Why Corporate America REALLY Went Woke
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Summary
In this episode, Simone and I discuss why the Democratic Party is more aligned with the right than the Republican Party was in the 90s and the early 2000s, and why that matters. We talk about why this matters and why it matters now.
Transcript
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Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be talking to you today. Today, I wanted to deep dive on one subject
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that has been something that has come up in other things that we have talked about, but we've never
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really done a deep dive on it. And I've noticed some common misconceptions people have around
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this, which is I think that everybody broadly knows that in the 90s, big business was predominantly
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right wing. If you were, you know, we always use like the Jack Donaghy stereotype here. If you were
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a big business guy, you were a right wing guy. If you were a big corporate guy at like some, you know,
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whether it's BlackRock or whether it's, you know, McKinsey, the stereotype was, is that you would
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be right wing. Today, the stereotype is that you'd be extremely left wing. The core Republican Party
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used to be made up of an alliance of a theocratic faction in the United States and a big business
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faction. And it broke apart, making way for the new right alliance with big business departing
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the alliance in the early 2000s. Now, the question is, is why? And the answer that I have always given
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historically is that this happened because the mimetic virus that we call the urban monoculture,
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some people may call it wokeism, whatever you want to call it, spreads better and faster within
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bureaucracies. This is a part of it, but I don't think it's everything. Secondly, I think a core
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mistake that a lot of people make when they're looking at this is to assume, and I've heard this
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from so many people that, well, it's natural that big business was a Republican aligned a party in the
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90s because it wanted lower tax rates, it wanted less regulations, it wanted all of that stuff.
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And this is a very naive understanding of what businesses actually care about, especially large
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businesses. It is actually just as perplexing that big businesses align themselves with the right in the
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90s as big business align themselves with woke us today. Because generally, big businesses prefer
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a large amount of regulations and taxes and other barriers to entry. There's a reason why Sam Altman
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is going around trying to get everybody terrified of AI so that you can get additional AI regulations,
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because he knows no matter how big the regulations are, they'll never be enough to shut down open AI,
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but they may prevent his competitors. Do you want to talk on this before I go further?
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No, keep going. This resonates though. And so I was thinking about this, and I was talking to
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someone about this, and I was saying, well, here's a really interesting thing. When I look at what the
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Democratic Party represents today, an alliance of, and I always use the word urban monoculture,
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but if I change the definition, an interesting pattern emerges. It is an alliance of big business
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interests, and the dominant cultural group in the United States, whose primary interest is imposing
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its value system on other people. And then when I say that, and I go back to the 90s,
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that was the alliance that existed as well. It was big business, it was the dominant cultural group.
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So when we talk about the theocratic coalition that existed in the 90s, this was a group of individuals
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who are basically like, okay, where does Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, the main American religious
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systems, Mormonism, where do their sort of moral shadows overlap? We're going to call this the
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Judeo-Christian tradition. And then we are going to try to impose this on citizens through laws,
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through the school system, through other things like that. And that is, they were never as good at it
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as the urban monoculture was, but they definitely had the same gist of an idea. And I think, one,
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before we go into it, this also helps highlight where we are so antagonistic to some people on the
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right, where I think lay people, when they see us being antagonistic to these groups, they say that
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we are being antagonistic to groups that are just further right-leaning than ourselves. And I think
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that these are the same types of people who think that what happened is the right today is just the
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90s Democrats, and that the both parties have been moving to the left, when instead, what I'd argue
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is no, what actually happened is the left today is the 90s theocrats. It's just, we have a different
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dominant cultural group in this country. And the right today is a fundamentally new party that doesn't
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really represent the axis of the political axis that existed at all in the 90s.
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Exactly. And so when these people are doing their thing, and they're like, oh, we want to impose
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like gay marriage bans or something like that. I'm like, well, you're just acting like the left,
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from my perspective, you're trying to impose a cultural value system, which is why I think there's
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so much hostility to this sort of rhetoric within the modern right. But before we go further with this,
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I want to ask the question, why does big business constantly find itself on the same side
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as the dominant cultural group attempting to enforce its value system using the justice system
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and using laws within the country? Well, because they have the money, right? And business goes where
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the money is, like sharks following blood. Do they have the money, though? I don't know if they ever
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really had the money. I don't know how you can, you can't impose a policy upon other people without
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having deep pockets. Politicians don't listen to you if you don't have deep pockets.
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Well, no, I also think that, you know, I think the major huge political donors did go woke.
