RadixJournal - The Lost Decade and the Silent Civil War

00:00:00.000 It's Tuesday, December 24th, 2019, Christmas Eve, and welcome back to a special holiday

00:00:09.460 edition of The McSpencer Group.

00:00:13.240 In an effort to expand racial diversity, I've invited Irishman Keith Woods onto the panel,

00:00:19.580 and joining me, as always, is perfidious Albion incarnate Edward Dutton.

00:00:26.000 This week, we forgo the predictable Trump and Brexit retrospectives, and instead engage

00:00:33.660 in reckless and all-but-incomprehensible metaphysical speculation about the past and the future.

00:00:41.540 Enjoy.

00:00:43.920 Well, everyone, welcome back to the holiday edition of The McSpencer Group, and I am very

00:00:52.520 pleased to have two special guests along with me, Eternal Anglo, Ed Dutton. 0.92

00:01:00.560 Ed, how are you?

00:01:02.500 Okay, good, good.

00:01:03.560 I'm still celebrating.

00:01:04.520 I appreciate the holiday cravat that you've chosen.

00:01:08.860 Yeah.

00:01:10.220 We're all very excited about that.

00:01:12.040 And alongside us, we have the most articulate teenager in the alt-right.

00:01:20.520 That is Keith Woods.

00:01:21.860 How are you doing, Keith?

00:01:23.100 Yeah, not too bad.

00:01:24.640 I feel like I'm here to bring some balance, you know, the Anglo empiricism. 0.85

00:01:28.720 I'm going to bring in some national idealism from Ireland, you know?

00:01:33.940 That's good.

00:01:34.580 No, I actually do appreciate that.

00:01:36.200 We were joking about that online.

00:01:37.900 And also, you should take my crude criticisms as a compliment.

00:01:42.640 You're a very young guy.

00:01:45.160 It's always good to see young people entering the movement.

00:01:48.740 So, how are you all?

00:01:50.960 Are you ready for Christmas?

00:01:55.000 Yes, we went down the other day.

00:01:57.340 I've got my Christmas ham.

00:01:58.740 It's ham they have up here.

00:01:59.880 And the various larticos they have up here, maxillartico, which is liver and swede casserole, liver casserole.

00:02:10.580 It's actually quite nice.

00:02:11.540 I've actually got used to it.

00:02:12.280 I actually prefer it now to English Christmas food.

00:02:15.120 It's taken me a while, but I actually prefer it.

00:02:17.760 So, yeah.

00:02:19.260 That's excellent.

00:02:19.920 Do you have turkey in Ireland?

00:02:22.120 Yes, we have turkeys in Ireland.

00:02:25.220 Yeah, I actually...

00:02:25.880 Besides the people.

00:02:26.580 He was referring to the animals, but...

00:02:29.580 I actually thought it was funny this year, the Christmas season.

00:02:33.920 There were some people on YouTube that were really white-pilled and excited and thought it was a big victory for us.

00:02:39.660 Because some of the supermarkets in Britain, you know, Tesco and Sainsbury's, that do these multicultural ads every year.

00:02:46.860 This year, they didn't do, like, full global homo multiculturalism.

00:02:50.740 Everyone thought that was, like, a big victory. 0.56

00:02:53.080 The advertisements aren't full of brown people.

00:02:56.580 It's, like, such a small little victory.

00:02:59.480 Last year, they had Muslim women in headscarves celebrating Christmas and giving each other presents.

00:03:04.580 I forget which one that was.

00:03:05.700 Just eating potatoes while wearing the jajab. 0.86

00:03:07.620 Yeah, eating halal turkey or whatever. 0.96

00:03:13.400 But it was absolutely ridiculous. 0.96

00:03:15.540 And, of course, they got feedback that it was ludicrous. 0.87

00:03:18.220 So perhaps they've toned it down this year.

00:03:20.480 Although I haven't actually watched any of them, I have to say.

00:03:22.560 But that's good news anyway.

00:03:24.720 Well, later on today, I'm going to go actually visit Santa Claus.

00:03:29.360 So that should be fun.

00:03:30.740 And you get to sit on his lap and he'll give you a present and ask you what you want this year.

00:03:35.340 And I might even take my kids this time.

00:03:37.520 All right.

00:03:41.620 I try humor here.

00:03:43.040 Okay.

00:03:43.580 That sounds kind of cringe, Richard.

00:03:48.920 All right.

00:03:50.620 Well, we'll get into cringe later.

00:03:52.760 Being that this is the holiday edition, I wanted to take a step back and not only reflect on 2019, but really reflect on the past four years of craziness in the right.

00:04:10.860 Like, this has been a period really like no other that I've at least experienced in my lifetime where we felt like we were winning.

00:04:22.360 We were on the right side of history.

00:04:26.160 All of these things were coming into place.

00:04:28.600 And then I think that after that, there was a lot of disillusionment and maybe depression and blackpilling and all that kind of stuff.

00:04:39.320 So I think it's been quite a time, but at the least you could say it has been an interesting time to be alive on the right.

00:04:47.580 So I wanted to talk about the two big things that occurred, that is Trump and Brexit, and basically look at all of it.

00:04:57.280 And I know, Keith, you did a very interesting video.

00:05:00.600 I watch most of your videos.

00:05:02.840 I find them very insightful.

00:05:05.480 I can't watch Ed's content.

00:05:07.900 It's basically completely unbearable.

00:05:11.720 But yours is actually quite good.

00:05:17.160 But you did a good video on the kind of postmodernism of Trump.

00:05:22.740 And we could start out with Trump.

00:05:24.580 Maybe we'll just mix in Trump and Brexit together because they are certainly related phenomena.

00:05:29.000 But this postmodern aspect of Trump and the way in which he's this, he's kind of like Diet Coke, you could say.

00:05:39.900 There's actually no calories.

00:05:42.360 There's no there there.

00:05:43.620 But it actually really does get you excited.

00:05:46.380 And it feels like the real thing.

00:05:48.380 It's even better than the real thing, as U2 has declared.

00:05:54.000 And so I think basically, I mean, we can criticize Trump from a lot of different levels. 0.94

00:06:01.420 He's a tool of global homo. 1.00

00:06:03.840 He's a tool of Zog or whatever. 0.99

00:06:06.000 He's just a conservative.

00:06:07.500 He does Paul Ryan's agenda.

00:06:08.820 All of these are solid criticisms, actually.

00:06:11.820 But I think or the other thing about him is that he's a racist nationalist.

00:06:15.880 Unless this was you here on the left.

00:06:18.000 But I actually think the best way of understanding him is as this kind of postmodern simulacrum of a nationalist.

00:06:27.420 And we can project our hopes and dreams upon him.

00:06:30.760 And he can kind of mean whatever we want him to mean.

00:06:34.380 And it's a new type of politics.

00:06:36.620 There's maybe some precursors to this, but it actually is something new and something very, very, you know, postmodern West, you could say.

00:06:47.000 What do you think about that?

00:06:47.860 We'll start with you, Kay.

00:06:50.800 Yeah, that's fairly accurate.

00:06:52.320 I mean, yeah, the Trump campaign was an interesting thing.

00:06:56.480 That's around like when I kind of got red piddling, you know, got into this in a ride or whatever.

00:07:00.780 But I suppose like there's the pre-election Trump and the post-election Trump.

00:07:05.780 And you should probably delineate the two because what he ran on is so different from what he is now.

00:07:11.500 But, yeah, you know, a lot of people picked up on this, that Trump has this postmodern aspect to him.

00:07:17.660 That, like, he kind of reminds me of Greta Thunberg in a weird way.

00:07:23.020 And that they're both so, they're both so outrageously, whatever they are, they're like a parody of themselves that it's kind of impossible to critique them.

00:07:34.080 Because that self-awareness is already kind of latent just in their very being, if you know what I mean.

00:07:40.320 So Trump was able to, like, defy all sort of conventional morality.

00:07:45.260 And, you know, a lot of people thought, like, the, you know, his divorces and stuff would count against him with the Christian vote or whatever.

00:07:51.680 But Trump was just so out there and so in defiance of, you know, the moral norms that were governing dialectic of Republican politics that he became totally immune from all that.

00:08:03.760 But I think, you know, a lot of leftists were saying Trump is a postmodern phenomenon.

00:08:08.320 But I think he's actually a sign of things to come, which is, you know, there's talk about this shift into metamodernism where the, you know, the dominant irony of postmodernism.

00:08:20.080 You know, you have Generation Z now that have been completely raised, just steeped in irony, you know, raised on, you know, 4chan and YouTube and all this.

00:08:28.700 And, like, what happens is, you know, irony is wholly negative.

00:08:32.420 It's always used in deconstruction.

00:08:35.740 But we're in a situation now where there's nothing left to deconstruct really.

00:08:40.160 Like, there is no metanarrative beyond sort of this, you know, nihilistic, solipsistic individualism.

00:08:46.520 And so, you know, after the deconstruction comes reconstruction in a certain sense.

00:08:51.800 And the trend, it hasn't been discussed much, but the trend in metamodernism seems to be that the reconstruction takes the form of a kind of a self-aware return to tradition.

00:09:02.060 You get what's called ironic sincerity, which is a kind of self-aware sincerity.

00:09:05.380 And that's what I saw in the Trump campaign, because he's very self-aware.

00:09:10.780 He has this postmodern aspect.

00:09:12.200 He's very brash.

00:09:13.160 But at the end of the day, the reason he appealed was there was a sincerity there, which was a return to a kind of more industrial era, more morally wholesome United States.

00:09:25.460 And it's interesting even in, like, the, you know, the aesthetics that flourished in the alt-right, like, kind of fasciae of aesthetics,

00:09:33.240 where it's just, like, marriage of forms from a bygone time with kind of a hyper-modern aesthetics.

00:09:41.300 So you get, you know, retrofuturism was very popular because, like, the 80s was another time where, you know, people were looking at optimism to the future.

00:09:49.780 So you get this interest in marriage of, you know, people were sharing a lot of, like, sort of Soviet retrofuturism, where you have, like, a very traditional form, like a nuclear family.

00:10:02.100 But, you know, they're living on marriage.

00:10:04.080 So it's this clash of, like, the sincere return to simpler time of moral wholesomeness or whatever with the progress of modernism.

00:10:14.480 And that's what metamodernism seems to be taking the form of.

00:10:17.400 Yeah, I think it's interesting because I was just thinking about the generational aspect of it.

00:10:26.180 Speaking as a Gen Xer, and I guess Ed is, I'm a little bit older than Ed, but he is more or less a Gen Xer, more of a Gen Xer than a millennial.

00:10:35.220 We can remember the 80s, and we can remember a time that, you know, it was certainly hopeful.

00:10:42.600 It was decadent in its own way.

00:10:43.840 That was the, you know, age of, you know, staying up until 6 a.m. on high on Coke and, you know, wagering all your money on some stock junk fund or whatever.

00:10:55.400 But it was actually an era of American hopefulness and American power and arrogance even.

00:11:04.960 This kind of ended with the fall of the Soviet Union where, you know, we won. 0.96

00:11:10.640 And then the 90s was actually a bit of a different decade.

00:11:13.660 It was almost kind of a hangover from that.

00:11:16.100 And I think the, you know, one of the reasons why the boomers are attacked is that they seem to have a kind of meta-narrative to them. 0.91

00:11:24.060 They, you know, it was, we destroyed racism.

00:11:29.720 We broke down the walls.

00:11:31.240 We brought everyone together.

00:11:32.200 And we created the greatest economy ever and, you know, and so on.

00:11:36.500 And I think the zoomers are almost interesting in their just kind of lack of a meta-narrative at all.

00:11:44.360 It's not so much the kind of black-pilled meta-narrative that distinguishes Gen X where we were like, you know, all that stuff you talk about, civil rights, spreading democracy to the world. 0.96

00:11:55.900 That's all bullshit. 0.93

00:11:57.240 You're just doing it for the oil or, you know, all that kind of, that kind of Gen X cynicism or Gen X irony. 0.99

00:12:03.300 But I would say zoomers are almost in this position where they don't have any kind of meta-narrative and it doesn't matter.

00:12:11.300 It's irony upon irony.

00:12:12.840 It's like the Russian dolls where you keep opening them, but there's no ultimate end to it. 0.96

00:12:18.540 There's just another ironic, you know, Joker mask figurine below the last one that you pulled out.

00:12:25.480 And I think that does, I mean, again, I think sometimes we get a little too into the generational divide

00:12:31.860 and we start attacking our elders or our younglings.

00:12:37.220 But I think there really is a different, a fundamentally different experience.

00:12:43.660 So what do you think about this, Ed?

00:12:45.100 Is this way too lit crit for you and your empirical mind?

00:12:50.520 Yeah, my immediate reaction was that you are both talking centrist, postmodern bollocks.

00:12:55.200 Yeah, but there may be a kernel, I can kind of, of truth in the bollocks.

00:13:01.980 Oh, good.

00:13:02.860 Yeah, and that is this.

00:13:05.160 With reference to what you said about the 80s, I thought that was quite interesting.

00:13:08.380 Because if you think about the 80s in England, I'm not so sure I can comment on America or Ireland,

00:13:12.180 but in the 80s in England, who was running Britain?

