, we disagree about a great many things,
Speaker 1: but we both want, you know, a bright future for America.
Speaker 1: It's like that's I mean, that still exists. And like
Speaker 1: if you're from like you know, I'm say Iola, I
Speaker 1: don't actually know that much about Iolist. That maybe a
Speaker 1: profoundly ignorant statement, like in the kind of more historically
Speaker 1: normal parts of the country, but like, fundamentally politics, the
Speaker 1: culture war, and they're kind of one and the same,
Speaker 1: have become a war of belief, right, a war between
Speaker 1: those mutually incompatible means. And so I think that's another reason.
Speaker 1: And this is I guess something we went into in
Speaker 1: our last conversation. To forgive me if you're bored hearing
Speaker 1: you repeat myself. But I think that's another part of
Speaker 1: the reason why we see that sort of totalizing that
Speaker 1: you're just describing that totalizing behavior. And also here's another
Speaker 1: example that cultural dissolution I spoke about earlier, where the meaning,
Speaker 1: the institutions, the responsibilities that created meaning. As those have
Speaker 1: gone away, politics has stepped into their place. So my
Speaker 1: friend arn McIntyre wrote a book, The Total State, which
Speaker 1: is about exactly this. It's a very good book. I've
Speaker 1: read it, you should too. But he makes a point
Speaker 1: that many others have made that for total politics, total
Speaker 1: control by the state, this kind of tyranny, there can
Speaker 1: be no rivals. So in the Roman context, right, they
Speaker 1: had to smash the old families for the empire to
Speaker 1: be born. Like if you have this sort of you know,
Speaker 1: familial kind of mafia organization that runs the state, well
Speaker 1: you can't have an empire in that at the same time,
Speaker 1: or you know, you can't have you know, the church
Speaker 1: and you know the revolutionary government, right you. So as
Speaker 1: those institutions have fallen apart, both through deliberate action and
Speaker 1: just lack of interest, the state has stepped in. So
Speaker 1: going back to kind of the sexual revolution, right, all
Speaker 1: of the institutions you had around family formation. As those
Speaker 1: broke apart, well the government steps in. So now you
Speaker 1: have you know, divorce court, you have CPS, you have
Speaker 1: all of these things which exist to take up the slack.
Speaker 1: But also that's now a new way that politics affects
Speaker 1: your life because if you're in government, now you get
Speaker 1: to dictate the rules of all of the those different things.
Speaker 1: You have created an entry. You've taken something from the
Speaker 1: a political because I mean, let's be honest, right, Like
Speaker 1: can you imagine talking to like a farmer from eighteen
Speaker 1: hundred about like family politics. It's like, what does that
Speaker 1: even mean? You know? I have I guess I vote
Speaker 1: because I own property, Like it's sort of beyond the
Speaker 1: scope of politics, right, Well, that enters into the political arena,
Speaker 1: and it is more and more stuff gets dragged into that. Well, well,
Speaker 1: everything becomes political and two, the total amount of power
Speaker 1: the state has grows and grows and grows because now
Speaker 1: the state doesn't just to get to decide, you know,
Speaker 1: if you get you know, like frog marched into a
Speaker 1: you know, a frontline battalion in a war. Well, they
Speaker 1: also get to decide do you have custody of your kids?
Speaker 1: They also get to decide, you know, any number of
Speaker 1: things you mentioned hr like, let's be honest, that's sort
Speaker 1: of an arm of the state, you know, of a
Speaker 1: plus or minus. And so I think that that's another
Speaker 1: part of it as well. Right, that is why politics
Speaker 1: is totalizing because more and more, even down to you know,
Speaker 1: the relationship between parents and children, the relationship between you know,
Speaker 1: husbands and wives have entered into the romal politics. What
Speaker 1: I'm getting at there, Mike, do.
Speaker 2: You last question? How do you feel about the future
Speaker 2: for use an individual and as our society is a country,
Speaker 2: both in the short term and the long term.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I have to get characterized to someone who's
Speaker 1: you know, black pillow, right, because you know, I frankly
Speaker 1: look at.
Speaker 2: Kevin said bleak pilled which I thought I'd never heard
Speaker 2: that before.
Speaker 1: Have you heard that that is true about Kevin actually
Speaker 1: the world's most black pilled man.
Speaker 2: Well, he said bleak. He said bleak pilled, not black.
Speaker 1: Well, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, that's an accurate term.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: I love Kevin. I'll get off all that.
Speaker 2: But point is the.
Speaker 1: That is all all, almost all that analysis is true
Speaker 1: there that are going badly, very badly. You can look
Speaker 1: at any number of you know, social criminal trends over
Speaker 1: the last sixty years and say this is not going
Speaker 1: great fair enough. I agree with that fundamentally. I look
Speaker 1: at the dissonant movement, the resistance what everyone call it
Speaker 1: as being in the ascendant. We have answers for these problems,
Speaker 1: to questions that many are not even asking. I see
Speaker 1: this in a couple different ways. One of my buddies, Thomas,
Speaker 1: he talks about this because he deals with many of
Speaker 1: these same issues. And he said, look, man, I've been
Speaker 1: in this for longer than you've been alive. And when
Speaker 1: I started out, you were the biggest deal in the world.
Speaker 1: If you had a physical newsletter with one hundred people
Speaker 1: subscribe to, that meant you were a big deal. You
Speaker 1: were important. Look, man, if you have like one hundred
Speaker 1: listeners on your podcast, no one cares there's nothing and
Speaker 1: look like I'm not saying that if you were a
Speaker 1: podcaster with one hundred listeners you should neck yourself. Not
Speaker 1: my point at all, but to say like that has
Speaker 1: scope has increased. But also like within the the political
Speaker 1: groups I'm affiliated with, the conferences I'm going to, not
Speaker 1: only they're growing in terms of numbers, but also the
Speaker 1: quality of people is rapidly expanding. I went to the
Speaker 1: Old Gory Club OGC conference in Tennessee last year. I've
Speaker 1: been three times down three years in a row, and
Speaker 1: there was a marked difference from year two to year
Speaker 1: three that I went there. Not to say the guys
Speaker 1: there before weren't good guys, not at all, but I
Speaker 1: was meeting more and more guys who are capable, like
Speaker 1: competent people with something to lose. You know, a guy
Speaker 1: who's in his forties working in tech in one of
Speaker 1: those big tech cities, pulling down a whole lot of money,
Speaker 1: and he basically like, look, man, like, things aren't going
Speaker 1: well and I think I need to do something about it,
Speaker 1: Like I feel compelled for the sake of my family.
Speaker 1: It's like, okay, good, like not good that that's happening.
Speaker 1: To you, not good that we're in this situation, but
Speaker 1: like that's a strong sign when people who are serious,
Speaker 1: people who have something to lose, who have something from
Speaker 1: a certain perspectives better that they could be doing. That's
Speaker 1: a strong that's a leading indicator. You see this as well,
Speaker 1: Like and I won't name any names, but like as
Speaker 1: I'm sure you'rewhare Michael. You can see people's names and
Speaker 1: emails on substack, and you know, every once in a
Speaker 1: while you get email Okay, I know that name, so
Speaker 1: you google it and you're like, oh, shoot, that's actually
Speaker 1: that guy. Why is why is he here? Because you
Speaker 1: don't just default to our weird corner of the internet, right,
Speaker 1: that speaks of something, And so generally speaking, like in
Speaker 1: the mid to long term, I think I think we're
Speaker 1: gonna win. Like the short medium term is likely not
Speaker 1: going to be pleasant. But I look at even my
Speaker 1: friends in South Africa, the guys that after Form, the
Speaker 1: guys that Arerania, and I see a country that is
Speaker 1: way worse than we are now. Right, they don't have power,
Speaker 1: they don't have roads, a horrific crime, and yet there
Speaker 1: is still that kind of light there like they're building
Speaker 1: something they're making something. They made their own university how
Speaker 1: to scratch. It's like, okay, that's real, Like that's something
Speaker 1: even in these kind of horrible circumstances on paper, it's like,
Speaker 1: well that is like that's there's something redemptive in that, right,
Speaker 1: that is again one to call it like you can
Speaker 1: do it. You know, look at these guys who had
Speaker 1: it worse than you are, in a worse situation, they
Speaker 1: were able to make something worth preserving. And I think
Speaker 1: that that is incredibly white pulling from the perspective of
Speaker 1: like okay, like something can be done, like there is
Speaker 1: a way to beat this kind of cultural degradation. And
Speaker 1: also like again that I think that that is very
Speaker 1: much kind of an anecdote or antidote, excuse me to
Speaker 1: that that kind of crisis of meaning. And so when
Speaker 1: it comes to the show to medium term, like on
Speaker 1: any issue where you're like, oh, do you think this
Speaker 1: is going to get better or worse, It's like, oh, dude,
Speaker 1: it's going to get way worse if present trends continue.
Speaker 1: Like you know, you look at something as stupid as
Speaker 1: like driving down the road and not being hit by
Speaker 1: a guy who doesn't know how to drive in an
Speaker 1: eighteen wheeler. It's like, well, I's probably gonna get worse.
Speaker 1: Like that seems to be, you know, given to current trends,
Speaker 1: you know, the demographic, to crime, any one of these.
Speaker 1: It's like, okay, well, yeah, I accept that analysis. But
Speaker 1: the idea that you know, things are going to get
Speaker 1: worse soon and they will stay worse forever, I fundamentally
Speaker 1: disagree with. And again it's because you know, I see,
Speaker 1: you know, so many young guys who are discontented, who
Speaker 1: feel as if they're being screwed and are taking the
Speaker 1: appropriate measures, who are organizing, We're building you know, networks
Speaker 1: of like minded individuals, We're building things, whether business or
Speaker 1: political institutions, who are basically saying like, oh okay, like
Speaker 1: this sucks, I'm going to fix it, like I am
Speaker 1: going to make it better. And I think that that
Speaker 1: attitude is exactly what's needed. And there's a great, a
Speaker 1: great segment in you know, Nick Land's Cracker Factory in
Speaker 1: the book Dark Enlightenment, which I think I've referenced like
Speaker 1: four times in the last week because it keeps coming up.
Speaker 1: We He talks about how for you know, Western anglos
Speaker 1: in particular, that the default mode of conflict resolution is secession,
Speaker 1: basically like, ah, all right, I lost, I'll go start
Speaker 1: my own thing. He said it all across America, right,
Speaker 1: like the formation of Rhode Island, even where it's basically like,
Speaker 1: oh shoot, we lost that fight. We have our own
Speaker 1: thing now. And you see that cultural idea carried obviously
Speaker 1: the American Civil War, but also even into something like
Speaker 1: white flight. Right, well, it's like, I guess I'll start
Speaker 1: a suburb somewhere like I don't. I don't want to
Speaker 1: be a part of this thing anymore. And it's understandable.
