00:00:28.680I mean, you've you've led quite the life. You've covered wars and presidential elections in 60 different countries.
00:00:36.240You've you know, you've got bestselling books. You've been you know, your your work is in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Atlantic Forbes.
00:00:45.660I mean, you've you've done some great work and your books are on national security.
00:00:52.080And I wanted to have you on because you see the world in a different way than I think most people do.
00:03:35.600But they also knew that with the majority control
00:03:39.580in the House and the Senate, they could fix that.
00:03:42.060The federal gasoline tax is 19.6 cents per gallon. The federal fuels mandate, ethanol and so on, is another 30 cents a gallon. The Jones Act adds 3 cents a gallon. You put those three together, you can knock 53 cents per gallon off the cost of gas with a single vote in the House and the Senate.
00:04:01.300They could have done that in the spring or the summer, even the early fall.
00:05:00.500and the conference votes, and different candidates present their plans. If I become
00:05:04.800committee chairman, I will do A, B, and C, and someone else will have a different plan.
00:05:09.180Use elections. And then after two years, we have another vote and say, are you accomplishing
00:05:15.900your goal? When future historians look at America, and they will say, how did this country
00:05:22.360that was so dominant so quickly after World War II and for so long suddenly unravel?
00:05:29.340And what the conclusion I think they will come to is that America methodically cut away all the feedback loops, all the accountability for its elites, leaving them free to create and destroy as they saw fit, but without any real feedback from the voters.
00:05:48.280So people stayed home, and that's a kind of vote, or voted, because they were unhappy with their lives, because they thought correctly, I assume.
00:06:00.180I mean, I think the best way to understand any election is to assume that the people are right, that the new majority that election created is correct.
00:06:09.200And your goal as a political analyst is to understand why they voted that way.
00:06:15.860They voted that way because they thought that the entrenched elite, and I would locate it mainly in five or 10 people in the United States Senate, just refused to make the kinds of changes.
00:06:45.860Right. Why is this something that is simply not a computer database that can be queried and you can know for certain whether the title is clear or not?
00:06:55.260And why isn't the government held accountable if someone tries to steal your title?
00:06:59.260Yeah. Why don't we pay fees to move something from the closing agent's office to the county?
00:07:06.140Why is this not a simple electronic filing that's five dollars? Right.
00:07:10.000There is deregulation in the housing market that could significantly lower the cost of housing.
00:07:15.300And they didn't even debate it, let alone do it.
00:07:18.720And for the young people who are saving to buy their first home, this is a terrifying moment.
00:07:24.740They have school loans, and they have a great desire, an American desire, to own a home.
00:07:31.320Why not show that you're on their side?
00:07:33.800There's a wonderful 18th century phrase, moral imagination.
00:07:38.000It's the ability to project yourself into the life and mind of another person.
00:07:43.240And what we have is an out-of-touch Republican elite that lost that ability to see the world through another person's eyes.
00:07:50.900So let me ask you this, because I think the Democrats are going to make almost the same mistakes.
00:07:59.600And I think they're going to interpret this.
00:08:02.200And if you look at the the the different bills that that were presented to the people to vote that, you know, the different propositions, they were not voting lockstep with themselves.
00:08:15.420They were putting leftist in and then saying, yeah, but no transgender stuff.0.95
00:08:20.940None of this. You know, they were passing things that were almost diametrically opposed.
00:08:26.280and i think this is my view and i'd love to hear a correction on this um that people were fed up
00:08:35.440with being lied to i care about you i'm gonna fix things for you i'm gonna listen to you and then
00:08:41.900they get in and they do absolutely nothing so they want to send a message you know or i'm not
00:08:47.540voting for that i don't care how desperate it is i'm not voting for you again um you need to learn
00:08:55.260your lesson we don't work for you you work for us but now the democrats are going to come in and i
00:09:01.200think they're going to overplay their hand maybe my guess is because they think they have been
00:09:08.660brought in for marxism or wokeism or anything else and they and and the trial of trump and
00:09:16.480all this where i think the people who voted for them this time want the same things that the
00:09:21.820republicans wanted just help me reduce the cost of my life let my leave me alone so i can prosper
00:09:31.860and i don't think they're going to do it either yes well okay but there's an analytical mistake
00:09:39.100that conservatives very typically make when analyzing the other party so the structure
00:09:46.020of the political parties is fundamentally different the republicans are a consensus
00:09:51.160party. They fight over ideas. And then when an idea gets to, let's say 80%, then the other 20%
00:09:59.140sort of shrug and say, I guess I don't care about that anymore, or I'm going to hold my nose and
00:10:03.440stay with the party. And so the analytical mistake the left makes in analyzing the right is they say,
00:10:09.720oh, look, all these people are arguing publicly and the party's going to fall apart. But that's
00:10:15.240not how consensus parties work. They grind away to find consensus. And then they're remarkably
00:10:20.220uniform once they've reached that consensus. It's hard to imagine, but in the late 1970s,
00:10:25.960the Republican Party was very skeptical of tax cuts. The Reagan agenda on tax cuts was considered
00:10:32.780dangerous and reckless. And it took 10 years of fighting before that became part of the Republican
00:10:41.880Bible, if you will. But the analytical mistake the right makes is they see the left and they say,
00:10:47.920okay, well, all these ideas are contradictory and there's no way to make it all work.
