00:27:02.120But it turns out that this is a developing story. So it's still people are still debating this. There's people coming to the story with takes still that are really lukewarm. What I am talking about is the current kerfuffle between Stephen Crowder and the Daily Wire.
00:27:21.560Now to a fascinating battle between The Daily Wire and comic and YouTuber Stephen Crowder,
00:27:29.060who Daily Wire offered $50 million to over four years.
00:27:33.740But Crowder said the offer and its restrictions were tantamount to a slave contract.
00:33:34.620There's a lot of things Stephen Crowder has done that I liked.
00:33:38.020I actually think his Change My Mind thing was kind of a cool idea.
00:33:42.200I thought that was, you know, as a repeatable, scalable type of content, that's kind of cool.
00:33:48.180I don't really watch it, but it seemed like a clever enough idea.
00:33:51.360His mug club thing is a very good idea.
00:33:54.700It's one that I think should be replicated by anyone who can.
00:33:57.780Having a membership list and an email list is better than gold in this scene.
00:34:04.500We should normalize trying to make little memberships, you know, where you can speak directly to your people and you have this ecosystem that is apart from, you know, social media.
00:34:18.520um you know there's i his show i don't really watch it i i don't personally find him funny
00:34:25.620steven crowder has never once made me laugh and i've seen a bunch of stuff i i know he's
00:34:31.620a stand-up comedian i bet it's terrible that's just my opinion uh other than that
00:34:36.520i don't really care too much about him but i think it's he can probably make a better run
00:34:44.480at something the size of the daily wire that's not you know just to make the republican party
00:34:51.800more zionist which is essentially what he's trying to do or what ben shapiro is trying to
00:34:57.680um and so that i think is it good or bad that he's doing this i think i think it's good i think
00:35:02.840that's all i need to know but like i don't think you get points for saying oh i see what he's
00:35:06.920trying to do i don't give a shit if you're not doing that you're a fucking loser if you think
00:35:11.340you can succeed without planning things if you if there's people in our scene that still think
00:35:17.600popularity comes from lightning strikes it's not you know and if his whole campaign is like i'm
00:35:24.400taking on big con big conservatives i don't really care how genuine it is a for effort let's see where
00:35:32.120it goes i guess that's my my policy right and and this is where i want to get your opinion
00:35:37.960my thoughts are that the contract was shit and i've lived i watched hours of these streams i
00:35:46.780watched crowders for a stream i watched the response from their uh co-founder of the daily
00:35:52.640wire where he went line by line by the through the contract you read out the whole fucking
00:35:56.880contract and justified it and then i saw one with ben shapiro after essentially doing the same thing
00:36:02.320but less legal and more this is how it is this is how every contract is and it's not now that
00:36:09.580might work for people who've never read a contract or never written a contract you've written contracts
00:36:15.420judas i've written contracts and we both signed contracts and we both broken contracts i'm sure
00:36:21.760so we're not legal minds but i got a pretty good understanding of contracts insofar as most
00:36:30.000contracts can be wherever the fuck you want them to be there actually aren't a whole lot of rules
00:36:33.600with contracts that's the fun that's the funny thing about them well that's the great thing
00:36:38.860about the idea of a contract so hearing shapiro talk about contracts in this way it's kind of
00:36:44.980like a guy at like like a cell phone wicket trying to say oh don't bother reading it it's
00:36:50.900boilerplate it's the same as everything else just sign at the bottom so now hold on a second
00:36:54.740So you're playing on the assumption of the lowest common denominator that contracts are this boilerplate, are this set-in-stone institution or product that isn't infinitely editable and customizable, which is actually how tort and contract law work generally.
00:37:16.260It's literally an agreement which is written.
00:37:19.000It doesn't have to be written by a lawyer.
00:50:09.540I think the first thing that I said to you when I first started watching, or when I just observed, no, I didn't observe the thumbnail.
00:50:15.380I think we're just talking about trade generally.
00:50:18.960And I was saying, like, yeah, I was aware that there isn't as much trade between provinces as there ought to be.
00:50:27.320And I was aware that provinces did sometimes make trades with the U.S.
00:50:33.440But to me, it was like here and there occasionally they make trades with the U.S.
00:50:38.840and then watching this again i'm just taking it at face value that zion isn't just fucking lying
00:50:44.060and fabricating numbers but that chart was insane it seemed to be something on on the order of like
00:50:51.340each province trading about twice as much with the states as they do with all the other provinces
00:50:56.800combined which is fucking wild yeah and the reason that stood out and there's a few other
00:51:02.960things that he brought up that were interesting uh one one that he kind of took exception to
00:51:08.660But it is it seems true, at least for the average citizen of Canada, which is that there's not a lot of places for us to go outside of three major cities.
00:51:19.840So the trend you see in America is people leaving these metropolises, metropoli of, you know, Los Angeles, New York, a few big cities and kind of going to the second tier or third tier cities like Austin, Texas is a big one.
00:51:35.980austin texas really really wants to be like the silicon valley of the south and it's not working
00:51:43.740it's really i don't want to give an old thing but my wife went down to texas uh to austin a while
00:51:49.920ago and absolutely fucking hated it um same thing it's like it's too big for its britches anyway
00:51:56.420point but canada doesn't really have that it doesn't have second or third tier cities that
00:52:00.900it's it's kind of a city it's got suburbs it's got a lot of houses and developments here it's
00:52:06.960basically you got these three big cities of vancouver montreal um toronto and you got some
00:52:12.260and then it's just small towns and villages um and those present different problems now i know
00:52:18.060you're we're both advocates of getting out of cities if you can obviously but i do think it
00:52:24.460present if you're just a worker just a guy who doesn't want a homestead and is just like i i
00:52:30.260need a place to go i want a house with some kids in a yard there's not a law of options period
00:52:36.360unless you literally carve it out of the wilderness yourself and what do you think about that i mean
00:52:43.580it's kind of complicated like if you work in i don't know what they call them like brain industries
00:52:49.120or whatever like if you're if you're in design or they're called brain industries are they actually
00:52:53.740where i just coined that by the way and you know marketing and i'm being nice thanks buddy you know
00:52:59.940smart smart guy stuff yeah i can see how that would be difficult you can't go anywhere but
00:53:04.580another city but um i don't view that as a canadian problem so i'm discounting that like i don't see
00:53:10.120like he showed the map of canada i'm like okay so how is that my point is how is that different
00:53:15.280from anywhere else on earth like this is just a global phenomena that uh that these industries
00:53:24.640we like if you have to work in those industries you have to work in an urban center like i don't
00:53:28.700know it's just it's almost a tautology so um if you now if you step if you want to look at the
00:53:34.180actual issue that they have in the states and you say if you want to work anywhere or live anywhere
00:53:40.380in terms of like housing and labor or like an employment availability generally then all of
00:53:46.960that is being really thrust into the urban areas i get it um but also i don't know how true that is
00:53:54.560in the states that's the argument that he's making i don't know how true it is because i know that
00:53:57.880it's not really that true in canada like if you are just a guy looking for a job and a house
00:54:03.100there are a shit ton of options for you outside of the cities and he's making the argument like
00:54:08.000oh, all these cities are compacted. There's not enough options. They don't have a lot of places
00:54:11.140to go. I just don't. I don't think that it's true unless you're the sort of person who
00:54:16.640has a really, really narrow set of work that they are willing to do, I guess.
00:54:23.800The problem, I agree with what you're saying. The problem, I think, that's going to emerge,
00:54:29.680and I'm going to tie together a few different articles here, and we've done this in the past,
00:54:33.820And you'll need to rein me in, reel me in if I get off the reservation on this.
00:54:39.460But there's this meme that goes around in our circles for the development of this sort of North American, it's kind of like NAFTA, but a bit more solidified, between Canada and U.S. and Mexico.
00:55:28.880So for Canada, with each province trading so heavily and so dependent on America, they are essentially in there's no unity between them as a nation.
00:55:40.920And financially, they're so tethered to America that might as well be an appendage of America.
00:55:46.040And this is brought up a lot. And this I'm not even talking about politics, values, history, identity.
00:55:53.580I'm talking just numbers, just economics.
00:55:57.420But those can be a serious driving force.
00:56:00.380Combine that with what I think we're going to see the trend of Mexico handling more and more manufacturing for America,
00:56:10.100taking all of this manufacturing from China and putting it right in Mexico for a variety of reasons.
00:56:16.640I think cheapness of labor might be one.
00:56:19.980Essentially, Mexico is making a huge play for manufacturing.
00:56:23.580and i think a lot of people because china is so toxic uh on the world stage like it everyone's
00:56:32.720complaining about china there's up and down from the political class down to the citizenry
00:56:38.060people are uncomfortable with supporting china for a variety of reasons i think they're generally
00:56:43.100happier about having it a on their own continent and b with uh oh mexico there are neighbors there
00:56:50.700our friends america's half mexican already you know what i mean and this will get pushed more
00:56:56.560and more and more with uh the increase of mexican politicians like we know this you'll need to hear
00:57:02.120this from me everyone knows that the relationship with mexico strengthens the more mexicans you have
00:57:07.260in the political and the financial class so that seems like a foregone conclusion to me
00:57:12.340so you are seeing at least through economics and trade um the creation of the cum zone
00:57:18.520and there's a couple there's one thing here i'm on the website of the white house whitehouse.gov
00:57:26.300and this would have been back from january 10th but i'm just getting to it now
00:57:30.380this is the declaration of north america dna so i'm just going to read the first little bit here
00:57:38.640today president andres manuel lopez or how many names do you fucking need mexican president
00:57:46.840And President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Trudeau met in Mexico City for the 10th Annual North American Leaders Summit, NALS.
00:57:55.960The leaders are determined to fortify our region's security, prosperity, sustainability, and inclusiveness through commitments across six pillars.
00:58:05.320Number one, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
01:00:08.640like fuck you man i'm north american for life like what do you mean like a continent i'm a continental
01:00:26.580yeah you know like even if you said like yo man i'm asian there's like asia like what does that
01:00:32.160me um but north american sounds clunky no one really believes in it but i do think there's
01:00:38.720a movement towards essentially destroying borders between mexico america and canada
01:00:46.060um here's another headline just to tell you what i'm talking about u.s seeing uptick in
01:00:54.600illegal border crossings from canada um so this is basically talking about how we got an illegal
01:01:02.720immigration problem and now it's coming from canada too now what we're talking about is mexicans
01:01:08.960i'm not mexicans that's the other side indians they got mexicans coming in the back door
01:01:14.720indians coming in from the top um and asians coming in through the sides that's the story
01:01:21.100of america right now um and so there's people crossing the border legally for the exact same
01:01:26.260reasons for economic opportunity for safety it's too cold up here and people might be thinking i'm
01:01:33.380trying to be funny with that no no no canada being cold will be a justified reason for allowing
01:01:39.960refugees into america mark my words that's gonna like what do you expect indians to stay in a cold
01:01:47.140place get ready for that um what i'm seeing is that the discussions about north america shifting
01:01:53.900towards like what are we like we don't even need these borders and also the fact that canada
01:01:59.180economically is in such dire straits that canadians i think are generally looking towards america
01:02:05.300just for cheaper groceries i think you'll find fertile mental ground to propose the idea one
01:02:15.280day not right now but maybe in five years of why don't we all live in the cum zone that way we can
01:02:22.380and that's this is the pitch they'll make to the conservatives they'll say this is going to be the
01:02:28.060best way to bring back manufacturing we're going to bring back manufacturing to mexico and then
01:02:35.400we'll open the boris mexico so guess what you know what china's not going to have it and then they
01:02:40.160say that to the right and they say cha-ching yes to the left they'll say and guess what and we're
01:02:45.760going to take more from russia we're going to be more sustainable so russia can't have a grasp on
01:02:51.240our throats and they'll say yep cha-ching these are the two narratives that can be rolled out
01:02:55.960now if people are thinking it's impossible imagine that happening does it seem reasonable that people
01:03:02.520would go along with that i think so so far what do you think yeah absolutely it's one of these
01:03:08.560it's one of these perfect examples of ratcheting not it's not an example because it's we're kind of
01:03:13.380guessing here but um it would be a case of ratcheting where you have the left wing dialing
01:03:19.240it up to 11 uh it should be zero and then the conservatives dial it back down to six and say
01:03:25.180look what glorious success we've delivered you it's like no no when we say we want manufacturing
01:03:31.420back we want it back we want it in akron ohio we want it in the rust belt we want it where it was
01:03:37.500before we want silicon valley to actually make silicon again you know we invented it it should
01:03:43.820be there and frankly it should be only there it shouldn't exist anywhere else on earth except
01:03:48.760there so um anything else is just you being a faggot i don't know like but i agree that they
01:03:55.680would attempt that and unfortunately i agree that it would work it would definitely work there'd be
01:04:01.080a lot of people who would like to just be done with the conversation and say finally it's resolved
01:04:05.780so here's a quote from the article i was just talking about uh the uptick in illegal border
01:04:11.800crossings there's this woman named seamer who's representing here seamer could not say whether
01:04:17.420could not say why there are more families but said it's always been an issue quote people are
01:04:23.280always trying to find a better way of life they bring their kids across and children don't have
01:04:27.200a choice uh jagdish patel's father told the canadian press his son held many jobs in india
01:04:34.060but none worked out so it's not it's not it's not a case of unemployment it's that
01:04:42.300this shitty guy couldn't hold down a job so he went to another country unemployable and then
01:04:48.140canada didn't work so now he's crossing the border illegally into the u.s yeah um so yeah
01:04:54.460they're just saying there's been an uptick since covid ended they're seeing thousands and thousands
01:04:58.380of uh border crossing and interact this is the stuff they've caught they've caught these people
01:05:03.800going over there might be more who haven't but we're seeing the map we are already aware of the
01:05:08.880the malleability of the borders so to me like knowing what i do about the government look at
01:05:16.780how they treated drugs we have a drug problem what we should just legalize drugs because what we
01:05:21.960the last thing we want is these families in jail who wants to hold an indian family in jail we
01:05:28.840should we should actually help them get to america so they're just going they're going to use that as
01:05:33.460the wedge issue to get this through and then the economics is the new one that i'm seeing and i
01:05:38.860think the economic one will be the one that actually does it and i think manufacturing
01:05:43.680friend shoring as they call it it's the opposite of offshoring they call it friend shoring bringing
01:05:50.080that back to mexico i'm like well it's over then because we don't really have and canada doesn't
01:05:55.160have the capability to mount a strong national defense like you're going to need strong canadian
01:06:00.720nationalism to push back against this and i don't see it i just don't um because canada always plays
01:06:07.520fast and loose with its i'm looking at an article right now this was back in december from regarding
01:06:13.360the trucker protest now canada redefined economic impact as violence to justify freezing protesters
01:06:20.640bank accounts so canada already has a very unilateral highly centralized view of how it
01:06:28.720believes it should be able to get people's money you know i mean and i just saw there was a clip
01:06:35.000from the world economic forum recently it was christia friedland who is uh by all accounts the
01:06:44.640one who's really running the country right now it's not justin trudeau it's christia friedland
01:06:49.300who's running she's at least competent i disagree with everything she says but i see her as a threat
01:06:55.700because she is intelligent she's just a globalist she had a clip that some people said was taken out0.95
01:07:03.480of context but i don't think it was at least not where it counts and she was in giving a speech
01:07:10.500and describing how you know people in the west are competing with people throughout the world
01:07:18.060and they expect 10 times what everyone else is is making for the exact same amount of work
01:07:24.560So they need to work 10 times as harder or work 10 times less.