00:13:14.740 Who was running Parliament at that time?

00:13:16.660 On the one hand, in the Conservative Party in 1980, who was the Foreign Secretary?

00:13:21.700 Lord Carrington, a hereditary peer.

00:13:24.120 Who was the Home Secretary?

00:13:25.660 It was William Whitelaw, gentry, you know, basically kind of lower nobility.

00:13:29.800 And there were loads of other people like that that were running the country, the upper class, the aristocracy.

00:13:35.240 And they have these groupish values, these values of noblesse of liege, of self-service,

00:13:41.100 of laying down your life for your country, of thinking of the group and that kind of thing.

00:13:45.960 And who was the other group that was running the country?

00:13:48.100 It was the trade Labour, but the trade unionist Labour.

00:13:51.960 Most of these people that were members of Parliament for the Labour Party, but not the leader at the time,

00:13:56.100 that was Jim Callaghan, unionists, left school at 14 and gone down the pit.

00:14:00.680 And those were the two groups of people that were running the country,

00:14:02.980 the upper class that have these groupish, these group-selected, you might call them values,

00:14:07.260 and the working class that have, again, to some extent, these group-selected kind of values.

00:14:12.300 And the somewheres, the people that are somewheres, not the anywheres.

00:14:17.000 The people that have, in the upper class, they have a strong connection to the land, to the village.

00:14:22.160 They're the lord of the manor.

00:14:23.560 You know, they have this connection.

00:14:25.140 In that way, they're connected to a sense of place and a sense of family.

00:14:28.860 Family is all important to them.

00:14:30.500 Where they are is all important.

00:14:31.940 And the working class, it's connection to a town, to a village, and to a local area.

00:14:36.000 That was who was running England in the 1980s.

00:14:38.620 Now, I think, as I was criticised on our last stream for saying positive things about Mrs. Thatcher,

00:14:43.340 and a lot of people were annoyed by that.

00:14:44.940 So let me say some negative things about Mrs. Thatcher. 0.90

00:14:47.240 And that is what is heralded with her, and to an extra extent, her predecessors, Heath, Harold Wilson,

00:14:54.840 and then her successors as well, Blair, Major, Brown, is the rise of the middle class

00:15:00.940 and the complete evisceration from Parliament of the upper class, they go,

00:15:06.260 and it's kind of shameful to be upper class, and they don't tend to get elected,

00:15:09.800 and the working class.

00:15:11.080 They are either literally destroyed or they stop, the trade union movement is crushed.

00:15:15.740 And so there's this change to these middle class values, these values of individualism.

00:15:20.000 Now, I think that was happening anyway.

00:15:22.100 That had been happening for a long time.

00:15:23.760 That had been happening maybe even since World War I, you could say.

00:15:26.140 Or even you could go back further.

00:15:27.220 You could say that had been happening since the medieval period.

00:15:29.000 But I think it really gets crystal.

00:15:31.560 In the 80s, we still haven't gone full individualist.

00:15:35.480 There's still this balance there where there is substantial and growing individualist values,

00:15:40.740 and you could argue that Reaganomics and Thatcher's, what she did to England and whatever,

00:15:46.100 is reflecting that.

00:15:47.380 But there's still this influence of these group-selected values that certain ideas aren't questioned.

00:15:52.400 You've got this generation, World War II generation, even the tail end of World War I generation

00:15:56.980 who have fought for their country, you know, who've known suffering, who've known what

00:16:00.740 it is to have to make a sacrifice and have done that unquestioning, unquestioning.

00:16:05.580 And then you have this new generation that don't know anything like that.

00:16:09.100 They've never really suffered.

00:16:10.300 And you have the expansion into the organs of power of the middle class.

00:16:16.940 And I think that what is interesting about what's happened in both America with Trump and Britain

00:16:24.060 with Brexit, as embodied in people like Boris Johnson, is you have a society that has been

00:16:32.480 totally overtaken by these individualist anti-group values, which goes other things as well,

00:16:37.620 because one of the things that defines the middle class is moralism.

00:16:40.980 They don't have as much money as the upper class, and they want to distinguish themselves

00:16:45.140 from the working class.

00:16:46.280 How do they do that?

00:16:47.180 They do it by saying they're religious, by saying they're moral, by saying they're educated,

00:16:51.920 by saying they're more refined, by saying in that sense that they're superior.

00:16:55.520 These are the Puritans, the Puritan people.

00:16:58.420 That's what the middle class were. 0.53

00:16:59.840 And they take over.

00:17:01.500 And you have this alliance in America of the kind of upper class, really, of someone like

00:17:05.580 Donald Trump.

00:17:06.240 I mean, OK, America's quite cagey about who is upper class in America.

00:17:09.820 I mean, is it the descendants of the Southern Planters?

00:17:12.520 Is it the members of the, what's they called, the Society of Cincinnati, which is a bit

00:17:15.380 like a kind of House of Lords?

00:17:16.600 Is it the Society of Cincinnati?

00:17:18.420 Wait, wait, wait, wait, yeah, or whatever.

00:17:20.760 But there are basically an upper class in America, and that's what Trump is part of.

00:17:25.140 And he has, therefore, this, there's something inherently disingenuous, I think, about the

00:17:28.960 middle class.

00:17:29.560 They're always striving to not fall down into the working class.

00:17:33.980 You know, in England, we talk about the garden gnome test.

00:17:36.480 You'll get people who are lower middle class and their parents and their kids want to

00:17:39.440 garden gnome.

00:17:40.540 And their parents said, God, you can't have a garden gnome, because they don't think

00:17:42.940 people, they think people will think they're working class.

00:17:45.000 They work on a garden gnome, you know.

00:17:46.860 They'll say, like in Bridget Jones, don't say, don't say what, say pardon, she says.

00:17:50.420 Don't say what, say pardon, in Bridget Jones.

00:17:52.460 And pardon is a sign of being lower middle class.

00:17:54.800 Upper class, say what?

00:17:56.060 And working class, say what?

00:17:57.140 So you have this, and you have this genuineness, therefore, to upper class people.

00:18:03.020 There's a degree to which they're difficult to corrupt, because they've got loads of money,

00:18:06.840 and they're kind of secure in who they are.

00:18:09.020 They're not trying to prove anything.

00:18:10.540 And so that's why I think you see with Trump this genuineness, and thus this charisma, which

00:18:14.300 appeals to working class people, who also have, I think, a genuineness in some ways.

00:18:19.120 I'm not saying they're honest or whatever, but they're not trying to be something they're

00:18:22.120 not.

00:18:22.380 They just want to, they're working class, they just want to get into money and whatever. 1.00

00:18:26.280 They don't have the, they're not moralising in the same way the middle class are. 0.73

00:18:29.940 And it's the same thing in Britain.

00:18:31.080 You have this alliance of the Brexit people led by, okay, Farage, would we say he's upper

00:18:37.500 class?

00:18:38.040 He'd say he was middle class, but nobody upper class says they're middle class.

00:18:41.060 So, I mean, that's the, he said that he went to public school, which puts him in the

00:18:43.860 top socioeconomic 4% of the society.

00:18:46.520 And with Boris, obviously, Eton, you know, a gentry family, descended from royalty on one side, 0.97

00:18:52.380 and Turkish nobility on the other.

00:18:54.200 So, so, so this is a, this is an upper class person and has managed to achieve this majority

00:18:58.920 of 80 by, by winning labour areas.

00:19:01.620 It's extraordinary.

00:19:02.300 So I think that's, that's the, that's the fascinating thing.

00:19:04.820 This, this class alliance of the, of the, of the, of the genuine versus the pretentious

00:19:10.600 of the people that are happy to have garden gnomes, either because they like them or one

00:19:15.140 of these or the other, and those that wouldn't touch garden gnomes because they're common.

00:19:18.460 Um, the, the, the, the, the victim of the victory of the garden gnomes.

00:19:21.660 Um, and so I think that's, that's what's significant to me about the last four years.

00:19:24.980 I, I, I think there, there was an interesting wealth aspect to Trump because, you know, the

00:19:30.720 other night there was a democratic debate and the, the meme from the democratic debate

00:19:35.800 was wine cave.

00:19:37.420 And apparently Mayor Pete Buttigieg went to a wine cave.

00:19:41.620 There was actually a funny joke on Saturday Night Live, which is, uh, hasn't been funny

00:19:45.460 for a while, but they said, uh, it, it was filled with, you know, expensive wine and candelabras

00:19:50.440 and crystals.

00:19:51.240 It was, it was just like eyes wide shut, except without any sex appeal whatsoever, which kind 0.62

00:19:57.940 of, uh, I think probably accurately describes it, but, um, they, they treat that, you know,

00:20:03.520 there's, there's this idea that the billionaires are, are running the show and et cetera.

00:20:07.500 Whereas Trump was really able to flip that on his, on, on its head, uh, in the sense that

00:20:12.660 I'm a self-funded campaign.

00:20:14.820 I'm not going to be beholden to all those people.

00:20:17.040 I know how the game is rigged because I was the one rigging it.

00:20:19.820 And now I'm going to rig it in your, on your behalf.

00:20:22.000 That was an amazing move that he made.

00:20:24.100 If I could just say that was very good.

00:20:25.360 I did that.

00:20:25.680 And that was, that's again, if you look at English politics, you had in the eighties,

00:20:28.680 you had the gentry who you've got, it costs money to get yourself selected to be an MP, 0.99

00:20:32.760 right?

00:20:32.940 You've got to travel around the country.

00:20:34.340 They don't pay expenses.

00:20:35.760 It takes ages and ages to do it.

00:20:37.460 It costs money.

00:20:38.460 Who's funding this with the gentry. 0.98

00:20:40.120 They're just funding themselves.

00:20:40.980 It's, they're difficult to corrupt in that sense.

00:20:42.700 It was public service.

00:20:43.800 Did you know that when Winston Churchill, who was upper class, but the lower ranks of us and was

00:20:48.080 constantly in debt because he was an alcoholic and a gambler and whatever, but the salary was

00:20:52.840 500 pounds a year in the thirties.

00:20:55.560 So someone like him, he couldn't afford to have the lifestyle he wanted.

00:20:59.340 I had a massive country house and the 42 staff and whatever, and be an MP.

00:21:04.080 And Kenneth Clark, who was the chancellor of the Exchequer in the nineties in a conservative

00:21:08.580 of it in England, he actually worked.

00:21:10.280 So he'd work half the day in Birmingham as a barrister and then make his way to London

00:21:15.120 and then be an MP for the second half of the day and then go home again.

00:21:18.700 And he did that for years and years because you couldn't, the salary was so low.

00:21:22.460 And it meant that, that, um, on the one hand, that meant that they were corruptible, the people

00:21:27.760 in the middle, but on, on the other hand, now they've got these massive salaries.

00:21:31.240 Now they're just, it's, it attracts greedy people rather than those concerned with public

00:21:35.020 service.

00:21:35.660 So there's been this change to the ACs.

00:21:37.680 That's very interesting.

00:21:38.300 Real quick with Trump, he wasn't just some rich guy.

00:21:42.420 Um, you know, whether we want to deconstruct his actual wealth, uh, I think we'll save that

00:21:48.480 for another time.

00:21:49.220 There, there are people who think that it's all smoke and mirrors, which I, I think there's

00:21:54.060 some actually reason to believe that, but he, he wasn't just that he was a, he was a word

00:21:59.300 that I won't say that is well-known in America, but it's a, it's a terrible word that begins

00:22:04.480 with N that you refer to African-Americans, which I of course cannot ever conceivably say

00:22:10.040 on YouTube, but you use that word and you say rich after it.

00:22:13.700 And it means basically that you've never had money before.

00:22:17.600 You're not really sure, uh, you're, you're actually not sure of yourself.

00:22:22.340 You're comfortable in your own skin.

00:22:23.880 And, and so you go and blow all your money on absurd Cadillacs and gold plated, uh, trinkets

00:22:31.560 and, and so on.

00:22:32.820 Uh, you are in rich in that sense.

00:22:35.940 Um, and I think Trump kind of was a visual of that.

00:22:39.260 Trump does, is not like the other billionaires.

00:22:41.420 The other billionaires are Michael Bloomberg or the Starbucks guy who was running for president

00:22:46.360 for a little bit.

00:22:47.080 They're actually very boring.

00:22:48.800 They kind of present themselves as middle-class, uh, they don't present themselves, they, they 0.98

00:22:53.660 always have some, uh, uh, bogus or truthful story of how they pulled themselves up from

00:22:58.500 their bootstraps.

00:22:59.280 Uh, Trump was the kind of very different than that.

00:23:02.380 They, they wear the black suit and tie, just like a politician, the kind of uniform.

00:23:06.740 You could argue that Trump was so well, a, Trump was hereditarily wealthy.

00:23:10.620 So in that sense, one could argue that there isn't an insecurity, which you perhaps would

00:23:14.040 get if you were poor and became wealthy. 0.97

00:23:14.800 He was so gaudy and bombastic and ridiculous with his wealth. 0.96

00:23:18.560 He was, he was, he was rich enough to be that gaudy and bombastic without it actually 0.95

00:23:22.660 affecting, which is actually quite clever because then it appeals to perhaps what his potential

00:23:26.900 electorate would do with money if they had it. 0.77

00:23:28.320 But anyway, our, our friend here was one.