00:10:53.620That's not the structure of their party.
00:12:08.300They came here fleeing tyranny in the North African lands.
00:12:13.920they like america's free enterprise uh culture free expression all that right
00:12:21.660what they're sick of is actually something that is not generated by the right they're they're sick
00:12:27.400of uh an overly what they consider to be an overly sexualized culture yes and you know i mean i'm in
00:12:35.620my northern virginia neighborhood i sat with my neighbors as they gave out halloween candy
00:12:39.140And let's just say what teenage girls wear as costumes doesn't just horrify Muslims. It horrifies many adult Americans who say, gosh, don't give away the mystery of your femininity for attention, right?
00:12:56.120And we've broken down these feedback loops in which older women have loving and meaningful
00:13:01.940conversations with younger women and say, hold on, think about this a little bit, right?
00:13:13.600So if you go and you read and you talk to Muslim Americans, you will come away, I think,1.00
00:13:21.220and your audience is not going to like me saying this, you come away very hopeful about1.00
00:13:25.340america they don't like uh the corruption they don't like the pornography uh they don't like
00:13:32.780um the promotion of alternative what they consider to be alternative lifestyles
00:13:37.440um on on those issues they are more socially conservative than not just in the median
00:13:46.080american voter than the median republican voter right um but we see across the industrial world
00:13:54.640Europe, North America, Australia, so on, that there is a coalition built between the rising
00:14:01.920green parties, which are Islamic parties, and the left-wing parties, which are receding.0.60
00:14:09.380And they always imagine, the left does, that this will be a permanent voting class for them,0.83
00:14:16.680the same way that African Americans were, and to some extent still are.
00:14:20.500But they misjudged this completely. What these Muslim Americans want, some of whom are quite radical, but most of whom want the normal middle class things that would not surprise 1950s housewives, right? And that is something that the country is going to have to really digest.
00:14:44.160So I view this as, this is a replay of 1978-1979 Iran.0.88
00:14:52.320Well, let's look at what happened there, right?0.81
00:14:55.040So the left, including very famous leftist philosophers like Michel Foucault, were all for the Ayatollahist revolution.
00:15:05.520A New Yorker right here flew with the future Ayatollah Khomeini from Paris to Tehran.
00:15:12.040and a number of leftists famously wrote articles in the French media at the time,
00:15:17.980bitterly disappointed they weren't able to get on the flight.
00:15:21.240Within a year and a half, most of those, and they were, some of them were leftists,
00:15:25.460some of them were open communists, allied in the Soviet Union,
00:18:47.600We told the story of a woman who was homeless,
00:18:50.460living with her mother in her car, using the fading light coming through the windshield
00:18:54.980to study medical books. And now she's at Yale Medical School and is becoming a medical researcher.
00:19:00.760These transformational stories are happening in America every day. These are what Ronald Reagan
00:19:06.340used to call everyday heroes. Why aren't we connecting with these people? Why aren't we
00:19:11.600celebrating them? Not using them as political props, but just saying, look, this is the promise
00:19:18.900of America. This is what you can do. And here are the lessons learned. And these are the things you
00:19:23.740can do to copy this success. $28 may not sound like an awful lot to a scared mom considering0.94
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00:19:54.560Your gift can help create another opportunity.
00:19:57.320For $28, you can provide that free ultrasound through a pre-born network clinic.
00:20:02.020There, a woman can see her baby, talk with people who still will listen to her, see what she's facing, receive compassionate support, and consider another choice before abortion becomes her answer.