Speaker 1: But eventually you reach a wall, right you can't run
Speaker 1: any further. And if I can close on this, it
Speaker 1: reminds me of a great essay translated in English or
Speaker 1: written I can't quite remember, by my buddy Ernst Vinzel,
Speaker 1: conscious Carocle, member of the team in after Form, where
Speaker 1: he talked about the importance of digging a trench, and
Speaker 1: he was basically saying, He's like, look like, when you retreat,
Speaker 1: you don't retreat to run away forever. You retreat to
Speaker 1: make a defensible position. You retreat so that you have
Speaker 1: time to dig a trench. We have something to defend
Speaker 1: and that essay was incredibly impactful in my life. It's
Speaker 1: actually not a huge It was at almost the exact
Speaker 1: time decided to start a podcast, decided to get involved
Speaker 1: in this, to put out eventually, to put out my
Speaker 1: face and make this what I do. And I was
Speaker 1: walking around downtown Richmond. They were tearing down the monuments
Speaker 1: and I was listening to this, walking down Monument Avenue.
Speaker 1: The least statue was still up ritually defaced, covered in graffiti,
Speaker 1: and I was walking past. I believe it was Davis,
Speaker 1: might have been the admiral whose name I can't remember,
Speaker 1: but looking at these just holes in the ground where
Speaker 1: you know, the symbol of a culture had been dug
Speaker 1: out and replaced with just a pit of mud. Listening
Speaker 1: to him read this, listening to talking about, you know,
Speaker 1: retreating to find something defensive, and I was like, God,
Speaker 1: damn it, he's right, And so yeah, book, things are
Speaker 1: gonna get worse. Like you know, all of the available metrics,
Speaker 1: at least the ones I'm seeing, things are gonna get worse.
Speaker 1: But fundamentally, I view us, our guys, whoever you know
Speaker 1: it is, listening to this is like containing the seeds
Speaker 1: of or a generation of renaissance of something that could
Speaker 1: actually fix this. And I might be wrong, you know,
Speaker 1: I might you know, be overly romantic in that, but
Speaker 1: to me, like I see that as being an immense,
Speaker 1: an immense white pill, right, a case for hope. And
Speaker 1: look like, if it doesn't work, if this project all
Speaker 1: turns to dust, well look man, it's better than watching
Speaker 1: Netflix and blowing your brains out. I guess like it.
Speaker 1: At the very least, it is a meaning to your life,
Speaker 1: which is I think, you know, even if it is
Speaker 1: ultimately unsuccessful, there's sort of a heroism and a doomed cause.
Speaker 1: And I don't think our cause is due.
Speaker 2: You know, it's in talking to you now for over
Speaker 2: ninety minutes. And you know, my friend Matt Smith, I
Speaker 2: don't know if you follow him and his son Maxim
Speaker 2: with the book The Preparation that they put out back
Speaker 2: a few months ago.
Speaker 1: You should.
Speaker 2: You should talk to Matt on your show Maxim two.
Speaker 1: Yeah, check that out.
Speaker 2: They wrote a book, Matt, excuse me, Matt, Maxim and
Speaker 2: Doug Casey wrote a book called The Preparation and it's
Speaker 2: it's a path that they carved out for Matt's son
Speaker 2: Max And you can follow him on Substack and it's
Speaker 2: a really good book, which I'll let those guys, you know,
Speaker 2: going to go into detail with you decide to have
Speaker 2: him on. But Ben keller Ren I've had on here.
Speaker 2: Will has been on now a couple of times. Make
Speaker 2: sure I'm not missing anybody here. I don't want to
Speaker 2: forget anybody any I think that's it. But you know,
Speaker 2: talking to you guys is I'm gonna group you here
Speaker 2: for a second because it does provide me with a
Speaker 2: practical approach. Provide, not provide me, provide a practical approach
Speaker 2: on where we're at and working within the system the
Speaker 2: best that you can. And it's it's great to hear,
Speaker 2: you know, And so I appreciate you, you know, taking
Speaker 2: time for me to taking time to come on.
Speaker 1: Sure thing, man, thank you so much for having me on.
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed it.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: While I'm thinking about this, uh, you should talk to
Speaker 1: my buddy Johann Kurz.
Speaker 2: I'm talking to him. I'm actually talking to him. The
Speaker 2: first week in March, Yeah, first week in Marshall be
Speaker 2: on my show.
Speaker 1: He was on.
Speaker 2: He was on with Matt. He was on with Matt
Speaker 2: Smith and Doug Casey.
Speaker 1: They're working on a very similar project. But Johann's book
Speaker 1: is fantastic. I liked it so much I got given
Speaker 1: a copy by him. I gave that away. I've bought
Speaker 1: four more copies and given them out, that's how much
Speaker 1: I like it. But he's another person who is in
Speaker 1: a much more intelligent, well expressed way, looking at the
Speaker 1: same issues that I have that I am, and similarly
Speaker 1: has decided to actually do something about it. So for
Speaker 1: those wondering, like, oh, what should I do Johann Kurz
Speaker 1: leaving the legacy, that'll be my That'll be my shill,
Speaker 1: check that book out. But there were many minds devoted
Speaker 1: to this problem, and like Kurrs, many others, many serious
Speaker 1: people who could be, you know, making lots of money
Speaker 1: and not thinking about this, who've decided that this issue
Speaker 1: is worth their time.
Speaker 2: Where could people find you?
Speaker 1: So you can find me The Jay Burton Show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube,
Speaker 1: anywhere you want to listen to podcasts. I similarly have
Speaker 1: a free and premium feed. The premium feeds on Patreon,
Speaker 1: Substack or gum Road. It's like five bucks a month.
Speaker 1: It's pretty cheap. Helps me support this project, get the
Speaker 1: episodes early and add free, but you get all the
Speaker 1: same content so you don't have to feel like you're
Speaker 1: missing out on the free feed. But again, Mike, thank
Speaker 1: you so much for having me on. Man, this was
Speaker 1: a ton of fun.
Speaker 2: For those that you know have not supported Jack and
Speaker 2: has showed the Jay Burden Show, you know, I think
Speaker 2: after listening to him for ninety minutes, it gives you
Speaker 2: if you don't have a re if you didn't have
Speaker 2: a reason, then you have a reason now and support
Speaker 2: what he's doing. And you know it's important. And I
Speaker 2: thank you, and you know, I hope, I hope this
Speaker 2: is the first of many conversations ahead. I'll be the host,
Speaker 2: you'd be the guest.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure again, I'll have to come back on this
Speaker 1: with a ton of fun.
Speaker 2: Mike drop Jay Burton, thanks for coming back, man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, it's good to see you again. I'm glad
Speaker 1: to be back.
Speaker 2: Appreciate you taking the time. You know, we were just
Speaker 2: talking offline for a minute and you know, talking about
Speaker 2: Johann Kurtz, which you mentioned him when last time when
Speaker 2: when you and I spoke, and uh what it's incredible
Speaker 2: that you know I had Will Will Tanner on yesterday
Speaker 2: got to speak with Johan have have you have had
Speaker 2: had you on before and now you're back, and man,
Speaker 2: I'm just so appreciati that you guys make time for me.
Speaker 2: So thanks.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, of course, I'm happy to be here. I'm
Speaker 1: always somewhat uh, somewhat cautious to be mentioned in the
Speaker 1: same sentences as Johan and Will, who are extremely well
Speaker 1: spoken in Genteel and I Will put out at least
Speaker 1: one to two episodes a week with a dick joke
Speaker 1: in it, so you know, it's uh, I'm surrounded by
Speaker 1: uh by better men. Yeah, man, the uh it's funny.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if I mentioned this to Johann,
Speaker 1: but I've given out like three or four copies of
Speaker 1: this book. I like it. I've just bought a you know,
Speaker 1: a bundle of of off Amazon, and actually I still
Speaker 1: have one more copy. I just haven't had time to
Speaker 1: give it to the guy I think he'd be. For
Speaker 1: the point is, yeah, what can you say about that guy?
Speaker 1: He's very, very talented, And I've got to catch up
Speaker 1: on that episode I have. After he and I spoke last,
Speaker 1: which is probably six months ago, I haven't been in
Speaker 1: touch and I have something I need to fix because
Speaker 1: uh yeah, as you've said, great guy and very very
Speaker 1: uh well spoken, which is a you know, commendable trait.
Speaker 2: Well and you know also with that, I was talking
Speaker 2: to somebody in the gym last week and he was,
Speaker 2: you know, I'm gonna be forty eight next month. And
Speaker 2: this guy was, if I had to guess, was older
Speaker 2: than me, and he was ripping on younger people, which
Speaker 2: you hear, you hear this stuff. And so I was
Speaker 2: talking were specifically referencing my conversations with both Will and
Speaker 2: you that I was having this week, and I said, I,
Speaker 2: you know, I gotta tell you, the younger people, some
Speaker 2: of the ones I talked to, they're not clueless, they're
Speaker 2: not dumb, they're not stupid, and you know what, they're
Speaker 2: taking their own initiative. They don't want to go to
Speaker 2: the corporate route. They don't want to go to the
Speaker 2: traditional and you know what, I don't blame them. I
Speaker 2: wish I would have been that age to recognize it
Speaker 2: because I hated it. I hated college, no offense to
Speaker 2: people to go, but I hated corporate sitting at a
Speaker 2: desk all day long. So I have a lot of
Speaker 2: optimism and hope and you know, I hate that word
Speaker 2: for your like people in your age, the gen z s.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well I think on that like that guy, I
Speaker 1: don't know what his specific complaints were who he was
Speaker 1: talking about, but look like we understand that, you know,
Speaker 1: wisdom and experience is something you get with age, and
Speaker 1: so you know, you definitely see younger guys sort of
Speaker 1: falling into you know, well traveled pitfalls, right, So on
Speaker 1: one hand, you get it, but at the same time,
Speaker 1: we've got to understand that, like we're talking about a
Speaker 1: large group of people and like that that talented top
Speaker 1: ten percent, Well, it's always a minority, right, So if
Speaker 1: we're talking about the large the largest groups, right, a
Speaker 1: whole general, especially one where you know you still have
Speaker 1: and I'm a little fuzzy on this, but you still
Speaker 1: have kids in high school, right who are part of
Speaker 1: that generation. It's like, well, you're probably not wrong, Like sure,
Speaker 1: I'm one hundred percent sure that you know, nine eyed
Speaker 1: out of one hundred nineteen year olds or morons. I
Speaker 1: certainly was. But at the same time, right, we've got
Speaker 1: to understand one who will be talking about because like
Speaker 1: in a culture like America that's incredibly fractured and diverse
Speaker 1: in both positive and negative sense of that. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: who are you talking about, man, because, like, you know,
Speaker 1: I know a bunch of guys in you know, the
Speaker 1: homeschool space, Like I was talking to this morning at
Speaker 1: the gym, and he's got a twelve year old that
Speaker 1: you know, works jobs with him, you know, like it
Speaker 1: helps his dad as a contractor, knows how to put
Speaker 1: you know, shingles up and do all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: And it's like, Okay, well that's an incredibly capable young man,
Speaker 1: well above his years. So like if we're talking about
Speaker 1: that group orsus anyone else, It's like, I understand the appeal.
