TRIGGERnometry - Why Ordinary People Have Less and Less Power with Joel Kotkin

00:00:00.000 We spent basically the entire period since the Middle Ages, you know, with ups and downs,

00:00:06.820 moving towards a society where if you worked hard and you developed a decent number of skills,

00:00:15.720 you could live a modest middle-class lifestyle and you could afford to raise a family

00:00:20.360 and you could afford maybe to have a little backyard or a nice flat.

00:00:26.460 That was what we had achieved.

00:00:29.440 And by 1970, Western societies, Japan as well, had achieved that role.

00:00:36.380 And now we're moving exactly away from it.

00:00:39.220 And if you think that you can do that without there being major social disruption, I think you're wrong.

00:00:59.440 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:01:14.420 And this is the show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:01:20.320 Our brilliant guest today is a geographer and the author of a number of books,

00:01:24.240 the latest of which is The Coming of Neofeudalism, A Warning to the Global Middle Class. 0.99

00:01:28.720 Joel Kotkin, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:30.380 Oh, it's my pleasure.

00:01:32.140 It's really great to have you on.

00:01:33.740 Can't wait to discuss your book and other things that you've written about recently.

00:01:38.000 Before we do, though, tell everybody who are you, how are you, where you are,

00:01:41.540 what has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?

00:01:45.400 Well, basically, I was born in Germany.

00:01:49.300 My father was in the Army.

00:01:51.020 I grew up in New York.

00:01:53.220 My family's been in New York since about 1900.

00:01:57.420 So I have roots there. I moved to California, went to the University of California at Berkeley in the early 70s, which was interesting.

00:02:07.160 And then I've been a journalist basically all my life. I've had university think tank affiliations, but my mindset is that of a writer, of a journalist.

00:02:17.520 And, you know, one of the things that's missing today is as we keep trying to find specialties, so people write about this and write about that, but they don't write about the big picture.

00:02:28.440 You know, it's like Sorokin wrote many years ago that we know more and more about less and less.

00:02:35.660 And I think that's where we're, you know, where we've headed.

00:02:39.900 I think of myself as just a writer.

00:02:42.740 And if you say who would I consider, you know, role models or people that I would look up to would be people like de Toadful, Weber, but many people who were not necessarily academics.

00:03:00.700 And one of the interesting things in the last few years is that many of the really interesting books are not coming from academia.

00:03:08.040 They're coming from outside.

00:03:09.860 And, you know, when I wrote The History of Cities, which was published all over the world, it was really interesting to me then.

00:03:18.520 I said, well, how come you asked me?

00:03:20.420 And they said, because, you know, you write in this strange language called English in a way that people can understand.

00:03:30.700 And I think that that role as a writer, as somebody without a particular political affiliation, without an ideological sort of stamp, that kind of person and function in society has really diminished in the last 50, 60 years.

00:03:49.940 What we used to call public intellectuals, they almost don't exist anymore.

00:03:54.540 And I think that whether or not that can be revived or not is going to be a big question.

00:03:59.600 Well, we're grateful that you exist

00:04:01.180 and many of our former and upcoming guests,

00:04:03.700 I would say, are public intellectuals.

00:04:06.060 And that's one of the reasons it's such a pleasure

00:04:08.240 to have you on the show.

00:04:09.200 I was going to get straight into the neo-feudalism stuff,

00:04:11.920 but you piqued my curiosity

00:04:14.120 by talking about Berkeley in the 70s.

00:04:17.580 What have you seen in the last 50 years

00:04:20.800 that's been happening to our society

00:04:23.280 that stands out for you since those days in particular?

00:04:26.120 Oh, boy.

00:04:26.680 Well, I think there are some good things and some bad things. I mean, I think certainly attitudes towards race, towards gay people have certainly improved considerably, maybe gone a little bit overboard in some areas.

00:04:44.660 But basically, I think those are improvements. I think the offerings, if you can afford them, of quality of food, quality of certain kind of entertainment experiences, that's gone on. I lived in Los Angeles in 1975 with Southern California. We moved to Orange County six years ago.

00:05:05.360 But, you know, living here, Los Angeles, when I moved there, it was in a lot of ways more endearing than it is today.

00:05:13.560 But the food is better. The culture is better.

00:05:16.720 It's a more, there's certainly much more integration of particularly Hispanic and Asian Americans in the society.

00:05:26.840 So there are some improvements.

00:05:28.780 The negatives, the spirit of intellectual debate is being squashed.

00:05:33.980 The rise of the oligarchic tech companies and their Wall Street backers are constraining speech, constraining how people talk.

00:05:46.300 And even in some cases, as a parent, I noticed they've had a very negative effect in many ways on younger people in the sense of tying them more and more to their phones and making it a little bit more difficult for them to relate to other people.

00:06:02.480 And obviously on the education side, it's a disaster. I mean, the kind of standards that we had at, let's say, at Berkeley or in almost any school in 40, 50 years ago, people actually read books.

00:06:19.300 I don't know if you've noticed that, like right now, if I assign three books, four books for a class, maybe they'll get read.

00:06:29.100 A lot of them won't get read.

00:06:31.680 And sometimes you'll, in the past, I could have eight or nine books and they would read the books.

00:06:38.100 I mean, so what we're doing is we're sort of, you know, even as we're technologically advancing in many ways, we're socially and intellectually regressing.

00:06:46.820 that's a bad combination it is i agree with you and so speaking of what you're talking about in

00:06:53.680 your book which is essentially the ever-growing gap not only in wealth and income but also in

00:06:59.680 influence and power between a small elite and everybody else a friend of mine who's a fan of

00:07:04.780 the show sent me a a graph earlier today which was the genie coefficient uh for the western world

00:07:10.700 And it's literally like a line like this for the last 60 years, basically.

00:07:15.800 So the rich are getting richer or the rich part of society is getting richer

00:07:19.980 and the poor part of society is not at anything like the same rate.

00:07:23.820 And what you talk about is the logical end product of that process, right?

00:07:28.820 Right, right.

00:07:29.740 And which is already, you know, clear.

00:07:31.940 Like, you know, you think about how we discuss, let's say, the issue of urban renaissance

00:07:37.400 It's a favorite topic of the progressive elites and also the real estate interest, including many from the right.

00:07:45.080 Well, what they're writing about is the world that they live in.

00:07:48.100 Like when I was working on a project in London, yes, there are some of the richest precincts in the world and certainly in the UK are in London.

00:07:56.640 But if you bother to go outside of those areas, actually, there's also some of the highest rates of poverty in all of Europe.

