Kind: captions
Language: en
You've said a quote though that I think
is really powerful which is there's no
historic society that has looked like us
that didn't have a revolution and I want
to get a sense of what is it that we
look like.
>> The best example I've gotten recently
since we last spoke is that NZE had a
term called the age of the last men and
he was writing in the 1880s um and and
he said that no one would truly
understand his work until the year 2000
really
>> and Yeah. Yeah.
>> Whoa. And so the age of the last men is
in the 21st century and it's a society
where um he said the west would be dying
because it would push um envy and crabs
in the bucket and lack of ambition and
conformity to a point where there
wouldn't be space to live. People would
not be procreating. The west would not
be able to survive. It would be the most
dangerous period in our history because
it would be so complacent. And it's
really interesting when he frames the
age of the last men that all these
things which we see as moral are
actually profoundly immoral
because
there's lots of things where not doing
something is immoral. And we're a
society where we're not doing a lot of
things. And so I think we're a we're a
profoundly sick and um endangered
culture.
>> So what are the things that we're not
doing that we should be doing?
>> Traditional human societies and I want
to sort of set a frame for this where
our cultural frame as a society is like
30 years. We can pull music from the 80s
um and we're still running out of 80s
music and uh we can't go back further.
The furthest we can imagine is sort of
World War II, but at the same time, the
scale of human history is thousands of
years around the world. And if you're
only looking at us, you're going to
think we're less than we are less than
1% of the human race. And every other
society in history had vastly different
social norms than us on a variety of
things. So, um, we've gotten rid of
having a coherent culture, which is a
really big deal that no one thinks
about. When you pass on things through
generations, the nation is a
generational inheritance, and we've
thrown that away. And that includes um
the religion, the social structure,
codes of politeness,
um a national identity, uh a source, a
sense of honor, and there's a series of
beliefs that practically every
pre-industrial society has that we don't
and we sort of I mean, this is a huge
topic I'd be happy to unpack and we've
got several hours, but um we don't
realize that this is not the end point
of humanity. We're an insane aberration
of a bunch of variables thrown together.
>> I I think it's worth going in so that
people can have landmarks as to what
exactly is going on. So, um, writing
about the what a shared myth is is
something I've been focused on recently.
Getting people to understand that we all
live inside of a frame of reference that
we tell ourselves a story and that we
can't even agree anymore on what America
was founded on. like whether we are a
profoundly racist culture that is just
about colonialism and slavery or whether
we have created uh the most prosperous
nation that the world has ever known.
Like we we have both of those stories
being told at the same time and the fact
that we don't have anything to share I
think has profoundly problematic
consequences from a a divide the nation
up standpoint. Um so I'd love to hear
what are some of the landmarks that you
see? what are the things that like
specifically are dissolving
um that you think are problematic? And
the the line of questioning started with
what are we not doing? So what are the
things that we're not doing that are
problematic that have led to those
things?
>> You gave me a lot of interesting uh
conversational threads and so I'll pull
a few of them, but I don't think I'll to
get to all of them. One of them is
um so people know Jordan Peterson for
his pundit career which has gotten quite
popular but I think Peterson's most
important work is something no one
noticed which is maps of meaning.
>> Yeah. Fantastic book.
>> Yeah. I've it was such a hard read. It
took me like 2 years but I finally
completed it. And it's so intelligent
because he's looking at human neurology
and biology and all these different
things and saying, "How come countries
will die fighting over their religion?
How come uh two countries are willing to
go to nuclear war over something? How
could anything be important enough for
that?" And the thesis is that humans
have to sort of build frameworks of how
we interact with the world or maps of
meaning. And these exist inside our
neurology where we have to interface
with good, evil, higher, lower forms, a
variety of things just to function as an
actual human being. And that's very
important. And another threat I want to
pull at is there have been multiple
myths about what America is over its
history. The first one which came about
uh after the revolution, early 19th
century was uh America was a republic.
Then with the mid to late 19th century,
America was an Anglo-Saxon uh British
nation.
Early 20th century is America was a
frontier culture uh built off sort of
the shared uh challenge of entering a
new land. Then the theory from World War
II until the mid to late 20th century
was America was a nation built off sort
of diversity, mixing peoples together.
But back then it was seen more as like
Italians, Irish, Jews with the local
Angloac with the local Anglo-Saxon
population. And then the theory in the
21st century has been that uh America is
built off oppression and uh colonialism
and racism. Um and for all of those
questions, do you want me to unpack
which of those I believe? it'll be
helpful to understand what you believe
but with a specific eye towards why does
it matter like does it provide stability
>> um because when I look at your work one
of the things that I feel like you're
trying to do is understand the different
ingredients that have made this moment
dangerous and that gives me a sense of I
can follow cause and effect in your
thinking and so I'd love to hear those
narratives through the lens of well if
you believe this this is sort of the
knock-on effect and you can see it in
society today.