00:20:13.760When women see their babies through an ultrasound at Preborn,
00:20:16.180the network clinic, 80% will choose life.0.84
00:21:49.700I mean, the attacks on Elon Musk is amazing.
00:21:52.820I find if we attack Elon Musk, I think he's going to end up being like the guy in contact,
00:22:01.800the Carl Sagan book where he's living in space.
00:22:05.460I mean, one of the greatest minds and the exact kind of mind we used to celebrate who could come in, you know, Nikola Tesla, Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, they can come in and revolutionize.
00:22:26.660Can we still handle, do we want to hear those stories of success?
00:22:32.700Because it seems like the left just wants us to eat those people.
00:22:38.380Well, as far as when we were telling these true stories in black newspapers,
00:22:44.160we got letters from both the publishers of the newspapers and from many, many ordinary readers
00:22:48.980who were delighted to hear those stories because they couldn't find them anywhere else.
00:22:53.600And one woman, who I think owns the Philadelphia Tribune and historically black paper, said to me, you know, I'm so tired of stories about black America being about teenagers in handcuffs. Tell me more about Rolls Royce dealer. Tell me more about the guy who joined the Navy, and then became a brain surgeon, and has now saved the life of a homeless boy, right?
00:23:15.820there's another story we had um the there is a great hunger for these stories there is because
00:23:22.700people want to rise in america and they want to figure out how the winners did it now regarding
00:23:29.060elon what is the optimal number of elon musks it's definitely not zero but it's also not one
00:23:36.380yes right it's probably 200 right but let's be honest with ourselves
00:23:42.240These, Edison is a classic example. Edison was a fantastic source of innovation, new ideas, new businesses, whole industries, right? But he was not a pleasant person.
00:23:56.760I love you. Thank you for knowing that. I love you. He was a monster. I think he was a monster.
00:24:03.260He hired goons. So Hollywood began in New Jersey, the great train robbery, that early silent film.0.89
00:24:12.240was shot, you know, across the river from New York City.
00:24:16.140And if you turn the camera around, you'd see the skyscrapers in the background almost.
00:24:38.020Mother Teresa does not, you know, lower the cost of putting things in orbit, right? I'm sorry, right? We need the holy people who quietly comfort the ailing and the sick and visit people in prison and offer them hope. We need those people.
00:24:57.540But we also need the disruptive, dislikable, right?
00:25:01.900I'm not saying anybody you want personally here.
00:25:04.560But you need both, but we need to be honest about who these people are and say, yeah, if you want the disruption, if you want, geniuses are disagreeable.
00:25:15.320If they followed the rules, they wouldn't make a contribution.
00:25:18.740Well, I don't want them breaking the laws, but I do want them, yeah, as long as they're not breaking the laws, I don't want to overlook that.
00:25:27.540But if they are if they are looking at it going, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, we can do it this way.
00:25:33.480That is their disruptive mind. And that's that's progress has always come with that.
00:25:41.480But, you know, you try to put him in jail because of his his opinion or what he has done with his companies.
00:25:49.580If they're not if if he's not breaking the law, there's there's you don't put him in jail.
00:25:54.120And I'm telling you, he'll either go to India or to space.
00:25:57.540he's not and then america's the loser america's the loser right but why do they want to go after
00:26:04.580elon two reasons one is to send a signal that if you are on your way to becoming the next elon we0.87
00:26:10.860don't want you yes yes they want to punish those because they want to maintain the status quo right0.71
00:26:20.120this is what aristocracies always do to defend the status quo and the second thing is we have
00:26:25.580to realize where we are in history, right? Because we are always the sum of things that came before
00:26:30.760us. The silent generation gave us the New Deal, the World War II victory, and the 1950s, which1.00
00:26:39.140are a far more complicated and horrifying time period than most Americans realize today. It was0.67
00:26:44.000so long ago. The baby boom inherits it. They inherit an education system that is already on1.00
00:26:51.820its way down. Because if you suddenly increase by 5x the number of students, you can't increase
00:26:59.540the number of quality teachers by the same number. And within a decade or so, the baby boom, we have
00:27:04.620unionization of teachers and so on, right? And you can look at other American institutions the same
00:27:09.440way. Now that baby boom is in, it's in retirement years. And they're desperately trying to preserve0.76
00:27:15.860a system that they inherited that's 50 60 years out of date they're terrified of change in
00:27:22.680innovation because it's a threat to the status quo and that's why they want to punish elon they
00:27:30.280want to prevent these threats but that's what made the soviet union the soviet union that's
00:27:36.900what gave you the zil right and that's what's killing england now right that's what's killing0.82
00:27:43.720Europe now. It's, do you defend the status quo or do you evolve as the environment around you0.68
00:27:51.480has changed? I heard Mark Andreessen talk about this the other day, and he said, you know, we've
00:27:56.160sent everybody to Harvard Management School. And he said, you know, in the 50s and the 60s, it was
00:28:02.400probably good to have managers. He said, you had the, you know, the inventive class, the Henry
00:28:07.800Fords, and then you just had to manage the car company. He said, but everything is being disrupted
00:28:11.660now and managers cannot manage disruption it's it's antithetical to uh the the whole system you
00:28:21.120need to how do you manage a space uh company when the other guy's like yeah but i want to
00:28:28.440not only send him up at half the cost i want to catch him on the way down you know what i mean
00:28:34.000you're not keeping the status quo so he said our real problem and i i would extend this to
00:29:29.320If things grow at one, one and a half percent, they're fine.