00:08:08.360 I mean, it's not even, you know, you see that in New York where they'll say, oh, the cities come back.

00:08:14.200 And yes, in certain areas.

00:08:16.220 But the poorer areas have become poorer.

00:08:19.200 And many of the middle class suburban areas went through somewhat of a decline.

00:08:24.660 So, you know, what we have is we have a media that functions in a way, but that gives us a very distorted picture of what's actually going on in the society and how things are reported.

00:08:40.720 I mean, my wife has to listen to me when I, well, I can't, sometimes I can't even read the New York Times.

00:08:46.720 I'll read a piece and I say, where was the editor?

00:08:48.920 Did they ever think that maybe there's another point of view or maybe to question it, particularly on issues like race, climate, gender, it is like, you know, it is newspeak now.

00:09:01.560 I mean, it's just like you cannot, you can't, you can't even acknowledge that there's another side.

00:09:08.180 You can't acknowledge that maybe there's some nuance here.

00:09:11.280 So I just find the intellectual environment, you know, very, very difficult.

00:09:16.240 And I have no, by the way, I have no sympathy for the far right at all.

00:09:19.820 You know, and they're just as bad.

00:09:21.940 It's just that they don't have the big megaphones.

00:09:25.780 And it's a great point.

00:09:27.700 And what these people on the left and don't seem to understand is that by doing these pieces, by ridiculing people, by not letting people into the conversation, all you're doing is emboldening them and you're radicalizing them.

00:09:44.340 They don't seem to understand this.

00:09:46.220 That's a really big point.

00:09:47.420 I'm actually working on an essay right now, you know, talking about President Biden's

00:09:51.920 just bizarre policies of, you know, we're going to help, you know, we're going to have

00:09:56.980 special programs to help people by their racial characteristic, basically, you know, black.

00:10:03.300 Well, in a country where Hispanics are now much more numerous and Asians may eventually 1.00

00:10:08.700 be more numerous, what are you going to do?

00:10:11.720 Are you going to have racial vetting for positions?

00:10:16.280 Are we going to decide that the number of pilots has to be X percentage to match some other percentage in the population?

00:10:25.460 I mean, this is sort of the direction that we're going.

00:10:28.800 And your point, I think this is one of the biggest spurs for white nationalism.

00:10:34.560 I mean, look, I'm in what we would say in Yiddish. 0.97

00:10:37.560 I'm an ultra-cock. 0.91

00:10:38.360 I'm going to be 70 next year.

00:10:39.680 So I'm, you know, I've had a pretty good run as much of my generation. I look behind me and I say, if I were a young, a white male in trying to get a job in a corporation today, I realize that I'm in a race with lead weights on my feet.

00:10:58.560 Now, if that's the case, which I think in many cases it is, those people are going to be resentful and you're going to sow racial resentment by establishing racial quotas in societies like the UK, like the US, like Australia, like Canada, that have had some terrible racist past, but had moved to a position where they were making sure that there was no discrimination.

00:11:26.560 Now we're moving to a different kind of discrimination. That can only create an ever more angry society on both the minority point of view and in the, let's say, the native born predominantly white population. It's a recipe for social chaos. 0.86

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00:13:04.300 It is a recipe for social chaos.

00:13:06.620 And the other problem is, Joel, saying to these people, you know, you're lucky, you're privileged.

00:13:10.400 And they're going around going, well, look, wages haven't increased in real time.

00:13:14.420 inflation through the roof and by the way i'm probably never going to be able to own a property

00:13:19.800 right right when this and and this is an issue that i would say if the left focused on issues of

00:13:28.180 upward mobility and how to make life better for for people irrespective of the race you know

00:13:34.740 why should we have a system where a kid from appalachia in which there has been generations

00:13:43.060 of poverty or in the north of England, you know, in some coal mining town where things have not

00:13:49.300 gone well for 50 years or more, why is that child who's brought up in very difficult circumstances,

00:13:57.380 very similar circumstances to an inner city minority population, how do you get that population

00:14:05.520 um and and say to them you're privileged but the you know many of um african americans and and

00:14:15.340 certainly other minorities are upper middle class or middle class and and are doing fine i mean you

00:14:22.060 can't it you you've really got to approach it from a class point of view from a class perspective

00:14:27.780 of how do you raise the the the lower classes how do you raise the working class to middle class

00:14:34.460 How do you provide incentive for the middle class to work hard and provide for themselves?

00:14:41.980 That whole sort of gestalt of politics that dominated much of American and European politics is being transformed by an obsession on climate, an obsession on race, an obsession on gender,

00:14:58.000 which, by the way, is heavily funded by the oligarchs, because as long as we're not talking about class, as long as we're not talking about the fact that maybe it's not a great idea that Microsoft controls 90 percent of the operating systems on computers.

00:15:14.800 As long as we talk about race, talk about about transgender, talk about, you know, how the culture should should relate to certain groups.

00:15:26.120 that isn't what we should be discussing the real problem in in in the u.s and and around the western

00:15:33.800 world in increasingly in east asia certainly soon in china is this class divide and if we don't

00:15:40.600 figure out a way to provide younger people with something close to the opportunities that our

00:15:45.680 generation had my generation had i think we're in for a lot of trouble of and coming from different

00:15:51.440 directions. And when I think about feudalism, I sort of see a Game of Thrones type of world,

00:15:58.920 right? And one of the features, of course, is that if you're born into the royal family, let's say,

00:16:05.120 you're going to stay in the royal family. You're going to be rich and powerful and influential in

00:16:09.340 that world. And if you're born a peasant, you're going to die a peasant. If you're born a blacksmith 0.80

00:16:14.500 son, the best you can be is a blacksmith, right? Are you genuinely seeing that kind of future for

00:16:23.120 us where your parents and their station in life almost predetermines your outcomes?