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So I agree with that. But I don't think that that is why the politicians are following them. I think
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that when I look at the sort of imposition of woke culture on other people, I think it was from a
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vocal minority and that the wealthy then ended up following it because they saw this vocal minority
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and saw them as a threat. And I think it's very similar to like the satanic panic of the 80s or
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the, you know, the extremist evangelicals of the 90s, where they never really made up that large of
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a population. But if you had something like, you know, a demon in a show or something like that,
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you had to be very careful about it or anything that could be seen. We actually saw this with the
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Catholics. I don't know if you're familiar with this, but for a long time, Hollywood wouldn't
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make any movie that could be interpreted as anti-Catholic because the Catholics were very,
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very good at vetoing movies. The organization I'm talking about here is the National Legion of
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Decency. But my timeline is a bit off. They were mostly prominent between the 1930s and 1960s.
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And they used the audience of 20 million Catholics who back during that time period would actually
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listen to what the church told them to do, which they don't so much anymore, which is largely why
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the council lost power to boycott movies. And they ended up influencing things like the Hays Code and
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most of the movies that were released. And there was actually this chain of like movies made by
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Hollywood specifically to endear studios to the church. Like in one of them, the plot was something
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like a Catholic preacher was given a confession, but like that the guy was going to murder someone
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or like murder him, the preacher. And like, he couldn't do anything about it because he was so moral
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and he had to follow, you know, these rules. And this was a common thing. And you might actually have
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noticed this, that Catholic preachers were disproportionately in media in the 80s and mid-90s.
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And you basically don't see them in media anymore because they weren't that big a faction of Americans.
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So their appearances were artificial, you're arguing?
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Their appearances were artificial due to, and I'll look up in post some specific examples of this,
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but it was a specific union of Catholics that would boycott movies.
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That's so interesting. I mean, that, I suppose, makes sense.
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So it's more about who is strategically in power? Is that what you are saying is going on?
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No, I think the right, despite what people would say today, in the 90s and 80s had a form of
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cancellation. They would say that this individual is satanic or this individual is, you know,
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they'd use different words to label them, but they had a form of saying, oh, this company does this
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or this, therefore we won't do business with them. And I think especially children's media was very
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afraid of crossing these boundaries for a very long time. And I think that the wokes more borrowed
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these existing tools, but implemented them much more effectively. And I think what we might be seeing
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here is big business is a very susceptible to bullying more so than it is looking for market
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So you wait, you, okay. So could this be an issue of larger bureaucracies having basically the
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sensitivity to criticism? And that's why they're more subject to whatever the mainstream zeitgeist
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is because they have compliance departments, they have lawyers, they have marketing departments that
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are capable of hearing criticism and freaking out about it. Whereas smaller organizations just don't
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literally don't have an ear or an eye to that kind of thing.
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I wonder if it might even be that the type of person who works at a large company is more sensitive
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to criticism. So when I think about our friend groups, you know, our job basically with the
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pro natalist movement is attracting criticism in a way that furthers the message of the movement.
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Um, so we're always going around baiting media sources to try to get them to talk about us. And
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then we use that to draw attention to our cause areas in ways that are usually pretty effective.
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Like, honestly, we've been enormously effective. I don't think that there's been a public media
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figure that has been as effective as us at either rising or catching attention in the last five
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years, which I take, I take great pride in, but this has given us a unique understanding of who
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has freaked out about knowing us or being publicly associated with us and the people at startups or
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venture capital firms or small companies, they're like, okay, fine. The bureaucrats who work or run
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very large companies are extremely scared of being associated with us. They are extremely scared of
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criticism. And I wonder if a fear of failing, which is I think where this fear of criticism comes from
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failing in other people's eyes or being seen as not good enough associates was working in large
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companies. Yeah. Well, I, I could see basically not being willing to stand for anything personally
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and being really afraid of being subject to criticism would make a job at another company where you can
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always blame it on someone higher up the line, blame the company, blame your manager, et cetera.
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Yeah. Yeah. I could see that. And you could argue that also people with a bigger external locus of
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control are more likely to be drawn to larger organizations and bureaus. Actually, I'm having
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an understanding here. Both of these types of people aren't just drawn to large companies. They're
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also drawn to academia. They're both career tracks where it's for people who are more afraid of
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failing. They don't want to go outside their bubble. They're just like, okay, this is what I've been
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doing for the past four years. I'm just going to keep doing it. If I can maybe make some money from
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doing it. And they're very sensitive. They have a lot of status anxiety. They're very sensitive to
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the status the job gives them. And so not just a fear of media criticism, but potentially a fear of
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criticism within these organizations makes the mimetic virus spread faster within the organization.