00:29:33.240And, you know, this is an age old problem between the innovators and the managers.
00:29:39.120Uh, AT&T solved this problem by creating Bell Labs. Yes. Because managers would kill any new
00:29:46.360idea because it's a threat to the status quo. So they separated it off into a group called Bell Labs
00:29:51.700and they invented a lot of things. Xerox created Xerox PARC and was the, the, the touch screen,
00:30:00.200the, the, the, the Mac windows interface, all those things come out of innovations from Xerox PARC.
00:30:05.340Yeah, right. But they needed a separate, distinct area where the managers weren't in control. And then they needed a trusted bridge between the innovators and the managers saying, okay, Mr. Manager, I know this is going to be disruptive. I know you're not going to like it. But we've tested it. Here are the tests. Here's how we slowly phase it in so we don't change your world too much. But here's how we continuously improve, right?
00:30:31.920that that so that's two things right one is you have to separate innovation in a protected place
00:30:37.940where it can fail because the best innovations fail and fail and fail before they succeed
00:30:43.060and then you need a trusted bridge who the managers trust and this is the problem of the
00:30:48.860republican party the there's a lot of whom will want to protect the the republican version of
00:30:54.520the baby boom status quo and there's no trusted intermediary yes who can come to them and say
00:31:00.940Look, we've tried this in the laboratories of democracy. This thing is working in Texas. This other thing is working in Idaho. Let's bring them to Washington. They don't trust Trump. They are waiting for, they're waiting Trump out.0.91
00:31:15.860there are many republicans in washington who are absolutely delighted by the defeat in the
00:31:21.320midterms yes their seats are safe and they are not going to be challenged to respond to the outside
00:31:27.720world and they get to keep their role their status their paycheck and they're just they don't really
00:31:36.580care if that's if that's true and they don't and they're celebrating today then they're not going
00:31:42.340learn any lesson so how does the republican party change or is it just over well i mean what what
00:31:49.140happens here it's never over right democrats have come back from far worse um one analogy is 1994
00:32:01.060bill clinton saw the republican wave coming and he held rallies all over the united states
00:32:09.140maybe more rallies than Trump did in the last cycle. It didn't matter. For the first time in
00:32:15.12050 years, Republicans got control in the midterm elections of 1994. They got control of House
00:32:19.940representatives. First time since 1954. And what did the Democrats do? Did they go into a cave and
00:32:30.240sulk? No. No. They retooled. Right. And this is what the Republicans need to do. Number one,
00:32:37.940i would get rid of the consultant class i would change how the consultant class works
00:32:42.620so let's say glenn you're running for office and you really want to be you know city council
00:32:47.860member or congress or whatever and you and and you say well i don't know much about elections
00:32:53.180i'm going to hire a consultant who knows a lot more than i do makes sense to hire a specialist
00:32:57.580when i have a heart problem i go to a cardiologist i have an election problem i should go to an
00:33:01.900election specialist and the local party says well here's the list of approved consultants you can
00:33:06.940news. If you don't take someone from this list, we're not going to back you. And you say, oh,
00:33:14.040okay, well, let me talk to them. Oh, okay. I'll pick item number three. Great. That guy starts
00:33:20.080with you and he takes 20% of your television ad buys, 20% of your radio buys, 20% of your direct
00:33:26.760marketing costs. Even the door knocking people who are paid, he's collecting a percentage on.