00:23:29.720 Exactly.

00:23:30.160 He was always appealing to, he was the poor man's rich person in, in a way, since if he,

00:23:36.180 he acted like poor people would act if they had a billion dollars, they'd put their last 0.65

00:23:40.980 name on top of a big, tall building and they'd sell ridiculous ties and steaks. 0.99

00:23:46.120 And with Boris, there's, there's just, there's the comedy element that we, we, we Britannic

00:23:51.020 peoples, I include you, Richard, in that, and I include, um, uh, Keaton, that, that, that,

00:23:56.140 that is, is the eccentric.

00:23:58.440 We like the eccentric.

00:23:59.480 Why do we like the eccentric?

00:24:00.580 Well, because we, we like, we have to, we have to like the genius, otherwise we wouldn't

00:24:03.900 have produced so many per capita geniuses as a, as a people.

00:24:06.780 And the eccentric is really a kind of a, um, a kind of a version of the genius.

00:24:10.720 If you'd like, it's the genius without outlier high IQ, but with some other traits of the

00:24:14.480 genius, you know, the charismatic, and we, and that's what Boris is.

00:24:17.320 And there's a genuineness to this.

00:24:18.800 I remember once years and years ago, uh, they did this new thing of where they're interviewing

00:24:22.440 people on TV, try to make it interesting, where they get the reporter to stand there

00:24:26.100 while the person they're talking about walks out of the building.

00:24:28.600 So something's happening visually in the background while, while the, while the, the subject walks

00:24:32.480 past and this happened.

00:24:33.640 And of course he, she was talking about Boris, uh, as he walked past her and he's actually

00:24:37.200 stopped live and said, no, no, I never said that.

00:24:39.680 No, I didn't say it.

00:24:40.360 What are you talking about?

00:24:41.400 And it confronted her and that, and that, that really kind of characterized the difference,

00:24:45.920 the genuineness, perhaps it's a created, uh, it's a, it's an artifice.

00:24:49.480 It's something he's worked on, but it, it comes across as this, but you were going to

00:24:52.940 say something anyway.

00:24:53.960 Um, yes.

00:24:54.540 Yeah.

00:24:54.800 Yeah.

00:24:54.980 You do see this kind of as a symptom, a symptom of sort of a decline in social trust.

00:25:01.000 I think like, you even see this in Ireland, there was a very famous, uh, billionaire here

00:25:05.380 that was like a self-made billionaire during our economic boom, Sean Quinn.

00:25:09.580 And, you know, he took a big gamble on a bank here and lost all his money.

00:25:13.640 And it was like massive campaign, like, Oh, free Sean Quinn.

00:25:17.000 And like, give him his money back and all this.

00:25:18.600 Cause he was like, you know, he was mad at the people and he, uh, you know, he got rich 1.00

00:25:22.000 and there's this feeling of like, you know, someone like Trump is like, Oh, he's a jerk, 1.00

00:25:25.740 but he's our jerk. 1.00

00:25:26.500 And it's like, when the system is so rigged, it's like, well, if we can just, uh, you know, 1.00

00:25:30.840 get one of them on our side to sort of steal as much for ourselves.

00:25:33.740 And like when Ed was talking about that alliance between the elite and the working class, it

00:25:38.760 kind of reminds me, if you've ever seen century of the self by Adam Curtis, he talks about

00:25:42.420 this, that, uh, the post world war two labor government was actually full of elitists.

00:25:47.900 Uh, you know, a lot of them are from very sort of noble backgrounds.

00:25:50.640 And these are the people that brought in, you know, the NHS and, you know, the modern welfare

00:25:53.980 state into Britain, and he talks about this, that they saw themselves as an elite and they

00:25:59.000 took a very paternal view of the state.

00:26:01.920 And so it's this kind of paradox where, uh, you know, as things get very, uh, democratized

00:26:06.420 and liberalism becomes much more dominant, the kind of people you're getting into government

00:26:11.440 now, they tend, you know, even like the, the rich businessmen, the self-made men, there's

00:26:16.400 this attitude to the state and to social institutions.

00:26:19.940 That's naturally sort of, uh, revolutionary or radical.

00:26:24.100 Whereas when you have like a paternal elite class, there isn't that same feeling, you

00:26:28.840 know, when you're elite is coming from the capitalist class, there is this attitude to the state

00:26:33.100 that's very, uh, you know, very opposed to it naturally.

00:26:37.420 Well, it's, it's individualist.

00:26:39.380 The people that we, who are the people that do well on the capitalism?

00:26:42.760 I mean, you, whether it's taking us all the way back to Weber, it's people that have these

00:26:47.140 individualistic kind of Protestant values, really.

00:26:50.620 Um, and, and that's who does well.

00:26:53.300 And those, those values have come to sort of dominate society.

00:26:57.120 Equally, who does well, Weber argues, it connects to this, is people that are kind of

00:27:00.980 religious.

00:27:01.560 It gives, being religious, very, very religious, gives them a sort of a certainty and a fervor,

00:27:06.620 but also an incentive to work hard.

00:27:08.480 According to Weber, they want to be sure they're part of the elect.

00:27:10.940 God will bless his elect.

00:27:13.000 And therefore it tells them that they are part of the elect if they become rich.

00:27:16.640 And what we seem to have now are these Puritan groups without God. 0.91

00:27:20.480 So without, without, without the kind of love and kindness and humility that's instilled

00:27:24.120 into you by their being a God, they're just Puritan. 0.53

00:27:27.060 Um, and it's, and it's, it's about, um, reassuring themselves that they're the best.

00:27:31.700 I'm the most moral because I, I, I blew myself to a train or stand on the roof to hold up

00:27:37.000 working class people in the morning or whatever.

00:27:39.700 It's more than that because wokeness is a, a kind of Puritanism and wokeness is coming 0.68

00:27:45.480 from capitalism.

00:27:46.960 Wokeness did not come from the proletariat, for God's sake.

00:27:50.720 If anything, they're, they're a bulwark against it.

00:27:53.600 And it, and it, it, it came from the capitalist class.

00:27:57.080 I would even say that it, they, at least it might've been theorized in academia, but it

00:28:02.060 certainly became the religion of the hyper middle class in the sense that, you know, at,

00:28:09.240 at this point, if you deny a transsexual child, the right to gender reassignment surgery, you're

00:28:17.440 somehow evil. 0.84

00:28:18.360 Uh, much like in an earlier version of America, if you're, you know, drinking too much or womanizing, 0.99

00:28:24.780 you're, you're, you're the devil itself. 0.97

00:28:26.700 Now it's been transferred. 0.99

00:28:28.760 Yeah, go ahead.

00:28:29.420 There's a question that it came from the middle class.

00:28:31.200 Of course, it's this, it's this, it's this in the middle class.

00:28:34.220 It's the people, they are quite well off, but they're not well off enough to be secure.

00:28:39.320 And so how can they get themselves self-esteem?

00:28:41.540 Well, it's by saying, okay, well, I might not be rich.

00:28:43.660 I might not be wealthy, but I have morality.

00:28:46.440 And, and, and, and this deals with the, the, the distance they're not certain they do.

00:28:50.480 And that's why they have to go completely over the top, um, and become so upset if their

00:28:53.760 ideas are questioned.

00:28:54.660 So it's a way of competing within their own, uh, superstructure, uh, for, for status in

00:29:00.160 an ever more woke kind of, um, arms.

00:29:03.040 Well, I think this ties into what we were saying earlier, that as we've, as we've, you know,

00:29:08.660 with Thatcher and Reagan and these people, as we've traded our elite for, uh, a sort

00:29:13.460 of capitalist elite, uh, they have these values, you know, capitalism and capitalists are, are

00:29:19.040 naturally sort of, uh, revolutionary, you know, they have to break down barriers to

00:29:23.720 trade, to open new markets.

00:29:25.420 I think what you see actually with wokeness is this is the ethic of the capitalists.

00:29:29.580 This is the, you know, the high, low alliance and what happened really, you know, people

00:29:33.440 talk about cultural Marxism, but what the effect of cultural Marxism, what the effect

00:29:37.840 of the Frankfurt School was, was that in the late sixties, when these radicals were

00:29:42.060 taken to the streets, capitalism just basically adopted the social stuff without the economic

00:29:47.100 stuff.

00:29:47.540 So, you know, Mercurius talked about an alliance between the Black Panthers and the radical

00:29:51.460 environmentalists and all this stuff to overthrow capitalism.

00:29:54.700 But, uh, and even Zizek has talked about this, that, uh, for the capitalists of the time,

00:29:59.200 they realized that an ethic that appealed to this kind of revolutionary social ideal was

00:30:04.460 actually very beneficial from a capitalist point of view, because what has it led to

00:30:08.720 in the real world?

00:30:09.420 It's led to an erosion of borders, uh, an opening of markets, you know, cheap labor, uh, move

00:30:15.020 to consumerism away from other means of fulfillment.

00:30:18.300 And, you know, what people call cultural Marxism, I just see as the, the sort of social, uh,

00:30:23.860 superstructure of post-Fordist capitalism.

00:30:26.040 This is what sustains its cultural capitalism, which is, yeah, the nuclear family was the

00:30:32.060 superstructure of, uh, sort of forest industrial capitalism.

00:30:35.400 And now, you know, you want to, if you want to defend capitalism, the superstructure of

00:30:38.940 modern capitalism is transsexuals and gay marriage. 0.95

00:30:43.020 Yeah, it's a very interesting point that he makes there.

00:30:45.160 I mean, Kevin MacDonald has this concept of effortful control.

00:30:48.920 The idea is that you can kind of force yourself to believe something.

00:30:52.000 If the incentive is strong enough, you can compel yourself to believe something.

00:30:56.040 And you say, you could argue that some of these left-wing, these woke people, they're

00:30:58.900 not hypocrites.

00:30:59.700 They, they, they actually think they think these things on some level, perhaps they,

00:31:04.040 they unconsciously or whatever, know that they don't.

00:31:06.160 And that's why they become so, they have these conflicts and that's why they become

00:31:09.160 triggered and violent and emotional when, um, their, the illogic of their position is

00:31:13.420 highlighted.

00:31:13.820 So what this would, what, what, uh, um, it would imply, what it would imply is that, is

00:31:20.040 that, um, these people on some level, these, these middle class people, they understand

00:31:25.500 that it is in their economic interest and in evolutionary terms, our economic interest, although

00:31:30.720 this is not the case anymore, but for a long time was tied in with our evolutionary interest

00:31:34.720 because rich people outbred poor people, um, uh, throughout history until really quite

00:31:39.620 recently, um, is, is to ensure that there is this complete breakdown of any kind of paternalism,

00:31:45.380 of any kind of, any of religion, of anything that, that, that stands in the way of attaining

00:31:50.480 money, um, um, and so, and, and, and, and being able to morally virtue signal, that's

00:31:55.740 the other thing they want to be able to do, of course, those two things, but also money.

00:31:59.000 And so therefore you have to undermine the working class so that there's cheap labor.

00:32:02.820 That's great.

00:32:03.600 That's, that, that's, that's helpful to people like that.

00:32:05.780 It means that plumbers are cheap and the kind of things they need, the labor, whatever they

00:32:09.900 want to do is, is going to be, is going to be cheap.

00:32:11.920 Um, um, and you have to, um, uh, then the virtue signaling and all this kind of thing

00:32:17.080 helps to continuously undermine that.

00:32:19.280 It undermines nationalism, undermines all these things that stand in the way of making money.

00:32:23.320 So, so, so, um, I think that you could argue that there is, I think there's probably more

00:32:27.320 to it than that in terms of evolution or whatever, but I think there's, that perhaps

00:32:30.280 is part of it.

00:32:30.900 Yeah, I would, I would, I would agree with that, but, but what they created is this fragile

00:32:35.200 state as a consequence.

00:32:36.520 What they've created, if you follow Peter Turkin's research or whatever,

00:32:39.740 or as a consequence of it, when you have, um, lots of workers who are badly paid, that's

00:32:45.500 one of the things that creates a fragile state because people are pissed off.

00:32:48.820 People are unhappy, uh, and people are open to being inculcated with new things.

00:32:52.380 And then in addition to that, one of the things they've gone on about is education.

00:32:56.000 It's a very middle-class thing, education.

00:32:57.660 Everyone has to have formal qualifications.

00:33:00.500 Conscientiousness predicts middle-classness.

00:33:02.220 Conscientiousness is about rules and formalizing things and whatever.

00:33:05.360 And so you have this ludicrous situation now in the UK where something like half of people

00:33:08.820 that are 18 go to higher education.

00:33:10.700 I mean, it's completely insane and unsustainable.

00:33:13.100 And what that creates is intra-elite competition.

00:33:15.960 I mean, lawyers is a good example of this.

00:33:17.620 All of these people do law degrees.

00:33:19.740 There's not enough places in Britain to be a solicitor or barrister for anything like-

00:33:24.320 And you can't really differentiate them.

00:33:26.060 You know, they're all smart.

00:33:27.580 So they're, you know, they're-

00:33:28.960 But they're not all smart, really, aren't they?