01:07:29.840She was making a strictly globalist approach.
01:07:33.040And this is what he said when I talked to him about what's going on in the American middle class.
01:07:37.700We demand a higher paycheck than the rest of the world.
01:07:41.040So if you're going to demand 10 times the paycheck, you need to deliver 10 times the value.
01:07:46.940It sounds harsh, but maybe people in the middle class need to decide to take a pay cut.
01:07:52.660again not untrue if you're looking at the dynamics of the global economy but politically
01:07:59.200and socially a very difficult thing some people are saying oh that's that's not the context of
01:08:06.400what she was saying i'm like no no but it really is she's basically saying that the middle class
01:08:12.280needs to adjust its expectations to live in a globalist you know society right we're not you're
01:08:21.100not just as a worker you are competing with chinese people you are competing with africans
01:08:26.460because it's all the same dollar which is infuriating yeah it which is i'm like don't
01:08:34.200this is what i hate i see this at work all the time too don't act like you're not in charge
01:08:39.440this doesn't need to be it you could you know when we discussed many many episodes ago
01:08:45.620the book free trade doesn't work we also discussed um national system for political economy
01:08:52.580by frederick list and they both said essentially the same thing but it was showing how countries
01:08:59.520like britain and other ones that really took off during the industrial revolution
01:09:04.080actually got that way into like the the heavy hitters in the world right now and usually because
01:09:10.240there was a time when no one made anything there was a time not long ago we didn't have
01:09:16.520manufacturing we didn't have factories all you can make was ships and then people just traded
01:09:21.820cotton and textiles and what have you and then that's changed the industrial revolution but
01:09:27.020there was a time when that was all new and the ones that really took off and became the heavy
01:09:31.660hitters they were heavy on trade like china then they went through a period where they imposed
01:09:37.360sanctions blockades whatever because they said we want lots and lots of trade lots of imports
01:09:43.840now we're cutting off all imports because we need to build up our infrastructure we need to learn
01:09:48.280how to make this stuff ourselves to make it domestically and so instead of competing with
01:09:54.020all the imports we're literally going to make it so they can't import their stuff so we we can
01:09:59.580develop it ourselves then after they do that they re-enter the global marketplace so they don't
01:10:05.660become stagnant and monopolistic which is generally what happens because there is a point
01:10:10.920when you do want global competition and that is to keep your domestic manufacturing whatever more
01:10:16.980agile but there is a role that government plays if you're trying to get into a new industry or
01:10:23.340trying to build yourself up again where it's like you know what we're not even going to allow
01:10:27.020imports you want a good example of this is um we hear about them every election the dairy cartel
01:10:33.600what's the dairy cartel well it's the you know it's a nasty name for a union and what i learned
01:10:41.300about liberals and leftists is they love unions until they see a union because it seems that
01:10:47.720every union they every union that exists it seems that they hate sorry okay i caution calling it a
01:10:54.680union because there are no workers involved it's a you could say it's a union but it would be a
01:10:59.840union of ceos it's a union of corporate entities who control all of the you know they're all of
01:11:07.840the going concerns in the dairy industry and they're all colluding to fix prices and influence
01:11:14.420regulation so i mean it's not it's it's a union if you think of the of the companies as laborers
01:11:21.140but in some sense it's actually the exact opposite of a union because there's absolutely no
01:11:26.300representation for the gut like with the egg one right they have the the egg grading bays all of
01:11:31.980those guys working at the egg grading stations they're making fucking 19 an hour and they probably
01:11:36.700hate it as much as anyone but it's the companies that own those egg grading stations are the ones
01:11:41.920that are setting the price floor so that the rest of us have to pay six dollars for a dozen eggs
01:11:46.520which only cost 12 cents to produce yeah so i mean i'm saying is it is a union it's just different
01:11:52.380types of guys because what is a union at a low level if not price fixing you're just trying to
01:11:58.360price fix wages no i see what you mean it's just like the union is usually associated with
01:12:02.860the idea of like labor labor fighting back against the higher power and this is the this is the
01:12:10.020opposite this is the higher power fixing fixing prices in order to fuck with their consumers
01:12:16.280or it's fixing prices just to be like we don't want to compete with cheaper milk coming in
01:12:21.180from china because it might very well be that there's no canadian dairy manufacturers if they
01:12:26.500just so it's like it's the exact same sort of thing it's just the the the big bad that they're
01:12:33.320against isn't the corporation it is a corporate it's the rest of the world right it's just like
01:12:39.760it seems like the only unions that exist and are functional is this and cops and teachers
01:12:45.160and so let everything the left is hate but they're the only successful union same thing with the eggs
01:12:49.960like what they're trying to do is protect their domestic production which is kind of what you
01:12:55.560need and we have to pay more for eggs milk but it's like or we could become yeah but but just
01:13:00.900so okay i'm john i'm not fully understanding like using the eggs i don't know as much about the
01:13:04.500i know a lot about the egg the egg board the egg cartel but like with the eggs them setting a price
01:13:10.160floor makes them less competitive like it makes it makes it easier for foreign eggs to enter the
01:13:16.040market and succeed because they're sold at so much less and then the government has to put
01:13:20.140import restrictions on foreign eggs like in the states they're joking about like how
01:13:25.180eggs are 12 cents and like 12 cents a dozen in mexico and in texas it's seven dollars right
01:13:30.400so i mean the reason that it's seven dollars in texas is because they have some equivalent of
01:13:35.420the egg board which is setting a price floor under below which you cannot sell and i don't see how
01:13:41.980that benefits the local i mean it benefits the local industry in the sense that it makes them
01:13:47.040filthy fucking rich but it does not make them agile and it does not help them in any way other
01:13:52.620than them just the c-suite of those five companies become inordinately rich yeah but i mean that's
01:13:59.640what a union is too like they just want more money that's literally the only reason you get a union
01:14:03.780so i guess that's why i'm misunderstanding like is the is the objective here to form these in
01:14:09.700order to rebuild an industry to make it more competitive globally because this doesn't do that
01:14:13.900this is the opposite yeah no that's like this is the point where like if you're just trying to
01:14:17.560protect domestic production from being flooded from the outside world this is what it looks like
01:14:23.200and if they're not agile that and they're not developing more that's a different problem
01:14:27.300but it's like if you're a nation and you want you have people who want to farm eggs and you want
01:14:32.160them to be able to farm eggs you need these sort of protections so just so they they're not
01:14:36.300competed out the market that's what a government would do yeah and then it's just at different
01:14:42.480levels it's just ceos do it versus workers but literally the only reason workers do is because
01:14:47.120they want more money so like let's say let's just take i'm just gonna work through it a little bit
01:14:50.900in my head here so like if we take eggs for example if we wanted to make the the egg industry
01:14:56.020in ontario more uh agile and more like marketable and like employ more what how do we measure that
01:15:03.460right employ more people higher quality product faster rate of return more like more like you say
01:15:10.600agile maybe we mean like they are adaptable like if there's bird flu they recover more quickly than
01:15:15.620foreign competitors and things like that right so we can say those are our metrics the first thing
01:15:20.260that you do like you said you could close the border so no foreign eggs come in so you have a
01:15:24.400captive market so canadians or at least ontarians must buy ontario eggs fine but why then is there
01:15:31.300a cartel this is the question if the government has already closed the border shouldn't you then
01:15:36.560leave it as a playground for the local egg trades to work it out amongst themselves why set a
01:15:41.820government mandated floor on egg prices when what you're doing is taking an arbitrary amount of
01:15:47.480money and handing it to a bunch of ceos like from a business standpoint that you've disconnected
01:15:53.380you've disconnected the profit incentive from the productivity of the actual firm so the firm
01:15:59.420doesn't need to be productive in order for them to make money. They can literally burn eggs and
01:16:04.380they will still make money. So you haven't made it more productive. You've actually ruined the
01:16:08.320entire industry and forced everyone to buy an inferior product. So I think we're using
01:16:12.840manufacturing standards to what is just like a commodity too, which I think is where it gets.
01:16:18.020Yeah, but I'm using it as an example because I know a lot about that specific example,
01:16:21.860but I think it applies generally speaking, that it's one thing to close the border
01:16:25.560so that you have an internal market which you have a complete top-down view of not control over you
01:16:31.620have a view of it and you can kind of make adjustments as necessary but i think to say that
01:16:36.720for the government to then get directly involved and set like price floors and production targets
01:16:42.000is not going to like that isn't going to resolve it like the other thing is i don't trust bureaucrats
01:16:46.820to be able to pick an effective price floor this is this is the like the the price discovery
01:16:51.040problem that socialists have in the first place right yeah so that's the thing so if it if they
01:16:56.600went too far in a couple of areas where they they did one thing but they went too far and set the
01:17:01.980price floor that's something we could fix but generally the idea of their existing protections
01:17:08.420for domestic production and those protections generally meaning you probably have to pay a bit
01:17:14.180more for domestic product versus the market being flooded that's one thing and if it's like oh they
01:17:20.080went too far and then they're trying to charge too much or fuck with the market some other way
01:17:24.740that's something that once again the government could step in and fix let me rephrase it a
01:17:29.680different way just to just so because i know we're kind of talking about two different things
01:17:33.180um it's chicken or the egg you could say it's whether or not whether or not the higher cost
01:17:41.160of the local product preceded the closing of the borders or not right because saying we make eggs
01:17:49.700at $6 a dozen, just at an open market rate, and our competitor is 12 cents, we must close the
01:17:56.560border to force people to buy the expensive eggs so that we have the capital to figure out how to
01:18:01.980make the eggs cheaper. The goal is to make the eggs cheaper and more competitive so that we can
01:18:06.800later on reopen the market. But what we have, just as a matter of fact, what we have right now
01:18:12.300is the opposite. We have an open market, but we have a price floor, and the price floor is
01:18:16.980a mandated price floor it isn't six dollars because it is a market rate for six dollars it's
01:18:22.080a price floor the market rate is actually closer to the mexican market rate it's incredibly cheap
01:18:26.460to produce eggs that's why i like this example is because it's a great example of something that's
01:18:31.020insanely cheap to produce and the government is adding a 5 000 markup on it just so they can give
01:18:37.100money to their friends right so that's why i'm saying that there's two separate things and the
01:18:41.220first one is closing the border to allow a market to grow and become healthier is fine. But saying
01:18:50.280we're going to create a price floor from a government level, a high price floor, I just
01:18:56.100do not see how that helps an industry grow in any way. No, no, you're right. I guess I was trying
01:19:03.660to use this as perhaps an inelegant example for someone like Chrystia Friedland to tell her that0.76
01:19:09.740you actually do have control you can build up these these domestic things you have the power
01:19:15.500to do that and we've seen it happen in other areas uh especially that's what we were talking
01:19:22.080about before and that's absolutely true like they have she wants to complain about problems in this
01:19:26.680market problems in that market or oh what can we do i guess we have to french or no you have a 100
01:19:31.560percent control you're the federal government i don't even like the fact that they have that
01:19:35.180control i don't think they should have it but the fact is they have that control and then them
01:19:39.340complaining about there's nothing we can do fuck you you could literally complain you could create
01:19:43.220these markets out of whole cloth if you wanted to yeah and i guess to go back that's what i'm saying
01:19:46.940with um it's probably because i know you're very very skilled on this topic because we were talking
01:19:53.040about this i'm remembering now we were talking about how we just want to buy cheap eggs like
01:19:58.680the situation where people don't know is uh eggs are insanely pricey right now and no one knows why
01:20:05.720And the news coming across the feeds is that Canadians are just stealing groceries, which is a very real conversation I had with my wife today.
01:20:14.920Canadians are experiencing the biggest jump in their grocery bills in more than a decade.
01:20:21.680There's a new Angus Reid poll that's just come out this morning, suggests many Canadians are actually changing their habits because of those rising prices.
01:20:30.160In the meat section of a Toronto Loblaws, an eye-popping price tag for a tray of chicken.
01:20:37.460Almost $27 per kilogram, more than $37 for five breasts.
01:20:43.020As sky-high grocery prices take a big bite out of shoppers' bank accounts,
01:20:48.760it appears more people are resorting to supermarket shoplifting.