00:16:29.080 Well, let's put it this way. Upward mobility is more difficult. You mentioned property,

00:16:33.940 probably the most important way that the middle and working classes have traditionally developed

00:16:38.180 wealth. I mean, you think about my mother or my mother-in-law, as they got into their 80s and

00:16:45.420 90s, it was that property that allowed them to retire, not in subsistence, but with a certain

00:16:52.640 degree of comfort. That next generation isn't going to have that opportunity in large numbers,

00:16:59.100 particularly who can afford, I live in Orange County, one of the nicest places you could ever

00:17:05.460 want to live in many ways. But, you know, a house here is going to cost even at the bottom,

00:17:13.580 maybe eight, nine hundred thousand dollars. And a decent house in a good school district is going

00:17:19.860 to probably run you over a million. How many people who do not have wealthy parents are going

00:17:25.900 to be able to afford that? So what you're seeing is like when you poll people and you say, young

00:17:30.620 people say well how are you going to buy a house the biggest um factor now is inheritance you know

00:17:36.660 that literally you can you know so that like for instance if you like i have a friend who who is

00:17:42.720 selling real estate in brooklyn and in a very nice part of brooklyn and and what she tells me is that

00:17:48.840 half the over half the people over 45 under 45 um have to have co-signing parents so if you're

00:17:57.520 from a poor family, exactly how are you going to get in this market? So what we have to figure out

00:18:03.520 is how do we expand ownership? How do we expand entrepreneurship? How do we expand opportunity?

00:18:09.720 Now, I think this is what Democrats should be talking about and what the Labour Party in the

00:18:16.080 UK should be talking about and the Labour Party in Australia should be talking about and the

00:18:21.720 liberals in Canada should be talking about. But they're not. They're talking about transgender 0.94

00:18:27.520 issues and what a woman is. And they're talking about, I don't have a particular position. 0.80

00:18:35.120 And I'm just like, this is their obsession. Systemic racism, canceling people who may

00:18:42.120 have said something that somebody somewhere may have found remotely offensive. Having special

00:18:48.440 programs for people by skin color. This is a terrible agenda, defunding the police. I mean, 0.99

00:18:55.960 that's a particular issue here. Adopting climate policies where the rich who push for extreme

00:19:03.100 climate policies are not affected. What they're saying is, you've got to cut back. So I'm going

00:19:09.400 to be told by Jeff Bezos, you've got to reduce your carbon footprint. Here's a guy whose company

00:19:17.980 his carbon footprint is probably bigger than those of some African countries. And you've got a guy

00:19:25.460 who's got four or five houses, you know, God knows what. I don't begrudge him. I mean, I think

00:19:32.000 I've met Jeff. I think he's a really smart guy. And, you know, and he has created a terrific

00:19:37.640 product, unlike some of the other people who have also made a lot of money. But the reality is,

00:19:43.720 You know, if you're going to address climate change, you can't have it in a situation at very medieval, I have to say, where the rich buy indulges.

00:19:52.140 Well, I bought, you know, 3,000 acres of woodlands in Brazil.

00:19:57.860 So therefore, I can fly in my own private jet and then worry about climate change.

00:20:04.020 But you better not get on that Ryanair flight from London to Spain for your one week of sunshine that you look forward to all year.

00:20:18.060 I mean, if you're going to make a change, you have to look at what the effects are on working people, on the poor.

00:20:30.560 Or, you know, for instance, we go to Africa and we say to Africa, no fossil fuels.

00:20:37.920 Well, here's a continent where electricity is in short supply and there isn't going to be enough wind and solar to power those economies as their populations are one place in the world with the populations growing.

00:20:52.000 We're not even thinking about the effects.

00:20:53.720 I'll give you a great little story.

00:20:55.180 I got a, once in a while, you know, I don't know if you probably have these, you know, people embedded in these increasingly insane organizations.

00:21:04.940 Occasionally they contact you and say, can I talk to you?

00:21:07.860 So I talked to this guy, PhD candidate at Stanford working on electric vehicles.

00:21:15.200 And he said, well, so here's my situation.

00:21:20.000 I'm working on electric vehicles, and, you know, he's okay with it.

00:21:25.580 But he says, every time I ask the question, where's the power going to come from?

00:21:29.320 They say, don't worry about it.

00:21:31.420 And he says, I guess I'm an engineer.

00:21:33.860 I'm taught to say, well, if I do X, there's going to be Y.

00:21:38.020 Now, do I mitigate it?

00:21:40.400 What are the effects going to be?

00:21:41.660 That's what I'm supposed to be doing as an engineer.

00:21:44.560 And he's told not to do it.

00:21:45.640 The groupthink, the desire to make, to not ask questions.

00:21:52.220 I read newspaper accounts and I just, I say, you know, I said we had fires here in California.

00:22:00.760 Now, there are lots of reasons we've had fires in California for a very long time.

00:22:04.740 Actually, we have less of the big urban fires than we used to have.

00:22:08.500 But, okay, the fires of climate change.

00:22:11.060 No, climate change might be part of it, but there are very detailed reports from state commissions that say a lot of it was the policies that the Greens imposed on fires.

00:22:23.780 They wouldn't let them take out the old growth, and that was very combustible.

00:22:30.240 A reporter should be looking at both of these issues. 0.93

00:22:33.700 They should be talking about the climate and what the effect might be, and also maybe are we doing something wrong on the policy side?

00:22:40.380 Are there other reasons why these things happen than just to say, oh, it's the climate crisis?

00:22:46.400 So now we're like medieval clerics running around saying every bad thing, every time there's a drop of rain that happens at a time it shouldn't happen, or every time the temperature is high.

00:22:58.940 I always find it interesting that every time we have high temperatures, there's major coverage, and when there's low temperatures, we have very little.

00:23:05.360 Now, look, I believe that there's climate change. I think it's probably likely that there's something going on. But instead of thinking about how do we adapt to it, we're deciding that we're going to punish the peasants and make them essentially pay for the obsessions of the aristocrats.

00:23:26.140 I mean, you know, it's really, to me, it's just incredible how we sit there and we think about making major transitions that are just absolutely against the interest of a large portion, the majority portion of Western societies.

00:23:43.280 And at the same time, we're depriving opportunity to advance for the parts of the world that are the majority of the world, which are developing countries.

00:23:52.980 It's just astounding to me that we don't even seem to consider this in discussions because, you know, basically governments in most cases and increasingly are run as technocracies.

00:24:10.920 And, you know, to them, every problem has to be solved in a particular way.

00:24:16.360 And we don't consider, like, for instance, here in California, they say, well, we want to cut greenhouse gases so everybody has to live in an apartment in a dense area.

00:24:25.860 Now, besides the fact that that science there is actually not very good, the reality is if you're telling a whole generation that they're never going to own a house, that they're going to have to pay high rents, and that there's no way that they're ever going to have what they want, what do they expect?

00:24:42.340 What kind of society do you think you're going to have?

00:24:44.380 You think you're going to have a bunch of happy campers?

00:24:47.380 Well, you know, you better be selling SOMA on a massive level if you want that to happen.

00:24:52.600 Right. And Joel, one of the things you just talked about is ideology.