00:33:30.680 It's just they-

00:33:31.200 Well, I know, but they're smart enough to do a Rubik's Cube or whatever. 0.62

00:33:34.460 They think they're smart.

00:33:34.840 They've got a law degree.

00:33:36.280 And so this makes them resentful and unhappy and angry that they can't get what they want.

00:33:41.160 And so this creates intra-elite competition, which creates instability.

00:33:46.040 And so you have this breakup of the elites that hate each other.

00:33:49.160 And then the third thing of the state fragility is this distrust, then, that this raises.

00:33:53.300 Because you have this breakdown of trust within the elite.

00:33:55.460 You have this broad distrust.

00:33:56.520 You have ideas like fake news, judges as the enemy of the people, or whatever.

00:34:00.300 And all this is happening.

00:34:01.320 And according to Turkin, we are at the level of distrust that America is at the level of

00:34:04.840 polarization, based on his quantitative methods of working this out, that it was at the beginning

00:34:08.920 of the civil- before the civil war.

00:34:11.180 Right.

00:34:11.300 And at that time, there was over-promotion of law.

00:34:13.860 There was too many lawyers and whatever.

00:34:14.860 All of these things were- too much immigration, all of these things.

00:34:17.420 So we're at that point.

00:34:19.560 And of course, in the 80s, when Richard and I were children watching Care Bears and whatever,

00:34:26.360 you know, you don't remember things like this, I'm sure.

00:34:28.560 You've probably been brought up on all kinds of politically correct stuff.

00:34:31.040 But you've been with Care Bears.

00:34:33.280 Childhood was comparatively pretty politically incorrect.

00:34:36.960 But yeah.

00:34:38.580 He-Man?

00:34:39.280 He-Man?

00:34:39.640 Oh, I loved He-Man. 0.83

00:34:40.700 We were- my daughter and I were actually watching He-Man recently.

00:34:44.200 I was like, oh, I love this show.

00:34:45.380 Because I was- you have a sister, don't you?

00:34:48.760 But I was the only child.

00:34:49.860 I was the only child, yes.

00:34:50.300 And an only grandchild.

00:34:51.940 And an only great-grandchild.

00:34:53.640 And Christmas 86, I think it was.

00:34:56.240 Or 85.

00:34:58.400 85.

00:35:00.240 I got both Snake Mountain and Castle Grayskull.

00:35:05.580 Oh, wow.

00:35:07.400 They spoiled you right in that year.

00:35:09.480 Yeah, no, I loved-

00:35:10.560 But there was this positivity, anyway.

00:35:12.140 That's the point.

00:35:12.440 There wasn't this breakdown.

00:35:13.320 There was much more of this trust.

00:35:14.940 There wasn't the internet to undermine things.

00:35:16.940 And so they've caused their own demise, I think, or are causing it.

00:35:20.700 Well, let's talk-

00:35:21.920 Okay, this discussion has been so meta that we haven't even really talked about Trump too much.

00:35:27.240 But I think that's fine because I- you know, anyone can go talk about Trump.

00:35:31.160 I think we're offering something different.

00:35:32.980 But I think there's this aspect.

00:35:35.260 I agree with what Turchin is saying about polarization.

00:35:41.300 I actually haven't read Turchin in a little while.

00:35:43.420 I need to revisit him because I've been- when we chat, you're always bringing him up.

00:35:47.380 So he must be on to something.

00:35:48.980 But the polarization has almost become a race in modern America.

00:35:55.220 And I don't know if this is occurring in Britain as well.

00:35:57.940 But if you- because, you know, everyone at least overtly is PC and post-racial and colorblind or whatever.

00:36:04.980 But when you drill down on some of these, say, polling or any kind of empirical evidence for polarization, the political party has almost become a race.

00:36:17.020 It's not so much that you disagree with the liberals, that they're spending too much money on welfare or something.

00:36:23.580 It's that you don't want your children to marry a liberal.

00:36:27.240 And you think the liberals are inherently bad people.

00:36:30.340 They think they're above the law. 1.00

00:36:31.460 Whereas on the reverse side, it's conservatives are utter buffoons and racist and they just want a billionaire Nazi in charge and all this kind of stuff. 0.95

00:36:42.640 And so this- this, you know, a system is going to break down, but it has to break down along current fault lines. 0.94

00:36:50.300 And I think it's very sad in many ways that it's breaking down on these party polarized fault lines.

00:36:59.240 But that's what parties- parties would be manifestations of fault lines.

00:37:03.560 Right.

00:37:04.040 And they- they clearly are.

00:37:05.880 It's going to do that all the way.

00:37:07.320 I mean, if you think about the civil war in England, the fault line was not where you pro-the monarch or pro-parliament.

00:37:12.140 Right.

00:37:12.400 Then as you move on to the fundamental breakdown of British politics and, by extension, American politics, is are you Whig, i.e. more pro-parliament, or Tory, i.e. more pro-king?

00:37:22.520 As I understand it with Irish politics, the division was over the civil war.

00:37:26.140 If there's a civil war, and that division will go on for a very- Fianna Gael or Fianna Foyle.

00:37:32.040 And that division will go on for a very, very, very long time indeed.

00:37:35.880 And that's what-

00:37:37.380 But picking up on your point, though, about them hating each other increasingly, my colleague Noah Karl has done research on this.

00:37:44.020 And, you know, that is true.

00:37:45.260 Fine, there is polarization.

00:37:46.600 But it's much more that the liberals hate the conservatives than the conservatives hate the liberals.

00:37:50.500 So the conservatives might object a bit if his daughter married some hippie soy boy, whatever. 0.97

00:37:58.480 But the liberal would really, really strongly object if his daughter married some conservative, stereotypically.

00:38:05.640 So there's-

00:38:06.500 Because they have a stronger puritanical-

00:38:08.220 The stronger, yeah.

00:38:08.740 It's much more religion for them.

00:38:10.040 It's much more kind of a replacement religion.

00:38:11.880 So it's much more kind of venom.

00:38:13.940 And also the height, Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations, and the finding was that there's these five moral foundations, and there's a degree to which right-wing people have all five of them.

00:38:26.280 And there's a degree to which the left only have basically two of them.

00:38:29.640 So they're not very strong in disgust, and they're not very strong in loyalty, whereas-

00:38:35.920 They're probably not strong in disgust.

00:38:38.400 Equal, no.

00:38:39.120 Well, except disgust of people who aren't liberal.

00:38:41.860 Exactly, yeah. 1.00

00:38:44.220 But just to look at what they're- what the world they're birthing, I mean, the best argument against it is you just look at it, and you're like, this is stupid and gross and insane. 1.00

00:38:56.520 Yeah. 0.99

00:38:57.120 You don't need to rationalize beyond that.

00:38:59.140 The likelihood is, it's not just Turkin's model that would predict this.

00:39:03.820 It's all kinds of other models.

00:39:04.920 I mean, this social epistates is the application model of my colleague on mutational load and what that leads to, and also Putnam and the research by Tatu Vavnen on what happens if you have a multicultural society.

00:39:18.420 They always break down into war.

00:39:20.080 Well, okay, but will this, because this is a countervailing force, is that we've become- we're comfortable.

00:39:32.380 There hasn't been an economic breakdown.

00:39:34.440 Since 2006, I actually believe, in America, there are no new high-paying jobs.

00:39:40.980 Like, the economy, the jobs that are being created under the greatest economy in our history are retail and bartending and things like that.

00:39:49.460 It is not the middle-class version of this.

00:39:52.780 But people are still ultimately content.

00:39:56.140 They can purchase enough on their credit card.

00:39:58.840 They can get- they can pay $9.99 to get Netflix and watch it all day.

00:40:04.360 People- and again, I think the just obesity epidemic and other things around that are indications of this.

00:40:12.920 It's hard for me to imagine there being a civil war.

00:40:17.300 When I see boomer tweets about, like, you know, oh, if Trump's impeached, we're going to all rise up and take over the government.

00:40:25.420 I just- I can only roll my eyes at some level.

00:40:28.100 And then the other aspect of this is the fact that in, say, the American Civil War, you had actual ideologues who were prominent in government who, whatever their failings might be, could articulate what this was about.

00:40:48.240 This was about perpetuating a slave system. 0.90

00:40:52.200 This civil war was actually about race and not about all these, you know, the tariffs or whatever these libertarians want to tell us.

00:40:59.600 No, this was actually about maintaining our order. 0.87

00:41:02.980 Whereas the Republican Party, it's goofy at best.

00:41:08.520 And with Donald Trump, whereas all that- that Donald Trump of 2015 and 2016, you know, retweeting Mussolini quotes and saying they're all going back home and, you know, I want Americans to dream and all this kind of stuff.

00:41:21.320 This has been wiped away for this, like, half-remembered dream of Thatcherism or Reaganism, where, look at the- it's amazing, the Dow Jones went up again.

00:41:32.680 Like, everyone is happy.

00:41:33.940 Everyone is rich here.

00:41:35.420 Or we're going to literally, at this point, he's doing rallies where he's talking about bringing back the old light bulbs and toilets and dishwashers.

00:41:43.100 How these- we're going to throw out those EPA regulations, your toilet is just going to basically create a tsunami in there, and your dishes will be washed in 30 seconds with this nuclear blast that's going to occur, you know, if our- Greta Thunberg be damned. 1.00

00:42:00.560 And it's like- so what I'm saying is that we have this hatred and distrust that's undeniable, but it's being articulated in the stupidest possible manner. 0.96

00:42:12.960 It's being articulated among people posting memes on Facebook or complaining about dishwashers. 0.93

00:42:21.080 And it just doesn't strike me as this is going to actually lead to violence and civil war.

00:42:26.260 I think America's going to go out with a whimper and not a bang.

00:42:29.460 I don't think there's going to be a new civil war.

00:42:31.100 I think there's going to be a meme war or something like that.

00:42:34.320 Yes, I don't think it would be a civil war of the intensity of the last one, no.

00:42:38.980 And I wouldn't be surprised.

00:42:40.820 I wouldn't be at all- more like the fall of Rome.

00:42:43.940 I wouldn't be surprised if people were less able to articulate things because, as my research, my colleagues' research has shown, we're becoming less intelligent.

00:42:51.280 And the less intelligent you are, the less good you are at articulating things.

00:42:53.840 I mean, you have all kinds of civil wars in African tribal societies.

00:42:57.320 They're not intelligent enough to articulate what they're fighting about.

00:43:00.280 What they're fighting about is their genetic interests and the genetic interests of their group.

00:43:05.140 They don't articulate like that at all.

00:43:06.520 They don't articulate in any way.

00:43:08.060 And so you wouldn't expect us to be as good at articulating what's going on as Enoch Powell was, and certainly not, of people of the generation of the Civil War,

00:43:16.200 which was the most intelligent generation the world has ever seen, as far as we can work out.

00:43:19.880 So I'm not surprised that it's inarticulate.

00:43:22.460 Yes, I think you're right.

00:43:23.320 I think the fact that the level of comfort is so high would mean that this would be a slow – we're going to see a slow decline and a slow, low-level sort of civil war, put it like that,

00:43:34.620 rather than a complete breakdown, until things get worse and worse and worse and worse and worse,

00:43:39.960 until you can't rely on things you used to be able to rely on, like, electricity.

00:43:43.940 Even the other day, wasn't there some bungled attempt to send a rocket to the space station?

00:43:47.820 They've balled it up.

00:43:48.680 In India, lots of little things going wrong all the time.

00:43:53.140 And when that happens, as you see in India, stress levels are higher. 0.78

00:43:58.860 People become more religious.

00:44:00.140 They become more instinctive.

00:44:01.300 They become more nationalistic.

00:44:02.580 They become more conflict-prone.

00:44:03.940 And you get what's happening in India, by the way, at the moment now, which is basically a nationalist government that's taking over the largest – or the second largest state in the world.

00:44:12.560 Well, so that would be more how I would see it, yes, than a complete breakdown of civil war, because the level of comfort, as you say, is that people have things – people have something to lose.

00:44:24.280 Whereas in the American Civil War, a lot of people had nothing to lose.

00:44:26.980 And also in the American Civil War –

00:44:28.600 Where they were willing to wager something.

00:44:30.620 Yeah, you were only a generation after the industrialization.

00:44:36.560 And so these people have been subject to selection, so they would have been strongly grouped, selected, and thus for them to lay down their lives in a way which is – in big numbers – in a way that is – what was it, 10% of the population that was killed?

00:44:48.900 Right.

00:44:49.820 Which would be unlikely to occur now.

00:44:53.000 So, yeah, I think it would take a different form.

00:44:54.540 I think it will happen.

00:44:55.200 Well, I think the way I would say this, if there is a civil war, would the last man show up?

00:45:01.300 Is, you know – I mean, the last man in Nietzsche's sense, obviously.

00:45:05.120 It's just I would say no.

00:45:07.840 But –

00:45:08.320 Yeah, I don't really like this narrative that a lot of people have, especially in the right, that, like, there's going to be some big collapse that's just going to have this big paradigm shift overnight.

00:45:17.880 You know, the libertarians, like, oh, the fiat currency is finally going to – we're finally going to prove that fiat currency isn't real and everything's going to collapse.

00:45:26.720 Or, you know, the more nationalist types that there's going to be a race for any day.

