TRIGGERnometry - February 14, 2023


The Truth About Davos, WEF & Klaus Schwab - Michael Shellenberger


Episode Stats

Length

30 minutes

Words per Minute

179.25981

Word Count

5,391

Sentence Count

223

Misogynist Sentences

4

Hate Speech Sentences

5


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we take a deep dive into the World Economic Forum, Davos, and the Great Reset. Is it a conspiracy? Or is it part of a Malthusian, pro-capitalist agenda? And what is the point of eating insects?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.880 Davos is a grift and a cult, but it's also a bid for global domination.
00:00:07.360 I wish it were a conspiracy because then it would be a lot quieter.
00:00:10.480 It's so loud. It's also basically pay to play.
00:00:14.480 If you pay a million dollars, the expectation is that you get to be on stage.
00:00:18.400 And by the way, one of the discoveries that we pointed out is that they're not
00:00:20.880 transparent at all about how they use their own money.
00:00:23.440 But yeah, they want control. I mean, you kind of have a sense of it.
00:00:27.120 They want to make it expensive to buy, to use energy.
00:00:30.820 They want to make it more expensive or hard to eat meat.
00:00:33.920 They do want to encourage more consumption of insects.
00:00:36.820 They do want to encourage that you don't own as much.
00:00:41.420 They, you know, want to, you know, basically exercise a kind of elite control over food and energy production.
00:00:51.080 And not just elite, but really European control over how countries produce food and energy.
00:00:57.480 Funny, because World Economic Forum will be like, these are all conspiracy theories.
00:01:00.560 And it's like, well, no, they're actually from your website.
00:01:12.060 So, Michael, moving on, because we could quite easily do the entire interview on this.
00:01:17.160 But moving on, let's talk about the WEF.
00:01:20.340 Let's talk about Davos. Let's talk about the Great Reset. I have intentionally avoided this
00:01:25.900 because I am cynical enough about what is happening, the powers that be, unaccountable
00:01:31.120 leaders, et cetera, et cetera. Is this an exaggeration by people on social media saying
00:01:38.520 that these people, they're modus operandi in 10 years, we're all going to be living on insects?
00:01:43.200 What is going on? Yeah, I love this story. So I think that my view can be summarized in the
00:01:51.360 headline of the piece that I did with Isabella Kaminska as a former Financial Times reporter
00:01:57.900 who had done real investigative reporting into the finances of Davos. And what we said was
00:02:05.880 Davos is a grift and a cult, but it's also a bid for global domination.
00:02:14.940 And that basically summarizes my view of World Economic Forum and Davos, which and it really
00:02:20.820 mirrors a bit of the thinking that we developed in Apocalypse Never, which is that what's
00:02:25.420 driving this apocalyptic and Malthusian pro-human, pro-scarcity, anti-human environmentalism
00:02:32.560 is really money power and religion and so what you see is so one question is then is it a
00:02:40.060 conspiracy and i was joking i was like i wish it were a conspiracy because then it would be a lot
00:02:44.900 quieter it's so loud you know i mean i will this summer i had heard about the insects thing and i
00:02:51.160 was like well that's really i mean that's crazy you know they they don't really i was like i went
00:02:55.900 just googled world economic forum and insects and i was like i couldn't believe how many articles
00:03:00.340 and videos they had promoting eating insects by the way i've eaten insects i eat i eat uh the pupa
00:03:07.360 that they eat in the bar in korea um and it was disgusting and the koreans for them it's like a
00:03:14.040 novelty though notably people are pretty drunk when they eat those bugs and my wife who's korean
00:03:19.460 asked her father about it and he was like he's like basically he was like we ate bugs after the
00:03:24.780 korean war because he was a boy during the korean war because we were starving you know and so when
00:03:30.300 you so there's this all this kind of crazy weird like insect stuff it's like what's going on you
00:03:37.080 know um you know there is a there is a somewhat conspiratorial aspect of it but it's not really
00:03:42.760 what people think it's more just sort of getting insider information on what new companies products
00:03:47.820 they have and who's going public but it's very ideological i mean it's just i mean look you know
00:03:53.320 what we all know what world economic forum is it's malthusians these are people that think there's
00:03:58.580 too many people in the world. They think that we all need to return to pre-industrial technologies.
00:04:04.200 They don't want us to eat meat. They promote vegetarianism. And some of the reasons-