00:24:57.000 And I'm sure that's a big part of some of the things that are happening.

00:25:00.160 But when we talk about the housing crisis, particularly here in the UK, where it's very pronounced.

00:25:04.740 Yes.

00:25:05.080 I also think I talk about this in my book a little bit as well, because what I see there is, yes, partly it's about ideology.

00:25:12.080 But partly now, it's all about the incentives.

00:25:15.620 People who own property like me, right,

00:25:18.200 have absolutely no personal short-term incentive

00:25:21.520 to see that problem fixed.

00:25:24.140 Because we benefit, because we are now part of,

00:25:28.120 like, we've got our foot on the ladder,

00:25:29.920 and as the ladder moves up and further away

00:25:31.820 from everybody else, we're going to be propelled with it.

00:25:34.480 And screw all the guys over there, right?

00:25:37.340 He's pointing at me, Joel, by the way.

00:25:39.240 I don't own property.

00:25:40.420 And that's how it will stay.

00:25:41.640 You peasant. 0.96

00:25:45.260 Exactly.

00:25:46.500 He's the peasant.

00:25:47.980 So Francis is going to remain a serf, which is good. 0.98

00:25:50.700 But my broader point is, like, we've got to a position

00:25:53.720 where none of us seem to be thinking about anything

00:25:57.080 beyond our own personal short-term interest.

00:26:00.140 And I've just had, my wife and I just had our first child,

00:26:03.960 and it's already shifting the way I think about this

00:26:06.460 because I'm now thinking about other people, the future.

00:26:10.200 It's not just about me.

00:26:11.640 What is going to be the case when my son is 40 years old, right?

00:26:15.300 But we don't make decisions as a society on that basis.

00:26:18.420 We don't think about what the housing crisis is doing to the marriage rate,

00:26:22.140 what it's doing to the average age of the first-time mother,

00:26:25.380 what it's doing to us as a society.

00:26:27.400 The point that you make, if everybody's living in a flat share

00:26:30.280 with five other people in the city with no access to nature,

00:26:32.980 no access to their own property, etc.,

00:26:34.740 what is that actually going to do to human brains and human behaviour

00:26:38.220 and the stuff that spills out into the streets?

00:26:40.080 We only think about the short term right here, right now. What benefit to me?

00:26:44.860 Well, we have, you know, we certainly have that here. I mean, there is a strange alliance. And I think you have this in the UK as well. The upper class of property owners are also the biggest environmentalists because they don't want to see development.

00:27:02.220 You know, they don't want, you know, somebody to build, you know, 10,000 houses in Essex.

00:27:07.840 You know, they don't want to do that because they know that that means that my property, which has gone due to no intelligence of my own, has gone from, let's say, a very common here is California being, you know, probably one of the epicenters of all this.

00:27:26.520 you know people who bought a house for 150 200 000 30 years ago it's now worth a million half

00:27:35.340 why would i you know why would i want to give this up so the the the danger with is also that

00:27:42.440 much of the property is now owned by people who don't have children or um or their children are

00:27:48.900 already gone. So they don't really care. And so I think that we do have a, nobody is really

00:27:57.120 looking at the future, or not nobody, but most people are not really looking at a future that

00:28:02.900 I think is socially sustainable. We can't have a society in which, you know, if we go 20, 30 years

00:28:09.500 from now, and let's say in the UK, home ownership goes from, let's say 50% to 30%. Do you think

00:28:17.500 that's going to be a stable society. I mean, we spent basically the entire period since the

00:28:23.900 Middle Ages, you know, with ups and downs, moving towards a society where if you worked hard

00:28:31.380 and you developed a decent number of skills, you could live a modest middle-class lifestyle and

00:28:38.980 you could afford to raise a family and you could afford maybe to have a little backyard or a nice

00:28:44.780 a nice flat that that was what we had achieved we by 1970 western societies japan as well

00:28:53.960 had achieved that goal and now we're moving exactly away from it and if you think that

00:29:00.600 you can do that without there being major social disruption i think you're wrong can i just pick up

00:29:06.660 on one other point that you made earlier which is about the environmental stuff um and we've got

00:29:11.580 net zero here in the UK, and anyone who says anything about how this may cause some problems

00:29:16.440 is automatically a climate change denier and all of that rubbish. I'm pretty convinced climate

00:29:22.940 change is happening. I'm pretty convinced it's caused by human activity to some extent. But I

00:29:28.800 also don't think impoverishing the people who are already poor in society is the answer.

00:29:33.740 And the main point I wanted to raise with you is what you said about technocracy, because

00:29:37.640 if you had a referendum on net zero in the UK,

00:29:40.760 I don't think you would get over 20%, personally.

00:29:43.580 I mean, I haven't seen the polling,

00:29:44.600 but I don't think it's a popular thing to do,

00:29:46.680 particularly when you explain to people

00:29:48.060 how much it's going to cost them.

00:29:50.140 But we've never had any public conversation

00:29:52.400 about whether this is an approach

00:29:54.640 that we want to take or not.

00:29:56.180 It's kind of foisted on us by the politicians.

00:29:59.320 And no one really particularly cares

00:30:01.900 what the ordinary person thinks.

00:30:03.300 They don't particularly care what the polling is even.

00:30:05.700 is just something that the people who are smarter

00:30:08.980 and more, you know, respectable than us

00:30:11.800 have decided that we must do.

00:30:13.360 And that's it.

00:30:14.840 Well, I think we're moving towards,

00:30:16.700 I think that you're exactly right.

00:30:18.200 I mean, you take here in California,

00:30:22.480 Governor Newsom basically says,

00:30:24.100 we're going to get rid of, 0.99

00:30:25.060 we're going to get rid of gas,

00:30:27.860 the gas industry.

00:30:29.120 We're going to wipe out 300,000 jobs.

00:30:31.080 Because California, by the way,

00:30:32.480 sits on a pool of oil and gas.

00:30:34.260 if nobody noticed, but John Paul Getty's wealth comes from that in part. But the reality is

00:30:43.300 what we do is we say, okay, we're going to, everyone's going to have to have EVs. Now,

00:30:48.640 the problem is EVs are A, expensive. God knows where the electricity is going to come from.

00:30:56.040 And if you know the economies of places like South and East LA or Oakland, they're filled

00:31:02.160 with car repair stores, people constantly working on their cars.

00:31:07.940 There's a whole car culture.

00:31:10.040 You'd never get that through the legislature.

00:31:12.660 You would have a huge problem.

00:31:15.400 You just say, see, what COVID is, one of the worst parts about COVID is it put in place

00:31:22.500 a dictatorial regime.