00:45:30.820 And it's like it's still – it's still – it's still going to be trapped in this sort of optimistic paradigm where there's progress and then there's a collapse.

00:45:37.660 Whereas, really, like, we're in the decline.

00:45:39.640 We're witnessing the decline.

00:45:40.540 I mean, if you want to know what the decline looks like, I mean, there was a study out the other day that – I know you were – I've been dying to attack you all weekend for defending Thatcher.

00:45:50.620 But nine of the ten poorest regions in North Europe are in the UK.

00:45:56.200 And the richest region of Europe is also in the UK, which is the city of London.

00:46:00.680 So it is this, like, slow de-industrialization.

00:46:03.760 You know, in the U.S., everything's getting focused in Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

00:46:07.180 You know, you have these areas of Manhattan that are, like, you know, real first world, virtually no crime.

00:46:13.940 And then on the other side of the city, you have places that are, like, you know, slums in Africa.

00:46:18.680 So it's this slow transfer.

00:46:21.740 The nation-state is completely losing all power to even control any of this because with things becoming so international now, it's like, you know, you get this thing.

00:46:31.000 Well, if you try to raise taxes, corporations are just going to leave.

00:46:33.840 So capital isn't beholden at all to nation-states now.

00:46:38.520 And nations are in this weird position of having to sort of undercut each other to try and feed off the scraps of these international organizations that are just not beholden to the values of whatever nation-state they're in now.

00:46:50.680 And at the same time, that gives them such power that when they do set up shop in a nation, because they have to plan long-term for their own business success, they end up making decisions that have massive social effects and shape the sort of social superstructure of whatever nation they're in.

00:47:10.680 And that's now become an international rather than national.

00:47:13.740 So it's affecting the sort of international ethic by a few countries that are sort of struggling away outside of that.

00:47:20.920 So, I mean, yeah, the idea that there's going to be some big collapse, I mean, I don't really buy it.

00:47:24.760 The system has proven itself to be so sort of anti-fragile, the way it just absorbs these shocks.

00:47:29.940 I would note, though, that, yeah, in general, my feeling would be that, based on the studies I've read, that it would just be we're in the winter of civilization and it will be a slow death.

00:47:41.420 Was there a sudden collapse of Rome?

00:47:43.400 Well, you can talk about turning, such as the invasion of Rome or such as Rome were drawing from Britain.

00:47:49.660 That was the kind of turning point.

00:47:52.040 And you'll have turning points.

00:47:53.440 You'll have things after the event.

00:47:54.800 I would argue that the crash of Concord should be considered a turning point, for example.

00:47:58.520 That it was a significant thing that had never got.

00:48:01.860 We'd always managed to rescue it before. 0.99

00:48:03.740 Little stupid things going wrong and declining civilizations. 0.99

00:48:07.020 Concord crashes. 0.99

00:48:07.980 And I don't think we're ever going to get it back up in the air again.

00:48:10.800 And you'll have you'll have turning points, which after the event, people can simplify and go, oh, yes, Concord crashed.

00:48:16.720 And that was when the West collapsed.

00:48:18.320 But of course, it's not it's not it's not going to feel like that at the time.

00:48:21.000 But on the other hand, it is true that I forget the name of the paper, but that if it's 20 or 30 percent,

00:48:27.740 you get tipping points and when you get tipping points, things can happen relatively fast.

00:48:33.420 Right.

00:48:33.620 So one of the things that you get is an area and foreigners start moving in.

00:48:36.700 And once foreigners make up about 30 percent of the population of that area, then you get a tipping point. 0.99

00:48:41.520 And the people who aren't foreign will start to leave relatively quickly, which was these perceptual abilities to kind of smell the air and understand correctly what's going to happen. 0.91

00:48:51.940 And this can lead to certain things happening quite fast.

00:48:54.660 So there may be certain events.

00:48:57.240 I think 2008, 2009 was certainly a turning point.

00:49:00.540 And in a way, the last decade since then has been a turning point.

00:49:05.460 I mean, we've never we had a stock market crash and we've had a stock market bonanza recently, but there's never been an actual recovery and there's never actually been optimism.

00:49:18.140 That kind of heady, positive social mood optimism that you would associate with, say, the end of the 1990s or the housing bubble era in the first seven years of the 2000s or so.

00:49:30.340 And so we've had this just kind of fake economy where everyone is unhappy.

00:49:36.240 The Dow Jones keeps going up.

00:49:37.600 I think there's actually been a markedly decline in optimism about technology, which is interesting, which I definitely did not see in, say, the late 90s.

00:49:47.940 I think that was a turning point.

00:49:49.320 I think maybe Trump will be Trump will and maybe even the impeachment of Trump will be viewed as a turning point in the end of America.

00:49:56.160 I could even see a kind of failed Biden administration, a kind of new LBJ type thing as the the liberals put forward a centrist.

00:50:07.260 And that is not really good enough.

00:50:08.940 And we kind of enter a new world of politics afterwards.

00:50:11.440 So I I think we've seen some clear turning points already that that really are perceived as such in the decline of of America.

00:50:20.960 I mean, the Iraq war, obviously, as well.

00:50:23.820 These declines have happened. These declines have happened before many times.

00:50:27.180 I mean, they've happened in the ancient world. It happened by biblical time.

00:50:29.680 They've watched society's rise and fall and they've noticed what happened.

00:50:33.480 And that is that the society becomes wealthy and people stop having children for whatever reason.

00:50:38.940 We're not quite sure why something to do with high intelligence and rationalizing everything or something to do with these studies where you are primed.

00:50:46.400 Although there's a lot of criticism in psychology of this priming thing with ideas of being wealthy and it reduces your desire to have children.

00:50:54.080 And then when it's the rich that stop having children, the rich more intelligent, the society goes into the decline.

00:50:59.300 And that comes together with the questioning of religiousness that is part of is on the decline.

00:51:05.380 The questioning of patriarchy and gender structures, all of these things, sexual licentiousness.

00:51:12.060 All of these things will come together when the society goes into decline.

00:51:16.360 Trust collapses, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:51:17.760 And this has happened again and again and again.

00:51:20.680 And it seems to me there's absolutely no reason why we wouldn't follow.

00:51:24.160 It's just that we've we've if the if civilization is a catapult, we've been catapulted into space further.

00:51:31.220 Yeah.

00:51:31.660 And the fall will not be either it won't be as far or it will be a more dramatic fall.

00:51:35.760 My colleague, Michael Woodley, has argued in his new book that this is this kind of might solve the Fermi paradox.

00:51:41.920 So this idea that we should be able to discover aliens because there's a there should be other civilizations in the universe.

00:51:49.800 But the problem is they're so rare.

00:51:51.700 And when they happen, they're fleeting.

00:51:53.460 They always will go through the same thing, reach a certain point and collapse down.

00:51:57.640 Right.

00:51:57.780 And so we don't have any aliens or time travelers because the society is civilizations to be never got far enough at the same time that another civilization has got far enough to be able to contact each other.

00:52:10.000 This is intergalactic pessimism.

00:52:11.860 The galactic problem.

00:52:12.840 I would I would also add another aspect to this is, you know, Dugan has has talked about these great ideologies of the 20th century, liberalism being the first one and then communism and then fascism as a kind of reaction against communism.

00:52:32.000 And in its own certain way, a degree of defending liberalism and I would, you know, put capitalism along with liberalism.

00:52:40.000 But these were all you could say part of a fossil fuel age and they were an age in which every ideology offered a higher standing of living to those who adhered to it.

00:52:53.540 There was no real traditionalist ideology that said, you know, vote for me and you'll be sent back into peasant drudgery. 0.94

00:53:03.640 We're going to take away your television and your upward mobility and but give you the, you know, hard certitude of Catholicism or whatever.

00:53:14.840 It all these ideologies that have actually worked have offered a higher standard of living and all of that has been possible.

00:53:23.600 Not not simply because of the Industrial Revolution, although that certainly played a part, but because of the age of fossil fuels and that is a limited age.

00:53:33.940 And, you know, it might, you know, peak oil might be overdone, but that doesn't mean that it is going to last forever. 0.94

00:53:41.140 And I think someone like Greta Thunberg is kind of ridiculous as she is and worthy of criticism as she is. 1.00

00:53:50.360 She she kind of is a kind of childlike Cassandra announcing a hard truth. 0.99

00:53:57.400 And that is real.

00:53:59.300 I don't know how the world I don't know if humans, the current crop of humans are mentally prepared for declining living standards or that dream of big money and having it all is just taken away from them.

00:54:18.360 And all of that looks impossible.

00:54:20.560 I don't I think it would drive us mad if anything that will inspire violence.

00:54:25.320 When I return, if we return to this idea of the suddenness of a collapse.

00:54:29.740 So one thing that would happen is that it would be it would come in the decline of civilization.

00:54:34.900 We were in 1870 at whatever it was, 16 inventions per million of population per year.

00:54:40.660 Now we're down to about four.

00:54:43.040 And by the end of 100 years, hence, we'll be back down to basically nil.

00:54:46.900 So we'll be back down to one.

00:54:48.260 So we'll be back down to over 1100.

00:54:50.020 We'll be in the dark ages on that on that measure.

00:54:52.900 And what you would expect is that at some point, the health service will start to be undermined.

00:54:59.080 We won't be able to sustain a health service.

00:55:01.220 And when that happens, there will be a big collapse because we are have a dysgenic population. 1.00

00:55:06.280 So many people are congenitally ill and they are they wouldn't 40 percent child mortality in 1800, one percent child mortality today.

00:55:17.080 What does that mean?

00:55:17.880 It means that 90 percent of the population, six million was the population of Britain in 1800.

00:55:22.920 Now it's over 60 million.

00:55:24.500 Ninety percent of the population would die.

00:55:26.980 Ninety percent.

00:55:27.980 That would once medicine starts to fall apart.

00:55:31.380 And and that would then you'll that would be something that would happen conceivably quite fast, relatively quickly over a matter of a decade.

00:55:38.180 Perhaps that there would be this collapse once once civilization has gone backwards so much that it couldn't sustain a complex medical system.

00:55:47.720 You know what I find?

00:55:49.280 Oh, go ahead.

00:55:50.640 Yeah, I was just going to say, you know what I find interesting, though, is even like on the left now and liberals, they all have this idea like everything's going to, you know, in 2050, sea levels rise.

00:56:00.520 Everything will be underwater.

00:56:01.540 You know, we're all going to pay for our sins, the environment, whatever.

00:56:03.840 But then on the on the right, there's also this idea that even if like they'll reject climate change or whatever, they think there's going to be a huge collapse in the next 20 years.

00:56:12.600 I just maybe Ed can speak in this.

00:56:14.360 It seems like anyone I talk to, like, doesn't think civilization is going to make it past 2050.

00:56:19.660 And I wonder, like, has there ever been a time in history where like the popular religion was this like apocalyptic collapse?

00:56:25.780 Yes, yes, yes.

00:56:27.960 There have been many times in history where where religion has been highly apocalyptic.

00:56:31.300 I mean, religion was highly apocalyptic.

00:56:32.780 What does that reflect?

00:56:34.500 Like, is that is this like people's guilt at the nature of the system or is it just like to feel the decline in standards?

00:56:41.420 And I think people people people can look around and they can understand they can on a sort of wisdom of crowds and they can kind of understand what's happening.

00:56:49.420 And what religion tends to do is it tends to take that which is evolutionarily adaptive and kind of make it into the will of God.

00:56:54.920 So you're more likely to do it.

00:56:56.140 And so under Darwinian conditions, if it would be the kind of religion that was adopted, that became popular in the 1600s was Puritanism and anti-witch hysteria as well.

00:57:08.760 Those two things. And those two things would presumably have been adaptive and they would have been adaptive in a context in which there were too many.

00:57:15.520 A, there were too many people.

00:57:16.940 So the witch hysteria is a B, there's strong group selection and lots of wars. 0.54

00:57:22.060 C, living standards are collapsing because the population is too high.

00:57:25.340 Population is too high within countries and within Europe.

00:57:28.020 So you get wars between European countries.

00:57:31.260 Religious groups get selected for over non-religious groups because ethnocentric groups get selected for and that current being religious.

00:57:36.300 And so therefore you get this apocalyptic kind of religion where the other people are absolutely evil and they have to be destroyed.

00:57:43.160 Protestant v. Catholic or whatever it is put as in religious terms.

00:57:47.460 But you have similar things, 100 years war, violent apocalyptic period of time.

00:57:52.120 And the witches were basically poor people that were sponges off the society, sort of nasty old people that nobody liked, undermined group coherence. 1.00

00:58:01.380 And it's just like weirdos with peculiar anti-patriarchal and that's anti-religious ideas. 0.57

00:58:07.240 So I would say there was a period like that then and there was civil war and there have been other periods like it as well.

00:58:12.980 Around that time of the plague, of course, then apocalyptic, whatever going on there.

00:58:18.180 And you had similar things at the fall of Rome.

00:58:20.480 You had the embracing of these mystery cults and all this sort of thing.

00:58:23.860 And Christianity, which could be argued as the ultimate apocalyptic cult. 0.84

00:58:28.120 So when things are in decline, this tends to happen.

00:58:32.860 And even with Judaism, when you have the decline of Judah, you have this sort of thing. 0.86

00:58:37.880 So it's just a mark of a civilization in decline.