00:04:10.220 Michael, can I just interrupt you there? Because I don't think a lot of people know what the World
00:04:14.140 Economic Forum is. This is just something that they've seen on the internet. They've been told
00:04:19.700 it in a pub or in a bar. And look, let's steel man the argument a little bit. I think that you're
00:04:25.060 obviously describing some of the things that they say. But from their perspective, wouldn't it be
00:04:29.800 fair to say that what is driving their agenda is they believe in the imminent climate catastrophe.
00:04:39.460 The world's about to end. And if we don't act globally, because that is a global problem that
00:04:46.260 no one country or no set of countries, frankly, can solve, then we are in for a climate catastrophe.
00:04:52.800 And what we need to do is get, you know, people from government, people from business and people from other spheres together in a place to talk about how to solve these great problems facing humanity.
00:05:05.620 Right. And if you believe in the incoming imminent climate catastrophe, then, you know, you're welcome there to participate in the discussion about how this should be solved.
00:05:16.360 And by the way, while we're fixing global problems, why don't we get Tony Blair to talk about how we need a register of who's vaccinated or not?
00:05:23.320 And why don't we get this and why don't we get that?
00:05:25.120 Isn't that really a more steel man version of that argument?
00:05:29.880 Yes.
00:05:30.500 Yeah.
00:05:30.780 And even to add a little bit more precision, it's really about bringing together policymakers and corporate executives to engage in dialogue and free exchange of ideas and to and to encourage what's called stakeholder capitalism, meaning corporations that are responsive, not just to their boards, but to the wider public.
00:05:56.200 And that's something that I think almost everybody believes we should do.
00:05:59.860 Now, in practice, it is not open to a variety of different views.
00:06:04.800 It's highly conformist.
00:06:06.720 That's what I mean about the cult aspect of it.
00:06:09.340 They do not allow views like the views that I hold or other people that you might call energy or environmental humanists.
00:06:17.100 They don't allow the idea that really with abundant nuclear power and desalination, there is no climate crisis because we can shrink the human footprint and reduce our pollution with nuclear.
00:06:29.860 It's very biased against nuclear.
00:06:32.340 It's biased towards renewables.
00:06:35.480 It promotes things like eating insects rather than intensive agriculture, which can reduce
00:06:41.540 how much land is required for meat.
00:06:43.060 So it's incredibly ideological, pretending to be open-minded.
00:06:48.220 It also pretends to be open to various people, but it's highly exclusive.
00:06:52.200 It costs up to a million dollars for a corporation to become a partner.
00:06:56.580 It's also basically pay-to-play.
00:06:58.600 If you pay a million dollars, the expectation is that you get to be on stage.
00:07:03.240 And so you start to see in the name of transparency.
00:07:06.760 And by the way, one of the discoveries that we pointed out is that they're not transparent at all about how they use their own money.
00:07:11.940 All we know is that Al Gore manages some of it.
00:07:14.700 That's as far as we were able to get.
00:07:16.520 But you basically get what's called a front running or or kind of creating new markets where basically you go and get, let's say, the CEO of a new insect company spends a million dollars and he wants to be on stage with, you know, a former prime minister with a Tony Blair or a celebrity as a way to kind of normalize and mainstream something that most people have a lot of ick factor around.
00:07:44.040 So that's fine if you have transparency that it's a pay-to-play operation.
00:07:48.380 You're paying for your public relations, basically.
00:07:51.800 But there isn't transparency about it.
00:07:53.500 They hide that.
00:07:54.860 They engage in that kind of statement that you were making, Constantine, around, oh, it's about an open flow of ideas.
00:08:01.760 I'll tell you the other is the corruption of the media.
00:08:04.000 World Economic Forum, this is the event.
00:08:06.700 I think maybe we forgot to mention it.
00:08:08.760 It takes place in Davos, you know, at Switzerland.
00:08:10.580 But, you know, the news media are literally either paying or paid or both to be there.
00:08:18.100 So you're getting this kind of relentless barrage of information coming from these events.
00:08:22.980 But often, you know, they entered into a financial partnership with Reuters.
00:08:27.600 I mean, here you have a news media company that's acting, supposedly doing journalism,