00:11:47.260
That, that's quite interesting. Yeah. Well, but then aren't you really ultimately just arguing the same
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thing that you've been arguing since the beginning, which is that mimetic viruses are more likely to
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spread in these large bureaucracies and maybe the refinement you've gotten.
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I don't think that the, the nineties version of like evangelical mom was really a mimetic virus.
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I think that they like evangelicalism didn't spread through companies in the same way wokeism
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spread through companies. I think that it, what we are seeing is, is, is two things happening
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simultaneously. You have this phenomenon that I'm talking about with people more sensitive to
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criticism, working in these large bureaucracies on top of them also being more sensitive to like,
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when a guardian article says something mean about me, my, sorry, people in my life freak out about
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it. And then we always get the email of, Oh my God, how could this happen again? You must be
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devastated right now. And I'm like, bro, the guardian doesn't even have a Twitter account anymore.
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Like, what are you talking about? Nobody reads this. It just establishes credibility for stuff
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like Wikipedia articles and getting in front of like a few other people's faces in terms of
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expanding our reach. But yeah, that's, that's my thought on that. But I'd also note how wokeism
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spread within companies. Cause we had somebody talking, we were talking to you about this
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and I hadn't realized it, but it's something that is really interesting, which is, and I note here,
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by the way, anybody who wants to hire us as consultants to anti-DEI fire company,
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now that we're stepping back from our day job, absolutely happy to help with that. Stanford
00:13:20.420
MBA, Cambridge degree in technology policy, run major companies in the past. We'll work
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inexpensively if we're helping make a company strong, but we'll even run for the work for
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a percentage of the increase in profits we can make you within certain margins or the
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cost savings we can give you. Cause that's the great thing about taking DEI out of a company.
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You're only saving money. Um, but it was when the DEI stuff started, what companies did like,
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they were like, Oh, I have to put this, like whatever person that fits all of these criteria
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into the company. All right. Well, we don't want to put them in like engineering and we don't want
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to put them in like making products. Cause like they actually need to be good to have those jobs.
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So where can we put them? Well, HR, like people don't really do anything in HR, often marketing
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to communications, PR compliance. And what they didn't realize when they were putting these people
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in HR and compliance, but specifically HR is where I think the initial crop was dumped is that now these
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people had control over hiring. Yeah. And they started to exclusively hire and heavily affect the
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hiring processes around these DEI objectives, which quickly DEI-fied the entire companies.
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And in addition to that, as, as Simone was talking about, you have things like marketing becoming
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heavily DEI. What happens when marketing becomes heavily DEI, then you'll have them leave Twitter
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when Elon buys it, for example, because they think that they can use the company at the cudgel,
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even when their customer base, they're still on eggs. They're still on these, these platforms.
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And they're, but they don't care like, because they're not in this for, at the end of the day,
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making money. They are now part of the, the DEI cordyceps virus. And they just want to expand the
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reach of the virus. What are your thoughts on that mechanism for how the spread was in companies?
00:15:16.420
Yeah. I mean that, I think that's what we've largely understood to be reality for a long time.
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It's, it's, it's funny how things happen. I think people think of arguments around the woke mind
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virus or the people on the left or the people on the right as, as being this, this all being a very
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concerted organized effort that happened on purpose where a bunch of people got together in a room and
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were like, ah, yes, this is how we shall slowly take everything over. And there are even people who
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are like, oh, let's conspire to do this, but it rarely works. Conspiracies rarely work out.
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Yeah. And I, we've been involved in conspiracies. We've been involved in organizations that are
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supposed to be conspiratorial. There people are just, there's not that many, like truly effective,
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independently thinking humans for a conspiracy to be effective. People are not that.
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What is interesting. And this is why I think your interest in governance is so crucial is that just
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the correctly misplaced incentive or the, the misplacement of a particular agent within a
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particular area, it's like putting a seed crystal into a substance.
00:16:30.120
Yeah. Like in a way that no human, no exerted effort could, could make something happen.
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What happens, for example, when, when you're tempering chocolate, you'll put a seed, like
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essentially a seed crystal, like a piece of chocolate that has been properly tempered in
00:16:48.100
with a batch of chocolate. And then you raise it to a certain temperature. And the idea is that
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your, she used to work in a chocolate factory, your one seed crystal will then help the rest of the
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chocolate snap into the right crystalline structure. And I, that's kind of how I see this happening is
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that once you get, for example, this certain culture in HR, it's able to make the rest of the
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company snap into that crystalline structure in a way that doesn't require you to go through each and
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every single department. It just kind of happens naturally and almost all at once.