00:58:41.680 I actually think that there will be strong religious revivals and that the turn of the century new atheism of Dawkins and company,

00:58:52.600 I think was actually kind of a head fake before a real strong revival of Christianity.

00:59:01.340 I think that Christianity arose in the age of anxiety.

00:59:04.780 Now, what Christianity became and how it evolved is something we can discuss.

00:59:08.900 But yes, that period in the decline of Rome is known as the age of anxiety.

00:59:16.360 And it unsurprisingly was ultimately dominated by an apocalyptic cult, which Christianity is fundamentally and was, I think, primarily at that point. 0.53

00:59:29.580 And the end times were upon us.

00:59:33.280 They were coming.

00:59:34.040 We were going to see it.

00:59:35.800 And I think the kind of, again, like early 2000s housing bubble era was the time of new atheism and moving away.

00:59:44.780 I think these cultural factors like Jesus is King by Kanye West, I don't think this is just a PR move on his part.

00:59:57.760 And I don't think this is just one album.

00:59:59.700 I actually do think this is a major trend.

01:00:02.940 And Christianity is kind of becoming what it ultimately is.

01:00:07.600 You know, Christianity appealed to the dregs of the Roman Empire. 1.00

01:00:11.660 It appealed to Jews, it appealed to women, it appealed to all sorts of rabble before it became a state religion. 0.99

01:00:21.080 Can I take you up on something that's quite important?

01:00:23.620 Sure.

01:00:24.640 Chris, that's a bit of a myth, really, that it appealed to the dregs of the Roman Empire.

01:00:29.100 To some extent, it's true, but it also appealed to the middle class.

01:00:34.080 Right.

01:00:34.340 It was the same middle class virtue signaling that you see in the apocalyptic cult of Extinction Rebellion or interrelated trends was also Christianity.

01:00:48.200 It was, as I said, the dregs of the Roman Empire.

01:00:50.600 No, but you said this sort of work.

01:00:51.900 You were implying it was the poor.

01:00:53.680 No.

01:00:54.180 It wasn't.

01:00:55.080 It wasn't.

01:00:55.620 I mean, it was.

01:00:56.240 I mean, they have they have names like they have names like I like the poor, as I said, the dregs of the Roman Empire became Christians. 1.00

01:01:07.600 The middle class.

01:01:10.680 The heirs of their time. 0.79

01:01:12.860 They had the names like Simon, who is called Peter.

01:01:16.340 OK, so this this means that this is a mixed marriage of Greek.

01:01:19.420 And he and so and so he was a fisherman.

01:01:23.020 He was he was a manager of a fishing company.

01:01:25.160 I mean, these are middle class people in the same way you get it now.

01:01:29.180 Middle class people who aren't that rich.

01:01:31.240 Maybe they're not upper class and they want to play for status.

01:01:33.400 How through one of these kinds of.

01:01:35.660 But look at Kanye.

01:01:37.060 And I should probably do some do some writing on this or at least some thinking on it.

01:01:42.540 But I listened to his album, Jesus is King, and I hated it, obviously, on multiple, not just on a musical level.

01:01:51.720 But if you look at what he represents, he's obviously he is upper class in contemporary America.

01:01:59.200 I mean, for God's sake, these are, you know, Kim Kardashian can make 10 million dollars by faking her wedding or whatever she did. 0.97

01:02:06.780 She can make millions off a sex tape. 1.00

01:02:08.520 I mean, she's the ultimate expression of postmodern capitalism.

01:02:12.540 But they basically present themselves as broken and needing this this big other that's going to kind of subsume them and save them.

01:02:25.360 They kind of accept the fact that they're in a broken world. 1.00

01:02:28.740 And I think oftentimes the figure of Christianity is the fool. 0.97

01:02:33.820 Christianity is heroes are not the heroes of other religions like the good ones in which you it's your God is an expression of your power and your ability to dominate. 0.98

01:02:47.600 Your God is an expression of your healing of your inner brokenness and this mixture of rap, of this kind of gospel stuff, of this, you know, I'm I'm terrible, but I'm going to find some truth out there.

01:03:03.580 I think actually is genuinely appealing to postmodern Americans.

01:03:08.540 And so I guess my longer term prediction is is in this age of anxiety, age of delitimization of existing institutions, of the existing order, this age of of a chaotic breakdown.

01:03:20.760 I think if anything can bring these people together, it is something like Christianity, but it's going to be a primitive Christianity. 0.99

01:03:29.180 It's not going to be the Christianity that, you know, trad Catholics love where they, you know, they'll post, you know, images of kings and princes and castles on Facebook or whatever and talk about how this is the Christianity.

01:03:41.380 It's going to be this real Christianity, the Christianity, the Christianity of its very origins.

01:03:47.100 The only Christianity, the only Christianity form that hasn't cucked really is orthodoxy.

01:03:52.180 Right. I totally agree. I certainly have sympathies for that, but I don't think that's going to be the dominant form of Christianity.

01:04:01.140 Also, there is this kind of fetishization of the East in Western culture.

01:04:06.060 I mean, even if you go back to Rome, the mystery cults and whatever, it's always from the East and the wise men came from the East.

01:04:13.920 Right.

01:04:14.200 And there's always been this.

01:04:16.800 So, so, so, um, I don't know, if it were to be a form of Christianity of Christian revival, then one suspects it would be something like, like that.

01:04:26.160 I don't think it would be orthodoxy and I say that I would love that to be the outcome, but I don't think that's going to be out there.

01:04:32.660 It's going to be Kanye Christianity. 0.96

01:04:33.920 So what do you think it would be if there was a Christian revival?

01:04:38.860 Orthodox Christianity is the third Rome. It's connected. It has national churches. It's not going to take, um, I think it's going to be global and individualistic, which is the ultimate, you know, this is the innovation of Judeo-Christianity.

01:04:53.120 Something like the New Age.

01:04:54.380 A bit like the New Age, but I think Kanye nailed it, actually. It's going to be...

01:04:59.320 Like, Spengler, Spengler talked about this, like, the increase in religiosity and, you know, the winter of civilization.

01:05:06.740 Right. 0.99

01:05:06.920 But, uh, like, that's interesting what you're saying about Kanye as well, because, yeah, like, when I think about it, like, a lot of, I don't recognize, like, anything in the top 50 charts now, but it's, like, it's full of these, like, Latino women that sing auto-tuned songs and shake their ass. 1.00

01:05:23.800 But there is this growth of, like, there's this weird trend of, like, like, are you, do you know who Billie Eilish is? 0.59

01:05:30.160 I know, I know about her. I don't really, I've never listened to one of her albums.

01:05:33.400 Yeah, there's this weird trend of, like, 17, 18-year-old singers that they're, like, they portray themselves as really authentic, and she gives interviews where she's like, oh, I'm so depressed.

01:05:43.740 I'm like, what's your favorite color? Oh, it's black. And, like, they're all so broken. 0.99

01:05:47.740 And it's, like, you're 18, and you've been signed to a record deal since you were 16, and, like, you're from an, yeah, and you're from an upper-middle-class background.

01:05:56.240 It's, like, you grew up in a white suburb, like, well, what has you broken?

01:06:00.460 It's weird. It seems to really appeal, it seems to be appealing to the Zoomer generation. 1.00

01:06:05.820 It is a weird thing.

01:06:06.480 But another thing I thought was surprising was that this return to religiosity, that a lot of people are returning to sort of trad Catholicism,

01:06:15.260 because it seems like trad Catholicism sort of asks too much of people.

01:06:19.640 I thought it would be much more kind of a New Age spirituality, where it's all about realizing yourself,

01:06:25.820 and it's this very, like, bastardized, like, hyper-real version of Eastern traditions,

01:06:30.500 where it's, like, positive thinking and feel-good or whatever.

01:06:33.380 So I am surprised if it's taken form of Catholicism.

01:06:38.080 I would be surprised.

01:06:39.100 I'm not surprised that this upper-middle-class girl is depressed,

01:06:42.740 because one of the things that seems to cause depression is if you are in a situation to which you are not adapted.

01:06:49.180 That's when people get very upset.

01:06:51.180 If they say this, the Bushmen, for example, of the Kalahari, have in large numbers now been moved onto reservations

01:06:56.320 so the Namibian government can do what they want with the forests.

01:06:59.760 They get terribly, terribly depressed because they're simply not used to things like having to live in a permanent house or whatever,

01:07:05.180 or interact with people that are close to them or have small amounts of space.

01:07:08.360 They can't deal with that, and they get terribly depressed.

01:07:10.440 And it seems to be quite probable that, oh, well, there's actually studies on this,

01:07:15.040 that if you compel a boy to do girly-type things that he considers girly, he becomes anxious.

01:07:22.680 And if you get a boy to play violent computer games, he does not become anxious at all.

01:07:28.180 He's fine.

01:07:28.900 Get a girl to do that, she becomes anxious. 0.83

01:07:31.520 Get a girl to do that as a two-player thing, so she's competing with another girl, 1.00

01:07:35.320 she becomes even more anxious.

01:07:38.140 And this would be consistent with evolutionary differences in being male and female,

01:07:44.440 that men are evolved to violence and competition and sort of high testosterone sort of things,

01:07:50.180 and women are evolved to the opposite. 1.00

01:07:52.260 And if you put women, and also because the effect is higher on boys,

01:07:59.260 there's a degree to which women are evolved to be kind of to deal with manly things in a way that isn't true in the reverse. 1.00

01:08:04.920 And that would be consistent with women being dumped by people, 0.99

01:08:08.220 partners and polygamous marriages in which the man goes for the younger wife, 0.79

01:08:14.100 and the other women have to go off and kind of allo parent. 1.00

01:08:16.540 But anyway, there's this issue where people are put in a situation to which they're not evolved,

01:08:20.940 and you could argue that upper-middle class people are very much put in a situation to which,

01:08:25.900 particularly girls, to which they're not evolved because there is this pressure, 0.97

01:08:29.140 you've got to get a career, you've got to do all these kind of things.

01:08:31.680 It's very unpatriarchal, really, whereas if you're working class, 0.66

01:08:35.540 it's much more clear gender roles, perhaps traditionalist in a lot of ways.

01:08:39.600 OK, there's other things that are stressful, like illegitimacy and not having a father,

01:08:43.060 and other things that are there, but in terms of being close to how we're kind of evolved to live

01:08:47.940 and instinctive and whatever, they're fine.

01:08:50.300 So I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's high levels of depression.

01:08:52.720 And also, as well, in the education class, it's an optimum level of mental instability, of anxiety.

01:09:03.360 So the higher up the social scale you go, the more anxious people are,

01:09:08.300 because it acts as a kind of motivator in education and in work and whatever.

01:09:12.620 And so it contradicts being middle class.

01:09:14.540 So I'm not actually that shocked by that.

01:09:18.640 It's also possible she was just abused by a music producer, you know.

01:09:24.380 Maybe both.

01:09:26.300 Should we put a bookmark in this discussion?

01:09:28.080 This was extremely meta.

01:09:29.740 This is why I'm always saying we need a moderator,

01:09:31.840 because whenever I'm the moderator, we just go off into la-la land, perhaps, as Ed would describe it.

01:09:39.220 We're not firmly grounded.

01:09:40.380 Put it to be grounded in the imperative nature.

01:09:44.080 It's very important.

01:09:46.840 No, I think this is a very good discussion.

01:09:49.100 And, yeah, we didn't mention Brexit or Trump,

01:09:55.040 but I think we really got at what's happening below the surface,

01:10:00.060 which is much more important than what's happening above.

01:10:04.140 Well, I mean, we could discuss something else at the end of the year.

01:10:08.300 Oh, okay.

01:10:08.440 Let's discuss something fun.

01:10:10.200 We'll do a kind of quick fun thing.

01:10:12.360 What about abortion?

01:10:14.040 Abortion on.

01:10:16.320 Well, I guess abortion.

01:10:20.240 We're celebrating the birth of Christ.

01:10:22.100 We're talking about...

01:10:23.100 We could give predictions for the next decade.

01:10:29.080 Oh, predictions for next decade.

01:10:31.300 Okay.

01:10:32.360 This is a very interesting one.

01:10:34.420 I'll reflect on what will the 2010s be remembered as,

01:10:38.880 the decade of the dildo.

01:10:44.520 Wait, what do you think the 2010s will be remembered as?

01:10:49.220 Real quick, I have to interject.

01:10:51.240 This isn't actually the end of the decade.

01:10:53.160 This, we're back at the year 2000 all over again,

01:10:56.900 where, you know, the new decade begins in 2001.

01:11:00.680 It's one, right?

01:11:01.680 This is zero.

01:11:03.140 So this is the last year of the 2010s that we're entering.

01:11:06.860 It's not the first year.

01:11:09.760 This just drives me crazy.

01:11:13.080 But what do you...

01:11:14.180 That being said, what do you think the...

01:11:17.040 What do you think the 2010s will be remembered as?

01:11:20.800 And what do you think the 2020s will have in store?

01:11:26.860 Well, one of you are going to go first while I think about it, or...?

01:11:30.140 Okay, so I think that if Turkey is right, 0.96

01:11:32.880 then the 2020s will be a decade of unparalleled conflict and violence.