00:33:31.960unbelievable you lose he wins most challengers lose he's in saint bart's a week after the
00:33:40.400election if we went to the caribbean together right now around the pool there are republican
00:33:45.420consultants spending big money on drinks and having a grand old time they got paid
00:33:51.240but think about how they got paid that person that idealistic person who wanted to run for office
00:33:57.500called and met with his friends and his family.
00:34:02.960And remember, donations are limited to a couple.
00:35:22.980And divide that between incumbents and challengers.
00:35:26.360And are you better in some states than others?
00:35:30.660Also, consultants tend to kill a lot of messages that a candidate is running really wants to talk about.
00:35:38.640Because it would be divisive or it hurt this interest group or so on.
00:35:42.920Because remember, the consultant has to make money between elections.
00:35:47.020and often that means advising various interest groups uh not just chambers of commerce big
00:35:53.940companies right so he doesn't want a a message that says you can build your data center but not
00:36:01.860only do you have to supply all the water you have to give free water to everybody in the county right
00:36:06.380not only have to supply all the power but for the data center but you know people in the county
00:36:11.660you should get free electricity for the next 20 years, right? Because who's going to hire him in
00:36:17.780the off years? Yes. All right. Secondly, when you get elected and you're in Congress, say,
00:36:25.400you should have to present your platform to be part of a committee, to be the ranking minority
00:36:30.400member or the chairman, just a member, and win votes from other people in the conference.
00:36:35.460So everyone's on board with your agenda. Instead, if you become committee chairman after waiting your turn for 15 or 20 years, by the way, any new idea you had is now 20 years old, right? For the most part.
00:36:49.120you act like a sultan it's up to you alone there's no feedback loop you've got the seniority
00:36:58.780and you know you're almost certain to be re-elected and there's no dynamic that forces
00:37:06.360you to change your mind to open your mind to other things and of course the permanent interest groups
00:37:11.260are already there that's who takes care of the fundraising so i mean there needs to be
00:37:17.040finance reform where you should be able to give far more money than you than this twenty six hundred
00:37:23.000dollar limit and because protesters tend to show up at the houses of donors you know the vow the
00:37:30.100vote is secret secret ballot yes why can't you have secret donations yeah um right let me i'm
00:37:36.620not saying this is the answer but these are the questions we need to be yes we we have to start
00:37:41.400thinking out of the box because the whole thing is broken. You talk about four utopias and that
00:37:48.240somebody who's going to run for president has to cobble together three of these theological
00:37:54.580or religious utopias. Can you explain this? Sure. And my thinking here is guided by a book called
00:38:04.560Albion Seed, which has been out for decades. It's highly worth reading. In fact, I think I've
00:38:11.760now read everything that the author has to say, who is a center-left thinker, but
00:38:20.320very interesting to read. Anyway, here's the idea. That America was settled
00:38:27.020by people from different parts of england so they did not immigrate from england to america
00:38:35.300they immigrated from a particular place in england yes so new england comes from east anglia
00:38:41.220and that's that hump of england that points out towards the netherlands and and germany right
00:38:47.000uh and and the adjoining counties contribute more so these are all people who are related
00:38:53.240religiously. They tend to be the same flavor of Puritan. They come from a lot of the same towns.
00:39:00.820They're intermarried with each other. And when you look at records of, say, baby names,
00:39:05.840you see the last names, but also the names of the babies, the people born in Massachusetts
00:39:09.920are named after people in East Anglia that they left behind, right? Just the same way,
00:39:16.980you know children get named after their grandfathers right um we see the same ideas
00:39:24.580so a social network has moved from east anglia to boston say and the same ideas move in that
00:39:32.940social network so the only place you find which hunts in america is in new england for the most
00:39:39.300part handful of exceptions and the only place you find which trials and which hunts in england
00:39:46.280is in East Anglia and the immediate adjoining territories.
00:40:30.480So you're saying, and then, of course, the Middle States are settled by people from the west of England who are on the coast where it faces Ireland.
00:42:09.240But they probably also move in the same family lines, right?
00:42:14.140So Ilhan Omar case, the fact that she is, her father was apparently a colonel in the military, running that country at that time, and was on a losing faction.
00:44:02.820Before that, they just buried them in the order in which they died,
00:44:08.200and so their family members would be scattered.