Speaker 1: And you see the same with boomers, right, people love
Speaker 1: to throw it around, but uh, you know, if we're
Speaker 1: gonna be adults, we have to talk about groups. I
Speaker 1: understand that. But at the same time, it's like any
Speaker 1: statement is inaccurate on that level, you know, on a
Speaker 1: personal level. And we spoke about this last time. Uh,
Speaker 1: And actually this is funny because this sort of connects
Speaker 1: to our you know, our eventual topic, right, which is
Speaker 1: that this war in Iran, which is there is a
Speaker 1: sharp generational divide in America and as we said last time,
Speaker 1: I really think that is to what degree has the
Speaker 1: system ever really worked for you? And sure, you know
Speaker 1: there are people like Harry Sisson or whatever that you know,
Speaker 1: the DNC twink that people are always making fun off
Speaker 1: like that guy's the bought and paid for right. He
Speaker 1: probably makes a lot of money directly or indirectly from
Speaker 1: his activism, like you'll never see him be anything other
Speaker 1: than that. But I think for a lot of people
Speaker 1: that that kind of you know, college to corporate path
Speaker 1: is either not an option or so unappealing of an
Speaker 1: option that you're sort of forced to go elsewhere. It's funny,
Speaker 1: I think last time, I'm speaking to you about, you know,
Speaker 1: my immediate peer group. And you know, one of my
Speaker 1: best friends, guy I lived with for a long time
Speaker 1: before I got married. He and I were talking and
Speaker 1: you know, oh, give no biographical detail on that, but
Speaker 1: he's the guy who sort of threaded the needle right,
Speaker 1: went to a good school, good grade scholarship, got into
Speaker 1: a you know, relatively lucrative corporate job, and he easily,
Speaker 1: you know, he's got a large you know, runway in
Speaker 1: front of him again to do something else because the
Speaker 1: institutions like that, even if you can sort of I
Speaker 1: guess I've said thread the needle, and we've certainly mentioned before,
Speaker 1: you know, the racial discrimination angle, the weird gender politics
Speaker 1: of the workplace, which are very much felt in corporate America.
Speaker 1: But also one of the weird transitions and you see
Speaker 1: this at all, you know, many different industries, is that,
Speaker 1: particularly over the last five years, there's been a move
Speaker 1: away from training people. And you see this when anytime
Speaker 1: someone's complaining about looking for jobs right where it's like
Speaker 1: the bare minimum entry level position says two to five
Speaker 1: years experience. And Okay, maybe is some of that because
Speaker 1: their positions they're not even looking to fill or it's
Speaker 1: one of those well we don't really need this, but
Speaker 1: if someone comes in who's massively overqualified, will take them?
Speaker 1: Or is it you know, part of the kind of uh,
Speaker 1: you know, like ethnic rackets that we found out about,
Speaker 1: you know, with different hiring practices, you know, the whole
Speaker 1: ongoing you know, h one B scandal that all may
Speaker 1: be part of it, but fundamentally a lot of these
Speaker 1: institutions are not interested in developing people, right. They would
Speaker 1: much rather find someone that someone else has paid to
Speaker 1: develop and then bring them in at the kind of
Speaker 1: middle level, and so, okay, sure, sometimes people are able to,
Speaker 1: you know, like my friend kind of you know, shoot
Speaker 1: the gap. If you're unusually competent in your right place,
Speaker 1: right time, you know, you're able to get thrown into
Speaker 1: a position that is expecting a lot of you, and
Speaker 1: you're able to rise that that one hundred percent exists.
Speaker 1: But that creates a very weird culture of there is
Speaker 1: nobody under a certain age and no one without you know,
Speaker 1: a certain number of kind of years in that institution.
Speaker 1: And so one of the things that we're seeing is
Speaker 1: that a lot of companies, because we've been talking about
Speaker 1: you and I personally, the people this problem with how
Speaker 1: different industries are gray right, they have a relatively small
Speaker 1: number of highly competent people nearing retirement who know how
Speaker 1: XYZ works, you know, the power grid, the you know,
Speaker 1: the water treatment plant or whatever, and they are retiring
Speaker 1: that knowledge is being lost with them, Well, at least
Speaker 1: what I'm seeing in their articles on this. You can
Speaker 1: certainly find them if you search where companies have basically
Speaker 1: started to make the gamble that well, what if we
Speaker 1: just pay that guy two x his working rate to
Speaker 1: sit in a cubicle for a year and a half
Speaker 1: and dump all of his knowledge into an AI that
Speaker 1: will solve the problem. Now we don't know if it
Speaker 1: will or not. I'm perhaps a little skeptical, but you know,
Speaker 1: that corporate route is, even if you can make it
Speaker 1: in the door, very difficult to you know, advance up
Speaker 1: the level because you have a large number of people
Speaker 1: who are by virtue of the sort of entry requirements
Speaker 1: ahead of you and also sort of bought into that institution.
Speaker 1: And so my buddy and others to basically been like,
Speaker 1: you know what, like, I don't want to be behind
Speaker 1: this big glut of people who are ten to fifteen
Speaker 1: years above me forever. I'll have to wait until they
Speaker 1: retire to ever rise above a certain level. The whole
Speaker 1: population pyramid is really distorted due to know a whole
Speaker 1: number of different things. And also, you know, the point
Speaker 1: is all of that is not just me complaining about
Speaker 1: the job market. It's to say that again, these sort
Speaker 1: of trends and forces that push people out don't tend
Speaker 1: to only push them out along one vector. Finally bringing
Speaker 1: it back to you know, the Iran war, we're seeing
Speaker 1: a very sharp divide I think it was New York Times.
Speaker 1: I'm not entirely sure it was a prestige outlet. Forgive
Speaker 1: me for not having a citation to hand that broke
Speaker 1: down opinions on Israel favorable or unfavorable by demographic as
Speaker 1: you would expect. More Republicans like Israel to Democrats. That
Speaker 1: you know, goes back to Carter and Reagan. Don't need
Speaker 1: to get into that, but the divide on age is
Speaker 1: rather sharp, and they put it at fifty basically that
Speaker 1: the majority of self described Republicans have unfavorable views of
Speaker 1: of Israel. It's a pretty dramatic majority. It's nearing sixty
Speaker 1: percent obviously, you know when you count that fifty plus,
Speaker 1: which is the majority of the Republican Party, of course,
Speaker 1: so it's you know, more heavily weighted that shifts. And
Speaker 1: this is what I've seen anecdotally is that my friends
Speaker 1: and peers, and sure some of them are like me,
Speaker 1: political nutcases, but most aren't. They're just kind of normal guys.
Speaker 1: Are by the standards of the ADL, extremely anti Semitic.
Speaker 1: And is that personal right? Are they going to their
Speaker 1: accountant's house with a burning cross?
Speaker 2: No, not at all.
Speaker 1: It's not that sort of quote unquote anti Semitism.
Speaker 2: It is a.
Speaker 1: To put it mildly, and aversion to our relationship to
Speaker 1: the State of Israel. And one of the long term
Speaker 1: struggles of the Republican Party. First we saw the sort
Speaker 1: of Maga revolution, right, and the problem with that from
Speaker 1: sort of a a political view is that it's sort
Speaker 1: of a cult to personality. Right, it's tied up in
Speaker 1: one man, Donald Trump. And look like, if you study
Speaker 1: your history, you understand this is a repeat thing. Right,
Speaker 1: movements tend to be led by one man. But you know,
Speaker 1: just given the kind of limitations of current American politics,
Speaker 1: at some point, Donald Trump is not going to be
Speaker 1: around anymore. He's either going to retire or he's going
Speaker 1: to pass away. He's, you know, an old man. So
Speaker 1: the question was always, well, you know, what becomes of
Speaker 1: this project after him? Right, what becomes of Maga or
Speaker 1: this kind of marriage of Mega and the Republican Party.
Speaker 1: And one of the really shall we say, interesting dynamics
Speaker 1: in twenty four was that men under thirty swung hard
Speaker 1: for Trump. Right in certain states, they were, you know,
Speaker 1: the deciding factor. It's been two years. Forgive me, I
Speaker 1: don't remember all my electoral maps. But this was a
Speaker 1: well reported upon, you know, feature of that election, and
Speaker 1: it was recognized by Democrats to such a degree that
Speaker 1: they started dumping a lot of money into right Harry Sissan, others,
Speaker 1: these kind of like mega or not MAGA sorry, like DNC,
Speaker 1: you know, TikTok influencers who you know. I'm not on TikTok.
Speaker 1: I don't understand it, but I see some bleed over.
Speaker 1: But also you may remember that rather uh, how would
Speaker 1: you say this, kindly uh, rather well built Hispanic woman
Speaker 1: that the DMC brought in as their sort of like,
Speaker 1: you know, ambassador to young men. She was going around
Speaker 1: to like uh, you know, frat parties and things like that.
Speaker 1: It went about as well as you would imagine. So
Speaker 1: it was incompetent, but at the very at least there
Speaker 1: was a reaction. There's a recognition that this group has shifted.
Speaker 1: If we, you know, assume normal trends that people tend
Speaker 1: to become more conservatives they age. If this group is
Speaker 1: already you know, a strong leader for you know, a
Speaker 1: strong sort of support of GOP, that will create problems.
Speaker 1: We need to hit that off. And that firstwhile effort
Speaker 1: was not successful quite simply just due to you know,
Speaker 1: the last ten years of you know, kind of like
Speaker 1: woke racial guilt politics. You know, this sort of extreme
Speaker 1: miss injury. It wasn't really working. But and it's not
Speaker 1: just this, but it is a part of it. This
Speaker 1: sort of salavish devotion, uh to the state of Israel
Speaker 1: has really alienated those people. And okay, sure, in many cases,
Speaker 1: is it you know, the most aeradyite kind of John
Speaker 1: Jay Meersheimer, you know, breaking down, you know, the power politics. No,
Speaker 1: it's gut level, it's instinctual. It's wrong in certain you know,
Speaker 1: provable factual instances. But people feel as if they were
Speaker 1: sold America first. They were sold you know, fixing our
Speaker 1: domestic problems, and what they got was a bunch of
Speaker 1: court cases. You know, things got wrapped up by the judiciary, which, okay,
Speaker 1: fair enough, isn't necessarily the president or the Republican Party's
Speaker 1: fault per se. And a huge shift to effectively neocon
Speaker 1: foreign wars. Right time is a flat circle. It's two
Speaker 1: thousand and six all over again. Nothing has changed.
Speaker 2: And when you ran, when you won effectively as a
Speaker 2: protest candidate, as someone who said everything that's going on now,
Speaker 2: whether it's you know, and a lot of it was
Speaker 2: the domestic excesses of the woke left, the trans kids,
Speaker 2: you know, the BLM stuff, the feeling that we have
Speaker 2: a demented old man at the head of this country,
Speaker 2: you know, throwing out you know, insane policies.
Speaker 1: I don't want that to stop. And you know, Trump
Speaker 1: came in with a large group of kind of disparate
Speaker 1: people you can think of, you know, Kennedy, you know,
Speaker 1: the kind of podcast circuit, all of these people who
Speaker 1: aren't necessarily natural Republicans per se to borrow a phrase
Speaker 1: from Reagan. Well, okay, sure that was going to be
Speaker 1: difficult to keep together. But seemingly every single one of
Speaker 1: those secondary issues has fallen by the wayside for foreign policy.