01:20:52.360It doesn't surprise me because food is really expensive and people need to eat.
01:20:57.780Concrete data is hard to come by because many cases go unreported,
01:21:01.960but one industry insider says the cost is substantial.
01:21:04.980The average grocery store will lose anywhere between $2,000 to $5,000 worth of food every single week.
01:21:11.840When we go to the poor person grocery store, we buy cheap groceries.
01:21:17.200You know, so do you. So do a lot of people.
01:51:47.680You've indulged too much in vice and sin that's rotted your mind and the mind like your body, but you rotted it.
01:51:53.820you know and that makes you sort of a vehicle for the antichrist and that's kind of like you know
01:51:58.080the biggest sinner is someone who just gave in and so you start seeing this is the birth of
01:52:04.640madness as almost excess knowledge you know you waded too far into the unknown into the darkness
01:52:12.220you read too many weird books you wished for too many things and now you're you went insane by it
01:52:18.680and so you know conversely if you didn't want to go insane you shouldn't get to you know wander
01:52:23.920off the reservation as it were and start looking into things you shouldn't look into so it's almost
01:52:28.940like madness is your mind being infected with like evil stuff and so you just gotta not be exposed
01:52:36.340to that that's how they started viewing madness there but still it becomes like a virus whereas
01:52:42.140before it was just almost random you know it was just oh like you're born you were born with it
01:52:46.580like you'd be born with like a stump leg you're just like oh you're just a guy who's crazy but
01:52:50.760now it's like oh my god i i can contract madness i can i can get it by doing something you know
01:52:57.520that's now you start to see the development of that um and then in the 17th century 1656
01:53:06.880specifically you start to see the shift from madness as like a wandering thing to something
01:53:12.400that needs to be confined and this is what they start seeing with disease too so rather than
01:53:19.140someone being diseased you just kick them out of the village opinions start to shift and there's a
01:53:23.820great many reasons why this happened one of it's because power as power centralizes
01:53:27.960you don't want just these people wandering around so we got to build a place for them
01:53:32.660and they need to be confined there we can't have sick people wandering the forest or on a ship of
01:53:37.460fools. We're just hanging out on an island. We need a place. We put them and they're not allowed
01:53:43.220to leave. And that's where you start seeing that. And you start seeing these pop up in Paris a lot.
01:53:49.820Somewhere in the 15th, 16th century forward, 16th century, 17th century into the early 18th century,
01:53:57.040there's a period of what he calls the Great Confinement. This is a period when the early
01:54:04.140modern cities are constructing general hospitals or hospital generals, poor houses, workhouses,
01:54:15.740jails, prisons, as places to confine those who threaten to disrupt the social order. The primary
01:54:24.860people confined during the great confinement were the poor, the migrants, and the unemployed.
01:54:32.220but the the the mad the mentally ill were swept up with them so uh so these were generalized
01:54:40.120unclassified spaces of you know of a holding tank in the middle of early modern cities
01:54:46.700but even at this time the lines between what is like a mental illness versus what is your mind
01:54:56.840rotting from disease versus what is just like a peculiarity these are all kind of the same thing
01:55:02.780you know they can't really delineate between these things they just know like oh you're crazy we got
01:55:07.500to put you in a prison for crazy people and even then like back at this time the idea of having a
01:55:14.240prison for like long-term criminals was that didn't really exist you know if you were a murderer they
01:55:21.640would just kill you right they'd kick you out or they'd kill you the idea of like we're going to
01:55:26.480keep you in this prison for 50 years would seem like a crazy idea to a lot of the middle ages
01:55:31.800people you know it's just like and then we pay for it what you know but the idea this new idea
01:55:38.100of like well we're just going to keep them there for the rest of their lives was that was a new
01:55:41.740idea at that time and he says that the phenomena of confinement coincided with the 30 years war
01:55:49.320uh and the and he blames us on economic turmoil so really what he's trying to get out with this
01:55:55.500book i'll just say this now he's trying to take a swing at this idea of social confinement he's like
01:56:03.360an anti-prison guy he's like why do we live in a society where you have so many people in prison
01:56:08.100so really he's tracking the history of madness what he's trying to do is make an anti-prison
01:56:13.860sort of thing um and then so he will tie it directly to economics too so he's saying oh
01:56:21.200is economically advantageous to have these people there because they can provide free labor and he
01:56:26.420outright says that in the book now that may be true um i'm not going to say that wasn't true
01:56:30.840because he he doesn't really cite a lot of primary sources as far as i can tell but that i could see
01:56:36.400that um so he says that the the phenomenon of confinement coincided with the 30 years war and
01:56:42.580economic turmoil um he claims that confinement was an answer to falling wages and other problems
01:56:48.840so what he means by that is that around the 30 years war you had a lot of people who were
01:56:56.440homeless and vagabonds so you had people in the streets and they didn't know what to do with them
01:57:02.300and so what they started doing was condemning idleness and he uses that word very specifically
01:57:08.720idleness and so idleness itself was then seen as a mental illness you're a guy who doesn't want to
01:57:15.840work you just want to hang out maybe got ptsd didn't have a name for that then but you have
01:57:20.400that you must be go to jail if you're just like a war veteran in the street and didn't want to go
01:57:27.460back to the fucking mill you're like well you have this this mental illness called idleness and so
01:57:33.620we're going to put you here and you're going to work for free now um and the prisons were used
01:57:39.240to house people during times of crisis um and then in normal times as a source of labor is what
01:57:46.320he's saying um and then eventually housing just the vagabonds and homeless there fell out of fashion
01:57:53.660so those very same prisons uh that sprung up a lot in paris and in britain like you can chart the
01:58:00.760rise of these sorts of uh sort of independently owned prisons um though it fell out of fashion
01:58:06.900and then it just became to house the insane and he's more making the case that we just started
01:58:12.080redefining what insanity was so insanity you know if you're in a town or a village meant that you're
01:58:18.420a babbling raving lunatic or you're a disease like you just literally cannot function in society
01:58:24.540that's what insanity and madness used to be you're a babbling freak then you see madness become oh
01:58:31.120you're just you're not living properly in society or you do it but you got a bad attitude
01:58:37.060or you know i mean like are you doing the wrong thing but that's only a crazy person would do
01:58:42.360that so that's the broadening of the definition of madness we start to see over time and he kind
01:58:49.800of blames the catholics so he doesn't blame economics right he says the insistence of the
01:58:55.060idle and insane the insistence that they should be able to work came out of morality rather than
01:59:01.100economic demand so he says that that was the catholic church saying doing some work will set
01:59:05.500you free shit since adam and eve's fool god has punished humans with the necessity for work
01:59:14.300being unable to work was both a sign of vice and a threat to the stability of the bourgeois order
01:59:24.220The mad, along with the idle, the deviant, the poor, were confined them as being unreasonable.
01:59:32.780But historian Roy Porter has criticised Foucault by saying that this picture of indiscriminate
01:59:40.140confinement does not seem to accurately match what actually happened in England. Few lunatics,
01:59:49.020he says were kept in gulls and workhouse superintendents resisted their admission
01:59:56.380and he juxtaposes this against the past so he says and i like this part this was so cool where
02:00:02.920he said traditionally in the ancient world and leading up to this time evil had to be brought
02:00:09.940into public and dealt with in a ritual right so if someone is crazy things that were negatively
02:00:17.180impacting society needed to be dealt with in the public square so if there was a murderer even or
02:00:22.880something someone just losing their mind it needed to be dealt publicly almost as a way to um to
02:00:28.560cleanse the community but he had said that um now it could all be done in secret or purposefully
02:00:35.860kept from the public and that's one of those paradigm shifts that i think is so interesting
02:00:40.400like you shift from the towns and the villages of the ancient world where everything was dealt
02:00:45.380with here but now there's this new idea where we deal with things in the shadows or you send them
02:00:51.440away to a place that's still you're there's you're still aware that they're there you didn't
02:00:56.700exile them they're not really exiled they're captive in a corner and that's like on a on a
02:01:03.160much larger scale that's again that's a new idea that didn't exist before um it says a madness in
02:01:12.340the classical age uh takes its form only in the shadow of reason as almost like anti-reason or
02:01:19.820unreason so he and by the classical world he means like the 1500s and 1600s so as we start this is
02:01:27.220kind of like an enlightenment era thing as we start to develop this thing called reason then
02:01:32.080we start casting insanity as anti-reason that oh it's just reason is good this is everything that
02:01:37.360negates that it's the shadow of that um and he says here the unreason will become something to
02:01:43.560be gawked at almost as inhuman which makes sense that as we start to define ourselves more through
02:01:50.620rationality um and more through that sort of utilitarianism that we we began to adopt in the
02:01:57.200west anything that's against that is not only anti-reason but if we define ourselves by reason
02:02:01.360they're just like not us they're like a different species entirely and that's when you start like
02:02:07.200being obsessed with them and so over the course of the book he's also charting
02:02:10.660our growing obsession with the insane i think the one example he gives was the marquis de sod
02:02:18.180at 24 sad was put on surveillance by the police who noted it wouldn't be long before we hear again
02:02:25.380about the horrors of the count of sad these horrors would occur just four years later when
02:02:30.560sad offered work as a maid to a widowed beggar when they arrived at his rented cottage he attached
02:02:35.700her to a bed and started whipping her violently. He then slashed her skin to0.65
02:02:39.780pour hot wax in the open wounds. All the while, the Marquis masturbated while
02:02:44.220threatening to kill her if she stopped screaming. When he was finally done, he
02:02:48.380forced her to do blasphemous acts during Easter Sunday before confiding her in the0.85
02:02:52.500room while he visited some prostitutes. However, his victim escaped through a
02:02:56.820window and roused the village against him. The resulting scandal forged the
02:03:00.660Marquis's less than desirable reputation, yet his status and connections meant he
02:03:05.200received nothing more than a slap on the wrist as his in-laws paid off the victim you know like
02:03:11.260these guys who make a name for themselves as being insane and if you look no further than the modern
02:03:18.540world and how many people are obsessed with serial killers you know like they are seen as like a
02:03:23.620different species than us but we're so fascinated by it but it makes you wonder like where did that
02:03:30.640distance come from you know like someone who's clearly mentally ill but we're that that fascination
02:03:37.340that's caused by the distance between it that's kind of what he's talking about right here
02:03:41.280how did that distance form you know and he claims and i don't this is the part i don't agree with so
02:03:49.680i'll see this up front too what he's also trying to say is that because we treat them as inhuman
02:03:56.800they become inhuman so he's he's doing that whole liberal thing where you know you send a send
02:04:02.480someone to a prison they're going to become a criminal i'm like i don't really agree with that
02:04:06.800he's saying that we send them to these chambers and they become animalistic
02:04:11.520you know that's he's kind of showing his political hand there but there is something to it where we
02:04:18.300were they were kind of learning as they went what to do with crazy people and so he talks about like
02:04:23.960over time so you have these prisons where you're housing the mentally ill but then within those
02:04:28.960prisons they had to start delineating between different types of mental illness so again you
02:04:35.740have this thing where you have the regular like pickpockets and then insane people and then insane
02:04:42.100murderers all the same so they start redefining different types of madness and that's where
02:04:46.640asylums come from they grew out of prisons because even within the prisons around even though they've
02:04:53.320kind of criminalized madness that realize that they need special prisons for the mad because
02:04:59.320they can't exist with other criminals so you make a an entire new branch of imprisonment which is
02:05:05.780the asylum which now has its own rules too so you're actually treating them arguably worse than
02:05:12.520criminals because they have less freedom there but you get there by degrees and you know the
02:05:18.060first asylums weren't even that long ago we don't really have them anymore um and depending on who
02:05:24.320you ask that's good or bad you know and that's why he says you know the 18th century you know
02:05:29.720this is the point of madness um that's far from medicine like it's not even seen as a medical
02:05:35.340thing it's just seen as almost evil thing there's no cure for madness you just get it from being like
02:05:41.600a sinner piece of shit and we just need to sequester you so that's why in his mind they
02:05:47.560were permitted to be treated brutally um now people can go back and forth about that however
02:05:53.680much they want but that's the claim being made here um he goes in depth in the book about how
02:06:00.760this classical age treated insanity and i don't think i have the time to go through it now
02:06:06.040it's all it's kind of annoying to go through it about how they started developing this
02:06:12.640conceptualization of what's going on in the mind like for example they says um okay they start
02:06:18.800in the classical age the definition of madness evolved to be a duality between what is essentially
02:06:25.580unhinged passion and profound unreason so if you're crazy that just mean like you were so
02:06:31.240passionate you can't control yourself um and there's like uh it's like a conflict between
02:06:37.200the body and soul or profound unreason like you're just unreasonable to such an extreme
02:06:42.180um and then treat that the way they treated that was like three different forms um and they they
02:06:49.020thought that it's called the awakening the return to the immediate and theatrical representation
02:06:53.640this is like the beginning of psychology but then they had they broke down madness into all
02:06:58.720these different names there's melancholia it's like you're mentally unwell but you're really
02:07:02.840depressive then there's different types of mania and different types of mania were described as
02:07:08.560warm or dry because they thought there were these sort of uh essence fluids in the human in the
02:07:14.920human body and they're not wrong but they said like oh there's you know when you're angry you
02:07:20.180kind of feel hot that must mean that there's this hot fluid inside of you that kind of excretes from
02:07:25.720your organs to make you mad so like if you're just a madman you must have too much of this fluid
02:07:31.020inside of you and they gave names to it so they were trying to like discover the chemistry of
02:07:37.520the mind now again they're not completely wrong because they just didn't know about serotonin
02:07:42.300yet they didn't know about sort of the synapses and the actual fluids that control happiness and
02:07:48.940depressiveness and whatnot but they were they thought it like came from your guts and just
02:07:53.400floated up through your head so he goes a lot in that in the book and what they thought caused
02:07:57.400madness i'm not gonna waste but not as always it's interesting stuff if you're into psychology but
02:08:02.740we'll go on for another hour talking about how men of the classical age thought
02:08:07.540depression worked versus mania and there was like the big five you're crazy or one of these five you
02:08:15.400know uh and it you know he gives credit to freud because he says and i do believe this he had said
02:08:23.680what freud was responsible for and psychoanalysis was bringing dialogue with unreason back into the
02:08:31.420fold uh because at that point madness as a concept was adrift it wasn't really spiritual anymore it
02:08:38.160wasn't really moral people didn't know what it was because at least in the old world they could
02:08:42.280say it's like a spiritual corruption now they they didn't scientifically understand it but they
02:08:46.620also didn't spiritually understand it as well freud brought it back um brought it back as like
02:08:52.020a representation of unreason but that could be reasoned with because that's all he likes this
02:08:58.540I'm not sure I like it. But what he's essentially saying is that Freud and psychoanalysis meant that unreasonable people could be reasoned with, but they need to be reasoned with in specific ways. So arguably, what he's saying is you need to either gaslight them, or trick them or basically rewire their brain to think correctly. And that is essentially what we see with modern psychology and psychoanalysis.