00:31:24.640 It's good for you.

00:31:26.300 We're taking care of you.

00:31:27.300 We now have the head of the EPA talking about not only do we want to call people who have any question on climate science, we're going to basically kick them off social media.

00:31:41.160 Anybody who disagrees how to deal with climate, that disagrees from the party line, they should be excluded too.

00:31:48.600 That's where we're headed.

00:31:49.620 um and and you know the you know when i teach a class on on the future and the book that i think

00:31:58.320 holds up best is uh huxley's uh brave new world i think you know if huxley knew about digital

00:32:05.460 technology he'd probably have had it all right it's sort of like we have a society which is

00:32:10.580 increasing control by a managerial elite you know what burnham wrote about um you know this sort of

00:32:16.740 idea of there being a uber class who know best, and they are empowered by this very wealthy

00:32:25.420 aristocratic class who supports them. Now, whether or not these two classes, what I call the 0.53

00:32:31.860 clerisy and the oligarchs, whether they will continue to be able to be in harmony, that's

00:32:39.880 going to be very interesting to see. It is astounding to me, by the way, that net zero is

00:32:44.460 being imposed by a conservative regime. It's kind of remarkable. If the labor rights were smart,

00:32:51.140 they would oppose it. But the problem is that climate change orthodoxy is so powerful on the

00:32:58.620 left, I think they won't be able to do it. They'll probably say, oh no, we have to get the net zero

00:33:02.960 tomorrow, not 20 years from now. Oh, absolutely. Isn't the problem, Joel, this? We are addicted

00:33:11.680 to offering simple solutions to incredibly complex problems.

00:33:16.380 Yes.

00:33:16.680 That's what we're doing all the time.

00:33:18.560 That's what all discussions seem to be about.

00:33:21.680 Oh, I think that's exactly right.

00:33:23.060 I think that's really, you know, like, you know, people say,

00:33:27.380 okay, a guy's running for mayor of Los Angeles.

00:33:31.200 You know, I don't know if he'll win or not.

00:33:33.100 Rick Caruso, who's a fairly middle-of-the-road candidate.

00:33:36.920 And the LA Times starts ranting and raving about,

00:33:39.540 Well, you know, he's he's he doesn't have a climate plan. He's mayor. The city is overrun with homeless people. We have a crime wave. The city has some of the worst economic numbers of any in the United States today. A city that should be booming. It's, you know, it's it's the the world's large only megacity that's in an absolutely perfect climate.

00:34:01.640 OK, that's that's what Southern California is. And and and we're worried about whether whether you know what he's going to have a climate change policy. We're thinking about one city. If the state of California fell into the ocean tomorrow, it would have it would make up for maybe what China does in two months in terms of increasing emissions.

00:34:22.800 I mean, this idea of there being, you know, well, the UK is going to prove how great we are.

00:34:29.920 Meanwhile, China's just, you know, I wrote a piece recently calling it, you know, the rope-a-dope strategy. 0.97

00:34:35.240 I don't know, you're probably too young to remember Muhammad Ali.

00:34:37.900 No, no, no, no, we remember it.

00:34:39.560 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Ali versus Foreman.

00:34:42.160 Okay. Well, you know, the bottom line is the Chinese are playing us brilliantly,

00:34:49.200 And the Indians aren't far behind. 1.00

00:34:51.040 They're saying, oh, yeah, we'll get to net zero, but we're going to get to it.

00:34:55.160 By the time we get to it, your economies will have been destroyed.

00:34:58.640 English economy is already basically, you know, moving in this direction.

00:35:03.680 You'll be financial services, media, and a great vacation spot for wealthy Chinese.

00:35:10.340 That's your future if you keep going the way you're going.

00:35:12.960 Because if England gives up, the UK gives up its industrial and energy production industries and becomes, you know, tries to go this sort of net zero route while China basically supplies all the products.

00:35:30.300 That's the other thing. We looked at this in California. Oh, yeah, we can reduce the emissions in California by, A, sending people and companies to other parts of the country. So how does it benefit the climate if a cement works, leaves LA where the customers are right there, and moves to Arizona or Mexico where they have to truck it in?

00:35:55.720 You know, it's it makes no sense. It's not even the weird thing is the climate policies, I think, in many cases are more about social control and the vision that many of the the left, particularly the progressive have had and some conservatives have had for decades, for decades.

00:36:15.060 If you want to know, you know, basically, the people who are now the dominant powers in our society really, you know, aren't really, I don't think they're thinking very clearly because at some point, the middle and working classes will push back and it may not be very pretty when they do. 0.88

00:36:37.280 And that's the worry, Joe, that they are going to push back.

00:36:40.720 Because here's the thing.

00:36:42.460 If you're playing a game and you have no chance of winning,

00:36:46.120 then there's no incentive to play the game.

00:36:48.680 And in fact, there's quite a lot of incentive,

00:36:50.920 as a five-year-old would do,

00:36:52.920 this game is rigged to grab the board and flip it.

00:36:55.840 Right. Right.

00:36:57.800 Yeah, I think that's...

00:36:58.960 And I think that...

00:37:00.220 I mean, that's why you get these strange results in elections today.

00:37:04.940 Like electing Donald Trump. How could that happen? Bernie Sanders would have been the Democratic nominee had the oligarchy and the party establishment not rallied behind Biden and essentially forced everybody else out of the race.

00:37:23.540 You could have had a socialist against the lunatic in 2020.

00:37:30.520 The anger at the grassroots level is very strong.

00:37:34.140 You look at the recent elections in France.

00:37:36.220 My wife's family's from France, so I kind of follow it.

00:37:41.600 Mélenchon, a far-left Trotskyite, his group may have been the biggest winners in the legislative election.

00:37:50.540 Le Pen and Zenmour, far-right candidates, they got about 20-25% too. So at least half the

00:37:58.840 population of France is rejecting any kind of liberal capitalism.

00:38:05.480 All right, Joel, I hear you. Our audience are very familiar with these arguments because we've

00:38:10.980 explored them at length because we, like you, think these are really important issues that are

00:38:16.060 coming that are already here

00:38:18.000 that are affecting our lives today.

00:38:20.040 What the hell do we do about it?

00:38:22.300 Okay, now that, I think, unfortunately,

00:38:25.020 I don't think either political party

00:38:27.180 has the answer in our country

00:38:30.480 or your country for that matter.

00:38:32.400 Yeah, agreed.

00:38:33.720 Somehow a sort of radical center has to emerge.