Speaker 1: And sure, foreign policy doesn't necessarily matter a ton of
Speaker 1: elections directly, right, it doesn't matter. Like to be honest,
Speaker 1: I think most people, especially most right leaning people, are
Speaker 1: relatively ambivalent on this war. But the problem is the perception,
Speaker 1: if we can use that term, that this is the
Speaker 1: highest priority, right, this is the actual purpose of everything,
Speaker 1: because all of those other secondary priorities have bent for
Speaker 1: this one. If foreign you know, ally quote unquote.
Speaker 2: Jake let me let me, let me interrupt you for
Speaker 2: a second. No, it's okay, let me because I'm gonna
Speaker 2: ask you something. As you've just explained, you know, from
Speaker 2: a from a from a political standpoint, what is you
Speaker 2: how do you feel watching these this war unfold like
Speaker 2: you as a as a married and you know as
Speaker 2: a husband, as a young man, what are your thoughts
Speaker 2: on it?
Speaker 1: Well? Look, uh so I just want to from the
Speaker 1: very beginning say, this is a very difficult war to
Speaker 1: get any information on. We don't have any embedded reporters,
Speaker 1: and everyone is lying. The propaganda I'm sorry, I mean
Speaker 1: to cut out. The propaganda is wild.
Speaker 2: Right now. Did you see a video going around this morning,
Speaker 2: the Lego video.
Speaker 1: No I didn't.
Speaker 2: Oh I should have sent it to you before. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's another one of these. You've seen a few of them.
Speaker 2: They've been putting them out periodically. There was another one
Speaker 2: that came out. I don't know, maybe it was last night,
Speaker 2: but I saw it first thing this morning when I
Speaker 2: got up, and it's another one of the Trump Israel.
Speaker 2: It's wild. It's like two minutes long. I mean it.
Speaker 2: I don't know who's making these things. They claim it's
Speaker 2: from Iran, but who knows. But to your point, you
Speaker 2: don't know where this is coming from and who's putting
Speaker 2: it out and.
Speaker 1: Right, so there is as you probably garnered from this
Speaker 1: discussion so far. I'm not the biggest fan of of
Speaker 1: Israel or the Lecud party, but I want to be
Speaker 1: cautious because there is a pattern of sort of crowing
Speaker 1: over the defeat of you know, the American military and
Speaker 1: of Israel. It is not necessarily honest. So for instance,
Speaker 1: you have things like actually this this raid to save
Speaker 1: a down to pilot, which we don't really know anything about.
Speaker 1: But the tweet that went around.
Speaker 2: Was can I say sorry? That makes no sense to me.
Speaker 2: I haven't talked about this on here yet from what
Speaker 2: I understand, and I could be wrong that he hiked
Speaker 2: seven thousand feet after crashing a plane on a broken leg.
Speaker 2: Now I've hiked three thousand feet before. I'm not as
Speaker 2: fit as a pilot, but I also didn't crash a
Speaker 2: plane before I did it. And three thousand feet. I
Speaker 2: went from ninety five hundred to twelve thousand, five hundred
Speaker 2: on a mountain in Arizona. It's hard. A thousand feet
Speaker 2: is hard, and these are well, travel trails that I
Speaker 2: was on very populated, you know, groomed for hiking. So
Speaker 2: I'm having a hard time buying the story about this
Speaker 2: pilot seven thousand feet crashing a plane three thousand feet
Speaker 2: So that's a hard hike. Sorry, no, no, not at all.
Speaker 1: And there's there's a point to what you're saying. I'm
Speaker 1: not the guy to talk to on that. I've not
Speaker 1: done a ton of research. I'm merely using this as
Speaker 1: sort of a prop, if you will, to explore this
Speaker 1: point where it's like, look like that from the like
Speaker 1: maximally anti Israel, anti American position, you have people saying like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, you idiots. You know this plane got shot down.
Speaker 1: All the planes of America are getting shot down, and
Speaker 1: how they wasted all this money to go grab a guy.
Speaker 1: I mean, man, I don't know. It seems like this
Speaker 1: war isn't going great, just from the perspective of, well,
Speaker 1: are people clamoring to take credit or are they looking
Speaker 1: to blame other people? Seems as if they're looking to
Speaker 1: attribute plame. Wh's just from a human behavior standpoint indicates
Speaker 1: to me this isn't some sort of soaring success. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, look like we're fighting a real
Speaker 1: country with real air defenses and a real government. Like
Speaker 1: do I think that's good? No, But on balance, it
Speaker 1: seems as if our planes are doing relatively well. They're
Speaker 1: not raining out of the sky like it's you know,
Speaker 1: footage from World War Two. So I want to admit that, like,
Speaker 1: not all of the coverage we were seeing is honest
Speaker 1: or true or fairly sees what we're fairly portrays what
Speaker 1: is possibly because again that's the other part. We don't
Speaker 1: really have, you know, sort of a divine like a
Speaker 1: plumb line on this. But I will say, big picture,
Speaker 1: what I'm feeling is sort of what I joked about earlier,
Speaker 1: right time is a flat circle like this, you know,
Speaker 1: decade and a half process to kick the neo cons out,
Speaker 1: to get away from the conservatism. The governance of George W.
Speaker 1: Bush has failed, or at least it's deeply, deeply imperiled.
Speaker 1: Because look like the anti War Coalition wasn't the biggest
Speaker 1: part of MAGA, but you can trace a direct line
Speaker 1: from anti Bush to the Tea Party to the roots
Speaker 1: of MAGA. It was people who basically said, I want
Speaker 1: a government run for my benefit, an America first government,
Speaker 1: and when government officials, Rubio, Trump himself and others have
Speaker 1: basically said, well, Israel sort of forced us into this, right,
Speaker 1: we didn't want to do it, but you know the
Speaker 1: exact reason why. But they basically, you know, put down
Speaker 1: an ultimatum and so we felt like we had to. Well,
Speaker 1: it doesn't feel like an America first government, right. That
Speaker 1: feels as if the priorities of a foreign nation, excuse me,
Speaker 1: rank higher than domestic ones. That naturally rankles people. You
Speaker 1: see this as well in the response to you know,
Speaker 1: the Joe Kent resignation. I assume everyone's heard about it.
Speaker 1: Basically Joe Kent, leader of some office in DNI for
Speaker 1: counter terrorism, resigned basically said, you know, I can no
Speaker 1: longer continue with this war. Seems as if you know,
Speaker 1: Israel goddess into this, and okay, you can believe him,
Speaker 1: you cannot believe him. You can think Joe Kent is
Speaker 1: a rat bastard, you can think he's an American hero. Realistically,
Speaker 1: does that matter? Right, He's a minor d and I
Speaker 1: official from an office that before now, like I guarantee you,
Speaker 1: neither you nor I knew about or could name you
Speaker 1: another director of that position. Right. But the response from
Speaker 1: the sort of Zionist aligned media is telling you have
Speaker 1: Alan Doshowitz noted massage enthusiast freaking out, absolutely losing his mind.
Speaker 1: This piece on substack. You can read where he calls,
Speaker 1: you know, Joe Kent, you know, an anti Semite, Jew hating,
Speaker 1: neo Nazi Nazi lover, and you're like, well, okay, man,
Speaker 1: he didn't say anything much Jews at all. He didn't,
Speaker 1: you know, use ugly or a piece of racial language.
Speaker 1: I haven't really heard any stories about Joe Kent making
Speaker 1: an extracurricular trip down to Argentina to you know, hang
Speaker 1: out with some hundred year old guys. To me, that
Speaker 1: seems unhinged. It seems insane. And when you're seeing it
Speaker 1: from other figures like Mark Levin, who's been heavily boosted
Speaker 1: by the President a number of times, effectively frothing at
Speaker 1: the mouth, you know, calling for blood, it seems kind
Speaker 1: of insane. And it seems especially insane, and you're like,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, well, why don't you care this much
Speaker 1: about my stuff, the stuff that I voted for you
Speaker 1: to do as a citizen of this country first and foremost.
Speaker 1: That seems as if that's the deal. And look, I'm
Speaker 1: not ideological about this. I understand corruption is sort of
Speaker 1: a fact of America, a fact of political organization period.
Speaker 1: You know, our leaders are you know, ultimately you know, human,
Speaker 1: and you know they have their moral failings. But it
Speaker 1: seems as if a request for h the leaders of
Speaker 1: my country to be primarily concerned with the running of
Speaker 1: my country, I mean that seems kind of reasonable. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm not even asking for you to be this sort
Speaker 1: of like wise philosopher king, just to care more about
Speaker 1: me than some other country. And when you combine that
Speaker 1: with you know, the fact that another big reason that
Speaker 1: Trump was elected is because you know, Biden's economy was
Speaker 1: was awful. It felt hopeless, It felt as if, you know,
Speaker 1: everyone was kind of you know, losing. You know that
Speaker 1: people were getting poor. And not only has the economy
Speaker 1: not gotten better, but the result of this war have
Speaker 1: made it worse. Right, the strait of horm moves might
Speaker 1: or might not be open right now. It's sort of unclear.
Speaker 1: We're in the middle of this like bizarre maybe cease
Speaker 1: fire maybe not again. The reporting on this has been
Speaker 1: really difficult, But fundamentally, when you you know, you sort
Speaker 1: of run on a like I'll make everything stop sucking
Speaker 1: so much, and you do things that materially make people's
Speaker 1: lives harder. For instance, we've all seen gas prices shoot up. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: does you know the lady who works at the local
Speaker 1: cracker barrel? Does she care about the fact that the
Speaker 1: new Ayatola may or may not be gay? Or does
Speaker 1: she even know what the IRGC is? Probably not, she
Speaker 1: doesn't care. And if she voted for Donald Trump, it
Speaker 1: was to make things better. And when things are getting worse,
Speaker 1: and things aren't getting worse due to you know, for instance,
Speaker 1: a free hurricane or just you know, the way that
Speaker 1: the global economy is going, but because of an active
Speaker 1: choice to do something you promised not to on behalf
Speaker 1: of a foreign alleged ally you still have to look
Speaker 1: around and you're like, wait a minute, what was the point, right?
Speaker 1: What was the reason that I, you know, colored in
Speaker 1: that little bubble? And so I think for many people
Speaker 1: it feels as if, right, we tried to do what
Speaker 1: we were supposed to do, right, vote the bums out,
Speaker 1: And very similar thing happened in twenty sixteen, albeit you know,
Speaker 1: at sort of a lower level of amplitude, and at
Speaker 1: least the first time around, you could kind of look
Speaker 1: at it and say, you know what, Well, you know,
Speaker 1: they tried all this stuff. They tried to impeach him,
Speaker 1: they tried to they kept him tied down so we
Speaker 1: couldn't do all that stuff, and they hated him so
Speaker 1: much they cheated to get him out. You believe that
Speaker 1: I happened to. But so there was a story there,
Speaker 1: There was something that you could say, well, you know what,
Speaker 1: this is why pulling the lever didn't do what it
Speaker 1: was supposed to do. And I think what makes this
Speaker 1: one particularly cruel is for that first six months to
Speaker 1: a year, seemed as if it was work right. We
Speaker 1: had Doge going around, you know, draining the swamp right,
Speaker 1: you know, getting rid of all this fraud. And sure,
Speaker 1: you know, there were this kind of flurry of executive
Speaker 1: orders and judicial stays going back and forth, but it
Speaker 1: felt as if something was happening right, they were making
Speaker 1: a good effort of it. And then you know, naturally
Speaker 1: the momentum starts to slow. Fair enough, you had Operation
Speaker 1: Midnight Hammer, which made a lot of splash on Twitter.