02:09:24.100but i think that the the movement was a bit better because prior to that we were just taking people
02:09:32.860designating them as insane changing what constituted that designation and locking them up in
02:09:39.180hell boxes for a while so as bad as it is now i mean imagine you were just thrown into a prison
02:09:48.260for the insane because you just had ptsd that's a much worse fate i think um yeah and then there's
02:09:58.180a period like i said we're insanity because of this because of the dialogue and because of it
02:10:04.560being seen as kind of this unknown thing becomes attractive to people and i think that's where we
02:10:10.860are right now socially again it goes back to the marquis de saad and him describing the the various
02:10:16.960debaucheries that go on inside the prison and people people being able to peek into the asylum
02:10:23.580becomes cool that's that's what we're doing right now we don't want to be there but we want to be
02:10:28.020able to peek into the madhouse we want our silence of the lambs we want to watch mind hunter we want
02:10:35.980to like gawk at them so it's that gawking that's just so interesting and that's kind of what he's
02:10:41.540trying to get out with this book about what caused that fucking gawking instead of what it used to be
02:10:46.080which was get the fuck away from me originally because you're diseased but then just because
02:10:52.160you're evil and then just because you're you're unreasonable get away but now it's this like
02:10:59.000relation this twisted fucking relationship we have with the insane but then also the expansion
02:11:06.260of everyone who is insane because now in the flash forwards now snap back to reality it seems
02:11:14.100like 60 percent of the people in north america are insane by their own admission yes that's
02:11:21.600another thing too the the normalization of it um and he he really ends the book and we could stop
02:11:29.920here because i know you have to get going but really near the end of the book he lets his um
02:11:35.740ideology blossom um and his critique upon not only the history of madness but imprisonment itself
02:11:45.900so by the end of the book he's saying that the asylum is a religion it's a grand leveling it's
02:11:53.000moral uniformity um it's you know recognition by mirror and perpetual judgment so he's taking
02:12:00.600almost like the prison as society critiquing itself you know but I might not agree with his
02:12:09.420conclusions but I think for a lot of the listeners yourself as well like we might not like Foucault's
02:12:18.380opinion on you know whether or not you know the whether or not madness even exists but the idea
02:12:25.480that we've we've watched the development of imprisonment over time I think there's a lot
02:12:30.080anarchists would find that interesting i think there's a lot of even people with maybe leftist
02:12:34.960priors who find it interesting like if you hate cops this is it for you right this is this is all
02:12:42.240the story of how over time the centralization of power made it so that we we created this entire
02:12:51.280class of this for this hybrid of the ins because even now look around anyone who's a criminal
02:12:59.360gets automatically labeled insane isn't that interesting that's that's the political argument
02:13:04.600being made every single day right now that if you are if you commit crimes if you're crazy
02:13:10.580that's only because of socioeconomic reasons if you do crime it's because you're mentally unwell
02:13:16.520so it seems that the they're making mental unwellness not a crime by saying it is only crime
02:13:24.520You see like the sleight of hand that's going on here? Like mental illness in this world is only tethered to crime. And for that reason, we should legalize crime. It's like the final form of this transformation. You know what I mean?
02:13:41.520where like then society itself becomes the prison because you've convinced everyone that they're
02:13:47.260insane and they need help and the only thing that can help you is psychoanalysis in a confined space
02:13:55.040and like we said before how do they treat uh the crazy it hasn't really changed you're you're
02:14:00.720employing theater you're confronting them with realities they're uncomfortable with like they
02:14:05.540what they do what psychoanalysis does is it breaks you down it breaks you down right to the
02:14:10.960fucking roots of your being and tries to rebuild you again so all that's happened is the prison
02:14:16.660has expanded for all of society and now everybody is in it anyway he says like psychoanalysis uh
02:14:26.720what was it he's got this line here and i i'm not sure exactly what it means but i think about
02:14:34.660that sometime he says psychoanalysis doubled the absolute observation of the watcher with the
02:14:41.140endless monologue of the watched so you describe like the interplay of like you're always being
02:14:46.660watched and you're always talking to the watcher as this like new fucked up relationship between
02:14:52.320the patient and the psychologist that's what freud give back that is unreason interfacing with
02:14:58.980reason constantly and there's no end point there's no real way you can tell when they're
02:15:04.100when they're cured you can only tell when they're fixed so now imagine that as the entire society
02:15:10.160just the constant dialogue between the watcher and the constant monologue between the person
02:15:16.480being watched and and then as long as that conversation is going on they think that is
02:15:22.820the cure and you can almost never stop the conversation so that's like a whole different
02:15:28.520power dynamic if they've convinced you that you're insane anyway i'm going off into the weeds
02:15:33.100here um i know you gotta get you're sick your sound doesn't work we're all dying that's good
02:15:40.620stuff though i appreciate you actually reading froucault i don't think froucault is honestly so
02:15:44.640far gone i think to some large extent he's co-opted by the left i know you can argue that
02:15:48.500he's a left winger but with a lot of stuff when they're that far back i don't think it's always
02:15:52.520fair to say oh he was clearly a socialist he was clearly a left winger he did have a lot of
02:15:57.020interesting ideas and i i don't think he should be thrown out so well the guys like him are usually
02:16:03.140good at identifying the problems in society and for my money even guys who get pinned as being
02:16:09.220marxist there's some of the best critiques of modernity like some of my favorite stuff has
02:16:15.280been like they're critiquing the industrial revolution they hate marvel movies they hate
02:16:19.320all this shit yeah you just don't always want to listen to their prescriptions that's all yeah
02:16:23.440that's it their prescriptions is like that that's why we shouldn't have thoughts you know or i don't
02:16:29.600even know what zizek wants to advocate for like weird sex you get it like strange sexual stuff
02:16:36.400but um yeah otherwise like i like the starting points and they seem to be the ones like
02:16:41.440who take a a you know let me see how many notes there are on this i don't think there's a huge
02:16:46.880yeah there's not a huge like index or glossary in here but anyway these i i read this when in
02:16:54.100i was about to hate foucault but i i'd like to this book i think there's a lot in here that
02:16:58.760people could look into and maybe if they don't like the ending they can at least take i think
02:17:03.82045 of this and maybe go off in their own direction if they wanted to maybe they quibble over the
02:17:11.000exact you know assessment of the histories or maybe they say oh we should broaden the scope to
02:17:17.680asia whatever and africa and south america whatever but i wasn't i was more impressed
02:17:23.560by this than i thought it i might not like his other stuff but this one i liked quite a bit
02:17:28.000cool anyway sweet all right that's good enough i'll talk to you next week no worries buddy thanks
02:17:34.880we just i'm kind of jumping in the middle right yeah like just like joe rogan bro yeah
02:17:56.420fuck you're gonna be a popular guest because you start off owning me right now
02:18:01.900but um yeah no uh there's an interesting we're just talking for people who weren't listening
02:18:07.420because how could you but we were talking about um sort of the mad scramble and this is something
02:18:13.460we've talked about on the show before sort of a mad scramble of people in the modern age
02:18:17.440to seek truth in the past and uh you know some people are especially idolizing uh medieval
02:18:26.320culture and medieval history are you there oh can you hear me yeah there you are sorry yeah
02:18:31.420people are sort of idolizing uh medieval history and uh i think there's an interesting uh part to
02:18:37.800that which is that i think part of it is the intersection of um sort of our awareness of
02:18:44.740medievalness and meme culture so we had talked about this before where um you know we kind of
02:18:52.000make fun of like all the memes that are talking about like roman uh motivation about you know
02:18:57.500here's here's a statue of guy holding snake and it says don't quit your job or whatever it might
02:19:04.400be and then but it's sort of like this poorly missed poorly understood idea of uh what the
02:19:10.640medieval life actually was intersecting with a meme culture that is is very very sensationalized
02:19:18.800and very bite-sized. It almost prohibits you from taking in information in a more nuanced way.
02:19:25.560So in one sense, maybe it's the fact that the information's good, but the conduit needs work.
02:19:30.880And then on the other hand, the conduits are good, but what's being plugged into it is usually bad
02:19:35.540too. So we have a few problems there. Well, yeah. And I was just saying before we
02:19:40.720started rolling, something is happening where we're in this cultural crisis and people are...
02:19:47.600our worldview is breaking down in the light of everything that's happening and we're trying to
02:19:54.340make sense of it so yeah people are casting back and having this kind of medieval fetishism and
02:20:00.540trying to you know erase the enlightenment and all this kind of stuff and but like the kind of
02:20:06.100meme culture that comes out of it is like i don't like people aren't actually
02:20:11.560trying to reclaim the medieval life they're like they're harking back to it and then presenting it
02:20:20.520in this weird post-modern way so like so there's something in there there's some kind of gas in
02:20:27.240there uh but it's just uh i don't know like it's easy for it to become a larp it's easy for it to
02:20:33.500be ridiculous. It's easy for it to be just like mega hyper cringe. But I think it's an attempt
02:20:41.780to kind of break through this cultural wall that we've hit to try to imagine a new way to think
02:20:51.060or a new way. And I think that's what's lost on people is they don't actually, they're not actually
02:20:57.380conscious that we are actually trying to do something new. We're not trying to regain the
02:21:02.360past we're trying to move forward but we but we have this weird thing on the right where it's
02:21:07.240like well that's progressive that's progressivism it's like well i mean yeah it is but yeah because
02:21:14.300sometimes it just is the language and i wonder because i always found that on even on the far
02:21:19.860right even in the fascist circles you do have a love of futurism yeah so there's almost this
02:21:24.980obsession with future fast go forward and um and to the point you had just made which is very
02:21:31.360interesting is that um i think a lot of people they have various fetishizations of the past
02:21:37.940across the political spectrum because i think everyone has the same underlying problem which is
02:21:43.560i feel i've been lied to about history and this is leftist this is on the right this is conspiracy
02:21:49.120theorist this is maybe the various religious denominations and then i think there's a variety
02:21:55.540of solutions to address that so some people just assume that everything's a lie all the time and
02:22:02.180then some people will try and dig out the truth and then discover how insanely difficult that is
02:22:08.180especially the further you go back and you get into it we did this on the show when we were
02:22:12.280discussing you know for example the history of the kings of britain by jeffrey of monmouth and
02:22:16.600another ancient text and it's like like you're gonna have giants you're gonna have dragons it's
02:22:22.240as real as anything else the further you go back it's like yeah merlin was here and he predicted
02:22:27.840all kinds of stuff according to a lot of the sources so it gets very difficult the further
02:22:34.220you go back to get by modern standards what we would see as like an accurate portrayal of anything
02:22:41.340and so i i think one of the biggest um sort of crises emerging in this paradigm shift where it
02:22:48.240is people trying to figure out what to do with history.
02:22:51.300And like you said, I think on the right,
02:23:18.240Yeah, no, there's something to that. It's, I mean, it's something like, you know, we have to kind of reclaim the wealth or the value or whatever from tradition that's been jettisoned by this kind of hyper-liberal, postmodern, you know, crazy world that we've stepped into.
02:23:40.500but we can't do that by just imitating like we can't just imitate like 18th century
02:23:49.860peasants or something you know like it's just not going to work it doesn't jive with the facts
02:23:56.820of reality in the 21st century so somehow we have to sort of uh and this is like an unsolved
02:24:03.500on maybe unsolvable at the moment problem. Like we have to reclaim the value of those things,
02:24:10.100but in this kind of new, you know, sci-fi weird world, uh, reality that we live in.
02:24:20.000And I don't know what that looks like, but I think that's really what everybody's doing
02:24:25.760with, with like this like weird meme culture going on. It's some kind of attempt to,
02:24:31.000make friends with the weirdness of the postmodern world, but integrate in the solidity and the
02:24:41.600gravity and the groundedness of traditional values. And it's a weird problem, but I think
02:24:50.000that's what people are doing. And it's cool. That's a good point. I think for a lot of people
02:24:55.460who have a lot of good things to say and a lot of true things to say i give one example of uh
02:25:00.560you know the the priest at my church um he's uh you know just just let people know i'm speaking
02:25:07.000with an orthodox christian i'm a catholic myself we're already speaking distance away from a knife
02:25:11.780but hopefully hey i'm we're we're bridge builders on blood satellite um yes but the idea was like
02:25:19.920a lot of the he has the same problem that a lot of people have which is how do we get young people
02:25:24.180involved in this and he's interested in me because i work in uh in marketing and advertising so which
02:25:30.520is a lot of time just like getting an idea and put it getting it in the minds of the right audience
02:25:35.720and so that's something that i've seen a lot of people struggle with like the information's out
02:25:41.280there though the wisdom is out there and i think we're and this might be i'm not convinced of this
02:25:48.640take i'm maybe 65 convinced this take but i'm going to say it and see how it feels i think we
02:25:54.620might be getting a bit tired of meme culture where i think it's mutated to such a degree that the
02:26:00.700memes have started turning in on themselves and become mutated and strange and almost like we've
02:26:06.660already gone past blackmailing memes and now we're on like happily suicidal memes and it's it's it's
02:26:13.740almost ironic it's post it's getting weird yeah so i'm like okay what's we got do we got we got
02:26:18.680liven it up with something because this used to be fun no one here's having fun we're trading
02:26:23.540images about how we want to die so there's got to be something else well my my view of that is
02:26:29.720you know i think what's been happening for the last i don't know decade two decades whatever
02:26:36.080is we've been in a phase of, um, like university. We've been in a, an academic phase. We've been
02:26:45.700in a talk phase. We've been in a, uh, debate metaphysics, you know, uh, political discourse,
02:26:54.540uh, critique, uh, writing essays, having arguments on Twitter kind of phase.