00:17:25.140
Well, no, I think out of here, HR is the department that can fire you, that determines your salary,
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moving up and down within the organization. As soon as you control that within an organization,
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you control the incentives that the organization has, and people will want to DEIF-ify themselves to
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ensure that they can move up or down. And I think something that you were talking about earlier,
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like the conspiratorial mindset towards this stuff, I think a lot of that is actually downstream
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of humanities. And I think that this is really important when I'm, when I'm interacting with
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people. And when I typically, I'm like, okay, this person is an idiot. When they start to see like
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big agentic conspiracies everywhere, because we're not an idiot, but the mistake that they're making,
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and it's, it's an inbuilt human mistake is humans are evolutionarily programmed to see the world
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in terms of theory of minds. So we look for theory of minds in everything. We look for theory of
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minds in mass groups of humans. We look for theory of minds.
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Oh, you'll see faces in tree stumps and in wall plugs. We just think, yeah, it's very hard not
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Yeah. When you see action, you're not thinking, okay, how could this action have evolved? I.e.,
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how could iterations of this action have been better at replicating themselves in non-iterations
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of this action, which is actually why most things happen. Most actual conspiracies are not agentic.
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They are not one individual attempting to, in part of a brand conspiracy, fool a bunch of other
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individuals. It is just a self-replicating thing. And so it's better rather than to look at who wants
00:18:57.600
this or who's trying to orchestrate this. I think it's better to look instead at the incentives and
00:19:03.700
where our incentives align. Right. But I think that, and people can say that this is the like
00:19:09.640
a kinder interpretation around this, but it very much isn't. If you look at what the implication is,
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if this is a mimetic virus, like that cordyceps virus, which infects ants and then makes them just
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spread the fungus. Once an individual is infected, they must be surgically removed from the company.
00:19:27.860
There is no amelioration. There is no cure. The only cure is cut once, cut deep. You have to remove
00:19:37.000
the cancer. Yeah. I haven't heard of anyone deescalating from a position that is like-
00:19:42.980
Yeah. Have you ever heard of a woke person genuinely deescalating? I don't think I ever have.
00:19:48.480
Yeah. Well, I guess what I, here's what I could envision happening because what we're doing is here
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with corporate America, we're contrasting the point at which it was sort of strongly influenced by
00:20:03.340
conservative Christian American culture of like the nineties to now when it has been very influenced
00:20:10.360
by woke culture, culture, the urban monoculture. When, when that Christian conservative subculture
00:20:19.800
suddenly became the minority in corporate America, that didn't mean that the people who used to enact
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witch hunts as Christian conservatives no longer existed at organizations, it meant that they kind
00:20:30.460
of realized that they were outnumbered and they had to go underground as it were, or just be tolerant.
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And I think that that's more what happens. It's not, these people can exist and not do damage
00:20:41.680
as long as they know that they don't have a mandate and they don't have impunity.
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I think the only instance from the Christians, really? Okay. I disagree with you. So convince
00:20:52.700
me. I'll explain why. Okay. So first you've got to put these people in two camps who can be
00:20:58.360
ameliorated is the people who just sort of like believed mainstream media. And then one day we're
00:21:03.480
like, Oh shit, I'm being lied to not like the torchbearers, but the people, I think a lot of people
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like us, JD Vance, a lot of these people who are just like, they believed the mainstream narrative.
00:21:12.680
And then one day they're like, Oh, you guys are all against us. Um, that, that community I think
00:21:18.000
can, can reform. The problem with the wokes is they don't have families. They don't actually need
00:21:23.040
to make money. They would rather enforce the message and self-indulge in a victim mindset
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than actually, uh, make money or keep their job. Whereas with the Christians, they, you know,
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they might've been an evangelical mom, you know, they had five kids to feed back home, you know,
00:21:40.320
I know there's much better place down the street. The girls are cleaner. The liquor ain't watered
00:21:45.640
down. Sure. And you get kickbacks. Hey man, I got five kids to feed. Take him to the dentist.
00:21:52.640
Uh, I got to put a Benny thing here. I got five kids to feed, but they, yeah. So they, they had to
00:21:57.920
worry about losing their jobs in a way that I think that the wokes don't. And they also had to worry
00:22:02.140
about feeding themselves. You see, it was a woke. If you're a Christian and you lose your job, you take
00:22:06.260
some level of personal responsibility for that. Even if you were, you know, trying to push a
00:22:09.920
Christian agenda, if you're a woke person and you lose your job, you take no, you don't feel like
00:22:14.700
you messed up in any sense. No, if anything, you sue and expect to win a ton of money.