00:08:32.320 but it's really just public relations for a bunch of for-profit companies paying to get on stage.
00:08:37.920 michael so what what are they i guess the question that an ordinary person listening about the davos
00:08:45.040 the wf the great reset you know what are they up to in simple terms like why should i give a shit
00:08:52.220 i mean control you know i mean this is sort of where i mean the conspiracy theorists on the
00:08:58.880 right who have been kind of like it's this great reset it's conspiracy they want to make you eat
00:09:03.420 insects rather than meat they want you to the other famous one was um uh all own nothing and
00:09:09.280 be happy which you know the great reset i mean it's funny because world economic forum will be
00:09:13.600 like these are all conspiracy theories and it's like well no they're actually from your website
00:09:17.080 or from the conference itself you know including but yeah they want control i mean you kind of
00:09:22.440 have a sense of it they want to make it expensive to buy to use energy they want to make it more
00:09:28.220 expensive or hard to eat meat they do want to encourage more consumption of insects they do
00:09:33.760 want to encourage that you don't own as much that you are mostly renting or that you don't have
00:09:40.200 assets they you know want to um you know basically exercise a kind of elite control over food and
00:09:50.800 energy production and not just elite but what really european um control over how countries
00:09:56.520 produce food and energy. And, you know, it requires pushback from populist movements,
00:10:03.840 you know, demanding cheap energy, because that's the basis of one of the bases of civilization.
00:10:08.880 It's also really harmful in places like Africa, where nations have corrupt leaders who are less
00:10:14.720 able to resist demands that they, you know, use solar panels rather than coal,
00:10:19.980 which is simply not possible to develop with. So you have, I think, real sinister implications
00:10:25.240 on developing economies and potentially, you know, kind of control and discomfort imposed
00:10:32.520 on developed ones. And how concerned should we be? Because, like, you know, a bunch of people
00:10:38.120 getting in a room somewhere and having crazy ideas happens all the time. Like, I get in a room with
00:10:42.900 people and we have crazy ideas too, but... It's called trigonometry. Exactly. So, how, I mean,
00:10:50.500 some of the people involved are influential and powerful and wealthy, etc. Should we be concerned,
00:10:56.840 I guess, is what I'm asking. I mean, it's funny. I think the thing I'm most concerned about is the
00:11:01.820 propaganda that comes out of them. I mean, you know, half of all people, you know, somewhere
00:11:06.400 between 30 to half say that, you know, climate change will lead to human extinction. You know,
00:11:11.180 you have children suffering anxiety disorders, believing that their very existence threatens
00:11:16.800 the polar bears or that we're having, you know, in fact, environmental trends, most of them are
00:11:21.580 going in the right direction. You know, we're moving from coal to natural gas. It's been
00:11:25.120 reducing carbon emissions in every rich country globally. They were basically flat over the last
00:11:30.740 10 years. We're protecting more endangered species around the world. The places where
00:11:36.500 endangered species are threatened is often from renewables. I mean, these are really there's like,
00:11:41.400 you know, I've surveyed the public. I used Google survey to survey the public in terms of things
00:11:45.520 they believe, and they believe the misinformation. And so, yeah, for me, this kind of circles back to,
00:11:52.380 I think, where the conversation started, which is that I think the real concern is the misinformation
00:11:56.520 coming from the mainstream news media about the nature of these threats. I think the political
00:12:02.260 right has done itself a disservice by just going too far in almost every case. Climate change is
00:12:08.200 real. It is something we should do something about. It's not an apocalyptic threat. You know,
00:12:14.820 there is a role for solar panels. I have them right over here. They're not able, you can't,
00:12:19.040 you can't lift people out of poverty with them, you know, um, insects, you know, maybe fine.
00:12:25.560 If you can safely grind them up into powder and sneak them into some food products, maybe that's
00:12:30.220 okay. There should be disclosures about it. It should not be forced on people. Um, but it's not
00:12:36.580 going to be an alternative to meat and nobody, I mean, the Koreans prefer beef too. So, you know,
00:12:41.080 I think, like, there's just some amount of, like, it's just actually it's about the misinformation more than the conspiracy.