02:27:01.040And memes are kind of like the ultimate pure expression of that conversation because it kind of distills the whole zeitgeist into really simple expressions that kind of hit you with the clarity of what people are really thinking.
02:27:19.220But the problem is, at some point, you have to go from an academic phase where this is all like university talk and critique into actual art into like real cultural artifacts being created, real, you know, novels and paintings and artwork and music and all the things that constitute really robust enlivening.
02:27:49.220authentic engaging nurturing culture that like feeds people's vision and feeds their souls we
02:27:57.580don't have that now we have a lot of podcasts we have a lot of talk we have a lot of debate
02:28:03.140but we don't have like a great movement of painters and writers that that have taken all
02:28:10.480this vision and all of this idea and and presented it in a way that everybody can
02:28:17.720get and that everybody is sort of nurtured spiritually by. So I think we're in a moment
02:28:24.060where we kind of have to make that transition. What we need is less talk and we need to take
02:28:30.620the zeitgeist of this whole thing and actually make really good cultural art with it.
02:28:40.640I agree with what you're saying. And we've been saying that for a long time. And we've talked to
02:28:45.620a great many people on the right who are starting now to do that. But and I try not to lay too many
02:28:53.260critiques on anyone who's doing anything good. You know, I don't like to be too critical on
02:28:58.340things where I think it counts. But if there's one minor criticism I'd give to a lot of the
02:29:04.580writers, especially, and I say this as a writer myself, and I have a book that's going to be
02:29:09.420coming up in the next month or so of short stories. But one thing that I found is that even
02:29:15.380in our writing our creative writing there's short stories long stories it's very very dystopian and
02:29:20.780people almost they start with as it almost starts as a blog post yeah they just have characters
02:29:27.120act out but there's not that that joy of actually telling a story just like you would see like is
02:29:33.640does Banksy paint like in a way but it starts off as a social critique and then it's it's displayed
02:29:40.240in a quirky way but that doesn't really speak to your soul in any way yeah it's like the weird
02:29:46.040yankovic of art yeah and it's also it's like tailor-made specifically just for like young
02:29:52.780dissident men with these certain tastes you know it's not something that speaks to like the whole
02:29:58.580culture you know it's not it's hard for a lot of people to get on board with something like um
02:30:03.600uh like thomas seven seven what's the what's the book he wrote uh oh steel storm
02:30:09.960steel storm like very there's a very small audience for that book you know like most you
02:30:16.480know 35 year old housewives are not going to be able to stomach that book you know and that's not
02:30:22.640you know like that it's fine i'm not saying that like every piece of art has to appeal to literally
02:30:27.020everybody but you you're gonna have to come up with art that speaks to people on some kind of
02:30:35.080broader scale if there's going to be a real cultural shift yeah and this is something
02:30:41.240this to speak to people you need i'm going to use writing as an example um i know you are a musician
02:30:47.320so you may have some some musically inclined opinions on this but i know uh one trick i
02:30:52.540noticed uh for me that works is you have to start with characters obviously and a lot of um and i'm
02:30:57.120not the best at this but i i know where i can do better but uh usually you have to have characters
02:31:02.920that you care about and i think a lot of writers don't actually have characters that they care
02:31:07.560about so they have these premises you know and they have a statement they want to make and you
02:31:13.200know if i see i again not trying to criticize too much but if i see another fucking short story
02:31:18.160that's set in why america like i i know nothing cool is going to happen here i know it's going
02:31:24.260to be suffering all the way down and you've probably got characters that you hate and you
02:31:28.620have characters you hate that you want to see suffer and then you know when we watch that we
02:31:34.400see that in movies all the time we watch a movie where there's you know one movie i watched recently
02:31:38.060is glass onion and it's like this is just populated by characters the writer wants to
02:31:42.680see fail and humiliate and i'm like this isn't enjoyable for anyone like it so i think if you
02:31:50.100actually take the time and make a character that you can you like and want to see things happen to
02:31:56.060rather than punish you might have a good story that really sticks with people rather than like
02:32:01.660another piece of their soul that you ripped out yeah i i think um i mean yeah my my general
02:32:08.440feeling about a lot of those stories and a lot of what's coming out in our circles is
02:32:14.120that it is i don't know how to say this except that it's it's still too political like it's still
02:32:20.920sort of it's sort of niche designed for our little weird little internet circle with our
02:32:28.960sensibilities and our memes and this is a conversation i've seen a lot lately on twitter
02:32:36.240um dave the distributors dave had like a massive thread about this a couple days ago about
02:32:41.800you know just these ideas of like should is you know is art right wing like how do we make right
02:32:48.320wing art or you know at some point does art transcend this the right wing left wing thing
02:32:54.920you know and i think that i think part of the problem is that our people are still a little
02:33:01.640too locked into the politics when they're making this stuff whereas at some point you have to and
02:33:09.080this is what you know when i was on this rap about universalism like there is a sense in which you
02:33:13.440What we're trying to do really, if you're really serious about tradition and spirituality, what you're really trying to do is really address the human condition at its deepest level.
02:33:26.740That's what we love about traditionally classic works of art, like the Odyssey or whatever, you name it, is that it's not that, you know, what's political about the Odyssey?
02:33:38.520You know, it's talking about life on its deepest level, and it's not caught up in all this trivial, meme-ish, you know, politics of the moment.
02:33:49.940And I think that's what we have to have a mind to, but it's very difficult to do that.
02:33:56.160And it's difficult for us as creators the more we're caught up in this, like, dissonant right-wing online culture.
02:34:03.480So personally, for me, it's like I feel like I have to take a step back from it. And when I'm in a real creative process, writing a song or writing a poem or a story or whatever, when it really gets going, I kind of forget about all this stuff because I'm trying to look at something deeper.
02:34:26.640And I think what I would say is that the hyper-liberal postmodern world has failed to see deeply into the human condition. And that's why we're all engaged in this critique of trying to restore that through traditional values and things.
02:34:45.060but we have to do it in an artistic way to actually produce the culture that will reawaken
02:34:54.380something in the society to allow us to move forward. Yeah. And this is where we get into
02:35:01.140a topic that people are probably sick of hearing about, but the concept of hyperreality. That's
02:35:06.360kind of what we're talking about when we soullessly try to ape and enact out these things that we feel
02:35:12.860like a connection to but it's like a cell phone at a renaissance fair yeah i was i had a joke in
02:35:19.540mind the other day i was thinking like how many of our problems on the distant right would be
02:35:23.160solved if we just held the renaissance fair once a year there's a lot of bad actors that wash right
02:35:29.960out and they would just do that but um yeah it's this idea of like yeah we're trying to enact
02:35:36.020something that was from the past but it's sort of soulless and you're you're you're perform it's
02:35:40.960performative and it's soulless um you know there's a way way deeper definition of hyperreality
02:35:46.360there's like marxist listening we're going to be like i gotta write i know what it is i'm just
02:35:51.120saying this is kind of uh the the thrust of what we're talking about and it it really does like
02:35:57.200you'd said i think you need to start from like you had said what is it that you actually like
02:36:03.500like if you are on the right let's say the dissident right broadly which encompasses a
02:36:07.540lot of different beliefs like what about your belief system do you actually like and some
02:36:12.940groups can probably answer that easier than others but there's a lot of people like they're
02:36:17.500only here just because they hate gay people and i'm like well you're not going to be able to really
02:36:21.360create anything with that you know it like you know it's got you know one example i would give
02:36:28.880is just to show people like it doesn't need to be sunshine and flowers uh one example is like
02:36:34.460the book blood meridian by cormac mccarthy so that's a very brutal book it's a very savage book
02:36:39.980but as you read it you can tell that this is a writer who has a deep knowledge and affection
02:36:45.700of america of the american landscape of american history the way he describes they how they traverse
02:36:52.240this terrain and he kind of meditates on these things and you could look at that book is like
02:36:57.160was that written as a right-wing book probably not but does it deal in themes that would be very
02:37:02.520familiar and palatable to right-wing audiences i would say yes and you know some people would say
02:37:08.280oh it's more complicated that i know that's kind of the point yeah um and so that's just one example
02:37:13.860people are saying like he just wants to do like happy stuff no i like miserable things just like
02:37:19.680any self-respecting man i like yeah and you could you could say that about almost any you know like
02:37:26.380really good art from the last forever. I mean, you know, identify anything as a classic and it's
02:37:34.440like, well, it's hard to suss out the politics of it because it's not explicitly right wing.
02:37:39.780It's not like, you know, when we write stories and it's all Nazis and, you know, it's like all
02:37:46.240the motifs of our memes are in there. You know, it's like, it's not, it's not like that when you
02:37:50.320read you know war and peace you know it's like it's talking about life you know it's like it's
02:37:56.720it's gone down a few layers underneath the the um just the ephemeral politics of the moment and
02:38:04.500it's you know it's it's talking about something about the human condition that is beyond time
02:38:10.600that doesn't change with the ebb and flow of history that's why it's a classic that's why
02:38:14.740that's why homer stands up that's why shakespeare stands up and we recognize what the left has
02:38:22.760abandoned is like the ability to perceive the value in that deep place but it's like we're
02:38:31.940trying to reclaim that deep place but we easily get caught up in just all the ephemeral political
02:38:37.900stuff of the moment and we can't get down to like the real deal so it's hard for us to produce what
02:38:44.900we need to produce are like classics you know we need like a real artistic movement and so now you
02:38:52.840know when i see all the bickering on twitter i just keep saying you know show me the art show
02:38:57.520me the art everybody's talking it's like show me something that's really going to present these
02:39:03.600values in a deep way to the culture at large. That's a great point. And before we move on,
02:39:10.140I am going to introduce you now. I am speaking here with Anglo Ortho, who's a very, very well
02:39:17.400known content creator, one that I'm a fan of. You can find him on YouTube. I don't believe you have
02:39:23.000an odyssey, correct? It's just on YouTube? Just YouTube. Yeah. So go there. He's got some videos
02:39:29.220on some things I think we're going to talk about today, but he's got quite a few long form videos
02:39:33.460on some topics of mainly relating to um i guess we can get into this now sort of your orthodox
02:39:40.760you have a very interesting story that i think would be interesting to start with you don't know
02:39:44.860the half of it yeah so like i'm going to give the very very brief headline of what i know is that
02:39:49.700you are orthodox christian yeah um and uh you're you're kind of in the sort of distributist sphere
02:39:56.900of things and you've been a speaker very popular speaker and made some videos and but you are you're
02:40:02.600a former progressive as well. And I remember you were speaking on that. And I guess to start,
02:40:09.200and you can take as many tangents or wander away from this point as much as you want, but
02:40:14.120what was your story in short going from a progressive and were you always adjacent to
02:40:21.860Christianity or did that come later or what do you think? Well, no, no. I mean, I was raised by
02:40:28.100an atheist my father was a like a hardcore you know christopher hitchens richard dawkins kind
02:40:34.720of atheist um a man of science um so i was never i mean i grew up i went to a sort of nominally
02:40:43.480christian private school so i was surrounded by southern baptist culture but i i never you know
02:40:51.020took it seriously i never thought it had anything to do with me i thought it was just kind of
02:40:54.760ridiculous. So Christian adjacent, not really. But in terms of progressivism, you know, I was
02:41:04.380talking to a friend of mine a few days ago, who's similarly like, you know, he's my age, we're both,
02:41:10.200you know, pushing 40 now. And we were both, you know, sort of automatically left leaning back in
02:41:18.160the, you know, when we were young in the early 2000s. And we were talking about how, and we both
02:41:25.560come out of it. And I was saying, you know, even when I was 21, 22, or, you know, when Obama came
02:41:35.380along or whatever was going on with the left, you know, I always kind of, I never really was
02:41:41.820all the way into it because I think because I was raised by, I was raised in a fairly conservative
02:41:49.780environment. I mean, my father, you know, he wasn't like a Christian or anything, but he was
02:41:55.200very conservative in his views of life in terms of just basic, you know, like taking responsibility
02:42:02.160for your actions. You know, he was very much against, you know, welfare and this kind of stuff
02:42:08.820and working hard and, you know, he had those values.
02:42:14.760And I grew up in rural West Georgia, which is very conservative.
02:42:19.360So I think even when I was like an urbane young person,
02:42:24.340I could just never really get all the way on board
02:42:28.120with the progressivist thing, you know?
02:42:31.420I always kind of felt there was something wrong with it.
02:42:36.920Um, and then once, once the Obama presidency started and rolled on for a few years, I started
02:42:45.660having more and more like, what are we, what are we doing?
02:42:48.240You know, you know, especially when like gender theory and black lives matter and all that
02:42:53.520stuff started up, I was like, this is not, this has nothing to do with, you know, what
02:45:31.840No, I remember that, that same kind of thing, you know, and I, I really, when Obama was
02:45:36.860elected, that's when it started for me.