00:22:20.040
You're the hero of the story, right? You know? And I think that one thing, one thing I will note,
00:22:25.700
and this is a surprise to me about companies is after this Trump election cycle, which has appeared
00:22:32.260
very different than previous election cycles. Last time Trump won, there was this broad perception
00:22:37.760
of like, the pollsters got it all wrong. And you know, the pollsters didn't know what they were
00:22:43.220
doing, but like broadly, everything else is still fine. Like society still works the way we used to
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think it did. This time it's almost acted like a mandate against the infected cultural institutions
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more broadly. We think with MSNBC being sold now with things like Disney going back onto X slash
00:23:02.540
Twitter, with a lot of rollback in woke policy that I didn't think I would see. I am actually
00:23:09.600
surprised how quickly business has turned on these individuals. Now, are they still putting out media
00:23:16.040
that's been in production for the past five years? It has like pronouns like God, one of the ones I was
00:23:20.080
actually interested in trying out recently. It was something like Avowed is the game I was thinking of
00:23:26.020
Awakened or something. Anyway, I'll add it in post, but it turned out to have pronouns in it. And I'm
00:23:29.660
like, I'm not going to play that. Like, I'm not going to do that because I know-
00:23:37.700
I think where we are seeing business able to make retreats, we are seeing it in many areas I did not
00:23:44.640
anticipate. So business might be correcting faster than I thought. I'd also note here about another
00:23:53.500
argument I've heard, which is very interesting. It's that business went woke because woke culture
00:24:01.660
It is, I guess. Yeah. I mean, the whole thing, the core of woke culture and the urban monoculture
00:24:07.860
involves atomization and divorcing the human from their family, from their community and
00:24:15.280
commoditizing everything. So suddenly, instead of having friends, you have a therapist and you
00:24:21.840
have social media and a bunch of things that you buy-
00:24:25.520
Wait, wait, wait. Can I just say how much I love that? Instead of having a friend, you have a therapist.
00:24:36.160
it's taught all these original sources of these things that you used to get are toxic. Now you buy it.
00:24:41.940
And to not buy these things is to be a conspiracy theorist, raw milk drinking homesteader who believes
00:24:52.460
in a bunch of crazy things and doesn't vaccinate their kids. And they're seen as crazy. And I was
00:24:58.740
thinking about this when you suddenly were concerned about food diets last night of like, now,
00:25:04.300
even when a totally normal person is suddenly kind of concerned about processed foods, there's this
00:25:11.900
feeling about them like, oh, you're one of those. Like you're one of those off the grid, like only
00:25:18.340
eats, you know, raw eggs. And by the way, like I'm super into that, but it is categorized by the urban
00:25:27.400
monoculture as sort of a crazy off the grid conspiracy theorist. So yeah, that does make sense. So you're not
00:25:34.100
going to, and you also, you're not going to make money from those people. So if you're a business
00:25:36.940
and you're marketing to someone, are you going to market to the person who does their best to avoid
00:25:41.580
hyper-processed foods, who does their best to avoid toxic social media, addictive games and things
00:25:50.380
like that? Or do you go for the person who has fully surrendered themselves to operative condition
00:25:56.320
and dopamine hits? Yeah. I mean, conservative culture says, you know, restrict yourself,
00:26:01.320
you know, have a degree of self-control. And those are bad consumers. They're not repeat
00:26:06.360
purchasers. They're not sticky. They're not addicted. Like that's terrible. You're right.
00:26:10.700
That's a bad investment. That is, I think it's the most convincing thing you've actually said to me so
00:26:14.780
far in terms of like why they have chosen to double down so hard on this audience is this is the most
00:26:20.860
trigger and spend happy audience. And an audience that is not woke is far more likely to not buy
00:26:28.920
things. That's convincing. Well, I mean, look at the way our family buys things. We tried to buy
00:26:34.300
just a few things that are very reusable. And I even look at the us when contrasted with much
00:26:39.520
poorer friends that we have, they buy so much more than us. Like, yeah, it actually like causes Simone
00:26:47.580
to like almost panic when she sees the way that other people who were friends with who are much
00:26:52.240
less wealthy than us spend money. They like actually like go out to like McDonald's. They
00:26:58.440
like actually like buy like snacks. These days, anyone who goes to a restaurant, I'm like, how can
00:27:05.720
you financially like survive this? This is I'll never financially recover from this. Oh my God.
00:27:14.600
I am never going to financially recover from this. Every single time someone goes out. Yeah.
00:27:19.680
Every single time we go out. RIP. When was the last time you went out to a restaurant, Simone?