Speaker 1: I don't think it really mattered for real people. It
Speaker 1: was so short, and it was like, okay, I guess
Speaker 1: we blew up their nuclear program. Who knows either way? Right, whatever, Okay,
Speaker 1: But then when it feels as if that momentum, that
Speaker 1: positive sentiment has run out, you know, you're you're dealing
Speaker 1: with like real domestic issues and the entire focus has
Speaker 1: shifted to the exact sort of foreign policy that ten
Speaker 1: years ago Donald Trump was criticizing. Right, he was making
Speaker 1: fun of the other Republican candidates in twenty fifteen in
Speaker 1: a way that shot him to popularity, right, making fun
Speaker 1: of Jeb Bush. You know, you can go back to
Speaker 1: the tweets Ruth's criticizing Obama, and so to me, you know,
Speaker 1: even aside from how well is this war going, are we,
Speaker 1: you know, kicking ass and taking names? Are we kicking ass?
Speaker 1: Taking names and then creating further problems? Is it a debacle?
Speaker 1: Who knows? But I think that the real problem and
Speaker 1: the real problem for a lot of people, and the
Speaker 1: reason that you see support from you know, young men
Speaker 1: just absolutely disintegrated right in the raw aggregate. I believe
Speaker 1: Trump's under thirty approval on his first day and office
Speaker 1: was negative one, which, okay, that's still negative but compare
Speaker 1: that to other Republican presidents. Right, that's a win. It's
Speaker 1: now deep into the double digits negative, right, very very unpopular.
Speaker 2: And so do you do do you go alongside with that? Jay?
Speaker 2: I mean? And if you don't mind asking, and I
Speaker 2: think I asked.
Speaker 1: You before, how do you Yeah? I am twenty six,
Speaker 1: so I'm right at the top end of gend.
Speaker 2: Do you feel like you're accurate with that reading?
Speaker 1: I mean?
Speaker 2: Is that how you personally do?
Speaker 1: I do? And as we said last time, this is
Speaker 1: heavily dependent on sex. Right, women are, especially gen Z
Speaker 1: women are much the left of men. And what I
Speaker 1: also don't think is going to happen is that the
Speaker 1: Democrats are going to win young white men. They aren't
Speaker 1: for any number of reasons. But what I think we're
Speaker 1: going to see is what we've seen time and time again,
Speaker 1: which is that conservative aligned voters just stay home, they
Speaker 1: don't show up. You're seeing that in kind of down
Speaker 1: ballot races across the nation. And what's frustrating to me
Speaker 1: is taking setting aside my feelings about this because, as
Speaker 1: I've said before, not a huge fan of the State
Speaker 1: of Israel for any number of reasons, but Okay, setting
Speaker 1: that aside, the political calculation here is baffling to me
Speaker 1: on on its face, because look like setting aside this,
Speaker 1: setting aside, you know, gas prices or anything else, the
Speaker 1: president had a pretty narrow gap to shoot. It's probably
Speaker 1: going to lose the House, but had a decent chance
Speaker 1: of keeping the Senate. Why does that matter? Well, one,
Speaker 1: you know, so he doesn't just get stuck doing nothing forever,
Speaker 1: vetoing you know, pants on heads, retarded bills and getting
Speaker 1: nothing done. But also, let's be honest, the Democrats want
Speaker 1: to impeach him. It've been very clear about that, and
Speaker 1: not only impeach him, but prosecute him and his friends.
Speaker 1: You've heard this rallying cry for certainly the last year,
Speaker 1: but even before that. I see no reason to disbelieve that.
Speaker 1: And so to me, that is really why the midterms matter,
Speaker 1: because you know, it's effectively a really decent shot of
Speaker 1: you know, Donald Trump, Trump being impeached and people around
Speaker 1: him facing jail time. And so, you know, I and
Speaker 1: naively assumed that people would be, if nothing else, at
Speaker 1: least self interested enough to avoid that. Right, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't want to be impeached. I don't want to
Speaker 1: go to jail. I don't want to, you know, be
Speaker 1: under the thumb of you know, figures like Letitia James,
Speaker 1: who you know, I believe suit him for five hundred
Speaker 1: four hundred, five hundred and forty four million dollars right
Speaker 1: to some kind of absurd, astronomical sum for you know,
Speaker 1: something that his accountant maybe should have gotten fined for. Whatever.
Speaker 1: The point is like, that is a very real fear, right,
Speaker 1: that is a very real consequence. And also we are
Speaker 1: also dealing with is shattering any chances of MAGA becoming
Speaker 1: a multi generational product. We spoke last time about the
Speaker 1: you know, the sort of dire economic circumstances where many
Speaker 1: young people also feel as if they're getting screwed over
Speaker 1: to sort of pad the retirement of baby boomers. And
Speaker 1: when you combine that with you know, figures like Lindsay
Speaker 1: Graham saying, you know, I feel as if my highest
Speaker 1: political goal is to go back to South Carolina and
Speaker 1: convince them to send their daughters and sons to die
Speaker 1: in the Middle East. You're like, well, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: I'm one of those sons, you know, I'm you know,
Speaker 1: I guess currently depending on this is another news story
Speaker 1: I was very difficult to verify if the age of
Speaker 1: selective service has been increased or not. Who knows. But
Speaker 1: the fact that that story went incredibly viral and I had,
Speaker 1: you know, my friends basically walking up to me shilling
Speaker 1: their phone and they're like, is this true? And I'm like,
Speaker 1: I have no idea indicates right that there is a
Speaker 1: lot of anxiety around that, a lot of feeling like
Speaker 1: wait a minute.
Speaker 2: So I don't mean it could interrupt you're right there,
Speaker 2: but like, so, I'm glad you bring this up because
Speaker 2: it's the automatic registration, I believe, right, Isn't that what
Speaker 2: the isn't that? What's the Do you know what the
Speaker 2: age rage is on that? Uh?
Speaker 1: At least as far as I know currently, it is
Speaker 1: eighteen twenty six, But there have been news stories. I
Speaker 1: have not verified this, so it is a rumor going
Speaker 1: around that that has or will be raised to thirty two.
Speaker 1: Who knows if that's true or not. But the fact
Speaker 1: that I have people in my normal life, right, guys
Speaker 1: who are in that you know, twenty six to thirty
Speaker 1: two age bracket saying like, hey, did you see this?
Speaker 1: I mean to me, that indicates that people are worried
Speaker 1: about it. They feel as if like, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: am I not only getting screwed because I can't buy
Speaker 1: a house or I can't you know, get a decent
Speaker 1: paying job, but also, now you know, you, Lindsey Graham,
Speaker 1: expect me to go fight some sort of ill conceived war.
Speaker 1: And again, I don't think there will ever be another
Speaker 1: Vietnam style draft for a whole number of different reasons.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's politically viable. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: the fact that anecdotally people are worried about it, people
Speaker 1: were concerned about it.
Speaker 2: Are you, Jay means that are you worried about it?
Speaker 1: Person? Uh?
Speaker 2: Person?
Speaker 1: Only know because I genuinely don't think there will be
Speaker 1: another draft for a number of reasons. I also don't
Speaker 1: think a land invasion of Iran is just geographically possible.
Speaker 1: It would be very difficult for us to do that,
Speaker 1: and so I could be wrong. I hope I'm right,
Speaker 1: But to me, I view that as more of kind
Speaker 1: of a leading indicator of generally felt anxiety, right of
Speaker 1: feeling like, wait a minute, I'm getting set up for
Speaker 1: something else that's gonna screw me over. And I think
Speaker 1: that's the feeling of a lot of people of like,
Speaker 1: not only did everything stay the same, right, did it
Speaker 1: just continue to be kind of shitty? But now this, right,
Speaker 1: you're adding another thing onto it. And at least from
Speaker 1: what I've seen, like, I don't see a lot of
Speaker 1: guys saying like, all right, great time to get out
Speaker 1: my shade guavera T shirt. They're just much like we
Speaker 1: were talking about with the corporate world, looking at you know,
Speaker 1: the political system, be like, what can I even do? Right?
Speaker 1: It seems as if there's no place for me, because
Speaker 1: really it seems as if and this may be the
Speaker 1: lesson of both you know, Ukraine and Israel, it's that
Speaker 1: you know, you're allowed some leeway domestically, but on the
Speaker 1: foreign policy front, it's always John McCain, right, no matter
Speaker 1: what you do, you're always going to be, you know,
Speaker 1: funding some foreign war the very least, if not, you know,
Speaker 1: sending people to you know, kill and die there and
Speaker 1: look like I'm not And I get this feeling as well,
Speaker 1: kind of you know, emotionally opposed to war as a concept,
Speaker 1: Like there are certainly guys in the anti war movement
Speaker 1: who view every war as illegitimate. I don't you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not some sort of peace nick, But to me
Speaker 1: and I think the thing that galls a lot of
Speaker 1: guys is it's like, well, this is so transparently not
Speaker 1: in our interest. This is so transparently not even our idea.
Speaker 1: So for instance, right, you have the Leaderanian negotiator, you know,
Speaker 1: in kind of back channel talks, trying to get this
Speaker 1: thing wound down, and he and his wife get killed
Speaker 1: in Pakistan by and his Ralely strike and you're like,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, aren't you guys supposed to be our friends, right,
Speaker 1: why are you killing the guys we're trying to talk
Speaker 1: to or similarly, write this kind of weird abortive maybe
Speaker 1: a cease fire, maybe not where you know, uh, Israel
Speaker 1: just continued striking Lebanon, you know, after we had sort
Speaker 1: of done some sort of deal. And look, don't get
Speaker 1: me wrong, it seems as if the Pakistani's kind of
Speaker 1: screwed the pooch on that one, like there was a
Speaker 1: big miscommunication. But nonetheless, right, it's sort of like that,
Speaker 1: you know, you've ever seen it, like at a bar
Speaker 1: where it's you know, a guy, you kind of a
Speaker 1: big dude, and his tiny little girlfriend and she starts
Speaker 1: picking fights, you know, and now he's the guy who
Speaker 1: has to sort of sort this out afterwards, you know,
Speaker 1: the kind of drug sorority girl. But like that feels
Speaker 1: as if the situation the situation we're in where it's like, well,
Speaker 1: we're not the ones making these decisions, but we're on
Speaker 1: the hook for right you have again, you know, Israeli
Speaker 1: officials confirming that, you know, idea of soldiers will not
Speaker 1: participate in a ground invasion of Iran. Again, I think
Speaker 1: that a ground invasion of Iran is fairly unlikely, But
Speaker 1: I also would have said that, you know, unilateral out
Speaker 1: of the blue assassination of Iotola that was unlikely. So,
Speaker 1: you know, may not be your guy for predicting things.
Speaker 1: But I think that if we can really drill down
Speaker 1: to it, the the problem is not necessarily the particular
Speaker 1: you know, vagaries of foreign policy, but it's that general
Speaker 1: feeling of oh, I'm getting screwed and you guys are compromised.