00:38:38.960 And I don't know how it could be done.

00:38:42.560 um we've seen some of the possibilities um sometimes when we get a candidate particularly

00:38:50.880 a candidate who is um either brilliant politically like bill clinton was i think i'm i i voted for

00:38:58.420 clinton twice myself um i mean there were bad parts about clinton but there are a lot of really

00:39:04.180 good parts um and they're they're occasionally candidates like what rick caruso is trying to do

00:39:09.280 in LA is, you know, bring a centrist position in, but it's very difficult. The thing that's

00:39:17.000 really surprising me, and I'm trying to understand it, is why are oligarchs and their ex-wives and 1.00

00:39:24.860 their offspring, why are they adopting the most extreme possible positions? Why are oligarchs,

00:39:33.380 why did they support a DA in San Francisco who's allowed one of the great cities of the world to

00:39:39.260 become accessible. I don't get it. They live there. Doesn't it bother them? Doesn't it bother

00:39:45.260 them that there are whole parts of the city you can't go to? Doesn't it bother them that San

00:39:49.660 Francisco has more drug addicts than high school students? You think that's the ideal? I mean,

00:39:57.740 I look at these people and they say, if your vision of the world is San Francisco today,

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00:41:11.100 So, but give us, how do we,

00:41:13.580 you talk about radical centrism,

00:41:15.380 that's music to my ears,

00:41:17.680 because that's kind of what I think about.

00:41:20.520 How do we deal with this, Joel?

00:41:22.020 Because, look, you've written books about this,

00:41:24.060 you're very persuasive in diagnosing the problem,

00:41:27.420 but it's up to people like you

00:41:28.680 and people like us and other guests on our show

00:41:30.500 to start to chart some of the way out of this malaise, right?

00:41:35.300 So give us something.

00:41:36.940 Well, I'm working on some of the ideas.

00:41:39.600 I'm begging you.

00:41:40.140 Can you not say I'm begging you?

00:41:41.420 Give us a way out.

00:41:42.620 Well, first of all, we have to get away from the ideology.

00:41:46.280 You know, I'm writing an essay about this right now.

00:41:48.620 Daniel Bell, great sociologist,

00:41:50.740 wrote the most important book in many ways of the 20th century

00:41:54.340 was the rise of post-industrial society.

00:41:56.820 um the coming post-industrial society but bell also wrote a book called the end of ideology

00:42:02.540 and around 1960 it looked like ideology was dying that you know parties differed but there wasn't

00:42:09.580 you know there was not a basic agreement about what we wanted um now we're ideology has come

00:42:16.600 back and we have to get away from this sort of one you know there's only one thing that really

00:42:21.740 matters, you know, race, gender, you know, the climate, you know, these issues which are

00:42:27.920 ramped up to some hysterical level. We have to still say, what really works? Like, you know,

00:42:34.740 Governor Newsom here in California, you know, signed this reparations bill. Besides the fact

00:42:39.600 that California was never a slave state, what you know, and there were about 1,200 slaves in

00:42:47.820 in california when when uh when the state um joined the union um the bottom line is

00:42:56.660 we have economic policies that make african-american incomes based if you based on cost

00:43:04.540 lower than they are in mississippi tell me what is so great about a reparations bill

00:43:11.960 when you have a state that's expelling its own black population.

00:43:16.100 San Francisco has a fraction of the black population it used to have.

00:43:21.700 Somebody even made a movie called The Last Black Man in San Francisco.

00:43:27.940 And I remember, because I went to school in the Bay Area,

00:43:30.880 and I worked in the Bay Area,

00:43:32.160 I remember when there was a very vital black community in San Francisco.

00:43:37.240 It's almost gone now.

00:43:39.760 And yet the same people were saying,

00:43:41.960 You have to adopt our policies, but your policies are causing this.

00:43:45.460 Your policies are causing poverty.

00:43:47.400 Your policies are making homeownership for the next generation and minorities and immigrants more difficult.

00:43:53.780 Why is it that minorities and immigrants are moving to Texas?

00:43:59.440 It was supposed to be the center of racism and reaction. 0.92

00:44:04.360 Well, yeah, there is a lot of racism and reaction probably still in Texas.

00:44:09.160 But you know what?

00:44:09.900 if I'm a young minority couple

00:44:14.000 or an immigrant couple or a millennial

00:44:16.000 and I can go and I can buy a nice townhouse

00:44:18.940 in a decent area for $175,000, $200,000

00:44:22.160 in West Houston,

00:44:24.360 is that better than living in a crate

00:44:26.740 in San Francisco or LA?

00:44:29.720 So Joel, so is that part of the answer then?

00:44:32.340 Because I know I'm probably annoying you

00:44:33.860 by focusing in on this,

00:44:34.940 but I do think it's up to us

00:44:36.840 to start formulating some of the answers.

00:44:39.060 I agree.

00:44:39.380 One of the things I really admire about the United States, particularly during COVID, when we had a pretty hardcore, you know, this is good for you, so you can't do anything kind of policy over here.

00:44:50.560 There were states in the United States, which you can argue whether they took a better approach or a worse approach.

00:44:56.180 But you, as a free citizen of the United States, had a choice.

00:45:00.140 You want to be freer?

00:45:01.600 Go to Florida.

00:45:02.540 Go to Texas.

00:45:03.660 You want to be, quote unquote, safer?

00:45:06.020 Stay in New York City.

00:45:07.240 Stay in California, right?

00:45:09.320 Is that the answer really here,

00:45:10.980 where at least in the, like, we can't move,

00:45:13.140 if we don't like the tax policy in the UK,

00:45:15.880 we can't move to Belgium, you know,

00:45:18.140 not least because we don't want to live in Belgium.

00:45:19.860 But you see what I'm saying?

00:45:21.100 Like, at least you guys have the opportunity

00:45:24.540 to offer different ways of doing things

00:45:27.120 and people can then vote with their feet.

00:45:29.420 Is that going to be part of the answer here?

00:45:31.500 Yes, that's an excellent part.

00:45:33.500 And frankly, I think people, you know,

00:45:36.400 within reason should be able to have the kind of communities that they they want to have i mean now

00:45:42.680 there there obviously are going to be health and safety issues that are that are universal but

00:45:47.960 you know to me the idea that somebody wants to have a um a community where um you know

00:45:57.200 more traditional values are are taught in the schools

00:46:01.220 and then there's another school district that wants to to make malcolm x's birthday a holiday

00:46:08.560 you know i'm this is a line that uh i think norman mail used when he was running for new

00:46:13.520 mayor of new york many years ago um the bottom line is we we should allow it this this was the

00:46:20.140 genius of the american constitution and by the way there's quite a bit of autonomy um historically

00:46:26.400 both in Canada and in Australia as well.