00:44:10.880And in many cases, the headstones were vague.
00:44:14.860It wasn't like, here lies the Smith family.
00:44:16.600um so these very radical for the time ideas persist for a very long time and the roots
00:44:27.400of political correctness for example come from these puritanical ideas in their most radical
00:44:35.140and unvarnished form and that's why california which was settled by a lot of people from new
00:44:39.840England, as was Washington and Oregon to a great extent, where we see both great innovation,
00:44:48.100a passion for education, a passion for business creation, but also a passion for censorship,
00:44:54.600a passion for not tolerating people of opposing points of view and thinking them evil for
00:44:59.420disagreeing with you. The idea that a certain group of people have a right to permanently rule
00:45:06.220because they are the good people, they are the elect of God, to use the 1870 phrase, right?
00:45:11.760So these ideas persist and have a kind of gravity to them. Gravity, we feel its effects,
00:45:20.320but we obviously don't see it. And there is a long historical gravity that continues to
00:45:26.840work itself in our politics. And as we add new people from outside and new social networks,
00:45:34.940We just make that gravity more and more complicated. But mapping this out, understanding what America's about, it's an amazing real-time experiment in liberty. And figuring this out should be the work of journalists and scholars, because frankly, it's absolutely fascinating who we are, what we think, why we think it, who we venerate and who we denigrate.
00:45:58.180and i don't see many people doing it anymore there's not a an incredible curiosity dead
00:46:06.040crazy nature right dead i can't tell you as a journalist you must know this um i can't tell
00:46:13.420you how many journalists i spoke i've spoken to over the years and they're just absolutely
00:46:17.900dead eyes they're just shark you know shark eyes um you're talking about something you can see
00:46:23.060they don't care they are they are not you're talking to them and they know what the next
00:46:28.080question is going to be and they just and they're like uh-huh okay you stop talking let me ask this
00:46:32.240question and you can tell there's no intellectual curiosity there at all and it i remember the
00:46:37.560first time i saw it with major reporters and major journalists it scared the hell out of me so i
00:46:43.500thought how are you even finding the truth you're kind of coming in knowing what the story is going
00:46:50.120to be. And you're just, you know what I mean? You're not engaged. There's no point with many
00:46:55.840journalists where they go, wait a minute, wait a minute. That's not what I thought. That's not
00:47:01.060what I've heard. That's not, you know what I mean? I don't understand that. You don't hear that very
00:47:05.060often unless it's agenda driven. That's the fun part. I know. Is finding the discovery that you
00:47:12.520didn't expect yeah that's that's the good part i know look when we at my current company when we
00:47:20.840interview journalists we always ask some version of this question why would a decent intelligent
00:47:27.460person disagree with you and about half the time the candidate we're interviewing says well a
00:47:35.460decent intelligent person wouldn't disagree with me and we don't hire those people yeah because
00:47:42.440you need curiosity and frankly sympathy for people who hold different views than you do.
00:47:48.600Humility. If I don't, if I, if I think I'm better than you and I know the answer, why am I talking
00:47:55.440to you? I'm only talking to you to bolster me, to make me look better because I already know
00:48:02.760you're stupid and I'm not. So I, I don't have any real questions for you because you're below me.0.99
00:48:07.540exactly it's a modern inquisition yes where the answers in the inquisition don't actually matter
00:48:15.980they decided that they're going to burn you anyway yeah right they just it's it's performative
00:48:21.840they get to act out well this is what a journalist does i'm having an interview
00:48:25.420and here you are on camera and it's also a good deal of virtue signaling by the way virtue
00:48:31.880singling is a classic puritan tell right we saw this from the 1600s onward
00:48:37.360and there's not a curiosity there's no data that would change their mind yes
00:48:47.060and and they say well this is science like well science is always in motion
00:48:53.320science butter has been good butter has been bad butter is good again i mean
00:48:57.740It's always it's always morphing. I mean, anyway, you know, so that's the thing to reclaim the institutions.
00:49:09.240We have to change the people involved.
00:49:14.100That is to say, we have to attract the curious, the humble and the hardworking.
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00:52:04.980Mainly, yeah. Let me explain. So we have class warfare in the United States, but it's not rich, rich is poor. It's not necessarily educated versus uneducated or black versus white. It's people who are members of the unaccountable class and people who are members of the accountable class. And let me define that.