Speaker 1: And I'm not saying, you know, this is Epstein stuff
Speaker 1: or whatever, but like you are not acting in my
Speaker 1: best interest. You have a higher priority. That isn't me,
Speaker 1: that isn't even America. It's those guys over there, and
Speaker 1: that's really frustrating to people. And so you know, you
Speaker 1: have figures even as you know kind of you know, diverses,
Speaker 1: guys like you know, uh, your Theovonne and Tim Dillon,
Speaker 1: who like, look aren't intellectuals, but they do have big
Speaker 1: audiences and they're widely listened to saying things along that line, right,
Speaker 1: saying things that like it basically seems as if you
Speaker 1: know this, this whole maga America first thing was a
Speaker 1: giant scam. I mean, the Epstein stuff is another great example, right,
Speaker 1: another instance where people felt like, I have this burning
Speaker 1: desire to fix this, like we don't do that anymore,
Speaker 1: that's not what we are. And sure we got way
Speaker 1: more documents, albeit you know, it was done very differently
Speaker 1: than we were led to believe, but still we had
Speaker 1: a bunch of documents out. And again it feels as
Speaker 1: if you know, we were promised transparency and we got
Speaker 1: more cover up. We were promised to America first and
Speaker 1: meet got Israel first. And look like, I don't irrationally
Speaker 1: hate Donald Trump, I don't have TDS. I don't I'm
Speaker 1: not sort of morally offended by the kind of borish
Speaker 1: or you know, it's like uncooth things he says in general,
Speaker 1: I think they're pretty funny. I still think he's funny,
Speaker 1: but it's like, look, man, like this was conditional for me.
Speaker 1: I gave you support because there was a patronage element here.
Speaker 1: It was a quid pro quo. And that's why Donald
Speaker 1: Trump shot to popularity, particularly with his most devoted, you
Speaker 1: know group, because normal working class white Americans had been
Speaker 1: for a long time promised a lot and given very
Speaker 1: low right. They have been promised these kind of vagaries
Speaker 1: about you know, either Christian values or you know, how
Speaker 1: trickle down economics would finally hit them.
Speaker 2: Tariff checks, the tariff checks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, tariff checks. I mean, that's another great example.
Speaker 1: But the particularly the Democrats had wasted white working class support.
Speaker 1: You know, people like my grandpa who'd been Democrats their
Speaker 1: whole life until Donald Trump showed up because they weren't
Speaker 1: big business people. But they realized they had sort of
Speaker 1: been replaced, that the Democrats weren't interested in white working
Speaker 1: class people anymore. They were interested in the Obama sort
Speaker 1: of rainbow coalition. And when Trump came in and was
Speaker 1: basically like, hey, I'm gonna do things for you I'm
Speaker 1: going to you know, and some protectionist policies bring manufacturing home. Okay,
Speaker 1: fair enough, you promised me something. And did people get
Speaker 1: all of those No, but they sort of got like
Speaker 1: a little bit of like a psychic patronage. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: he's smashing the libs, you know, he's you know, making
Speaker 1: fun of the the you know, the people I hate
Speaker 1: on TV and fair enough, and lots of those people
Speaker 1: will be loyal to him for that till the day
Speaker 1: he dies. He could do anything. But for a lot
Speaker 1: of other people, particularly in twenty four, it sort of
Speaker 1: felt as if like, well, geez, I'm getting screwed. You're
Speaker 1: offering me something, and even if I get one out
Speaker 1: of ten of these crazy promises, well, you know what,
Speaker 1: it's something and the idea. And I think this is why,
Speaker 1: you know, many people are sort of feeling one more
Speaker 1: insulted by this is that like, you know, you have
Speaker 1: the terms for people like us, right, It's like, oh,
Speaker 1: you're a Panican, You're you've tuned out, you know, you're
Speaker 1: you're insufficiently loyal. I have you abandoned ship. It's like, look, man,
Speaker 1: like just.
Speaker 2: So high school is so high school?
Speaker 1: Like yeah, it's also like, isn't it a marriage man?
Speaker 1: You know, like I didn't, I didn't sign a contract.
Speaker 1: It was conditional, right, it was this for that.
Speaker 2: I see people putting this out an X people that
Speaker 2: are older, that are and I'm not going to mention
Speaker 2: them because I don't want to give them any attention.
Speaker 2: But you know they're doing this whole testing loyalty. This
Speaker 2: is a this is a loyalty test. And I'm just like,
Speaker 2: are you are you kidding me? With are you kidding me?
Speaker 2: This is not high school? What are we what are
Speaker 2: we doing here? Well, because I question to your point
Speaker 2: of what you've just explained, you know, over the last
Speaker 2: forty minutes, because you question things and how you're not
Speaker 2: seeing benefit from it. Now all of a sudden, you're
Speaker 2: dis loyal, stupid, no, a hundred sorry, sorry to me.
Speaker 2: And it's one of those no, no, not at all.
Speaker 1: You're completely right, Mike. And it's one of those things
Speaker 1: where like, look like I caught a lot of flack
Speaker 1: early on in the Trump presidency for saying, we owe
Speaker 1: this guy some loyalty, we owe him the benefit of
Speaker 1: the doubt, and so give him a chance one hundred percent,
Speaker 1: And like I'll be honest, Washington guy, take a bullet
Speaker 1: or nearly take a bullet like that worked on me
Speaker 1: fair enough. And so I'm not coming to this position
Speaker 1: out of some irrational hatred for the man, or coming
Speaker 1: to this position because I'm so motivated by you know,
Speaker 1: hate for Israel or hatred of Jews. As Mark Levin
Speaker 1: would put it, that I just am chomping at the
Speaker 1: bit and anything that you know, that nothing would be
Speaker 1: good enough for me. Far from it. But it's sort
Speaker 1: of a you know, a rational actor here right who
Speaker 1: believes that I call balls and star At a certain point,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, look, this isn't in my interest, right,
Speaker 1: You're wasting your political capital, You're wasting your attention doing
Speaker 1: this for someone else, not for me. So like, yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: I'm not exactly hoping that you know, the Malas, you know,
Speaker 1: kill you know, seventy thousand American servicemen. I don't want
Speaker 1: that to happen. But like the idea that I have
Speaker 1: to get screwed over and then you know, clap for it,
Speaker 1: you know, I have to say, like, yes, sir, may
Speaker 1: I have another It's like, look, man, like this didn't
Speaker 1: work for the other guy. It's not working for you.
Speaker 1: You know, this is not some sort of like undying
Speaker 1: blood oath to President Trump. And you know what if
Speaker 1: tomorrow he said, you know what, we're done. This is stupid,
Speaker 1: let's go back home. Fair enough, great awesome, Still a
Speaker 1: stupid decision to get involved in the first place, but like,
Speaker 1: we need to be done with this, and however that happens,
Speaker 1: I'm fine with it, to be perfectly honest. And you know,
Speaker 1: in the future, if he's the one who gets rid
Speaker 1: of directly or indirectly birthright citizenship, great awesome. You know,
Speaker 1: there's some things that we got rid of through him
Speaker 1: that I thought we never would. And so you know,
Speaker 1: on balance, so you have to consider that a point
Speaker 1: in his favor, and I you know, I'm never going
Speaker 1: to diminish that. But at a certain point, it's like
Speaker 1: you've got to understand, right, there is no relationship in
Speaker 1: politics that is unconditional and you know, eternal like that,
Speaker 1: especially you know, given exactly why he you know, sort
Speaker 1: of rose to prominence. I will also say that as
Speaker 1: we go to the generational divide, you know, we're seeing
Speaker 1: this more and more strongly, right that I am not
Speaker 1: alone in these feelings that many people under a certain age.
Speaker 1: Did I mention last time I was on here, I
Speaker 1: can't remember the comments Ben Shapiro made about the war
Speaker 1: in Iran.
Speaker 2: If you do, I don't recall, please share so fair enough,
Speaker 2: And then I want to ask you. I want to
Speaker 2: ask you something else about the draft too, but go ahead, sure, sorry, Sure.
Speaker 1: Ben Shapiro has sort of continued in a trend we
Speaker 1: have seen since really the twenty twenty four election, which
Speaker 1: is a deliberate desire to inject a wedge between older
Speaker 1: and younger Republicans. So you may remember the series of
Speaker 1: leaks that have come out of you know, Young Republicans chats,
Speaker 1: you know, all of these sort of you know, youth
Speaker 1: institutions where you know, different figures have come in and said, oh,
Speaker 1: you know the kids in these chats they're saying naughty things.
Speaker 1: Kick them out, you know, denounce them, get rid of them. Similarly,
Speaker 1: again at Heritage, right where it was, you know, find
Speaker 1: the unbeliever. Oh, this Catholic kid wouldn't go to Shabbat dinner.
Speaker 1: You know he must be there must be something wrong
Speaker 1: with him. You know. The leader of you know, Heritage
Speaker 1: basically you know, first defended you know, Tucker Carlson over
Speaker 1: talking to I believe Darryl Cooper, maybe it was Nick
Speaker 1: fuent Tees. I can't remember either one, and then you know,
Speaker 1: was forced to apologize for that. And we've seen this
Speaker 1: sort of growing moral panic on the kind of neo
Speaker 1: conservative right over grapers quote unquote For those aren't familiar,
Speaker 1: this is a sort of semi derogatory term, although they
Speaker 1: embrace it for fans of Nick Funtes, basically saying that, oh,
Speaker 1: the young people are poisoned, you cut them off.
Speaker 2: Have you met him, Jay, Do you know him?
Speaker 1: I've not met him now.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: But point is, the idea is poisoning the well, right,
Speaker 1: anyone who is under a certain age, and anyone who
Speaker 1: is you know, not on board with the sort of
Speaker 1: you know, maximal neo conversion of Republican politics. Well, they
Speaker 1: are a graper, which is basically just a shorthand for
Speaker 1: a Nazi, and you need to cut them out right.
Speaker 1: Not my beliefs, the beliefs of people who spouse this.
Speaker 1: You've seen this coming from this sort of like you know,
Speaker 1: more explicitly kind of neo conservative way, but also from
Speaker 1: the kind of like former liberals, you know, figures like
Speaker 1: James Lindsay's and others, you know, basically saying like, watch
Speaker 1: out for these guys, don't let them in. And so
Speaker 1: what Ben Shapiro said is a very clever illision where
Speaker 1: he was talking about he was talking about a report
Speaker 1: from I believe the Manhattan Institute that said fifty three
Speaker 1: percent of Republicans under I think it was forty seven
Speaker 1: arbitrarily picked I assume, don't believe the Holocaust narrative, as
Speaker 1: you know, reported by historians, basically saying that over half
Speaker 1: of these people are Holocaust deniers. Isn't that awful and
Speaker 1: explicitly connected that fact to low support for the Iranian war, right,
Speaker 1: the idea is, oh, you don't support the Iranian war,
Speaker 1: you are a Holocaust denier. And then very quickly afterwards
Speaker 1: made an allision to what he and many others This
Speaker 1: is a point, you know, from I've seen from Lindsay
Speaker 1: and Mark Levin. And when I'm using these guys' names,
Speaker 1: I'm partially doing it because they're ridiculous and they're fun
Speaker 1: to make fun of, but also you've got to understand
Speaker 1: these are both you know, widely read figures, and for
Speaker 1: every one, I'm mentioning there's another fifty right who were
Speaker 1: sort of in that nexus, Douglas Murray.