00:46:30.440 I mean, I think it has something to do with the fact

00:46:32.140 that you went through a very different evolution than we did.

00:46:36.560 And also, these are big places with lots of room

00:46:40.660 and people can move from one place to the other fairly easily.

00:46:44.920 The tragedy to me, and here's part of what I would do

00:46:48.340 if I was in the UK, is you really want to see

00:46:51.980 more activity outside of London.

00:46:53.920 The more you concentrate everything in one place, it becomes very expensive and it expels a lot of industry because it has to go elsewhere.

00:47:05.400 I mean, if you take a look at what's happening in the tech scene in Europe, it's moving to the east because it's too expensive to be in London or Paris.

00:47:19.020 So I think one of the things is decentralization is going to be important. I think a lot of it has to do with self-sufficiency. So let's, like, for instance, Milton Friedman actually had a very good idea, which was a negative income tax. Instead of a basic income, let's incentivize people to work.

00:47:37.020 I don't think somebody who's working at Home Depot for $40,000 or $30,000 a year should be paying a lot of income tax.

00:47:47.200 They really, you know, actually they should be given incentive.

00:47:50.380 On the other hand, I don't want to see what many of the oligarchs want, which is to turn the vast majority of the population into a bunch of sort of mindless serfs who cash a check and maybe occasionally drive an Uber.

00:48:05.260 That's not the vision that's going to hold a society together.

00:48:09.040 So I think we have to incentivize work.

00:48:11.820 We have to make it much easier for families.

00:48:14.700 Like, for instance, okay, instead of having a giant bureaucracy to raise children, why don't we allow, you know, grandma to get a little bit of a stipend to watch the kid. 1.00

00:48:27.460 If the wife or husband has to go out to work, needs somebody to substitute. 0.91

00:48:32.420 Let's think about how do we preserve institutions like the family?

00:48:35.800 How do we preserve the chance for entrepreneurship and property for the next generation? 0.98

00:48:43.380 Those are the issues that we need to be addressing.

00:48:47.840 And I don't see that happening anywhere.

00:48:50.300 I think the right is, in many cases, just enslaved to capital.

00:48:57.060 Anything they do is okay.

00:48:58.560 And, of course, you know, Google could buy the American right for one-fifth of what they give to the left.

00:49:05.720 So, you know, you'll have that.

00:49:09.520 The right doesn't have the answers.

00:49:12.340 The left doesn't have the answers.

00:49:13.720 The answers are going to be what is it that people actually want?

00:49:17.720 What is it that – how do we help people reach their aspirations?

00:49:22.360 That's what we should be focusing on.

00:49:24.140 That's what, as a traditional Democrat, that's what I always thought was important.

00:49:29.620 You know, if you look at Harry Truman, Pat Brown, even to some extent Bill Clinton, the great appeal of Bill Clinton is Clinton understood, having been a governor of Arkansas, coming from a poor background, he understood that you appeal to people saying, if you work, play by the rules, you should have this.

00:49:51.720 now we have an admin a a democratic party says you can go you can commit crimes you could you

00:49:59.380 you could you could be disobedient in school you could be disruptive you could do this you

00:50:04.580 could do that but you're still going to get the check right you have rights and entitlements as

00:50:09.860 opposed to opportunities exactly and and so somebody who's a working class person working

00:50:15.420 at Home Depot, working at Walmart, working at the corner drugstore, whatever. That person

00:50:22.860 needs to be empowered. That person needs to be respected and not be treated all well. How much

00:50:30.200 carbon do you emit? You know, like what kind of vision of humanity is that? And then on the

00:50:38.740 climate issue, I would say, look, it doesn't matter what the UK and the US does. We've already

00:50:45.000 reduced our emissions by a lot. And we can continue to do it over time. But China and India

00:50:52.040 and Africa are not going to be on that, are not going to do that. And that's where the emissions

00:50:57.320 are going to grow. So yes, we should try to limit our emissions in a reasonable way, but we don't

00:51:03.300 have to destroy our societies in the process. And we can't kid ourselves that we live in a world in

00:51:09.700 which Europe and America can determine what's going to happen to the planet. That's over. It's

00:51:14.560 been over for 50 years already wake up and and we're not doing that we're we're we're living

00:51:20.520 you know and i think a lot of it is like i don't it doesn't matter if california reduces emissions

00:51:26.620 25 or 27 it doesn't matter because china and india will wipe that out in you know a very very 1.00

00:51:36.140 short period of time we need to be thinking about adaptation you know i'm so tired of people saying

00:51:42.020 Well, the seas are going to rise. I said, well, why don't you propose seawalls? We're going to not have enough water. Well, maybe we should do desalinization here in California. Maybe we ought to, a friend of mine at MIT is talking about, why don't we build a channel? Since the Midwest seems to be flooding more often, why don't we relieve them of their floodwaters and move them to the southwest in the canal?

00:52:05.420 You know, when you think about what the Chinese emperors did in ancient times, what the Romans did with their roads, with what we did here in the United States and what you did in the UK with canals, why aren't we even thinking about how do we adapt?

00:52:21.380 The Dutch learned how to adapt because of the, you know, they obviously have a sea level issue and have for a long time.

00:52:31.660 We can adapt.

00:52:32.900 Why aren't we talking about adapting to something that we can't fundamentally change because the dynamic of climate change is going to come from China and the developing world for the next 20 or 30 years.

00:52:44.340 we should do our our best but to destroy our societies in the process um i think doesn't do

00:52:52.180 anyone any good joe it has been a wonderful interview thank you very much before we go we

00:52:59.340 always end with our final question which is what is the one thing we're not talking about but we

00:53:04.320 really should be i would say more than than anything else what we really need to be talking

00:53:10.220 about is the impact of social media on discussion in general and the lack of of just good common

00:53:23.340 discussion you know i i've noticed over the years that there are many outlets which i used to do all

00:53:31.000 the time. No, my views haven't changed at all. CNN, MSNBC, NPR. You know, I wrote for the New

00:53:41.800 York Times. I wrote for the Washington Post. I worked for the LA Times. Very difficult to get

00:53:47.840 into those places anymore if you have a contrarian point of view. Very, very difficult. Sometimes I

00:53:54.120 sneak my way into the LA Times, but that's about it. I think that what we have is an environment

00:54:05.740 where social media is sort of pushing people to the extremes and the legacy media, which should

00:54:12.480 be sort of the arbiter and trying to be sort of in between, has decided to go on one side.