00:12:48.160 So it's like I appreciate the way that, like, the conspiratorial right has made the World Economic Forum a kind of focusing device for a lot of bad Malthusian efforts, which, frankly, at the United Nations level are just as terrible or in the U.S. Congress are just as terrible or in the British Parliament are terrible.
00:13:05.880 World of Inform provides, including this character, the head of it, Klaus Schwab, who literally looks like a James Bond villain.
00:13:13.220 It provides a focusing device for ordinary people.
00:13:15.740 It provides some frisson for people like Russell Brand and Glenn Beck and others on the right to make a big deal of.
00:13:22.100 But I think the bottom line is it's just espousing a really terrible anti-human ideology that we need to push back against.
00:13:30.240 And what is The Great Reset?
00:13:31.760 And is that just something that they talk about, or is that likely to happen in some
00:13:37.280 shape or form?
00:13:38.820 I mean, to some extent, the Great Reset, I mean, according to them, of course, they published
00:13:42.840 a book on it and they talk about it, always meant basically accelerating the transition
00:13:47.400 from fossil fuels to renewables.
00:13:49.840 So that's the, you know, and then you kind of go, is it going to happen?
00:13:53.780 Well, no, because we can't power the world on renewables.
00:13:57.800 So to some extent, it's their own Kool-Aid that they want you to drink.
00:14:01.760 You know, they think that the world, you know, there's always been this apocalyptic thing where it's religious, right, where they go and Al Gore did it before Greta and Greta did it before Extinction Rebellion, which did it before Just Stop Oil, which, you know, World Economic Forum has been there the whole time.
00:14:16.220 But it's kind of like everybody's going to realize that we're out of harmony with nature and we need to stop eating meat and use solar panels and wind turbines.
00:14:25.240 And then we'll come together and we'll come together as a world and we'll have a kind of a gentler, kinder capitalism and we won't have war anymore and we'll be harmonized with nature.
00:14:36.920 it's a kind of return to the womb bad harmony ideology that you know basically is replacing
00:14:43.780 the older judeo-christian framework with a kind of woke green framework
00:14:49.300 michael i've seen those part of the right you uh the conspiratorial right you call them and i and
00:14:57.260 i agree with that way of labeling them how much of this comes down to the fact that everybody went
00:15:03.960 nuts over COVID. And we were put in lockdowns. In my opinion, it was incredibly excessive.
00:15:13.120 We couldn't really justify it when we look at the effects, both economic and human,
00:15:17.660 that we're seeing now. And people on the right are seeing what happens with COVID and are thinking
00:15:24.680 to themselves, well, look, somebody's got to be in charge of this. There needs to be some
00:15:28.200 grandiose plan. It's them. Oh, for sure. That had to play a part in it. I mean,
00:15:35.980 and because there is centralized power, right? There is governments that are making these
00:15:40.160 lockdown decisions. The response to COVID initially, I supported a pretty strong response,
00:15:46.280 but clearly like it was just obvious after a couple of months that it wasn't what the elites
00:15:51.560 were treating it as and that we need to get kids back in school. And we were the worst in California,
00:15:56.700 by the way my daughter was kept out of school for um a year and a half i mean huge damage done to
00:16:02.420 the most vulnerable kids my daughter's fine but other kids suffered much more so yeah i mean i
00:16:07.200 think that there's several people and i share the call you need something like a truth and
00:16:12.680 reconciliation commission or kind of like what the fuck was all that about for the last three years
00:16:18.140 you know right um which is kind of like without it being um without it continuing the cycle of
00:16:25.340 of kind of revenge or something where it's more just like, what was that about? Because,
00:16:30.200 you know, I, I know you guys are interested. I'm obsessed with the psychology of all this.
00:16:35.660 And you had Josh Slocum on who talked about the cluster B personalities on the left
00:16:40.260 that hugely resonates with my research. Just a lot of anxiety disorders, a lot of narcissism,
00:16:46.700 a lot of psychopathy demonstrated within climate change movements. I've been documenting the
00:16:52.080 narcissism of the climate activists, you know, where it's all like the world is going to end
00:16:57.020 because of me and it will be saved because of me. And there's a grandiosity there. There's also what
00:17:02.600 psychologists call splitting, which is to see things as black and white, good or bad. You see