00:27:27.340
Hold on. I know this. Well, when we were at Hereticon, but that was included.
00:27:36.160
Okay. So when somebody else wasn't paying, when was the last time? Can you even remember? It must
00:27:40.140
have been a year ago at least. Like when you and I just did it because we weren't. Yeah.
00:27:45.820
You and I paid for a meal that you ate. Oh, my birthday at the hibachi place.
00:27:53.800
Yes. Your birthday. So that was pretty recent. Yes. Yes.
00:28:01.480
You, you got takeout for yourself. We cooked for the whole family.
00:28:06.100
Okay. Me? Huh. Yeah. I, I honestly cannot. I could not.
00:28:11.760
It must've been more than a year ago. I'm just pointing out that I think a lot of people don't
00:28:16.940
get, like, they think this stuff is normal and it's not normal if you're from a conservative
00:28:20.720
cultural group. It is a disgusting amount of overspending that is genuinely nauseating.
00:28:26.320
Well, and this is, this is how spending used to be. People think that, I guess, in the 1950s,
00:28:33.300
there was just some era of abundance. People were eating shitty canned food. Like when you
00:28:38.360
actually look at what are considered gourmet recipes at the time, it is stuff that, like,
00:28:43.740
even poor people living on food assistance would not bother to eat. It's stuff. I served
00:28:49.340
food in a tenderloin San Franciscan food bank. It was better than, like, the best 1950s had
00:28:57.100
to offer. People don't realize, like, the level of luxury that they're living with now.
00:29:00.580
Yeah, 1950s, like, if you look at, like, good 90s, it's like-
00:29:03.680
Like dinner party stuff. You would, like, go out of your way to, like, serve to the fancy,
00:29:07.540
your boss, you know, who's coming over for dinner.
00:29:10.140
It can be jello. So you'd have, like, some, some fruit in some jello. And then you have
00:29:15.400
some, like, I'll put things on screen here. It is quite disgusting, by the way.
00:29:18.360
Yeah, I'll see. I can share some of my, like, videos on cooking. So anyway, that was the 1950s.
00:29:23.780
People were like, oh, like, oh, it's so, we live in such. And also going out to eat was a
00:29:29.020
very big deal for a whole family to do that. And maybe, maybe a young people courting or something
00:29:35.880
might go out. It's like a, ooh, I'm really showing off.
00:29:38.120
No, I mean, honestly, one of the most disgusting signs of opulence is smart, casual restaurants
00:29:42.300
being branded as, like, a regular thing that people should-
00:29:46.640
Yeah, what a conspiracy. Yeah, I guess that's, that was sort of, maybe what we're seeing is the
00:29:52.700
tail end of this era in which American families were gaslit into believing that eating out regularly
00:30:00.980
was normal, that insanely opulent birthday parties were normal, that-
00:30:08.200
Oh my God, birthday parties for kids are insane. Why would you do that? Why would you give a child
00:30:13.660
Well, but even now, like, what's so normalized, and I see this, not just among influencers,
00:30:19.220
I'm just saying our friends, people buying cakes for birthday parties, like, bitch, make a cake.
00:30:25.540
Like, it can be a boxed cake. This is not hard. And it doesn't even have to be good. I mean,
00:30:31.460
I've had so many disaster cakes that, you know, because we're cooking in altitude or with, like,
00:30:35.740
borrowed pans or something didn't work out, and we just turned it into a construction cake that,
00:30:39.360
like, you know, it's a pile of, like, cake dirt. But it's fine. Like, but people are buying,
00:30:45.580
and these are, these are expensive cakes. There's fondant involved. They're multi-tiered cakes.
00:30:49.940
These are, and that's just the cake. Like, what else are they getting? Some people are renting
00:30:58.020
Oh, by the way, just so people know how we do toys with our kids. So we do do the future police,
00:31:02.980
where they take away the kids' toys, but we don't give them all back. In fact, we regularly clear
00:31:06.940
out all but about a quarter of their toys. We put them in the attic, and then we wrap them and give
00:31:16.100
It's great, because they treat them like, sometimes they remember them from before,
00:31:18.980
sometimes they don't, but they're always really happy to have them again, and they're,
00:31:25.460
they're otherwise ignored. It's not like they miss them. And if they miss them and ask for them,
00:31:31.820
Yeah, but typically they don't miss them or notice them, but if they do, we give them back. Yeah.
00:31:35.240
Yeah. I don't, I can't remember the last time they've asked for something back.