02:45:38.460I was like, because I was, you know, I'm 39, so I was, I don't know, I guess I was 19 or 20 when the Iraq war started up and everybody hated Bush and Halliburton and, you know, all that was going on.
02:45:54.440And so, you know, I think the first election I voted in was I voted for John Kerry in 2004.
02:46:03.920But at that time, it was like, well, you know, George Bush is terrible and, you know, all this corruption is going on and all these lies are being told.
02:46:11.960So and that was in the day of like, you know, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, where it just was like, oh, we're the enlightened people.
02:46:19.420We're not these stupid Republicans who want to bomb other countries and they wear tacky suits and, you know, they have no culture and we're the creative, artistic people.
02:46:31.040And we're smart because, you know, we understand Jon Stewart's jokes and all this kind of this kind of self-righteous attitude.
02:46:37.720Um, but as soon as Obama came along, I think I started to see that self-righteous aspect
02:46:46.800of it, maybe dimly at first, but then, you know, year after year after year and, and
02:46:54.640me, you know, becoming older and getting married and having kids and, and seeing the reality
02:47:00.480of life in that way, uh, you know, I started to kind of snap out of it a little bit.
02:47:05.880I was wondering if, and so when did your faith and your Christianity enter into that? Again,
02:47:13.040you went to that church, did it kind of increase in volume over time, would you say?
02:47:19.400Yeah, well, I mean, it's hard to say. I mean, because I was a sort of avowed perennialist
02:47:29.500when i was in my 20s um so you know my my attitude was that you know there's a spiritual reality
02:47:40.040there's a transcendent spiritual reality the soul persists after death but humans are incapable of
02:47:49.840of um imaging that reality fully so all these religions are you know uh incomplete attempts
02:47:58.240to do that you know like just uh joseph campbell type you know perennialism and so i like the
02:48:04.360monomyth and things like that right exactly yeah so i studied buddhism and i read the vedas and i
02:48:09.720was into this and i was into that and even in those days i think unlike a lot of those perennialists
02:48:17.500i was into christianity because i read um i guess i read the gospel of mark when i was 25 or 26
02:48:27.500sort of from that lens and i was like oh this is this you know there's something going on here
02:48:34.620uh that all of the other perennialist spiritual but not religious people seem to ignore you know
02:48:45.260you know it's like it's like a joke now that all the perennialists like they're like oh we we're
02:48:51.860into every religion except christianity christianity that's totally taboo but i wasn't
02:48:56.900like i i was sort of uh drawn to it and fascinated by christ um but in no way would i ever have
02:49:05.200thought about you know participating in any specific institution or ideology so uh and that
02:49:16.500that lasted a while. And I mean, really in my heart of hearts, there's still, you know,
02:49:21.900I still am that way to some degree, but I think at some point, well, like, you know,
02:49:27.940a lot of it had to do with, like I said, going through personal trials and, um, you know,
02:49:34.720just intense life disrupting crises to realize, you know, just how screwed up my worldview was.
02:49:43.660Were there any of those crises that you'd be willing to disclose to give context for people?
02:49:49.840Well, when my father passed away, this was 2015, because I had, you know, like I said, he was very sort of conservative in his worldview, and I had become very liberal in my worldview.
02:50:05.540And my life really was pretty much a disaster by the time I was 30.
02:50:15.340And I was estranged from my father for a few years.
02:50:21.060Really just because I couldn't handle, I couldn't tolerate our relationship.
02:50:27.820But things in my life got so bad and so rock bottom that at some point I kind of snapped out of it.
02:50:34.900And I realized, uh, oh, like my dad was right.
02:50:40.120I should have listened to him all this time and I wouldn't have made all these mistakes.
02:50:45.240And so I was going to ask you about that because like, do you feel like you've become more
02:50:53.400Cause I, I feel like very much as I get older, especially it started at that point because
02:50:58.740I, I hadn't spoken to him in like two years.
02:51:01.380um and i when i started really snapping out of it and realizing how wrong i had been
02:51:08.660i was like oh shit you know i uh i've got to i've got to make things right with my dad so i reached
02:51:15.100out to him and i reconciled with him and it was like a really beautiful thing and um
02:51:22.200and it was like a prodigal son type of thing you know because i didn't know if he would even
02:51:28.800you know talk to me but of course he did because fathers love their children
02:51:34.440um and then i realized what a dick i had been all those years and so i apologized and i i you know
02:51:42.160or you know i wrote him this long letter about how you know i wanted him to be part of my life
02:51:46.720and my kid's life and all this stuff blah blah and so we reconciled and it was this great thing
02:51:50.780And then it must have been, I don't know, two weeks after this, he passed away totally unexpectedly, massive heart attack out of nowhere.
02:52:03.560So then I went through this whole thing of like, you know, I had to go through the grief of losing my father after this really intense estrangement and reconciliation.
02:52:13.620And it just completely uprooted my entire worldview.
02:52:18.880You know, I had to, it was almost like starting over. And there was a lot of other problems going on in my life at the time. So that was, you know, and that was, you know, that was right when the, like the Trump thing was starting up and the political situation was going crazy.
02:52:35.780and um so in the process of you know then i had to go home and go through all my dad's stuff and
02:52:43.700you know like you know and it was like reconnecting with him and his more more traditional
02:52:51.120more conservative worldview that i had to take back on board and then and then that just went
02:52:58.680right into all the political stuff that happened 2016, 17, whatever, going forward. So yeah, for
02:53:08.720sure, for sure, I become more like my dad as I get older, especially after that.
02:53:14.540And that's a dimension to things that I think some people ignore. Sometimes we get wrapped up
02:53:20.900in the psychological, sort of the universalist psychological aspect of things, but then we
02:53:25.240forget that a lot of times their politics are deeply personal not only they're tied to
02:53:29.520the regions we grow up in especially if you're like a nationalist type
02:53:33.140but then also your family like my father he passed away when i was very very young when i was a
02:53:39.220teenager and uh so i missed out on a lot of that stuff but uh when he was a conservative guy and
02:53:48.040so but he was a conservative in an era where being conservative was different and uh you know as you
02:53:53.500get older you know you go usually when you're young i guess you go through a rebellious phase
02:53:57.020i'm not i'll tell you what some people say that they're like oh everyone rebels when they're young
02:54:00.500i do think that might be a symptom of modernity i'm not sure i just have a gut feeling that
02:54:05.700if you go back a few hundred years you might not have seen as many kids doing the 180 degree
02:54:11.680opposite what their parents did as like a rite of passage but you know i do wonder now and again
02:54:18.240like he didn't live to see it but i'm like i wonder if he would have been a trump guy because
02:54:21.880i remember like this and i'm gonna say this people i've never said this on this show i think people
02:54:26.580are gonna laugh about this but uh because i have a podcast and he was really really big into talk
02:54:32.240radio and something that he used to do was call in to like the conservative talk radio oh like
02:54:38.880rush limbaugh he would yeah yeah and he would become like a guy who would be put on the air
02:54:42.920i'm like jeez that i realized that recently like oh my god i'm doing the bit you know and he would
02:54:48.880say things offhand that i didn't understand like you would call people pinko commie liberals
02:54:53.920and i didn't realize what a genius move that was until i'm an adult i'm like that was so cool he
02:55:00.980might have been further off into the trenches than me i don't know like he might sounds like
02:55:05.780yeah we're in canada he might have flown down on january 6th yeah yeah yeah yeah i see my dad was
02:55:13.320like he was he was very sort of conservative in his foundations but he was more liberal than the
02:55:23.060community because we lived in like really deep south rural west georgia basically you know like
02:55:32.520like five miles from the alabama state line uh country you know deeply southern baptist
02:55:40.500conservative as you get. But my parents were very, they weren't natives. My mother was born
02:55:51.580in California. My father was born in Ohio. They had lived all over the country and they were very
02:55:59.520highly educated and much more, I would say, I don't know, culturally sophisticated than most
02:56:09.940of the people in our community so i i would have you know in a sense it's relative like i i would
02:56:16.840have seen my parents as being more liberal you know but in the context of like today's politics
02:56:22.920oh i can see that yeah they were actually really conservative um it's just that they had this
02:56:29.360cultural sensibility uh they had an awareness of the world beyond carolton georgia you know and
02:56:37.240they had this artistic inclinations and intellectual occupations. So I think that's
02:56:47.300why I kind of set myself up as more leftward leaning when I started my own life. It's just
02:56:55.380that looking back, it's like, oh, no, they were very traditional. They would have opposed all
02:57:03.860of the insanity happening now I don't know I think about what my dad would have done with Trump
02:57:08.600you know because he passed away in 2015 right before that happened and I don't know man I just
02:57:15.340don't know because he was more he was more I'd say libertarian you know than than you know our
02:57:22.100people yeah well there's this a comedian I really like named Shane Gillis and uh one of his bits on
02:57:28.800his latest special was you there oh sorry can you hear me sorry yeah you're back uh one of my
02:57:34.220favorite comedians is uh his name is shane gillis and um he has a bit on his last special where he
02:57:41.060describes his dad turning into a trump guy who's always a conservative guy yeah you know when trump
02:57:46.600first announces he's the guy in his recliners and get this clone out of here then after that first
02:57:53.420debate you know everything changes everyone forgets after that first trump debate like
02:57:59.340hundreds to 150 americans change their mind let's start so i'm like that i'd love to see that see
02:58:07.680going back just to see that would be worth it all these like conservative and then watching other
02:58:12.200conservative politicians have to do it too yeah i'm sorry i don't want to like i don't like
02:58:18.020reminiscing about trump but that was like the the coolest shit if you were paying attention at that
02:58:22.740time. We're not going to get that again. I mean, don't you miss those days? I miss that so much
02:58:27.800now. I always explain to people because in the wake of Trump, there was a lot of theories about
02:58:34.960what had happened. I know the Joe Rogans of the world. They're like, well, Hillary was just a bad
02:58:39.320candidate. I'm like, well, really, people overthink it. Why was Trump so popular? Because
02:58:45.100he's not a really cool guy. He's a really goofy guy. But they liked what he had to say. They liked
02:58:52.080what he had to say even if he said it in a dumb crazy way that's really all it was like you and
02:58:57.920no other zero other politicians were saying we have a problem at the border and we need to take
02:59:03.440that problem seriously it turns out if you do that everyone gets on board now what they learned from
02:59:09.280that is that oh you can just say that to get votes and then not do it which is kind of what we're
02:59:13.920seeing now yeah and then also um it just it was exciting he kind of made it fun and exciting and
02:59:20.220what it meant for people like us because i i remember walking into work the day after trump
02:59:25.720was elected i'm in canada like the entire and i was living in toronto canada which is you know
02:59:31.400very densely urban there and i'm like the sun was shining only for me that day i walked in
02:59:37.800whistling a tune i had to spring in my step i felt the same way there were there were ladies
02:59:43.460crying when i got to work it was the strangest thing it's like you it's like you saw
02:59:49.76025 people be assassinated was the vibe. But what it made us feel, and I think this is what people
02:59:55.960really want to recapture. I think it was the last time that people of our general political
03:00:02.140persuasion felt that we could move the needle on politics. Yes. There was so much hope. There was
03:00:09.140like, I just felt all this positive sense, this energy and this forward movement. And it felt
03:00:15.440like that for a while you know it really sustained it felt so hopeful we thought anything was
03:00:22.200possible and i think i'm still trying to chase that dragon well in a sense i mean the election
03:00:28.920of trump almost does kind of suggest that anything is possible i mean the fact that he got in there
03:00:34.500it really should not have happened that's what i was going to say next i think a lot of people if
03:00:40.760you really are honest with yourself and you're really paying attention at the time i know this
03:00:45.020is what i felt that i thought trump was very very popular but i'm like there's something in me
03:00:50.180screaming that you know what he's not gonna win something's gonna happen something magic is gonna
03:00:54.660happen there's no way the system will let this happen and so when i woke up the next day and it
03:01:00.720worked you're like what i was wrong so i because a lot of cynical people became uncynical and i
03:01:08.020thought there was there's such a magic to that and um and maybe that was some people will say
03:01:13.120that's too naive and stuff. I'm like, I don't know, man. Like there was a lot of, I'd like to
03:01:17.340harness that energy again. Cause I think it, you know, it would prove that we can do something
03:01:22.520and maybe not that, but something else, you know? Yeah. I mean, to me, it speaks of, you know,
03:01:28.640this fact that, you know, no matter what the situation looks like, there is this weird
03:01:38.060edge of reality there's this weird thing in play all the time and this is all i mean this almost
03:01:46.660strikes me as a kind of a a more liberal friendly idea you know that there there is this kind of
03:01:53.460strangeness to reality where crazy shit can happen like trump getting in there that you know there's
03:02:02.000this weird free play to the world. Things are not lock set in stone. So it's kind of, I feel like
03:02:10.000it's a contradiction for us because we lean toward order and stability and, you know, hard lines and
03:02:20.020definitions, et cetera, et cetera. But in this weird way, things like the election of Trump
03:02:26.080are a reminder that there's this weirdness to reality always that allows for new things to
03:02:35.760happen, novel things and creative things. And I think there's a sense of that nature of life
03:02:43.900in reality that the left has tried to own that we need to take back from them, if that makes any
03:02:50.900sense. No, no. I agree completely. But before I go on, I want to give a prediction for people.
03:02:56.680Something just occurred to me for the next.
03:02:59.260Sometimes we call things like Trump getting elected.
03:03:02.100Maybe we could even call that a black swan event where it really came out of no one.
03:03:19.280And I don't know when this will happen, but maybe the next 10 years.
03:03:21.500I think within our lifetime, we'll see the first openly organized crime affiliated person get elected to something at the lowest level governor.
03:03:33.400Now, the reason I say that is because I'm anticipating I was listening to Peter Zaihan the other day.