>> Yeah. Um
life without identity is very difficult
because
difficulty has no meaning without
identity and life has a lot of
difficulty. So if you have no framework
for who you are um and what you stand
for, you're kind of just going to float
around and the world's going to feel
empty. And I think that's a huge issue
that the entire society has today. And
every single attempt to build identity
has been destroyed. And this sounds this
is going to sound like it's a a
conservative talking point, but if this
was a murder, we have the gun. The guy
who did it claimed he committed the
murder. Um, you see the body. uh and I
don't know you have witnesses and that's
that the Marxists explicitly set out to
destroy the unified culture and that's
what thinkers like Marx and Gsky and non
sorry Gsky uh Marusa
um Yuri Bzmanov all these Marxist
thinkers had a legitimate process of
social disorientation which they planned
out each step and we've seen all the
steps happen in reality but the only
reason that worked because in a normal
society you just brushed that off is
that with the rate of change with the
industrial revolution and we talked
about mouse utopia last time there
wasn't that unified cultural anchoring.
>> Okay. So we've got a explicit attempt on
the part of the Marxist to go in to
leverage essentially the rapid rate of
change to know that people are going to
just try to make sense of that world.
And while they're doing that, we're
going to slip in all these confusing
conflicting notions. So it's going to be
hard for them. Now I'm using my
language, but it's going to be hard for
them to even leverage a huristic of just
mapping to somebody else's thinking to
say, "Oh, at least if I just follow
them, I have clarity." Now you're
following somebody who's very eloquent,
uh, very ariodite, and yet they
intentionally have woven in these
beliefs that are contradictory. And so
now you are paring something back, but
you don't necessarily understand it.
That speaks to a point I made in the
video I just recently wrote and I'm
about to record today. Um, and so the
issue we have is that modern thinkers
are pulling people from the last 200
years. They're very bad at big deal big
detail in context and sort of
understanding how the world works. Take
Markx as an example who's had an
enormous impact on the entire world
today. Even though people paper that
over, but even right-wing people are
hugely impacted by Marx. I mean, I am
I've done class analysis. I've looked at
I have my own sort of dialectic of
history. Um,
Markx built the idea of sort of
splitting history and society into
different principles and jostling them
together. Um, but Marxism is built off
all these assumptions like if everyone
is the same, which is not true. If
history has a direction, which is not
true, if the state can socially engineer
people, which are not true, if there has
to be a rebellion of the proletariat,
which doesn't actually have a government
system, which will result in utopia,
where you've added together 10 logical
assumptions, and if you do that in
coding, your code's going to crash. And
so that's what happened with society. So
last 200 years we're really bad at
understanding
how things interconnect where we can
understand things that we can prove with
science very easily sort of material
shifts um like how how the weather
occurs or uh genetics or whatever but
we're very bad at using sort of wisdom
to figure out what it actually means.
Meanwhile, the thinkers before then from
like uh I don't know the ancient world
uh or the medieval world, they often
have pretty good sort of like total
world human experience wisdom. It's why
religions like Christianity still work
today or why people read still read
Marcus Aurelius. But the way their
wisdom works is often in such like a a
differently coded way than modern people
that modern people don't really
understand it or they just think of it
as a silly story. When you look at these
ancient myths, you have to compare what
part of this was a silly story and what
part of this is symbolic wisdom. And
that's a very thin line. Um, but so
we're stuck with this gap where we can't
find the ancients identifiable, but then
the moderns don't really know what
they're talking about in a lot of cases.
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All right, [music] now let's get back to
the show. One thing that I want to see
if I can get to understand is I have a
really it's over overly simplified to be
sure, but it is so directionally
accurate that I repeat it often. Uh, and
it's my hypothesis about why exactly
society is broken right now. And then
that predicts exactly what we would need
to do to fix it. It goes like this. Uh,
all of the problems that we're facing as
a society right now are economically
uh they're born from bad economics. What
we've done is the uh in 1913 when we
went onto a fiat currency by
establishing the federal bank uh the
federal reserve we went into a system
where we could print money. By printing
money we were able to steal from people
through inflation. By being able to
steal from them uh via inflation we
created hyper inequality which I mean it
took 100 years to manifest but it's
manifesting pretty horrifically right
now. And so we had an American dream
where it was like there is a truth to be
faced that there's one asset class that
humans understand intuitively and that's
the house. The only way to protect
yourself from the devastation that is
inflation is an asset. And so now you
have the situation, this is a literal
statistic, 10% of Americans own 93% of
the assets. And people wonder why, you
know, we're getting just everinccreasing
inequality. Put that together with the
fact that we have an evolutionary
algorithm placed in our minds that makes
us absolutely go ballistic when we see
something as unfair. And so the jinny
coefficient which says basically if
somebody looks around and sees somebody
else has more than they have, they're
going to go bananas if it gets too big.