00:52:25.820people always assume oh he works in the private sector he's accountable that's just not true no
00:52:31.800large corporations especially have many many islands of unaccountability it's a hideout
00:52:37.720if you're a big corporation you can hide
00:52:39.460and you know there are parts of academia that are highly accountable like either the scientific
00:52:47.180experiment works or it doesn't right so does your the question is deciding which class you're in
00:52:54.960Does your pay largely determined by real-world results?
00:53:01.680In other words, if you're a shoe salesman, if you increase the number of shoes you sell, do you make more money?
00:53:19.840Does it, you know, does it treat a medical condition or does it help us understand the nature of steel under stress for aircraft or something, right?
00:53:30.900Does it have a practical result, right?
00:53:34.140And we have, every society has a mixture of these two classes.
00:53:43.740So the unaccountable today are civil servants who largely can't be fired, right?
00:53:52.280You have tenured professors and school teachers who largely can't be fired.
00:53:59.100You have large chunks of the corporate bureaucracy, not just the HR departments, but others, who are basically immune from being separated from their job.
00:54:58.000And Tom Wolfe writes about this beautifully in Minicus Works.
00:55:00.420But when money is no longer the gate, it becomes about status, about appearing to be things.
00:55:07.700and the problem with status games is they don't create progress they don't create innovation
00:55:14.980wealth it's a zero-sum game wealth is not a zero-sum game right you and i could both get
00:55:21.500richer investing in the same company for example but status the ankle biting to to move up in
00:55:30.660status is to take other people down it's a fixed pie so it becomes vicious it becomes counterproductive
00:55:38.640and ultimately socially destructive and societies that focus more on status than on results die
00:55:47.120and this is that's the direction we're going in isn't it yes but i don't i'm very optimistic
00:55:55.160about the future. So I do not see the end. I think there is a great desire in many parts of
00:56:05.740American life for people who want to leave the unaccountable class and join the accountable
00:56:12.220class, especially among young people. And my evidence for this is a little bit all over the
00:56:17.780map, but let me just tell it to you. When COVID has a fundamental shock to our political system,
00:56:26.860the full political effects of COVID have still not been realized. One of the political malpractice
00:56:33.180elements of the Republicans is they didn't campaign on the COVID lockdowns this time.
00:56:38.220Yes. Yes. You really want to bring these people back who told you you could go down aisle five
00:56:43.920in the hardware store but not aisle four or three right who told you right do you do you want these
00:56:49.300people in charge of your life right they didn't bring it up because the consultant class said oh
00:56:54.260it's old news right but there are a lot of people who in that covet time were in their 20s started
00:57:01.440seeking out very strict versions of christianity judaism and to a certain extent islam um so the
00:57:09.860traditional latin mass you know in the catholic world saw a big surge um the more conservative
00:57:16.920part portions of methodism and anglicanism saw a big surge russian and greek orthodoxy attracted
00:57:24.060record numbers of people so they're why are they joining a church that is
00:57:30.920its liturgy is complicated and hard to follow in some cases like the latin mass or the greek
00:57:37.620and Russian Orthodox, is not in English at all, right? Why are they doing that? Because they're
00:57:44.660seeking accountability in their lives. And more men than women, by the way, which is a change.
00:57:51.260Christianity, traditionally, over the last 30, 40 years, attracted more women than men.
00:57:55.080But after COVID, we saw the reverse, more men searching for accountability.
00:57:59.320Second data point. Why do we see such a focus online on self-improvement among young men? Lifting weights, becoming more financially literate. Again, they're seeking to become accountable to themselves and to others and to live a life of standards.
00:58:19.900This is all very healthy for our society. And that, I think, will power a lot of, there is a great desire to, we've seen alcohol consumption drop.
00:58:35.740Yes. We've seen. These are all the sum of many, many individual decisions. And I'm not arguing for a monocausal explanation. I think big changes have many causes, right? Like the Mississippi River has many tributaries.
00:58:52.460Right, right, right, right. So, but that said, more people are electing to become responsible. Look at under the Trump years, record number of people joining the military, even though the physical and educational standards make it harder to get into than ever before.