03:03:40.960And he was talking about how the cartels in the Mexican drug cartels are a bigger problem in America than anyone wants to admit.
03:03:48.260And that they they've started they've won several gang wars that no one really knows about.
03:03:52.940But like I think you're going to start to see the cartels flex and they're they're in a power play that is far beyond what most organized crime is doing.
03:04:02.280So I think like you'll start to see in the south, maybe you'll see a governor who everyone knows is like a brother of like a cartel guy.
03:04:10.960And then it's going to be, that's going to be the new thing.
03:04:13.360The new thing is going to be crime bosses run and everyone's cool with it.
03:06:08.300But I was wondering if you were willing to take as long as you'd like, but maybe give a brief overview of what that was.
03:06:15.760Because this is a topic we talked about on the show before, the conflict between universal ideas versus particular ideas.
03:06:27.340And so I'll let you go if you have anything.
03:06:29.260Well, yeah. And hopefully you can refresh me on some of the nuances of that discussion, because I feel like there was a lot of good points in there and I'm going to forget them. But in general, yeah, I mean, it's kind of like a false dichotomy, really, like universalism versus particularism, which I said in the video.
03:06:50.480It's like, well, in reality, it's like, you know, you have a set of universals and then they, as you scale down to the particular moment in time, things particularize and become differentiated.
03:07:06.180And there's this sort of chain that connects them.
03:07:09.280So it's not, you know, universalism versus particularism seems a little bit like a false dichotomy. But academic agent was, you know, I think in that video, he was sort of making a defense of particularism and realism, as opposed to idealism, which again, you know, I think these are false dichotomies.
03:07:32.780But because they're false dichotomies, you can't just divorce them. You can't divorce the universal out of your worldview because then you can't make any claims about anything. Everything becomes just a kind of relativistic chaos.
03:07:52.200And this is something that people on the right should understand after all this critique of the left and postmodernism that's gone on for the last 10 years.
03:08:02.580But, you know, but this happens all the time, you know, you know, like I mean, Carl Benjamin does this all the time.
03:08:09.220you know sargon he's always making claims but he's unwilling to kind of tie them down to any
03:08:16.680kind of actual metaphysic or actual i don't know religious claim or whatever you know he wants to
03:08:24.860he doesn't want to dirty his hands with that but he's making claims about virtue and goodness and
03:08:29.980this and that it's like well you can't have it both ways i mean you're either going to have to
03:08:34.320have recourse to some kind of universal claim about metaphysics, or you're going to just find
03:08:42.140yourself in this kind of chaos of incidental postmodernism, which, you know, which one do
03:08:48.280you want to do? Because you can have your pick, but you can't really have it both ways. And I
03:08:52.940feel like it just, you're just going to end up, my question to the academic agents of the world
03:08:58.340is like, well, then why do you, like if everything is just about this kind of nitty gritty, real
03:09:05.260politic realism with no metaphysical underpinning, and if there's no universalist claims you're
03:09:11.360trying to make, why do you object to the current power structure?
03:09:15.820You know, they attained power, they're good at keeping it, they're, you know, like why
03:12:08.860They don't like psychiatrists. There's a whole mountain of complaints we might have about what psychology has birthed. However, even as we critique psychology and psychiatry, we still accept this idea of the unconscious. We still accept a lot of what a lot of individuals don't know, but this stuff was birthed from the psychological movement.
03:12:30.640you know, our awareness of how the mind works, the entire idea of, you know, mental trauma came
03:12:36.540out of this in the 20th century and the late 19th century conceptualization, like the entirety of
03:12:41.940your childhood development being of critical importance was like a new idea. So I'm like,
03:12:48.140you know, we can't really, how much of our critique of psychology must we also use psychology itself
03:12:55.180within the critique. In that sense, ironically, when we critique liberalism, can we really escape
03:13:01.940out of the liberal mindset? Because the entire concept of being a dissident standing against
03:13:08.420the system is almost itself a liberal idea. Exactly. Yes, yes. Well, no, you can't get out
03:13:14.360of it. Just like you can't get out of, I mean, my objection to, like I mentioned, Carl Benjamin or
03:13:23.440academic agent does this too my objection to those guys the claims they they're trying to
03:13:29.000make claims without any recourse to any kind of religious metaphysical claim or spiritual grounding
03:13:35.180and it's like but there's still what am i trying to say i'm trying to make a like a transcendental
03:13:41.740a transcendentalist um like i'm trying to say uh i'm trying to make you can't make those claims
03:13:50.120without some kind of resource to typically religious-based notions of what goodness is
03:13:58.100or what virtue is. So they're just taking this kind of habitual leftover from Christian culture
03:14:08.880and using it, but they don't want to give any credit to that. They just want to use it because,
03:14:15.520oh, well, we all understand what virtue is, and we all understand what good is it. Well,
03:14:19.240we don't though. You can't just say that. You can't escape from the need to tie this down to
03:14:25.080some kind of metaphysical claim. So in the same way that you can't escape those things
03:14:30.240in order to make the case for traditionalism, you also can't escape the heritage of liberalism
03:14:41.020that we inherit from the last several centuries. And I would say, and this is what I'm trying to
03:14:47.980make the case for the people. Not only can you not escape it, but you don't need to. This is part
03:14:56.120of who we are. It's part of this whole organic chain of culture that we've grown out of. And
03:15:03.840you can't just say, it's like we're on a train on a track. You can't just be like, well, let's
03:15:09.540take the last 200 years of track and just get rid of it. It's like, no, that track is there for a
03:15:15.160reason freud and jung and whatever whatever you want to reference from the 19th 20th century
03:15:22.400all of it is there as part of this development and you can't just get rid of it it's just
03:15:29.260you know we can critique it and recognize its problems but we have to move forward we can't
03:15:34.240just go back to you know the 1600 yeah and like none of that ever happened because we actually
03:15:42.580got things of value out of it. And this is where people come down on me is I will make the case
03:15:48.360that like, no, we got value out of the enlightenment and liberalism and technology and 19th century
03:15:56.160romanticism and 20th century, this, this, that, and the moon landing and all of it. We are in
03:16:03.5602023. We have come this far and we must go forward and not just reject our inheritance
03:16:11.040like a bunch of angry liberal teenagers
03:16:14.600who are rejecting what their parents bequeathed to them.
03:16:18.380We have to understand the value of all of this
03:16:21.540that we've inherited it and bring it forward.
03:16:24.320One good example of that would be the gender debate
03:19:37.900you're not going to go back to the 15th century because that world and that
03:19:42.680worldview and that social structure is not going to jive with the reality of
03:19:46.940being an interplanetary species, but we have to somehow, you know,
03:19:52.580get a hold of those values and how they apply to the human condition and bring them into this reality of, you know, it's like when we go to Mars, are we going to Mars as like crazy blue haired postmodernists or are we going to Mars as like, you know, people who understand, you know, the need for, you know, strong men and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.
03:20:24.780You're not going to be landlocked in some peasant farm in Norway.
03:20:30.060And you know what was funny, now that you mention it?
03:20:32.720We've remarked on this before, but it seems like the only people who are excited about space are far-right guys.
03:20:40.140You're not going to find any leftists.
03:20:42.100Most liberals don't want to do it, but they have nothing but critiques for people who want to go to space.
03:20:46.080of the people who are excited about the prospect of colonizing mars it's only like far right guys
03:20:53.460who lift and eat liver all day you know try getting like a guatemalan interest in this no
03:21:00.480it's like these guys who just want to like fight aliens right now now now so yeah like we're gonna
03:21:06.460be the ones anyway what's more based and trad than conquering new horizons you know so like
03:21:12.420why like what what is what's what's like masculine and trad about wanting to regress 500 years there's
03:21:21.060nothing cool about that you know all the all the testosterone points to the horizon so we're going
03:21:30.240to mars you know the question is what kind of culture what you know are we going to be listening
03:21:35.760to taylor swift on our way to mars or are we going to have some kind of new genuine authentic
03:21:42.080you know deep nourishing music and art and movies to uh to be the soundtrack to our ride to mars
03:21:52.560well i can answer your question and i think listeners of the show will know what the answer
03:21:57.400is i know what music i'm gonna be listening to we are going to be listening to radiohead
03:22:02.260yes thank you thank you yes i got one i got one on the show guys how about you go fuck off we got
03:22:11.180it we got it's a radiohead show now yeah i tried to bring this up with millennial woes he mogged
03:22:16.660me did not want to go down that path it's been a long time anybody who's anybody who's not on board
03:22:20.780with radiohead i'm sorry man but you're just you're not on board like you're gonna get left
03:22:24.580behind this is a great episode i'm out there's a lot of wisdom being dropped right here i think
03:22:29.440a lot of people would be wise to be wise and get wise while you're at it yes um so and for people
03:22:38.260Well, just on the universalism versus particularism thing, for people who might be a bit confused, my understanding of it is, in short, we talk about this on the show a lot.
03:22:50.600When you're looking at the world, when you're looking at the laws that govern the world, there's some people who have an understanding of certain, like when we hear about human rights, inalienable human rights, there's things that apply to every human on earth.
03:23:05.780and then that is very that comes out of liberalism in a lot of ways that you know there's certain
03:23:11.040and you'll hear liberals say this all the time like everyone's kind of the same once you strip
03:23:15.060away all the culture while particularism is i think a bit more popular on the right and there's
03:23:21.120always a struggle between these two like we know there's certain realities there's certain things
03:23:25.660we can see and test do these apply to all humans or just humans in one particular region or a space
03:23:32.300and a time. And that's kind of the debate. And a lot of people on the right will say that I don't
03:23:38.160think you would call it relative. Some people call this relativism. I'm not sure that'd be the right
03:23:42.020term, but it kind of is that, you know, every race, every ethnicity, every whatever has their
03:23:48.220own truth and things like that, which also kind of came up with liberalism in a way. But just is
03:23:53.980that a fair assessment? And also what you were saying before of if we talk about things like
03:24:00.120virtue and inherent goodness, we kind of are dabbling in universalism. Is that a fair assessment?
03:24:08.120Well, again, I think it's a false dichotomy. And this is where the problem comes up in trying to
03:24:14.160talk about these things, because in a sense, of course, every group has its own proclivities and
03:24:24.880its own, you know, its own style or whatever, but it's, like I said, there's a universal
03:24:32.540human nature, but as you, as you focus in on the, on the particular situation of a certain
03:24:42.320time, a certain place, a certain people, a certain culture that, you know, the, the
03:24:48.920particularities mount up and they express themselves until it's hard to see what is
03:24:56.340similar about, you know, uh, some, you know, uh, an Anglo-Canadian in 2023 and, uh, you know,
03:25:04.560an Ottoman chic in the 18th century or something. But it's like, both are true and both have to be
03:25:13.920incorporated and i think the problem on the right is that people only want to look at the
03:25:19.700particularism and say like well they're you know we're not like those brown people and the problem
03:25:25.600on the left is they only want to look at the universalism it's like well all we're all one
03:25:30.700people one family one one love one harmony when really it's just these things are they're not
03:25:38.780these things work in relation you know the universal human nature is expressed
03:25:46.160in different ways at different times and it it it ebbs and flows and mutates and alters over time so
03:25:54.800that you know uh an anglo-american in 2023 is probably gonna have a hard time relating to
03:26:03.140you know an anglo you know 13th century peasant person you know so it's just it's just not that
03:26:10.860simple of you know particularism versus universalism both of these things are happening
03:26:17.100but the things that are important tend toward the universal you know like you you we probably
03:26:27.220have very little in common genetically or culturally with homer but we can you know we
03:26:33.660read the odyssey and we get really deep insights into the human condition the same is true with
03:26:39.340the old testament you know like you probably have very little in common genetically and culturally
03:26:44.320with the people that produced the old testament but it contains fundamental truths about human
03:26:53.180nature that apply to us. And this is true of great works of art and great works of culture.
