Can the Administrative State Be Replaced? | Guest: Kruptos | 8⧸16⧸23
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 3 minutes
Summary
In this episode, I'm joined by Kruptos to talk about his new piece, "Can we replace the managerial elite?" written in which asks the question, "Should we just take the people who are bad, take all the woke people at the State Department, and replace them with a bunch of based people, and then we have the based bureaucracy, and everything would be great?
Transcript
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We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
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Fast-free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land.
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Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped Flight.
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I've got a great stream with a great guest that you're really going to enjoy.
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So, if you've been paying attention to my channel for any amount of time,
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you've heard me drone on and on about the managerial elite
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and the importance of understanding the structures laid out by people like James Burnham and Sam Francis
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so that we can better grasp what's going on around us,
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why we have the assembly of this thing that many people call the deep state or the cathedral.
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These are all, I think, really important things to understand.
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But one question, one that a lot of people ask is,
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well, is it the structure itself that's the problem or is it the people?
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Could we just take the people who are bad, take all the woke people,
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take all the guys at the State Department who are trying to, you know,
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fly a rainbow flag over every Middle Eastern country,
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and could we just replace them with a lot of based people,
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and then we'd have the based bureaucracy, right?
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Well, there's a gentleman who has just written a piece that I thought was very interesting
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and addressed this in a very good way, and I want to talk to him about it.
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I'll make sure that he goes ahead and pitches that a few times here near the end.
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But in that sub stack, he does it very nice, and I really appreciate this.
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I do the same thing because sometimes, you know,
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I've got the time to sit down and read a piece,
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but a lot of times, you know, I'm mowing the lawn, I'm driving,
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I'm, you know, trying to take care of something, you know, go to the gym,
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and I want to make sure I can still, you know, get something.
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But you kind of lay out, you know, this argument about whether or not we can
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Before we jump into any of that, though, I want to ask you,
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Yeah, well, for me, Ellul goes back like a long way to college and university.
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I had a professor in undergraduate who was very big on Jacques Ellul,
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And then I, in grad school, picked up a couple of his books
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Actually, the first Ellul that I read, like cover to cover,
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was his last book on technology, The Technological Bluff.
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And then from there, I went back and reread or read the earlier books,
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you know, The Technological Society and so forth and other ones,
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That was actually the book that the professor introduced us to.
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I forget the class now, but he introduced us to Jacques Ellul's Propaganda,
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and that was selection readings from that book was actually the first thing
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that I read of him before, you know, The Technological Bluff.
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It's just, it was funny, one of those things after, believe it or not,
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Charles Haywood urged me to start a Stubstack of my own rather than pestering
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And he was really good, actually, as he said to me, you know,
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And, you know, I could maybe put out a word with you from a few people that I know.
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But then he says, you know, thinking about it, he says, probably what you should do
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is maybe, like, start a blog or a, and then Stubstack was just kind of taking off then.
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And, you know, like, why don't you try a Stubstack?
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And then I thought, well, how do I get the word out?
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And next thing you know, everything is kind of rolling that way.
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And then once on Twitter, you know, you'd be reading the timeline,
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and people would be making these comments about how things work.
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And then I'd be thinking, wait a minute, you don't understand anything.
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So I would just do these long threads on Ellul.
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And people, then you'd get some guys like, wow, nobody ever talks about Ellul.
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It's kind of funny that you're talking about Ellul.
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So then after writing a couple of pieces, I thought,
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why don't I start doing some deeper dives into Ellul's book for people
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So I've been reading some stuff that, rereading some books that I had read before,
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and then actually reading some new stuff that I hadn't read before,
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like his book on violence, Autopsy of Revolution was one,
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Now, there's a, the translator for The Political Illusion,
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because Ellul is, of course, French and wrote in French.
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The translator for Political Illusion made the observation that
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The Technological Society, Propaganda, and The Political Illusion
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So if you want to get at the core of Ellul in terms of his thinking about,
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you know, technology, propaganda, and politics,
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and how the three kind of interplay with each other,
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Probably the easiest one is actually The Political Illusion than The Technological
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Society, and Propaganda is a fairly dense and difficult book,
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but well worth the read for those who have read it.
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Well, I want to go ahead and to get, because I haven't read him,
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how this applies to kind of the administrative state,
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and whether this addresses many of the managerial elite questions
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There's been a seismic shift in the legal system.