00:17:07.240 this in Greta Thunberg's language all the time. Same thing on COVID. You know, you're a COVID
00:17:12.400 denier or you're a COVID believer. It's a real extremism. So I think there's a kind of, we're
00:17:19.860 I mean, we need to take some time to get a perspective on kind of, you know, how much
00:17:25.300 was, did people go crazy because of COVID?
00:17:27.880 How much of it was kind of in the works because of social media?
00:17:31.480 How much of it is due to longer term trends away from traditional religion towards more
00:17:36.520 secular orientations, which I think are anxiety provoking in people who have a lot of anxiety,
00:17:44.520 particularly some psychologists would argue that all anxiety is anxiety about death, including
00:17:49.760 social anxiety, fear of social ostracism, you know, how much of it is in the, you know,
00:17:56.840 you know, in sort of the move away from globalization back towards more national
00:18:02.180 orientations. I think we need to spend some time unpacking all those things and getting a clearer
00:18:06.380 view of it, because I do think what comes out of it potentially something very positive and
00:18:11.020 something very constructive, which is, you know, to be on guard against what you might call
00:18:17.960 totalitarianism, or you might call it a kind of mass psychopathy, or this kind of, I wrote,
00:18:25.740 I was writing about this a little bit yesterday, where, you know, Matt Taibbi, who was one of the
00:18:28.960 Twitter Files guys and was always skeptical of Russiagate, he was like, it felt like people
00:18:33.620 just kind of went crazy. I mean, there's something, there's a kind of madness, a kind of collective
00:18:38.620 madness that took hold around COVID, but we see it on climate change. We see it on trans issues.
00:18:46.120 you saw it on brexit we saw it on trump we actually called it trump derangement syndrome
00:18:51.880 you know where it's like i have a close uh friend relation who i said to her um i was like there's
00:19:00.620 just this evidence of the russia collusion's not there and she just goes well i just hate him so
00:19:04.580 much you know and it's kind of like it's nice because it was actually like right so you hate
00:19:09.860 him so much that you think that he did this bad thing that he didn't do. And I think just being
00:19:16.660 able to, in that environment, to sort of surface it and go, great, let's talk about that. Because
00:19:22.100 then we can kind of, I think you're actually able to loosen up some of that to kind of be like,
00:19:26.220 I don't like Trump either, but I don't think he was like working for Putin. And that's actually
00:19:32.000 different. And you need to, you need to go, I don't like that by the pussy, but I don't think
00:19:36.580 is working for Putin, you know, and if you can't disentangle that, then I think you've got some
00:19:41.980 trouble. I think we can disentangle it. I think the moment to do that is now as temperatures have
00:19:47.340 come down a bit. You know, I think even the fact this article I keep mentioning about from
00:19:53.100 Columbia Journalism Review is out now, wasn't out a year ago, even though you probably could
00:19:57.700 have published it a year ago. I think it suggests that some thawing is going on, some truth telling
00:20:02.700 is occurring, and hopefully some amount of reconciliation. I don't think we're going to
00:20:06.520 go back to that earlier form of objective journalism, but I do think we might find
00:20:10.740 ourselves to find more people, particularly people on the left, able to recognize the excesses of the
00:20:16.640 last several years. Yeah, and when you were talking about anxiety, I mean, one of the things
00:20:20.960 I actually did, and I was at an event where Isabella Kaminska, who you mentioned earlier,
00:20:26.080 and I unheard, we were talking, and I wasn't there to talk about the Great Reset, but it came up.
00:20:31.940 and i do see this obsessiveness with the anti it's not even the right necessarily it's a kind
00:20:36.900 of conspiratorial anti-woke people who certainly to me seem to have gone quite far it's almost like
00:20:43.900 to them you know the wf and klaus schwab they're kind of like the oppressive page his heteronormative
00:20:50.100 patriarchy they're playing that role that they play for the left an overarching system that is
00:20:55.700 responsible for all the problems that you experience in your life yes and i'm kind of
00:21:00.980 concerned about that because it's it's a victimhood mentality um you know it's it's kind of the same
00:21:07.060 thing in a way irrespective of the rights and wrongs of of what people say about the the forum
00:21:12.780 there is a disempowering high anxiety neurotic conspiratorial worldview that i just don't think