01:11:40.660 So I'm looking forward to it.

01:11:42.280 And I've got my Netflix, you know, subscription,

01:11:46.240 and I'm looking forward to watching all kinds of documentaries.

01:11:48.040 You don't need a Netflix subscription.

01:11:50.060 You can just open up the window and...

01:11:53.280 Oh, that's true.

01:11:54.200 ...observe the violence and chaos outside.

01:11:56.440 That's the new Netflix.

01:11:57.680 It's zero dollars per month.

01:11:59.420 Not up my way.

01:12:01.020 No, I'd have to go to Englewood with you again,

01:12:03.320 or whatever that place was called, Englefield,

01:12:05.440 to see some serious...

01:12:07.760 Go and have a church's chicken.

01:12:08.900 But you wouldn't let me do, because you were both scared.

01:12:14.000 But I didn't know how to have it.

01:12:16.140 I had that lovely pie, though, the bean pie.

01:12:18.340 That was lovely.

01:12:19.280 Well, we were adopted into Chicago black African Muslims.

01:12:25.420 So when the Civil War breaks down, they'll protect us. 0.69

01:12:29.880 They will.

01:12:30.240 Nation of Islam will protect us.

01:12:31.620 I think we got on with them very well.

01:12:33.240 And I impressed them all by scoring that basketball thing at the pub.

01:12:37.440 Oh, yeah.

01:12:38.260 So, you know, I got a lot of respect that day.

01:12:40.760 But I think it's going to be a lot of...

01:12:42.720 I think it's just going to get more and more...

01:12:44.340 I mean, we're seeing it already,

01:12:46.280 the over-extinguish and rebellion.

01:12:48.180 People have had enough with Brexit,

01:12:49.940 with the election in the UK.

01:12:51.340 There is this polarisation,

01:12:52.440 and I think it's just going to get worse.

01:12:54.480 And you're seeing this movement in two directions.

01:12:56.980 On the one hand, yes, the movement in the media and whatever,

01:12:59.240 and the left and just insanity.

01:13:01.460 You know, this woman that sacked recently, 0.99

01:13:03.840 or just for tweets, biological, essentially,

01:13:06.020 you can't change from being a male to a female,

01:13:07.740 or a female to a male. 0.93

01:13:08.740 This woman, with some German name,

01:13:10.580 Forstatter, or Maya Forstatter, or something.

01:13:12.860 And J.K. Rowling then tweeted about it positively,

01:13:15.080 you know, on her side, which was interesting.

01:13:17.000 So people, I mean, it's been looked at,

01:13:19.600 the possibility that there might be a peak woke,

01:13:21.820 that there might be, even on the left,

01:13:23.820 even the most delusional left-wing people

01:13:26.120 will get to a point where they realise

01:13:27.880 it's in their interests to stop advocating this nonsense,

01:13:30.060 and to persuade themselves to advocate other things.

01:13:33.080 Now, that happened, I mean, that's happened before.

01:13:34.980 Tony Blair, for God's sake,

01:13:36.260 stood in 1983 on an election to leave the European Union,

01:13:39.480 to get rid of the nuclear deterrent,

01:13:42.240 massive trade unionism, blah, blah, blah, blah,

01:13:44.440 and then managed to persuade themselves

01:13:46.000 over the first 10 years

01:13:47.620 to believe in none of those things.

01:13:49.720 So it's perfectly possible for left-wing people,

01:13:52.240 I mean, they've abandoned their economic insanity,

01:13:55.020 all of them, or most of them anyway,

01:13:56.520 people like Blair,

01:13:57.220 and so it's perfectly possible

01:13:58.700 that they could do so in terms of culture as well,

01:14:00.480 if they regard it as in their interests,

01:14:02.340 and they would,

01:14:03.220 if right-wing values were to take over,

01:14:05.520 they would, of course, abandon these things.

01:14:07.280 So I think you're going to see that,

01:14:08.560 this greater and greater split,

01:14:10.080 identitarians and conservatives

01:14:11.820 and whatever on the one hand,

01:14:13.160 there'll be internal splits within them, of course,

01:14:15.020 and nutcase leftists on the other,

01:14:17.960 more and more extreme,

01:14:18.880 and some kind of interesting reckoning

01:14:22.740 would be supposed to occur,

01:14:25.420 that's what I think.

01:14:26.000 Yeah, I would say this,

01:14:27.780 in my own lifetime,

01:14:29.340 there have been a few events

01:14:31.480 that were actually recognized as such

01:14:35.080 when they occurred,

01:14:36.580 as turning points, you could say,

01:14:38.780 as events that were far bigger than themselves,

01:14:41.720 and then all of the news

01:14:43.980 was effectively in their wake,

01:14:47.880 that even if we talked about this news item

01:14:50.660 or this happening,

01:14:51.720 it was ultimately about something else,

01:14:53.680 and I've lived through a few of those.

01:14:57.780 I would say that 2001,

01:15:00.420 the Twin Tower attacks,

01:15:02.480 which is now kind of faded into memory remarkably,

01:15:05.640 was one of those,

01:15:07.240 and the Iraq War certainly came in its wake,

01:15:10.640 and the Iraq War was something

01:15:12.020 where news would have come on the television

01:15:18.180 or on your laptop or whatever,

01:15:19.900 but it was ultimately about that at some level.

01:15:23.460 That,

01:15:23.980 this kind of age of the 2001 Iraq War,

01:15:27.400 Dubya era,

01:15:28.640 was then passed over into the financial crash era,

01:15:33.580 and this is something,

01:15:34.520 I think maybe even younger people

01:15:35.760 maybe didn't quite experience,

01:15:36.940 or maybe you did,

01:15:37.600 but all news from about 2008 through 2012

01:15:44.160 was more or less about finance and uncertainty

01:15:47.540 and the end of the middle class dream,

01:15:50.040 et cetera.

01:15:51.340 By about,

01:15:52.380 by the time that petered out,

01:15:54.940 we had the Trump era,

01:15:56.240 and as we know,

01:15:56.840 I mean,

01:15:57.020 all news is about Trump.

01:15:59.540 I do think that that is coming to an end.

01:16:02.700 It just has to come to an end.

01:16:04.040 So there's all these five- to seven-year-long periods

01:16:06.500 where there's one event

01:16:08.260 that generates the news cycle

01:16:11.960 and in a way generates consciousness.

01:16:15.220 Also within our lifetimes,

01:16:16.340 the collapse of the Berlin Wall

01:16:17.520 and the fall of communism,

01:16:18.620 that was another one.

01:16:19.960 No question.

01:16:20.820 Yeah.

01:16:21.040 It was under the time.

01:16:23.380 And then that heady idealism

01:16:24.880 that came at the end of that.

01:16:26.880 You know,

01:16:27.140 in the 1990s,

01:16:28.160 when I was coming of age,

01:16:29.440 I had just entered college,

01:16:30.640 I was graduating from high school.

01:16:32.440 I mean,

01:16:32.880 there were the kind of talk

01:16:34.740 about every,

01:16:36.000 literally everyone on earth

01:16:37.520 being a millionaire

01:16:38.340 and just all problems will be solved.

01:16:41.380 No more war.

01:16:42.300 Why would you go to war?

01:16:43.460 It's,

01:16:43.700 it doesn't make sense.

01:16:45.480 And from out of that heady idealism,

01:16:48.960 very similar to the period

01:16:50.160 right before the first world war,

01:16:52.180 there was this Muslim,

01:16:54.200 in many ways,

01:16:55.460 traditionalist reaction,

01:16:56.920 this big no against the end of history.

01:17:00.360 And so I think

01:17:02.240 we're due for a new turning point.

01:17:04.060 And I think this is something

01:17:04.960 that's just over the horizon

01:17:06.360 that we can't quite grasp

01:17:09.160 because we're not there.

01:17:10.980 But I do think

01:17:12.540 that there's going to be

01:17:13.340 a new event

01:17:14.240 that is much bigger than itself,

01:17:15.820 that it's going to change

01:17:17.040 how we think about things

01:17:18.600 going forward.

01:17:19.620 But I certainly am not,

01:17:22.460 at Nostradamus,

01:17:23.460 I can't tell you exactly

01:17:25.380 what it's going to be.

01:17:26.260 But a lot of the trends

01:17:27.880 that I've talked about previously,

01:17:29.580 the revival of Christianity

01:17:31.460 and religion,

01:17:33.060 the general fragmentation,

01:17:35.880 the kind of quiet civil war,

01:17:38.840 the civil war between variations

01:17:41.020 of Nietzsche's last man,

01:17:43.200 I think all of that

01:17:44.920 is going to play into it.

01:17:46.160 But there is going to be an event

01:17:47.560 in the coming two years

01:17:48.620 that is going to change

01:17:50.480 how we look at the world

01:17:51.800 and how,

01:17:52.180 it's going to change

01:17:53.980 what is news

01:17:55.120 and what we're talking

01:17:56.880 about going forward.

01:17:57.680 And that's going to happen

01:17:58.380 pretty soon.

01:18:00.960 Yeah, I mean,

01:18:02.040 yeah, I guess that's

01:18:05.060 one thing to predict

01:18:07.900 a decade

01:18:08.960 is it can always be

01:18:09.620 one of these black swan events

01:18:10.700 that Nassim Taleb calls them

01:18:11.880 that you can't foresee

01:18:12.840 that the probability

01:18:13.460 is so small,

01:18:14.160 but in hindsight,

01:18:14.820 you try and sort of

01:18:15.420 explain away

01:18:16.080 and you can make sense

01:18:17.480 of it with different factors.

01:18:18.740 Yeah, yeah,

01:18:19.100 like World War I

01:18:19.920 is an example he uses.

01:18:21.500 But if, you know,

01:18:22.760 if the current sort of

01:18:23.500 trends continue,

01:18:24.260 like I suppose

01:18:25.020 the 2010s were like

01:18:26.580 they were kind of

01:18:27.560 the decade of the hyper real,

01:18:29.280 you know,

01:18:29.520 with everyone having

01:18:30.960 a smartphone,

01:18:31.800 it was a real manifestation

01:18:32.740 of some of these ideas.

01:18:34.880 But now,

01:18:35.400 like going into this decade,

01:18:36.880 like in a sense,

01:18:38.160 like that social space

01:18:40.560 online has taken on

01:18:42.820 a reality

01:18:44.520 sort of as real

01:18:45.640 as the real world.

01:18:46.440 I can see in the 2020s

01:18:47.740 this fragmentation

01:18:48.620 becoming really stark

01:18:51.060 where like,

01:18:52.020 you know,

01:18:52.220 it's kind of like

01:18:52.680 people will become

01:18:53.480 more individualistic

01:18:55.040 sort of politically,

01:18:56.120 but you'll see,

01:18:57.540 you know,

01:18:57.680 much like the Gen Xers 1.00

01:18:59.060 would sort of pay lip service

01:19:00.300 to being radical individualists

01:19:02.500 or whatever,

01:19:02.960 but they'd all wear

01:19:03.500 the same band t-shirts

01:19:04.560 and they'd all support

01:19:05.340 the same,

01:19:06.540 you know,

01:19:06.840 like Xers in Ireland 1.00

01:19:08.260 and England,

01:19:08.760 you know,

01:19:08.940 they all support

01:19:09.460 the same soccer teams

01:19:10.400 or whatever.

01:19:11.320 But, you know,

01:19:11.920 so there's this kind of,

01:19:12.960 there's this kind of

01:19:14.140 hyper-tribalism

01:19:15.120 around things

01:19:17.180 that they choose.

01:19:18.260 I think you'll see

01:19:19.160 that in the 2020s

01:19:20.300 where you have

01:19:20.740 these sort of

01:19:21.380 social spaces,

01:19:22.380 whether it's,

01:19:22.980 you know,

01:19:23.080 you're a gamer

01:19:23.780 or, you know,

01:19:25.760 whatever else people

01:19:26.500 are into these,

01:19:27.140 buying bath water

01:19:28.000 or whatever,

01:19:28.480 but there'll be

01:19:29.940 these sort of,

01:19:30.580 people will have

01:19:31.180 this idea of sort of

01:19:32.180 choosing their tribe

01:19:33.440 and I think the world

01:19:34.880 will resemble more and more,

01:19:35.940 I don't know if you're familiar

01:19:36.600 with the video game

01:19:37.280 Fallout,

01:19:37.900 where it's like this

01:19:38.540 post-apocalyptic world

01:19:40.420 and, you know,

01:19:40.860 there's one village

01:19:41.540 where everyone is

01:19:42.100 worshipping

01:19:42.620 an undetonated nuclear bomb

01:19:44.780 and there's another village

01:19:45.640 where everyone's

01:19:46.300 an Elvis impersonator.

01:19:47.340 I think these

01:19:48.300 different spaces

01:19:49.500 will like,

01:19:50.480 they'll become

01:19:50.900 so sort of

01:19:51.820 so self-referential

01:19:53.860 that they almost

01:19:55.120 won't be able

01:19:55.700 to coherently

01:19:57.140 communicate with each other.