00:31:39.940
Which is, no, but it's a good system. And I think that so many people, they just are like,
00:31:44.120
oh, that wouldn't, you know, whatever. Like, yeah. Yeah. I think that the consumerist thing
00:31:50.160
might be part of it. Is it the urban monoculture was to an extent crafted or a partnership with big
00:31:55.140
business to create this belief that if you want something, and it's one of the things I've known.
00:31:59.740
No, no, no. It's again, any, you're using language that implies intentionality. When no,
00:32:04.780
it was that they clicked together that this, this on, on, on the one part, this memetic virus that
00:32:10.760
promised instant gratification and never having to say no to yourself and never having to do
00:32:15.220
something unpleasant in the moment. Plus an industry that profited from that mindset. Like,
00:32:20.860
of course they're going to love each other. Of course works for Doritos. You'd have like the
00:32:26.620
Hayes by Doritos and Dunkin' Donuts. That is beautiful.
00:32:30.820
Hayes brought to you by Doritos. Yeah, basically.
00:32:32.960
And now there's heroin chic brought to you by Ozempic. Now, yeah, it's sort of this really
00:32:38.520
interesting backlash. I think the more interesting question now is now that there is this backlash
00:32:45.460
to the urban monoculture and yet organizations are going to have to still figure out
00:32:51.360
how to make money going forward. What are they going to do? I mean, already there's a lot of
00:32:56.840
commentary online about what highly processed food companies are going to do in the face of
00:33:02.600
Ozempic becoming widespread because people just aren't having the same cravings for highly processed
00:33:09.360
and like snack foods that they normally would. So now what do they sell? Another, they're trying
00:33:15.720
to remarket a bunch of things. I don't know if that's even necessary. Maybe we've already reached
00:33:21.920
this point at which people are so morally, not morally, mentally bankrupt, like sort of incapable
00:33:30.060
By the way, Simone, I think I remembered when you last went to a restaurant.
00:33:33.680
It was when we were speaking at that conference in Vegas and I took you to that Chinese restaurant
00:33:39.620
and we ordered that dish that we split and the Raider shamed us for buying too deep a dish
00:33:43.900
and splitting it. Do you remember that? That was what? A year ago?
00:33:48.740
That was at the Bellagio. I don't know if that counts because it was a business trip.
00:33:52.540
Yeah. I mean, it was an expense to the foundation, so.
00:33:56.480
So then it doesn't count. Yeah. But if it's, yeah, if it's a business trip, you don't, I mean,
00:34:02.200
we wouldn't have spent that money to buy two dishes personally, but especially if you're traveling
00:34:08.060
for business, you should be respectful of the business that's paying for the thing and then
00:34:12.100
only buy one entree. That's what we did the entire time that like last personal vacation we took.
00:34:18.740
Which was in Switzerland. And we're like, oh shit, it's expensive here. We're going to share
00:34:29.000
People need to like normalize this because they don't understand the way people actually lived
00:34:33.380
in the fifties. If you are trying to be trad, being trad is being frugal. Okay. Yeah.
00:34:40.240
And this is the problem is they don't realize this. They think that being trad is a life of
00:34:44.420
abundance. And it is. Well, there's also the, this theme that keeps coming up in Hannah's
00:34:48.940
children, the super pronatalist book, that's actually super pronatalist in which parents of
00:34:54.320
five plus children are interviewed. And basically it's a book compiling their interviews. Very
00:34:58.160
interesting. A common theme that comes up is in response to this question of what will we do when
00:35:04.160
we have, how will we travel once we have five plus children? How will we get out of the house when
00:35:09.500
we have four plus children or six plus children? And the answer is you just don't like that. You
00:35:15.060
just don't do that anymore. And guess what? Life goes on. Like there's just kind of this expectation
00:35:20.940
of like, but how will we make it work? How can we possibly do it? And once you realize that the
00:35:26.940
answer is you just don't honestly, things get so much better. I love the trip thing. I don't know
00:35:33.540
if people know this, but like even the concept of vacations or trips is like a fairly modern concept.
00:35:37.820
Mm-hmm. Oh, and even the, even the scaled down 1950s version where you would go everywhere in
00:35:42.940
your car and go car camping, even that was very new because the highway system was a new invention.