00:21:20.520 is particularly healthy for people uh and it's not constructive right uh and i think what i'm
00:21:25.980 interested in in thinking about ways of how do we how do we form a positive vision of the future
00:21:31.820 and you and i've been talking privately about this as well it's like we need a pro-human ideology of
00:21:36.620 some kind whatever that looks like and i i certainly am not the person to come up with it but
00:21:41.020 there are some things that we start to have to we have to start going what are we for what do we
00:21:47.520 believe what is the counter vision okay the malthusians want to reduce the population of
00:21:52.060 the world to like a billion or whatever and take it backwards. What do we want? What are we for?
00:21:57.660 Right? Absolutely, Constance. I mean, I think it's so important that I'm considering
00:22:02.980 going to London in a few months to have this conversation. I do think that the conversation
00:22:09.460 that's occurring in Britain right now and in the United States are very similar. And traditionally,
00:22:14.720 these are great moments, moments of change like this are chances to kind of
00:22:18.520 of um learn from each other and and i think build that common platform you know for me i you know
00:22:26.640 i'm always inspired by you know when when rock and roll got too baroque and crazy in uh you know
00:22:32.640 there was a punk rock response and the punk rock response was like okay you have one guitar that's
00:22:38.960 all one guitar a drummer and a singer and that's it that's all i mean punk got crazy later but
00:22:44.520 for me, I kind of go, it's a punk rock moment and you've got to get back to basics. So what is it
00:22:50.200 that, what is the basics? And I kind of go basics is you got to have a civilization. You have to
00:22:57.660 have a civilization, whether you're liberal or conservative, you know, conservatives are kind of
00:23:02.420 trying to prevent a lot of change and they want to protect things. So they're on team civilization.
00:23:08.120 There's obviously the radical left, which is nihilistic and anti-civilization in a lot of ways,
00:23:13.480 but they're not the majority even of the left, I don't think. They're probably a third. So you
00:23:19.580 start to get a coalition of the normies. And I think it's a pro-civilization coalition. And I
00:23:25.160 would say three big things, abundant energy, law and order, and meritocracy. And on all three of
00:23:32.120 those things, you have very large amounts of support of the public. You have most of the
00:23:38.920 right, not all of it, but most of it, and I think a significant part, if not most of
00:23:43.820 the left.
00:23:44.900 That means that abundant energy means, sure, we're going to do some renewables, but we
00:23:48.920 need abundant natural gas and nuclear, or we're going to burn a lot more coal.
00:23:53.620 Law and order means you have to enforce laws, including laws against loitering, because
00:23:58.140 that's how we prevent sex trafficking, human trafficking.
00:24:01.180 You have to have laws against not sleeping in public, because that's how you get homelessness
00:24:04.240 or using drugs in public, because that's how you get addiction and drug dealing.
00:24:08.920 And you also, but that means that's not punishment either. That's actually enforcing laws and with an eye towards rehabilitation. And then the third part is meritocracy. Like the bridges have got to be made by the best engineers, not by people selected for their wokeness or the bridges are down, you know, or the pipelines are going to explode or the math is not going to be right.
00:24:31.540 So you've got to affirm those three things at a minimum. And I think that then becomes the basis for something. And I think there's other questions around things like, you know, gender ideology and trans and are some folks, you know, you know, at what age do people get to decide these things?
00:24:51.460 I think we need to work out. But in some ways, I just go, we need to reaffirm, you know, free
00:24:56.080 speech. These are some of the, I think, return to basics and then start to answer some of the
00:25:02.680 harder questions like social media regulation, like gender reassignment, surgeries and drugs,
00:25:11.660 issues where there's some complexity there that is worth working out. But I think reaffirming that
00:25:17.260 pro-civilization position will demonstrate that the anti-civilization nihilists on the right or
00:25:23.660 the left, right, who don't want to be part of society are really, are more marginalized and
00:25:29.420 we can have a conversation that wins a majority of support. Michael, I'm curious why you left out
00:25:35.520 what I would certainly add as a necessary plank of that, which is family and children. Is it just
00:25:41.300 you didn't want to add an extra or do you think that's a more complicated conversation?