Speaker 2: Douglas Murray, Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1: Man, I have no legally advisable opinions about Douglas Murray.
Speaker 1: I will leave it at that. Which, by the way,
Speaker 1: do you remember a while back when he said that
Speaker 1: you that no one was allowed to write an article
Speaker 1: on a country they hadn't been to. Yeah, I, given
Speaker 1: what I know of Douglas Murray's sexual history, I'm going
Speaker 1: to go ahead and bet he has not been to Iran.
Speaker 1: I'll leave it at that. They tend to, you know view.
Speaker 2: No, there's no coincidences. There's no coincidences with things anymore.
Speaker 2: There's no such thing as a coincidence.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Sorry, sorry to mean to chime in there, but no.
Speaker 1: No, not at all. So he goes from saying, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, young Republican men don't support the war I Ran,
Speaker 1: they're probably Holocaust deniers to talking about the rise of
Speaker 1: what he calls grievance politics. And this is another particularly
Speaker 1: insidious part of this argument which has been widely shared,
Speaker 1: which is basically the idea that oh, if you object
Speaker 1: to this, you are engaging in grievance politics, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, you believe that all the problems in your
Speaker 1: life are caused by other people. You're not accepting responsibility
Speaker 1: because you have grievances ill defined. So it's basically not
Speaker 1: only are you a Nazi holocaust denier for not supporting
Speaker 1: this war, you're also basically the woke left right. Young
Speaker 1: people are Nazi woke left, and this is being amplified
Speaker 1: to people of a certain generation, and it's not working
Speaker 1: on all of them. It's not what I'm trying to
Speaker 1: say at all, but to say that narrative, right, the
Speaker 1: idea that the young people are unsavable, you need to
Speaker 1: cut them out, that they're you know, the worst of
Speaker 1: the worst, is furthering that generational divide, that problem of
Speaker 1: succession that you know, Maga Incorporated had where it was
Speaker 1: already a tough row to hoo, you know, given the
Speaker 1: you know, the economy, given the affordability crisis, given this war.
Speaker 1: But the fact that all that same time you have
Speaker 1: these figures saying, yes, they're irredeemably bad, they're horrible, they
Speaker 1: need to be cut out, they need to be shunned
Speaker 1: from these institutions. Well, that means that the problem doesn't
Speaker 1: just apply at you know, the voter level. Well, what
Speaker 1: happens to all of these institutions, right, what happens at Heritage,
Speaker 1: what happens at the Daily Wire, what happens at any
Speaker 1: number of you know, these sort of you know, conservative institutions.
Speaker 1: Because from what I've heard, and I have multiple sources
Speaker 1: on this, this same fight is raging down the middle
Speaker 1: of all of these right people who feel as if,
Speaker 1: you know, they're American nationalists first and foremost, and people
Speaker 1: who feel as if we have this eternal special connection
Speaker 1: to the nation of Israel. And that's the the sort
Speaker 1: of approximate reason we understand there are other issues going
Speaker 1: on there at once. Like that's a that's a huge
Speaker 1: gulf to bridge, right, That's how are you going to
Speaker 1: you know, continue this you know force in politics on
Speaker 1: when you have kneecapped, you have literally you know, pulled
Speaker 1: the ladder up behind you and say no one else
Speaker 1: can come up. Well, and you know, forgive me if
Speaker 1: this is a real long time to get to this point, Like,
Speaker 1: but to me, it seems as if we're going to
Speaker 1: see the same logical conclusion we saw in the corporate
Speaker 1: world hit politics we're basically, oh, there is no way
Speaker 1: for me. There is no place for me to go.
Speaker 1: And I understand when I say no, I don't mean
Speaker 1: all there are guys right now who are in their
Speaker 1: early twenties in the corporate world. If you're listening to this,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, Uh, that sucks. And similarly, there are those
Speaker 1: same guys you know work at writing you know, speeches
Speaker 1: for different you know, Republican congressmen, and you know, reading
Speaker 1: through legal documents. I will also say, I'm sorry. So
Speaker 1: we're not talking universally, but it seems as if the
Speaker 1: logical conclusion is to explore alternatives, right, to find other
Speaker 1: places to go. And you know, big picture, right, if
Speaker 1: we're talking about these sort of talented, driven young men,
Speaker 1: it is incredibly foolish of leaders to abandon those guys
Speaker 1: because look like one obviously they will become, you know,
Speaker 1: leaders of another generation. But also right, we have to
Speaker 1: understand that like, those guys just don't stop existing because
Speaker 1: you have kicked them out of heritage or kicked them
Speaker 1: out of you know, your local young Republicans group. If
Speaker 1: they were you know, talented and driven enough to get there,
Speaker 1: that energy doesn't go away and do some guys get
Speaker 1: ruined when they're canceled one hundred percent. You know, they're
Speaker 1: they're sad stories. Although it seems to be working less
Speaker 1: and less, But like that's how you create real genuine
Speaker 1: political instability, right both on the level of there are
Speaker 1: no solutions available to you, red or blue, you're still
Speaker 1: getting screwed no matter what. Oh, you want to get
Speaker 1: a normal job and put your head down, you can't
Speaker 1: do that. Either. You want to work in politics and
Speaker 1: change it, you can't do that either. These guys don't
Speaker 1: just go away. They don't just disappear when you fired
Speaker 1: them from your office. And you know, a lot of
Speaker 1: the fear mongering over you know, the kind of coypers
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, I think is a realization of
Speaker 1: exactly that that there is a large, untapped well of
Speaker 1: energy that is not particularly friendly with you. And you've
Speaker 1: seen this in the religious world, you know, we can
Speaker 1: That's a conversation for another day. A very similar dynamic
Speaker 1: of you know, young people significantly to the right of
Speaker 1: you know, either their literal or spiritual elders. You know,
Speaker 1: that is creating problems. And I think that there's this
Speaker 1: desire to simply you know, stick your head in the sand,
Speaker 1: you know, to look and say, you know, we're doing great.
Speaker 1: You know, the war's going great, the economy is going great.
Speaker 1: You know, I have this video on Facebook of this
Speaker 1: you know, bright young conservative man Berlin Hollyhand seems to
Speaker 1: have been sort of you know, grown in a that
Speaker 1: everything is fine. No, it's not fine.
Speaker 2: That's the turning point, the new spokes face of turning point.
Speaker 1: That that kid, I don't think so he was auditioning
Speaker 1: for it. He was sort of squeezed out of a
Speaker 1: tube suspiciously soon after Charlie Kirk's Yes. I think he
Speaker 1: was making a run.
Speaker 2: Of it, and people are all making fun of him
Speaker 2: every one of his posts. People are just crucifying him.
Speaker 1: This may surprise you, Mike. Uh he said no when
Speaker 1: I asked him for an interview.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: Now is that because I have made a number of
Speaker 1: derogatory comments about his sexuality, his looks, and his name
Speaker 1: on the internet. Possibly I thought it would be a
Speaker 1: funny interview. He didn't agree. So the point is right, like,
Speaker 1: did he responds? Did he respond to it? Did he
Speaker 1: even respond to Yes?
Speaker 2: He did, and he said no, just said no. Reasoning
Speaker 2: the reasoning I could sort.
Speaker 1: Of fill it on my own. The point is, and
Speaker 1: I'll see this, and it's right. I think that you know,
Speaker 1: there is a desire particularly you know, and I think
Speaker 1: that this will change after mid terms, when certain realities
Speaker 1: become apparent that you know what, things are not going
Speaker 1: great and things are likely to continue in a negative
Speaker 1: direction unless changes are made, and those changes are entirely
Speaker 1: within the remit of people in power. It is possible
Speaker 1: to in an immediate sense fix these issues, but that
Speaker 1: would require an uncomfortable rearrangement of loyalty, and I don't
Speaker 1: know if anyone is willing to have that. And until
Speaker 1: that happens, these trends will continue. They are not imaginary.
Speaker 1: They are not a product of grievance politics of you know,
Speaker 1: idiot young people who've never worked today in their life
Speaker 1: when everything handed to them for free. These are real
Speaker 1: grievances that all of the problems with affordability that I
Speaker 1: mentioned last time. You know, the incredible amount of wealth
Speaker 1: it takes to live, as you know, my own lower
Speaker 1: middle class grandparents did right, literally a McDonald's manager and
Speaker 1: a lady who worked at a bank. Right. People feel
Speaker 1: that and that is not going to go away simply
Speaker 1: because you've called them woke, simply because you've called them
Speaker 1: the Nazi. And this is something that you know, we
Speaker 1: on the right were all too eager to point out
Speaker 1: on the you know, the nominal woke left. But when
Speaker 1: it comes to something that people in power care about,
Speaker 1: when it comes to one of their sacred cows, it
Speaker 1: comes right back around. And so to sort of tie
Speaker 1: a bow on this, what are my feelings on the
Speaker 1: Iran war? Uh? One, it doesn't seem to be going
Speaker 1: great just on a military level, right Iran is still there? Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we got rid of the malas Israel seems
Speaker 1: to be getting you know, if not you know, battered
Speaker 1: at least, you know, a bloody nose from this right there,
Speaker 1: taking real shells or real shelling. You know, we maybe
Speaker 1: haven't lost a lot of people, but we certainly lost
Speaker 1: more than we needed to. And ultimately the sort of
Speaker 1: military you know, situation on the ground doesn't really matter
Speaker 1: because this is exacerbated a widening political divide that I
Speaker 1: view as basically the sort of iceberg that sinks the
Speaker 1: Titanic of Maga. Because again, and I don't say this
Speaker 1: out of joy, but we are fast approaching the fiftieth
Speaker 1: percentile mark of you know, baby boomer mortality, right, that
Speaker 1: rate will be increasing at astronomic rate. And sure, fair enough,
Speaker 1: I understand, you know, Gen X is one of the
Speaker 1: most conservative voting blocks in America, But uh, buddy, there
Speaker 1: aren't a lot of you you know, at least compared
Speaker 1: to the boomers and the the you know, millennials, another
Speaker 1: large generation have you know, one do not like Israel
Speaker 1: and aggregate as well. And so the idea that we
Speaker 1: can simply keep running the George W. Bush playbook, like
Speaker 1: that's not a functional option. Maybe once, but after that,
Speaker 1: like who are you selling that to? Who are you
Speaker 1: selling that to? And again, we have to understand that
Speaker 1: both for our politicians and for us, there are very
Speaker 1: real consequences to this, another Biden level migration surge that
Speaker 1: changes how things go in the country. You know, if
Speaker 1: all of Maga is in jail, which okay, sure is,
Speaker 1: I realize not a definite possibility. But the Democrats at
Speaker 1: least seem to be saying that that's a real consequence
Speaker 1: for them. And so to me to watch, you know,
Speaker 1: a moment of incredible political capital, a moment where so
Speaker 1: much good could have been done, squandered and for what
Speaker 1: it really bothers me, and it bothers a lot of people.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it's really a frustrating situation. I'll leave it that.
Speaker 2: You get time for one more question. Have you considered
Speaker 2: if they do change that range of the draft to say,
Speaker 2: upwards of thirty two? Have you considered that at all?