00:59:11.380i think there is just and the pursuit of entrepreneurship at all ages is growing
00:59:19.200and as an entrepreneur you are highly accountable you have a handful of donors or investors who
00:59:27.560yeah at the beginning actually kind of like donors and these in the very beginning are
00:59:32.540your friends and family you can't get away from them on thanksgiving business idea
00:59:36.480effect they're electing to give up corporate jobs or not to spend the rest of their life in graduate
00:59:44.360school and try something so i i have a lot of hope for the future of the country as more people
00:59:51.520choose accountability how do you balance that with with marxism where you have it i want it
01:00:02.140you don't deserve it i do they're gonna go take it from you how do you because those are the two
01:00:07.780competing things we either become more accountable or much less accountable um and right and what
01:00:15.420gives you hope that says this one's gonna win not that one well i i'm not i don't have a crystal
01:00:23.900ball i have yeah i know but i mean hope what gives you hope yeah right right however we know
01:00:32.380something about the structure of the left we know who's attracted to it right so the left and there's
01:00:41.320a great study uh on the 1920s finish the finland right finnish civil war why people chose the size
01:00:50.520of the right and the left. And then that same research has been applied to many other
01:00:54.980circumstances, including our own. Basically, the people of the left are people who were born
01:01:01.000to successful upper middle class or better parents who chose the left because it saves
01:01:11.160them a lot of work, right? If you have a very successful father, you could work really hard,
01:01:17.640take a lot of risks and maybe be as successful as he is right or you can turn the game upside down
01:01:24.360and be morally superior to your father instantly right so the left is not about egalitarianism
01:01:32.640it's about turning society upside down and putting themselves in charge
01:01:37.200without having to do all of the work that changes you as you do it right if you set out to become
01:01:47.280an athlete, yes, your body will get stronger as you exercise and so on, but your mind and spirit
01:01:54.820will change too. You'll start to measure things more effectively. You will start to have different
01:02:01.340hypotheses about what's going to build this or make this jump shot better. You end up not as
01:02:08.420the same person with an athletic body, but a different person. And that same thing is true
01:02:13.540in business or in music or anything that's pursued seriously it changes you on the inside and on the1.00
01:02:21.600outside but if you don't want to change if you are a nepo baby for example0.96
01:02:28.320then the left is always there and always attractive yeah you can this is a part of human1.00
01:02:37.560nature it's a right and so therefore there will never be a you know some people on the right call
01:02:44.520it a final victory against the left that will never happen oh no yeah but take some comfort
01:02:49.000in the fact that there'll never be a final victory against the the right the people who are attracted
01:02:54.760to what we currently call the right are people who look into ascend right going back to the
01:02:59.720civil war in finland in the early 20s 1920s um the people who were attracted were to the right
01:03:07.080who fought on the patriotic side against the communists were the children of working class
01:03:13.820people. The ones the Soviets claim to be speaking for. And that is the natural constituency of the0.98
01:03:24.620accountable class. Now take this concept out of unaccountable and start to apply it out, right?
01:03:31.860Yes, it's obvious in politics. It's obvious in business. It's obvious in sports. What about
01:03:36.740architecture why do we have so many ugly buildings because the people who design those buildings and
01:03:43.600the people who approve those buildings are not accountable they don't there's no feedback loop
01:03:50.420telling them to build things that people think are beautiful and therefore like their their pay
01:03:56.540is not determined by how many people come to the building and celebrate it um why do we have so
01:04:05.720many novels and movies which are frankly terrible right it's um you know a friend of mine decided
01:04:14.260she was only going to read 19th century books for 60 days what a difference she went back to
01:04:20.320yeah she was shocked it was really hard for her for the first two but yeah but then she says to
01:04:28.420me when she goes back to reading modern novels because she's getting a graduate degree in english
01:04:33.120literature god bless her she says oh my gosh the emotional and intellectual subtlety is gone it's
01:04:41.120not there yeah so thin the contract yeah right it's only when you read these things and you know
01:04:48.560she goes even pop literature of the victorian era and you know pop literature would be dr jekyll and
01:04:54.120mr high the invisible man right the world's right is superior to literary novels of today
01:05:00.840right at least that was her her take in terms of human observation right so but we've given
01:05:08.820prizes out i mean this is true in creative arts and it's also true in journalism rather than
01:05:15.020connecting with readers and being held accountable by the people who consume your news you now have
01:05:20.780this complicated award system you know not just the pulitzer but literally thousands of other
01:05:26.000awards and journal literary fellowships and prizes make up a whole ecosystem so they're rewarding
01:05:32.900what the people who sit on those committees yes like yes not what the public likes
01:05:38.360people respond to incentives right and and so that is the problem right uh you when you create
01:05:47.680a feedback loop that produces things that are not desirable to the to the vast public