03:27:02.120Now, of course, there's a scale. So some things are more universal in their appeal and some things
03:27:07.200are more particular. But I think appealing to the particular is a very liberal way of producing art
03:27:13.600and culture. And appealing to the universal is a very traditional, classic-based way of producing
03:27:21.220art you know it's an interesting um comparison to this and uh i'm losing confidence in this
03:27:28.380comparison as i'm coming up with it but i think it's relevant it's almost like the difference
03:27:33.260between newtonian physics and einsteinian physics okay where right where we have you know both of
03:27:39.520these physics make sense at their scale like they're both true but once you change the scale
03:27:46.760one doesn't work and the other kind of works but they're both real at the same time and what we
03:27:52.280the world of scientists and physicists are trying to reconcile those two things in a lot of ways i
03:27:58.620see us engaged in the same project like we have in this conflict between you know like you said
03:28:05.460it's kind of a false dichotomy but we we understand that there are there has to be these universal
03:28:09.940things i love the example you had picked uh of virtue because in our scene i've spoken with a
03:28:15.800lot of guys like this and i i do believe they believe what they're saying when they say you
03:28:20.400know what i'm apolitical i'm just about virtue i'm a virtue guy and i promise i'm not playing
03:28:27.300the hatchling when i ask this but i'm like i i don't know what that means i don't know if i'm
03:28:33.680sweeping the weekly i'm just virtue and strength and honor that's my thing i'm like i what do you
03:28:38.440what does that mean like in the context of what and if we are talking about virtue as this almost
03:28:44.700a priori ontological thing like describe that to me you know i mean and so that's kind of the
03:28:50.940interplay it's like we we understand we know virtue in very particular ways contextually
03:28:56.080but maybe there's a way to elevate that to something you know metaphysical but how do you
03:29:01.900do that you know i mean and we're trying to we're always engaged in projects to figure out what we
03:29:06.760can elect from the particular to the universal you know and and we are in a scene that loves
03:29:12.520talking about the cycles of empires and the fourth turnings and things like that so we're always
03:29:17.620trying to come up with new things new particulars we think are universal
03:29:22.400there's a bit of a ramble there but i do it's kind of it's a similar project i think where
03:29:29.800like you said it's that that this project that we're engaged in all the time means that it can't
03:29:35.560be either or right that wouldn't make any sense sure and and i would just say that if you're you
03:29:42.180know if you're a you know a trad type person think about the great works of art that you love
03:29:49.040and compare them to the culture that you hate and ask yourself which one leans towards the
03:29:56.400universal and which one leans toward the particular because you know like think about um
03:30:02.640think about hip-hop you know hip-hop like 90s era hip-hop it's you know like at its best
03:30:12.840it can it can get to some sort of truths about human life and human nature but it's mostly
03:30:21.160very specifically about you know urban black american life in this certain setting in a
03:30:30.780certain economic bracket with certain rules and certain cultural expressions. And, you know,
03:30:38.060it's very, very particular. Now compare that with like Shakespeare, you know, people, you know,
03:30:45.520there's people in China studying Shakespeare that people all over the world have been imbibing and
03:30:51.480valuing and loving Shakespeare for 500 years because it's speaking very deeply to the human
03:30:58.940condition. Now, there might be an impoverished minority character in Shakespeare, but it's
03:31:04.880incidental. That's not the point. It's there because you have to choose particulars in order
03:31:12.560to tell a story. But the story is speaking very deeply to the human condition, as opposed to
03:31:19.500Taylor Swift or something that is very much aimed at a very specific little corner
03:31:27.340of history and culture. So I just think artistically, aesthetically, I want people
03:31:36.520to think about that because again, I think what we have to do is maybe stop talking so much and
03:31:43.480stop critiquing so much and start actually really making things and trying to speak to the culture
03:31:49.960at large in a way that is actually effective. I've never heard it summarized like that,
03:31:56.280I think that's a very profound bow you put on it just there, because I've never heard art incorporated into almost almost describing the effectiveness of our beliefs or our values, in a sense.
03:32:11.200Like, can you take these things that are important and put it in such a way that it lasts forever and is it is universalizing it because it seems that we're always concerned about making things that are eternal or making things that last a long time.
03:32:26.220it's like you know i i love the taylor swift example just for people who don't know taylor
03:32:30.520swift is usually designed for terminally single women and i've known these women in my life i0.99
03:32:37.060work with them at my office job and they're they're single women who desperately want to1.00
03:32:41.240find a boyfriend but they make the cardinal mistake of only listening to other single women
03:32:47.620it never occurred this is this blows my fucking mind it never occurred to a lot of these single1.00
03:32:51.500women to just listen to a married woman yeah i know and i i almost like wanted to grab her and
03:32:57.780shake her i'm like you are like getting close to 30 and i you're i know you heard somewhere that
03:33:03.280you can freeze your eggs you can't by the way forget it but i'm like listen to listen to a1.00
03:33:08.680happy woman for once in your fucking life they can't do it they can't do it the female stubbornness1.00
03:33:13.600is too deep and there's competitiveness i always felt bad for like a lot of the women in our scene0.92
03:33:19.340who have podcasts and who have things to say and i was wondering it's like women's sports i'm like
03:33:23.580i don't know why more women don't listen to you like you're married and you got a house and two
03:33:27.400kids and you got some cool you're funny you know they talk about crystals and stuff i don't really
03:33:32.100know about that but you know the girl stuff whatever it's not for me right but i'm like
03:33:35.840there's no what are women listening to like suicide like black makeup girls you know anyway
03:33:42.440but just back to the profoundness of what you said i think that's that i think makes art relevant to
03:33:48.920people as almost a way not using art just as propaganda which we're very very good at we're
03:33:56.280great at making propaganda especially ineffective propaganda we're great at making propaganda
03:34:01.260that looks like it was from 1945 we're good we got that locked up we got we got like paleo
03:34:08.940futurism locked in guys but like use art as almost a way to test the universality
03:34:15.720of your beliefs, if they are truly universal, like the people who are out there saying,
03:34:22.180I'm about strength and virtue. It's like, well, can you tell a story that really
03:34:25.580enlightens and illuminates and invigorates people? And I think if you can't do that,
03:34:31.340maybe we don't have, you know, these as powerful ideas as we think they are.
03:34:38.400Well, I think we're in danger. I think we've reached a point where we're in danger of sort of
03:34:43.800getting so trapped in our rhetorical, you know, it's like a, it's like a snake eating its tail
03:34:52.000or something. Like we just, you, we keep having the same conversations over and over and over
03:34:58.100again. And at some point it's like, this either has to translate into real culture that can speak
03:35:05.160to people, or we are doomed to just be like internet nerds, you know, who like, just, just,
03:35:13.220go off into some, you know, insanity that is completely irrelevant to the project of
03:35:21.820So I just think, you know, it's, I just feel like it's, there's a shift happening where
03:35:30.340we have to get out of that purely critical, rhetorical, intellectual mode and just encourage
03:35:40.500people, like make stuff, you know, like really, and take it seriously. And, and you kind of have
03:35:47.380to come out of the politics a little bit to do it, to really speak deeply to the human condition,
03:35:52.900or else you're only going to be making stuff that's marketable for, you know, young, dissonant
03:35:58.760right-wing men, basically. And I'm going to throw out a spicy take here. And, uh, you don't need to
03:36:04.580agree with it but i do think it is true that perhaps the last time we had something from the
03:36:10.760right that crossed those borders and had that staying power was probably nazi stuff and i only
03:36:16.820say this because it's still around and if you go there's japanese people who look at like old nazi
03:36:24.360stuff and think that's really like there's something about like the design the aesthetic
03:36:29.700the even people who they know they're not supposed to like it but they still think it's cool
03:36:35.380and when that guy shows up in a movie he steals the scene like there's something even though it
03:36:41.720was it's bad you're not supposed to like it but i'm like it seemed to have captured something in
03:36:46.380the zeitgeist that people yeah it fired people up in a way that i don't think anything has
03:36:52.060really fired them up since and maybe there's like design people like oh it's hugo boss like it's a
03:36:57.080lot of things that kind of coalesce together but that kind of political movement had a it was it
03:37:04.100was whatever you think about it it was firing on all cylinders and people still go back to it
03:37:09.300in terms of the expressly political yeah but thinking more generally i mean you can make a
03:37:16.700case for you know 20th century late 20th century popular art and music like i'm trying to think of
03:37:27.860a good example like kubrick you know is it is it explicitly left-wing you know i mean maybe like
03:37:38.760maybe you could make that analysis but like you know a lot of it speaks a little more deeply than
03:37:42.840let me let me make a better example like think about kubrick's actually a really really good
03:37:46.920example i think that's uh for people who are movie heads like me i think kubrick's fantastic
03:37:53.860there is something i would argue shakespearean about like some of his his peaks yeah like is
03:38:01.220is is 2001 a you know is that leftist propaganda you know you're gonna have an uphill battle with
03:38:07.280that one uh you know i mean but even but even like pop okay think about the beatles the beatles who
03:38:14.180are like you know you would you would peg them on the left without a second thought oh that's a
03:38:19.020that's a leftist project okay but if you go back and listen to early beatles records you know the
03:38:26.000stuff that was like hugely popular in england it's it's it's pretty traditional in its gender roles
03:38:32.460and i want to hold your hand you know it's basically like all the it's like you know
03:38:37.420you know i don't know i can't give a good example but go listen to that stuff you know and tell me
03:38:42.380that's not trad you know it's just it's just basic sane normal life and it speaks to life
03:38:48.840in a deep enough level with a sense of joy and a sense of intelligence and a sense of
03:38:55.440you know all the positive things in life that make people want to listen to it like there's
03:39:01.520nothing wrong with that. We need that stuff. We need just basic, sane, spirited things that just
03:39:12.820speak to normalcy and life at a deep level to help people come out of the fog of insanity
03:39:20.400in our culture created by people like Taylor Swift. Yeah. And also when you do this, when you
03:39:27.060create this art i think you do understand it better and this is something i was talking about
03:39:32.080a long time ago where you know we talked about these values that we have but if you don't
03:39:37.400understand those values or why they're important or why those specific values are important they
03:39:42.620can be inverted you know for example uh let's take a funny example let's take the the virtue
03:39:47.320of strength right everyone would agree that everyone likes strength who doesn't like strength
03:39:54.180some people but most people like strength but unless you understand a very specific type of
03:39:58.720strength strength could be martial prowess or strength you know air quotes can also be the
03:40:05.180strength of a man watching his wife get fucked by another man in a way that's strength that's a very
03:40:11.160much an inverted version of strength but unless you can delineate between different types of
03:40:17.000strength you're going to get people who can corrupt it very very easily so you all you need to have a
03:40:23.080more visceral understanding of your values and they can't be vague they need to they need that
03:40:30.140humanity to them rather than just you know it's poetry without being poetry you know we're not
03:40:37.600writing poetry we're just writing things that rhyme it feels like sometimes yeah i mean i think
03:40:43.320what we need is something like sanity like if i had to put it in a word just we need to like
03:40:48.700the cutting edge of sanity, which, which just means, you know, well, like, like you, in your
03:40:59.260example, you know, basic sanity would know the difference between, uh, you know, a kind of evil
03:41:06.500kind of strength and a good kind of strength. Uh, but I think, but I think it's very difficult for
03:41:13.020people in our world caught up as we are in all this, in all the politics to get to that kind
03:41:24.040of basic sanity. Because basic sanity also includes things like, you know, emotion and
03:41:33.500I don't know, aspects of the human condition that it's, you know, like caring about people
03:41:40.360We have a tendency to be, so we get so hard edged in our world. It's like, well, you know, I'm not going to write about caring people, caring about people. That's gay, you know, compassion. That's, that's gay, you know, like that, just that kind of like childishness where, you know, a real sane grip on life and humanity is what we need.
03:42:03.580Whereas we tend to, there's, we tend to have this kind of lust for violence and this kind of weird, hard, you know, I don't know, like overly, I hate to say this, but overly masculine compensation for the feminization of our culture.
03:42:22.880but it's like, well, basic sanity means like, you know, incorporating there, there is like a
03:42:30.600feminine aspect of human life that is a, you know, part of the proper, uh, you know, life of the
03:42:38.000species, you know, like, uh, this is what, and people will come down to me for this because I'll1.00
03:42:43.120tell people like the right is too hard on women. And it's like, you can't just throw away women0.88
03:42:48.020and just trash women. Like they're part, they're half of the equation. You know, you're not,
03:42:51.960you're never going to speak to humanity as a whole and speak to the culture as a whole if you
03:42:56.460don't find some kind of sane way to balance the the role of men and women and the the relationship
03:43:03.940of the masculine and the feminine yeah one thing i always caution people of i'm like because hating
03:43:10.000women can be very it can be you know fun hating women can be fun and educational sure oh sure but
03:43:15.480but i'm like you know i caution people like look if you hate women all day don't be surprised when
03:43:20.040just be end up surrounded by gay guys i've seen it happen so often and they're flummoxed at why
03:43:26.120this would happen yeah um fuck i was gonna say something but i told you you had a good point
03:43:32.080there and then i got waylaid by my idiot joke there um why were you talking about before the
03:43:39.040women thing uh art culture uh it's so hard when someone asks you to like do that oh yeah you had
03:43:47.760a good point name five i don't know no but um i i will just say i agreed with everything you were
03:43:54.340saying as you're saying i just got um i got distracted by my own stupid thought there um
03:43:59.180i know we have to uh get going soon you're probably uh very tired yeah some of us have
03:44:05.420to work in the morning yeah i guess we don't work in canada there what time is it where you are uh
03:44:11.960it's 10 02 right now oh so we're on the same okay yeah yeah i just wanted to say uh before we get
03:44:17.200going we can wrap up soon i just wanted to say before we get going that uh i've had a fantastic
03:44:21.700time talking to you oh yeah it's been great man um and uh i think we agree on quite a lot of things
03:44:27.700i think that when i look at some people get you know defeatist or fatalist when they look
03:44:33.760uh they survey the scene but i i get very optimistic you know um i get yeah i see that
03:44:40.560there's a lot of work ahead there's a lot of you know a lot oh you know what i was going to say i
03:44:45.260think i remember now okay just uh to your point about about men about i one thing i was doing i
03:44:52.400was reading about the american revolution i was reading this book called the true history of the
03:44:56.060american revolution it's very interesting oh i know it i know it yeah and and it was describing
03:45:00.260uh sort of the the scrappiness of the minute men and describe you know the images that we are
03:45:06.320probably used to portray the revolutionaries and their perfect outfits and the uniforms and he's
03:45:11.280Like most of the time it was something that their wife had made them before
03:45:15.480they went out, they provided their own everything.
03:45:34.920And that's what you did throughout time is that, you know,
03:45:37.560But the idea of sort of the martial man who was ready for war and who was a tough guy, and by all counts, by all estimates, would be the guy that we look up to as the badass.
03:45:48.720It's like, yeah, he was ready for war, but he wasn't always in war mode, which is something that we kind of get wrapped up in.
03:45:55.240Like, we always think we've got to be in war mode.
03:45:56.780But the thing about being a tough guy is you don't need to act like a tough guy if you are one.
03:46:02.120Just like power doesn't behave a certain way.
03:46:04.340Power behaves however the fuck power wants to behave.
03:46:06.960you know so if you are ready for action point being that you know real life killers real life
03:46:13.080badasses they can also love their kids want to raise their sons and like you know i always joke
03:46:19.260that all the biggest mafia badasses they all listen to fucking frankie valley and frank sinatra0.55
03:46:24.380and shit they need to listen to songs about being a mobster uh maybe a bad example because they
03:46:30.140watch movies about being gangsters but the point being that you do we have this conceptualization