00:25:45.960 I think it's much more complicated. I think it's part of that conversation that has to come out. But, you know, not first of all, not everybody has a family, you know, and yet civilization has got to be universal. It's not civilization for some of us. It's civilization has always been everybody gets to everybody follows the same laws. Everybody has the same protections, whether they have a family or not.
00:26:08.620 Now, I think there's a set of kind of pre-political things that are important.
00:26:14.300 Definitely family.
00:26:15.760 I mean, my family is the most important thing for me.
00:26:18.040 So for sure, I couldn't be here if I hadn't been raised in a particular way.
00:26:22.700 So I totally believe in it.
00:26:24.620 I'm not sure how it interacts with politics.
00:26:27.520 And I think that at worst, it ends up imposing a kind of inappropriately imposing a kind
00:26:33.580 of morality that should not be imposed.
00:26:35.280 You know, I'm really inspired by, I spent a lot of time talking about the Netherlands, but you could talk a lot about a lot of Western European countries, but in the Netherlands, you're a citizen. And so you have certain rights. It's very liberal. It's always been very progressive on gay issues, but they're also, you know, the marijuana laws are liberalized, but the city is safe. They, they don't allow open air drug dealing.
00:26:58.300 And I believe they're part of this increasing backlash against allowing minors to use puberty blocking drugs and sex, you know, and gender reassignment. So I don't know, for me, I kind of go, I don't know that I think civilization probably requires functioning families.
00:27:16.440 I'm just not sure I would make it part of that agenda because I think there's a lot of ways to
00:27:21.180 make a family. And I think I start to see some of the people that I agree with on a lot of issues
00:27:26.880 like conservatives start to say, you know, you know, gay, you know, same sex couples are not
00:27:32.580 families, um, should not be allowed to adopt. And I start to get a little nervous about what
00:27:37.840 the implications of being pro-family are. Michael, it's been an absolute pleasure.
00:27:43.420 thank you so much for coming on the show before we do our questions for locals uh the last question
00:27:49.840 we always ask is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should
00:27:54.900 be and you're not allowed to say the great reset yeah i mean i would say even continuing with the
00:28:01.980 what we just talked about i think the the i think one of the most important insights that i've been
00:28:07.100 i've gained from my research is i think the vast majority of people maybe everybody needs some kind
00:28:13.180 of faith. And if you put it in more psychological terms, everybody needs an immortality project,
00:28:19.920 everybody needs some story they tell themselves about how their lives matter, and not just in
00:28:25.220 the lives that they're on earth, but potentially after that. And I think recognizing that need,
00:28:31.540 that psychological and spiritual need, and having an open conversation about it and encouraging it
00:28:37.840 for others to have that purpose in their lives, that you need that, I think is really liberating.
00:28:44.720 I think it helps to answer and explain and understand why we're seeing a lot of anxiety
00:28:50.680 disorders, a lot of paranoia, a lot of alienation, because people don't know that they're actually
00:28:56.320 pursuing through their politics, a spiritual project. And that maybe if they were more aware
00:29:03.860 of that that really they're bringing to climate change a kind of apocalyptic religion subconsciously
00:29:10.700 that they would be less dogmatic more tolerant more open to being wrong and to considering
00:29:18.080 you know other ways of doing things and we can call it all lives matter which i'm sure
00:29:23.560 will bring everybody together michael michael it's been an absolute pleasure i look forward
00:29:31.360 to seeing you when you're here in London.
00:29:33.520 And we're going to do a couple of questions
00:29:35.260 that our supporters have already submitted
00:29:37.000 for you, for our locals, that only
00:29:39.280 they will get to see. But for now, thanks
00:29:41.280 for joining us, and thank you guys for watching
00:29:43.280 and listening. We'll see you very soon with another
00:29:45.460 brilliant episode like this one,
00:29:47.320 Aurore Show. All of them go out at 7pm
00:29:49.360 UK time. And for those of you who like your
00:29:51.240 trigonometry on the go, it's also
00:29:53.260 available as a podcast. Take care
00:29:55.320 and see you soon, guys.
00:29:58.040 Are you planning to run
00:29:59.300 again as for Governor of California?
00:30:01.360 Or are you going for a 2024 bid as an independent?