00:54:19.780 And so that discussion itself has gotten weaker.

00:54:23.840 And that's why we come up with, you know, with ideologies that make no sense in terms of reality.

00:54:30.440 Yeah, well, you're right.

00:54:32.000 I also think, though, that there's an emerging new thing, which is social media lets us down by creating tribalism.

00:54:38.540 Legacy media is taken aside for the most part, as you say.

00:54:41.980 But I also think there's a new thing emerging, which is what we're doing right here,

00:54:45.920 which is actually trying to have a conversation

00:54:48.440 that increasingly people, I think, are hungry for.

00:54:51.500 Do you see some cause for optimism there?

00:54:53.940 Yes, I do.

00:54:54.740 I mean, I see the rise not just of podcasts like this,

00:54:58.740 but, you know, what's being done on Substack,

00:55:04.880 you know, Andrew Sullivan, Ari Weiss.

00:55:08.020 That's a very positive development.

00:55:10.760 Publications like, you know, and of course I write for them,

00:55:13.240 unheard spiked um uh quillette um these are these are new ventures and yes they're not gigantic but

00:55:23.800 because they are they they are places where i can sit there and say okay i'm not being i'm not i'm

00:55:30.640 not listening to some you know ideologically driven presentation i'm i'm i'm i'm getting

00:55:38.200 an interesting point of view. So I think that there are some signs. I think there is a rebellion

00:55:45.840 among traditional liberals against what the woke have imposed. I think that is becoming very

00:55:52.640 obvious. And what's going to be interesting here in the United States after the 2022 elections,

00:55:58.680 let's just say the Republicans pick up 25 seats. Unfortunately, most of those seats will be from 0.96

00:56:04.640 more moderate Democrats, who Nancy Pelosi has sacrificed. And the question will be, well,

00:56:12.700 does the party go further left or further right? Does it go back to the center? And whether they're

00:56:20.500 capable of learning anything is, of course, an open question at best.

00:56:26.960 Joel, do you think institutions like the Washington Post, the LA Times, and New York Times,

00:56:31.340 do you think they can be saved or do you think it's now we have to create our own institutions

00:56:37.620 we have to do it via substat we have to do it via podcasts like this i i don't i i don't see

00:56:44.220 how you turn these around i i i watched in amazement you know i um i did a um um i was

00:56:53.540 doing some stuff on the la election so i said oh i wonder you know i have a subscription a digital

00:56:58.840 subscription to the la times oh i'll see what the la times are saying it was so incredibly biased

00:57:05.340 for you know karen bass the former vence ramos uh person who's probably going to be the next 0.98

00:57:13.400 mayor good chance she'll be the next mayor um and against caruso favoring all the you know you think 0.97

00:57:20.740 the san francisco chronicle supports budine you know the the da i mean the um i think these these

00:57:28.360 institutions have been so penetrated now, and that there's this whole generation of young

00:57:33.980 journalists who have been trained to think that their job is not to inform, as we were taught

00:57:41.040 in the old days, or to give people options, is to instruct, to push in a certain direction,

00:57:49.940 Very much like, let's just say, would be the case with the old Pravda in the Soviet Union.

00:57:58.700 That's really – and, you know, what happens is as the old, mostly liberal editors retire, die off, whatever, and there's nobody left who says, you know, you really have to tell both sides.

00:58:15.420 You really, you know, I mean, I know because I read these stories and I said, well, didn't the editor say you should talk to somebody who maybe thinks that there's something else going on?

00:58:26.060 You know, whatever, you know, particularly if it's race, gender, climate, anything involving Trump.

00:58:31.400 And I think Trump is an awful human being and the country would be infinitely better off if he didn't exist. 0.98

00:58:37.600 And he would be infinitely better off if he didn't run and he'd be infinitely better off if he was disgraced. 0.86

00:58:42.840 But the coverage was so venomous and so, you know, so biased, so, you know, things that you would say, well, how, you know, you can't say that in a newspaper account without sounding like you're writing something for the Democratic National Committee.

00:59:01.740 That those boundaries have just, they've collapsed almost completely. I mean, you almost sometimes can feel, well, here's what the party line is, and all of a sudden the coverage is all about the party line. I mean, it's astounding.

00:59:17.100 And the fact that dissenting voices are either eliminated or put into the, what I call the digital gulag, like, you know, and doing work.

00:59:27.180 Google, I used to love Google.

00:59:28.980 They had, it was great.

00:59:30.880 Try to do a Google search on climate, gender, or race, and you'll see how incredibly skewed their algorithms are now.

00:59:40.160 I mean, you know, there are certain topics where I just go to another another search engine because I even though I think Google may be more efficient, it it has been completely taken over.

00:59:53.820 And it and, you know, unfortunately, many of the people running our tech companies, they don't really believe in the First Amendment anyway.

01:00:01.220 So, you know, and they probably wouldn't even know what it was.

01:00:05.160 Well, Joel, we promised to ask you one last question that ended up being an extra 15 minutes.

01:00:09.660 So thank you for being so generous with your time.

01:00:13.160 We're going to ask you a couple of questions

01:00:15.500 for our locals-only supporters that only they will see.

01:00:19.080 But for now, thank you so much for joining us.

01:00:21.380 I really recommend everybody read

01:00:22.980 The Coming of Neofeudalism and really appreciate it. 1.00

01:00:26.860 Where can people find your other work online?

01:00:29.580 I have a website, joelcottgen.com,

01:00:31.940 plus I run a website called newgeography.com,

01:00:35.340 which runs all my stuff,

01:00:37.120 but also runs a lot of other stuff as well.

01:00:39.660 Fantastic. Well, thanks again for coming on and thank you guys for watching and listening.

01:00:44.260 We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode and of course on Locals for the Extra

01:00:48.260 Question. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available

01:00:52.580 as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys.

01:00:57.360 Do you ask what we the people can do to stop the slide into neo-feudalism if it's not too late?

01:01:09.660 We know you've been waiting and your full Great Outdoors Comedy Festival lineup is here.

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01:01:38.580 Three nights, five shows, huge laughs.

01:01:42.080 September 11th through 13th.

01:01:43.780 Buy tickets now at greatoutdoorscomedyfestival.com.

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TRIGGERnometry - July 18, 2022

Why Ordinary People Have Less and Less Power with Joel Kotkin

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