00:35:48.820
The concept that you had roads that you could travel across America, that was a big deal that
00:35:54.000
you could actually drive across America suddenly. Yeah. So, so, so my dad, whose father was a
00:35:59.420
congressman, so like not like an insignificant person and a fairly wealthy individual, they'd go on one
00:36:05.380
trip a year. It was a car trip to the Jersey shore. Yes. And they would just stay in one place the
00:36:09.580
whole time. It wasn't freaking Disneyland. It was a house. Yeah. And I think that we, as a society,
00:36:16.320
are like, this is one of the, you know, you were talking to me about this. They're like,
00:36:19.500
but if I have a kid, how will I go to Milan? It's like, well, maybe you need to not be going to
00:36:24.800
Milan. Milan sucks. What do you do? There's like one Da Vinci piece, some old churches,
00:36:32.500
but like the rest is just mostly office buildings. What do you, Milan? We say this is people who used
00:36:40.360
to split our time between countries every other month. Well, I mean, I think that's, that's also,
00:36:46.120
it's, it's kind of like, we're speaking from a position of so much privilege and abundance.
00:36:50.100
It's kind of shitty for us to do. Like you being like, oh, sex isn't that interesting,
00:36:54.040
but you've had so much sex. Like very much the way I am was travel as well. Yeah. Like you've
00:36:59.380
traveled so much throughout your life. And now I'm like, ah, you, you guys shouldn't live for
00:37:04.020
sex. Don't do that. I, I used to travel as I said, I think it was earlier. I said over a hundred
00:37:08.780
countries. I actually think if I remember correctly, the number was over 50 countries,
00:37:11.320
but over a large number of countries, I I've done tons and tons of travel. I've lived in like seven
00:37:15.360
countries and, and now I'm just like, ah, travel sucks. We still have a house in Peru.
00:37:21.320
Do we need to sell? We need to get that sold as well.
00:37:24.380
ASAP. Well, I'm trying the, we have to make all the plumbing repairs first. And the,
00:37:31.100
do you though? The house? Yes, we do. We actually really, there's no hot water in the apartment
00:37:35.460
right now. And the housing association is blocking Alexander from doing the fixes. But again, see,
00:37:40.200
like, this is the thing is everyone's like, well, I want to have multiple houses someday. I want to
00:37:43.860
have a vacation. No, you don't. Do you understand what a hassle that is? I mean, one, there's a property
00:37:49.680
taxes, two, there's a constant repairs, three, there's the cleaning for there's the travel
00:37:54.840
between the places and all the money that you have to spend just doing the travel. And then of
00:37:59.500
course, whenever you bring over more supplies from one country or another, there's import or export
00:38:03.960
taxes. It's some customs person decides to like slap on you after digging through your suitcases.
00:38:09.560
This is not fun. Yeah, it's super interesting to see how just having a lot of kids and the forced
00:38:22.400
frugality and groundedness that a large family forces on people causes them to become a lot happier,
00:38:30.100
it seems in this book. And it could be, it didn't have to be children. Like it could be that,
00:38:36.560
I don't know, both of your legs are cut off or something or whatever. Like it could just be
00:38:41.720
that you have been forced by law enforcement to not leave a certain radius around your house,
00:38:48.180
but then suddenly your life gets a lot better because you're not doing all this stuff that
00:38:52.260
ultimately doesn't make you happy anyway. I just find that interesting as a concept, but yes. Okay.
00:38:57.560
The big thing that I'm taking away from this conversation is that a big reason why
00:39:01.880
the urban monoculture paired so well with corporate America was that they mutually benefited
00:39:11.240
from reinforcing instant gratification and consumerism.
00:39:16.320
And how else is a flag company supposed to stay in business if you don't change it every year?
00:39:31.780
Sales are way down. No one's buying American flags anymore.
00:39:36.240
We had some success when we jumped on the pride bandwagon,
00:39:39.560
but now that it's a settled issue, there's just no demand for flags anymore.
00:40:05.060
They need to add, like, a new, like, keffiyeh pattern layer onto the end of it?
00:40:08.960
I feel like they ran out of new communities to add.
00:40:12.240
That's why I said they need to add the keffiyeh, Lauren.
00:40:16.640
No, no, no, no. Specifically to make it, like, Hamas-coded.
00:40:19.120
Like, a Muslim sign on the center of the gay pride flag?
00:40:35.600
it would have to be, like, a crescent moon, like, inside a Star of David
00:40:43.480
No, no, no, but, like, I just feel like it would be so extra offensive
00:40:46.420
in a way that actually works with the colonizer flag
00:40:49.500
Because already, like, if we're slapping that on, like...
00:40:52.480
No, they literally would put, like, a little X in the Star of David.
00:41:12.380
that I find frustrating when it comes to buying things for our kids.
00:41:25.320
I, well, so this is the way I was doing the cost.
00:41:40.200
especially considering we plan to have more kids.
00:41:55.820
I look at what I pay for them to do things on weekends,
00:42:44.960
like they throw in the sound of that guy going,