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An oppressive legal precedent in place since 1971
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The Americans who benefit the most are people of faith,
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It happened because high school coach Joe Kennedy
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used to take a knee in prayer on the field after games.
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But now the legal precedent that got him fired is gone,
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They want people to fill local stadiums and pray after the game,
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just like Coach Kennedy on his first game back,
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One, sign up at rfia.org and commit to praying on September 1st.
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Two, record a short video message challenging people
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I guess the first question for a lot of people,
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again, most people who have been to my channel,
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a general understanding that there is an administrative state,
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all these things that a lot of people are more familiar with.
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Can we just take the current administration, switch out,
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we'll train somebody in the new Trump administration
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or new DeSantis administration to staff it up properly,
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and that'll kind of correct the course of the current system.
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and part of it is the way that we look at technology.
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Okay, so Ellul argued that the most important thing
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the automobile, the air conditioner, the light bulb,
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He says, he argued that technology is made possible
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So he called that sort of underlying way of thinking technique.
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And so the idea of technique is that you take a problem.
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So let's say, for example, you've got a craftsman,
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they teach, they use their skill, their ability,
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they're gifted with kids, and they come across.
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How can we make the outcomes more consistent and predictable?
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So somebody sits down, he analyzes the teaching,
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He breaks it all down into a series of processes,
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you know, interviews teachers, does all these things.
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should I say, out of its natural embedded context
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a set of techniques, tools that then people can use.
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So then what you do is you plug people back into this system
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and you train them not so much to use their own gifts
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and abilities, and some will inevitably do that,
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but you basically train them into the system, right?
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because, you know, anything that has a policy manual,
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So this is the application of managerial techniques
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or what most people would call best practices today, right?
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Well, the best practices is actually a technique, right?
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So he says, argue, it came up through industrialization,
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And now we basically think about every problem this way.
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Everybody's got kind of a rationalized process procedure
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you ask yourself, well, why has capital gone woke?
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So whether you're trying to make your business more efficient
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and then you train your employees to follow them rigidly.
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And as a result, you produce consistent outcomes.
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Now, this whole process is very, very powerful.
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in order to have what we know as free market capitalism
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So it all kind of runs together and meshes together.
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And whether it's, you know, think tanks, policy groups,
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once you move beyond the level of like a single man shop
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You know, it's like the same thing with franchising.
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So as soon as you move from that small local community,
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one man shop up to those higher levels of scale,
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the thing that enables you to do that is technique.
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you know, your computer systems and all the rest,
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in looking at technology is that we've been taught
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A classical example of this is the debate over guns, right?
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the technology of a gun has its own inherent purpose.
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is that every technique has positives and negatives, right?
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So there's a reason why we introduce techniques
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But he says, with those positives come a price,
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So, you know, your son might find it in the drawer
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well, somebody needs a policy for guns or whatever, too.
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Sooner or later, somebody's going to get accidentally killed.
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right, so as technology gets more sophisticated,
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but the problems become more and greater every time.
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And he says, the harmful effects are inseparable
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but I think there's something I want to rewind back
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Can they be independently, you know, separated?
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raises the same question, is that there was a time
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when the idea of revolting against the king was
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Yeah, you need the political theology behind it.
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context, you can't go back to a monarch because
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forward to the dictator who exercise, who rules
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alternative communities, part of that task would
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And then the second one here, thoughts on taking
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advantage of places where the administrative state
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I mean, in the case that warlordism emerges, I'm
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That may be referencing like an I am 1776 piece
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because there was an idea that, you know, we have
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to get out of the cities and go to the country, right?
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And I forget who the author was, but he wrote a
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piece and saying, hey, listen, if you go to the
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communities, he says, go to a place like Detroit
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because there they have all of these areas where
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property taxes. And the city is just now bulldozing
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Well, not even more so, but they basically go in
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So you get a group of people, you get like, say,
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And you're close to all the services and blah, blah,
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The other thing is, is that the prices that you live
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in inner city Detroit, which, you know, I've been
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to inner city Detroit, it's not, it's not people,
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And that's kind of the idea is that you, you sort
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of, you go into these liberal territories and you
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basically conquer them from within, which is, it was
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And, and one that is sort of, it's, it's intriguing
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Nope. That is an interesting way to, to address
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that. I, that, yeah, I can see, I can see how you
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Make sure you're checking out all of his work over
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I think you should read the original just to get
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We, we went through many different, uh, parts of
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If it's your first time here on the channel, please