01:19:58.400 They'll have

01:19:58.580 their own vocabularies

01:19:59.560 and like the idea

01:20:00.320 of a collective

01:20:01.120 social space

01:20:02.060 will sort of disappear

01:20:03.020 and just be

01:20:03.740 given up to

01:20:05.140 some dominant

01:20:06.620 big other

01:20:07.140 that no one

01:20:07.560 really engages

01:20:08.200 with anymore.

01:20:08.840 This is the kind

01:20:09.680 of atomisation

01:20:10.540 that Zygmunt Bauman

01:20:11.820 was talking about

01:20:12.920 happening,

01:20:14.120 you know,

01:20:14.340 25 years ago.

01:20:16.340 I think that

01:20:17.820 that process

01:20:18.480 is,

01:20:18.940 that is happening.

01:20:20.520 What you would predict

01:20:21.420 is,

01:20:21.780 and we,

01:20:23.300 this stream

01:20:24.040 is evidence of that,

01:20:25.340 what you would,

01:20:25.940 what you would predict

01:20:26.700 is there is polarisation,

01:20:28.240 there is a degree

01:20:28.960 to which that,

01:20:29.800 those different groupings

01:20:31.040 would cohere

01:20:32.320 into,

01:20:33.660 into,

01:20:34.000 into two

01:20:34.600 fighting blocks

01:20:36.180 essentially.

01:20:37.320 Yeah,

01:20:37.480 I certainly think

01:20:40.400 politics will just

01:20:41.300 become something

01:20:41.980 for radicals as well

01:20:43.040 because it'll be

01:20:43.640 another one of these

01:20:44.260 spaces where

01:20:45.060 if it's,

01:20:45.920 if it's your passion

01:20:46.760 or your real interest,

01:20:47.900 you know,

01:20:48.100 it'll be,

01:20:48.900 you know,

01:20:49.640 the spur types,

01:20:50.820 they'll be into it.

01:20:51.980 It will become

01:20:52.360 something for radicals

01:20:53.180 in the sense that

01:20:53.760 if society is polarised,

01:20:55.360 then politics becomes

01:20:56.240 more violent

01:20:56.860 and more dangerous

01:20:57.700 and you've got to,

01:20:59.200 you've got to be

01:20:59.840 radical to want

01:21:01.060 to be involved.

01:21:02.260 Yeah,

01:21:02.460 but also,

01:21:03.000 also like,

01:21:03.640 I think like 99%

01:21:04.640 of people will just like,

01:21:05.740 because people that are

01:21:06.480 raised on the internet

01:21:07.300 now,

01:21:07.640 they can,

01:21:08.020 you know,

01:21:08.200 they don't have to

01:21:08.740 pay attention

01:21:09.360 to real world events

01:21:10.660 if they don't,

01:21:11.120 you know,

01:21:11.320 you can choose

01:21:12.040 what your interests are.

01:21:13.340 You know,

01:21:13.640 the time when there was

01:21:14.680 two TV channels

01:21:16.100 in my own country,

01:21:17.060 for example,

01:21:17.600 you know,

01:21:18.040 everyone watched

01:21:18.840 the current affairs show,

01:21:20.220 everyone watched the news,

01:21:21.060 whatever,

01:21:21.320 so there was always

01:21:21.820 some level of engagement,

01:21:23.520 but now,

01:21:24.020 you know,

01:21:24.200 you have people

01:21:24.680 in their 20s

01:21:25.740 and,

01:21:26.160 you know,

01:21:26.300 they have no idea,

01:21:28.300 they know absolutely

01:21:29.020 nothing about politics

01:21:30.020 or history or anything,

01:21:30.940 so I think politics

01:21:31.940 will just become something

01:21:33.000 for someone that's

01:21:33.900 very interested

01:21:34.880 in politics

01:21:35.700 and naturally,

01:21:36.760 that's going to attract

01:21:37.580 people that are radical

01:21:38.540 one way or the other.

01:21:39.440 Yeah,

01:21:41.160 these silos

01:21:42.380 of communities

01:21:43.760 that are actually

01:21:46.360 quite large

01:21:47.480 but then totally

01:21:48.560 disconnected

01:21:49.220 from some kind of

01:21:50.380 anything that could be

01:21:51.740 called mainstream.

01:21:54.660 We see that

01:21:55.480 in the alt-right.

01:21:56.880 That's what kind of

01:21:57.800 the alt-right has become

01:21:58.860 in a way

01:21:59.460 are these kind of

01:22:00.320 various silos

01:22:01.040 and it's kind of sad.

01:22:03.220 I do think that Trump,

01:22:04.380 just to bring it back

01:22:05.240 to 2016,

01:22:06.020 the formation

01:22:10.500 of the alt-right

01:22:11.500 kind of in a nutshell

01:22:12.580 was that polarization

01:22:14.320 that Ed was talking about

01:22:16.000 where,

01:22:16.740 you know,

01:22:17.000 it's like

01:22:17.340 we brought the normies

01:22:18.500 on board

01:22:19.060 and we brought

01:22:20.260 even a lot of the

01:22:21.000 conservatives on board

01:22:21.980 and then here we have

01:22:23.140 the white nationalist 0.51

01:22:24.040 and here we have

01:22:24.800 the Gamergate culture

01:22:25.940 and here we have

01:22:27.160 the anti-feminist

01:22:28.300 and here we have

01:22:29.260 all these weird

01:22:30.300 digital personalities

01:22:31.900 but we're all

01:22:33.140 on the same team

01:22:34.240 and that actually

01:22:35.900 was an expression

01:22:37.660 of polarization.

01:22:38.800 I mean,

01:22:39.180 maybe it was good,

01:22:40.260 maybe in hindsight

01:22:40.900 there were some

01:22:41.940 bad things about it

01:22:42.780 but it was what it was

01:22:44.680 but I think even,

01:22:46.380 I mean,

01:22:46.620 looking at where

01:22:47.820 we are now

01:22:48.520 going into the

01:22:49.520 2020 election,

01:22:50.640 I can't imagine

01:22:51.560 anything like that

01:22:52.420 occurring.

01:22:52.920 I think there's

01:22:53.340 going to be an attempt

01:22:54.000 to make it happen

01:22:54.860 but I don't think

01:22:56.620 it will take.

01:22:58.480 Yeah,

01:22:59.000 it would have been

01:22:59.400 very different

01:23:00.000 if Trump lost

01:23:00.940 the 2016 election

01:23:02.120 because all that

01:23:03.520 momentum from 2016

01:23:04.600 and the alt-right

01:23:05.280 would have sort of

01:23:05.740 carried forward

01:23:06.420 because they still

01:23:07.000 would have seen

01:23:07.340 themselves as a vanguard

01:23:08.180 whereas with Trump

01:23:09.380 in power it was,

01:23:10.180 you know,

01:23:10.380 I'll stick to the plan

01:23:11.580 and a lot of people

01:23:13.160 that were really

01:23:14.060 interested in the 2016

01:23:15.160 election cycle

01:23:15.940 just completely zoned out

01:23:17.120 because they're like,

01:23:17.740 well,

01:23:17.820 we won,

01:23:18.240 we have Trump in power

01:23:19.140 so he did have

01:23:19.740 this strong

01:23:20.440 anesthetic effect

01:23:21.840 where so many people

01:23:22.920 just zoned out

01:23:23.620 and especially boomers

01:23:24.640 it's like,

01:23:25.500 you know,

01:23:25.680 the boomers now 0.97

01:23:26.360 are back defending,

01:23:27.420 you know,

01:23:27.900 the same policies

01:23:28.860 that Barack Obama

01:23:30.180 or Hillary Clinton 0.99

01:23:30.900 would have carried out

01:23:31.620 because it's Trump

01:23:32.360 so whereas,

01:23:33.360 you know,

01:23:33.500 if Hillary Clinton

01:23:34.160 was in power

01:23:34.780 during Charlottesville

01:23:35.840 or,

01:23:37.320 you know,

01:23:37.800 during the silencing

01:23:39.800 of people on the internet

01:23:41.500 or during any of the policies

01:23:43.680 that Trump has carried out

01:23:44.560 really,

01:23:44.880 there would have been

01:23:45.300 a massive,

01:23:46.040 there would have been

01:23:46.420 a further polarization

01:23:47.580 and radicalization.

01:23:48.980 Yeah.

01:23:49.320 The Hillary granting

01:23:50.760 corporations and billionaires

01:23:52.020 tax cuts,

01:23:52.720 that would have been,

01:23:53.860 that could have been amazing.

01:23:55.900 And if you believe,

01:23:56.660 if you believe,

01:23:57.300 if you believe

01:23:59.100 that book

01:23:59.760 Fire and Fury

01:24:00.500 about Trump,

01:24:01.180 apparently Trump's plan

01:24:02.500 was to lose the election

01:24:03.780 and set up

01:24:04.640 something resembling

01:24:05.860 Fox News

01:24:06.600 and take all these dissidents

01:24:08.580 and take all this momentum

01:24:09.760 and turn it into

01:24:10.620 just a big

01:24:11.340 anti-Hillary,

01:24:12.700 anti-establishment thing

01:24:13.700 for the next four years.

01:24:14.700 That was his plan.

01:24:15.580 So,

01:24:16.420 I mean,

01:24:16.780 I know it's controversial

01:24:17.620 but maybe in a lot of ways

01:24:19.420 it would be,

01:24:20.760 it would have been better off

01:24:21.600 if Trump did lose.

01:24:22.940 I don't think

01:24:23.880 that's a controversial statement

01:24:25.080 at all,

01:24:25.660 at least from my perspective.

01:24:26.960 I heard that

01:24:28.080 Kim Jong-un

01:24:29.280 got a job

01:24:30.680 playing

01:24:31.240 Father Christmas

01:24:32.680 in a local pantomime.

01:24:36.860 He fancied a career,

01:24:37.840 yeah,

01:24:38.440 he fancied a career change.

01:24:41.220 There was a,

01:24:42.500 an Onion headline

01:24:43.820 from a number of years ago

01:24:45.480 which was

01:24:46.160 Kim Jong-il

01:24:47.960 agrees to total

01:24:49.420 nuclear disarmament

01:24:50.760 if he is allowed

01:24:51.800 to play Batman

01:24:52.800 in The Dark Knight Rises.

01:24:54.160 but it was so funny

01:24:57.760 because it's like,

01:24:58.320 ah,

01:24:58.480 that would actually

01:24:58.940 probably work.

01:25:01.420 During the Korean War

01:25:02.660 there was a few Americans

01:25:03.880 that defected

01:25:04.800 to North Korea

01:25:05.580 and then they got jobs,

01:25:07.260 they got jobs

01:25:07.900 in the North Korean

01:25:08.560 film industry

01:25:09.280 playing American

01:25:10.140 bad guys

01:25:10.760 and then married Koreans,

01:25:14.920 the North Koreans

01:25:15.460 and looked after

01:25:16.560 for the rest of their lives.

01:25:19.040 Even when there was famine

01:25:19.880 they always got

01:25:20.560 their ration

01:25:21.920 and had a lovely time

01:25:23.040 I think.

01:25:23.640 Sounds like a good gig.

01:25:25.900 You can get it.

01:25:27.160 Alright, gents.

01:25:29.020 This was a lot of fun.

01:25:30.940 This is the first time

01:25:32.080 Keith and I have spoken

01:25:33.100 so I hope

01:25:34.060 it's not the last.

01:25:37.480 Anyway,

01:25:38.760 I wish you all

01:25:40.800 a Merry Christmas.

01:25:42.240 I love this time of year.

01:25:44.340 I'm going to be

01:25:45.260 doing a little skiing,

01:25:46.560 taking it easy,

01:25:47.760 being around the kids

01:25:49.120 and so on

01:25:50.680 and my fiance.

01:25:51.880 It's going to be

01:25:52.740 a great time

01:25:53.980 but let's

01:25:55.820 let's put our nose

01:25:57.700 to the grindstone

01:25:58.320 in 2020.

01:25:59.580 That was a criticism

01:26:00.540 towards me, Ed

01:26:01.360 because you know.

01:26:03.560 Yes, yes.

01:26:05.100 Ed is incredibly prolific.

01:26:07.460 Life is to live,

01:26:08.880 get on with it,

01:26:09.640 do it, go.

01:26:10.960 I know.

01:26:11.300 Get on with it.

01:26:11.960 You're such an Anglo. 1.00

01:26:13.560 Get up.

01:26:14.720 Yeah, I don't sit around

01:26:15.900 drinking Guinness all day.

01:26:17.560 No.

01:26:18.540 He'll just write a book

01:26:19.780 like

01:26:20.280 in five days

01:26:22.300 or something

01:26:22.840 because he

01:26:23.540 When you're bringing in

01:26:24.360 all them studies

01:26:25.040 it reminds me

01:26:25.620 that quote from Plato

01:26:27.200 you know

01:26:27.620 I'm trying to think

01:26:29.000 stop confusing me

01:26:29.840 with facts.

01:26:34.080 Alright, gents.

01:26:37.500 I'll talk to you soon.

01:26:38.360 Thank you.

01:26:38.880 Merry Christmas to everyone.

01:26:39.980 Alright.

01:26:40.560 Merry Christmas.

01:26:41.100 Bye bye.

01:26:41.500 Bye bye.

RadixJournal - December 24, 2019

The Lost Decade and the Silent Civil War

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