Speaker 2: And what would you do if that if that occurred?
Speaker 1: Oh, I mean.
Speaker 2: Maybe this is an overly fatalistic view on it, but
Speaker 2: to me, at least personally, like I probably just do
Speaker 2: what my grandparents did and just you know, bite the
Speaker 2: bullet and at least, you know, see, like you know,
Speaker 2: at Lester, get a commission. You know, it's better than
Speaker 2: waiting for the number. And honestly, it's like even a
Speaker 2: horribly unjust war, and I view this war is horribly
Speaker 2: and horrible and unjust. It's like, well, you know what,
Speaker 2: like ultimately, you know, the little people you and I
Speaker 2: Mike are not always is in a position to you know,
Speaker 2: make decisions on that level. And so you know what,
Speaker 2: if I have to, I have to, I'm not particularly
Speaker 2: looking forward to that, you know, particularly it's worrisome and
Speaker 2: I've had this conversation with my friends as well. If
Speaker 2: you didn't GETO the data on what percentage of Generation
Speaker 2: Z is actually fit to serve, it's very low. I
Speaker 2: would guess that. I would guess it would be low.
Speaker 1: Yeah, mental instability and obesity, and you know what, fair enough,
Speaker 1: maybe you're getting ozembic shots in your MRIs and so
Speaker 1: that problem goes away. But you start to kind of
Speaker 1: run the math and you're like, all right, even on
Speaker 1: the top end of that age bracket, I am definitely
Speaker 1: in the top blah blah blah percent by like body fat,
Speaker 1: and yeah, I'm probably getting screwed, aren't I. So anyway,
Speaker 1: I mean I view it as a as a pretty
Speaker 1: unlikely situation, but you know, if it has to happen,
Speaker 1: either I get blown up, which is, you know, not ideal,
Speaker 1: but you know, if you're enough of a religious extremist
Speaker 1: kind of know where you're going, or alternately, it seems
Speaker 1: like a necessary part of being a good writer is
Speaker 1: having some horrific war experience, so you know what, maybe
Speaker 1: grand scheme of things, it's not the worst thing that
Speaker 1: can happen.
Speaker 2: I know, run out of time here, but I do
Speaker 2: want to give you a chance if you want to
Speaker 2: talk about your show and some of the stuff you're
Speaker 2: working on, and what can we expect from the Jay
Speaker 2: Burton Show.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, thing man. So, as we said before, the
Speaker 1: Jay Burton Show is my interview show, put out five
Speaker 1: shows a week. I've sort of been limiting myself on
Speaker 1: Iran more news because it is really depressing and if
Speaker 1: I have to talk about it more than a certain
Speaker 1: amount of week, I will go insane. But I had
Speaker 1: an episode not too long ago with Ron Dobson where
Speaker 1: we spoke about the Iranian nuclear program. So talking about
Speaker 1: the sort of five stages of a nuclear program, right
Speaker 1: going from you know, the ability to enrich uranium for
Speaker 1: medical usage all the way up to you know, really
Speaker 1: scary stuff intercontinental ballistic missiles. That's interesting if you're looking
Speaker 1: at the stated justification for this war, right we had
Speaker 1: to stop the Mullas from from getting nukes, from turning
Speaker 1: themselves into a you know, a sort of a pyeong
Speaker 1: Yang in the Middle East. How you recommend that. As
Speaker 1: far as what's coming up, I have Alex pet Kiss
Speaker 1: of Constant Glory on to resume the series about the
Speaker 1: Life of Caesar and the Roman Civil War, and then
Speaker 1: what else do I have coming out? Yeah, that's what
Speaker 1: I think I've got, you know, in the hopper immediately.
Speaker 1: I have no set structure for what my shows are
Speaker 1: there an hour long, but I'll be honest, I'm a
Speaker 1: little bit adhd. So we'll jump from you know, politics, history, philosophy, uh,
Speaker 1: what movies I've seen, and then every once in a while,
Speaker 1: my buddy car will come on and we'll just talk
Speaker 1: about like, you know, uh, literally anything I did. I
Speaker 1: did a show all about cars where all we did
Speaker 1: was look at bring a trailer for like an hour
Speaker 1: and a half. It was a great episode. That's great
Speaker 1: about anything.
Speaker 2: Okay, so what's the last question? This will be fast.
Speaker 2: What's the last movie you saw?
Speaker 1: Yeah, the last movie I reviewed for the podcast was
Speaker 1: actually Elite Squad tropea dae Elite. I watched that maybe
Speaker 1: three weeks ago and then did an episode on it
Speaker 1: just due to scheduling conflict. But before that I watched
Speaker 1: I can't remember if it was Hail Caesar rewatched or
Speaker 1: the Year of the Dragon nineteen eighty five. I did
Speaker 1: a review with Pete Quootees. Great movie. Honestly, a pretty
Speaker 1: good episode. So yeah, there's a lot of couple of
Speaker 1: films I've seen.
Speaker 2: I gotta listen to. I gotta listen to with Pete.
Speaker 2: Pete and I are friends and we both have a
Speaker 2: love of movies, and so I'll share with you real quick,
Speaker 2: if you got if you got a second, Yeah, I
Speaker 2: Matt brack and my friend Matt Bracken sent me on
Speaker 2: a trajectory six months ago to watch a few movies.
Speaker 2: So he said, go see f one, but before you
Speaker 2: do that, see Ford versus Ferrari, which I had never seen,
Speaker 2: the one of them, great movie. And then he sent
Speaker 2: me on the path of watching these. Clinice was spaghetti westerns.
Speaker 2: Have you ever seen those? Few of them? Yeah, fist
Speaker 2: full of dollars for a few dollars more, and the Good,
Speaker 2: the Bad, and the Ugly. You gotta watch him in order,
Speaker 2: because Sir Giulioni and Clinice Wood, Sir Giulioni did all
Speaker 2: three and he had no money for the first one.
Speaker 2: So if you watch him in order, you see the
Speaker 2: budget gets bigger and bigger, and the Good, Bad, and
Speaker 2: the Ugly is a classic. So then he says, when
Speaker 2: you get through those three, go watch Once upon a
Speaker 2: Time in the West. That's Sir Gioloni's fourth movie, Clinice Wood,
Speaker 2: wasn't in it. It's Jay. It's a masterpiece. It's a brilliant,
Speaker 2: beautiful film. So so then so I watched that, and
Speaker 2: then I recently watched V for Vendetta, which I had
Speaker 2: never seen before, and One Battle after Another I just saw.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I my brother in law saw One Battle after
Speaker 1: another did not give it glowing reviews, but uh yeah,
Speaker 1: I need to check out. I honestly, going through the
Speaker 1: spaghetti westerns would be great. I've been on a run
Speaker 1: of American crime movies with my buddy Andrew Edwards, but
Speaker 1: he's kind of a selfish prick and he, you know,
Speaker 1: had a baby and so you know, had to do
Speaker 1: some stuff around it instead of talking with a stranger
Speaker 1: on the internet about movies for that hour. So no,
Speaker 1: in all seriousness, you know, I'm glad for him to
Speaker 1: be doing that. And when he comes back, I think
Speaker 1: we're gonna do unforgiven. But we've got a whole bunch
Speaker 1: set up.
Speaker 2: Point is the reason I'm doing movie reviews is because
Speaker 2: if I talk about politics every day, I will go crazy.
Speaker 2: Where is Anya?
Speaker 1: And uh yeah, it's it's much preferable what's.
Speaker 2: On your American Crime LISTN what's what's movies that you
Speaker 2: you have to that you're gonna review for American Crime.
Speaker 1: Oh let me pull this on the top of your head.
Speaker 1: Let me sorry, give me a second time of the
Speaker 1: list from Andrew Edwards. By the way Andrew Edwards book,
Speaker 1: He is two the first one King of Dogs and
Speaker 1: then the second one. Uh, Crowbar really really fascinating. He's
Speaker 1: a great guy. You guys would get along.
Speaker 2: U you pull this?
Speaker 1: Uh?
Speaker 2: Hey, man, I get his contact of him if he
Speaker 2: wants to come on after, I'd love to talk to him.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, he's super interesting. Okay, So this is this
Speaker 1: is the list, and some of these I've I've picked
Speaker 1: from already, First Blood, The Natural Thief, No Good Thief,
Speaker 1: The Proposition, No Country for Old Men. Did an episode
Speaker 1: on that, dead Man Rush, The Gray Fox, Chinatown another favorite.
Speaker 1: I actually should do review on that with him because
Speaker 1: I love that movie, which Breaker Morant, Collateral, Sultancy, and
Speaker 1: Red Rock. Chinatown. It's a personal favorite of mine.
Speaker 2: I you know, it's funny. I'm an hour into it.
Speaker 2: I'm an hour and ten minutes into it. I had
Speaker 2: never seen that. I think Matt Bracken told me to
Speaker 2: watch that too. Never never saw it before. So I'm
Speaker 2: an hour and ten so I got like an hour
Speaker 2: left of it. It's great.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, well here's here's the reason I love it,
Speaker 1: and I didn't finish it. I didn't finish should get
Speaker 1: into this, but I worked for like a year and
Speaker 1: a half at one of the biggest car collections on
Speaker 1: the East Coast. It was primarily pre World War two stuff.
Speaker 1: And the way this guy got started was he was
Speaker 1: from my area, you know, bought and sold cars, moved
Speaker 1: out to LA and then basically did high end cars,
Speaker 1: the classic cars for movies, television and red carpet events.
Speaker 1: So for instance, we're talking like super high dollar like
Speaker 1: you know, Dus and Bergs, stuff like that. He did
Speaker 1: the cars for who framed Roger Rabbit and also for Chinatown,
Speaker 1: and so a bunch of those cars I saw because
Speaker 1: they were an inventory. I was like, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: you know again forty years later, right, it's like I've
Speaker 1: sat in that car. It's a piece of junk now,
Speaker 1: but it's still cool. So anyway, I love that movie
Speaker 1: for many reasons. It's done exactly an uplifting film. I
Speaker 1: won't spoil it for you. You probably guess that from
Speaker 1: the general tone of it, but uh yeah, man, anyway,
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry, Mike Jack.
Speaker 2: I gotta go where people find it. People. Where can
Speaker 2: people find you real quick?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, as a professional podcaster, you think i'd have
Speaker 1: this down now.
Speaker 2: That's what I'm here for. That's what I'm here for it, Jay,
Speaker 2: That's what I'm here.
Speaker 1: Available Apple, Spotify, YouTube, anywhere you listen to podcasts. If
Speaker 1: you don't want to listen to ads because they're annoying,
Speaker 1: you throw me a few bucks a month on Patreon, Substack,
Speaker 1: or gumbroad all under the same name. Get the episodes
Speaker 1: early in ad free. It's five bucks a month for
Speaker 1: twenty two to twenty five hours of content a week
Speaker 1: or a month rather, I'm not that good. Twenty cents
Speaker 1: an hour really not a bad deal. Again, Mike, I
Speaker 1: appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. Jay.
Speaker 2: As always, I appreciate you taking the time. I look
Speaker 2: forward to continue to following your work and more conversations.
Speaker 2: I had Mike drop what what what? What's what's
Speaker 1: Garagary program