And so the Federal Reserve made it
possible for wealth inequality to just
spiral completely out of control. Once
houses become became unaffordable then
you get this hollowing out of the middle
class and so now the wealth inequality
is going like French revolution levels
because of all those things I think we
actually are headed towards a French
revolution but it's economic in nature
everything else that's manifesting is
simply because the economics broke and
if you fix the economics there's enough
prosperity that people sort of fall back
into comfortable patterns and they can
overlook book, all the schizophrenia
that something like a Marxist philosophy
might uh bring. And so that like
encapsulates my core thesis as to what
is going wrong and therefore what we
would have to do to fix it. Um as you
pull all these threads of history, do
you have a similar thesis that you can
lay out? Is it tied to Marxism? Is it
tied to leftists in general? uh or is it
something else completely? So we're in a
really awkward position um because
I have a joke that hundreds of years
from now for the population number
they'll have line go up line go down
where 20th century is line go up in
demographics 21st century is line go
down and we're at the point where line
go up is starting to go into line go
down and this would be very
psychologically disorienting for people
because I think
if you fixed the economic issue um you'd
put a band-aid in a lot of these
underlying things but I think we do have
a c a pretty severe cultural issue which
is sort of working with the economic one
and we didn't have the cultural issue
until recently because money could paper
it over
>> and can you define what the cultural
issue is? So
you look at the baby boomers, they got
rid of a unified culture where it's the
shared story we talk about. It's that
people have lots of things that people
don't think matter in fact do where um
one of the great things about living in
Texas is there's sort of like a fluid
degree of social trust that makes doing
things easier. you can trust that like
let's say I um I forgot my my debit card
at a restaurant yesterday. I just went
back and got it and they just noticed me
like, "Oh yeah, uh you you you can have
it. We know who you are." That's
possible in certain cultures. Um but
then not in others. Or if like you have
an employee, you if it's a high trust
society, you don't have to watch over
them every second. And I'm I if you you
you don't have to micromanage or always
check in where culture affects
absolutely everything. But what happened
was that we had centuries of increasing
wealth where we thought we could get rid
of culture. The boomers are at the peak
of that. Then the death of culture also
chicken and egg lot of variables. But uh
once you no longer have a culture with
things like the the federal government's
responsible to the public, you shouldn't
print infinite money because that's bad
form and it's going to hurt people. Now
they're just so greedy that they're
going to do it anyway. So would it be
wise to define culture as the way you
mean it, informal rules that are passed
on uh from parent to child, person to
person without necessarily being
documented?
>> Yes. So anthropologically culture is
sort of a net sum of how a society
operates. It includes uh the a
government system is dependent on
culture. Um the uh religion is the
manners,
the accent, uh how child raring occurs,
uh how they cook. Uh the culture is just
the tum the sum total of the human
interactions and
what happened is that modernity had lots
of implicit issues which we used money
to paper over. Um and then once most
people slid into misery uh money didn't
do that anymore. I mean as an example we
don't have
um we have lots of very sort of sloppy
social rules in our culture. Equality is
one. Equality is just not an accurate
depiction of reality. And you can
believe in it as long as your societyy's
wealthy enough that you don't deal with
these conflicts. But then once you get
to a place where one person gets to make
their bills and the other person
doesn't, all the pleasant notions sort
of
become very costly. For example,
globalization worked in a world where um
there was the pie was growing for
everyone. But in a world where that
isn't true, you then realize other
countries aren't on your side. Does that
make sense? Where
>> 100%. Okay. So, we are no longer
transmitting via culture ideas that keep
our society strong and stable. When that
happens at the same time that the
economic pie begins to shrink, suddenly
you see all of the issues. But your
hypothesis is that the issues that we
need to address the more foundational
issues are ones of culture.
>> No, I think both are foundational.
Economic is first because people are
really struggling economically and you
need to fix that in order to uh just
have a functioning society because so
many people are just barely paying bills
and living really miserable lives that
if you don't fix that variable, that
variable is going to tear everything
else down.
Okay. So, uh this moment brought to you
by economics problem number one and then
culture begins to be problem number two.
Now, if we start getting specific about
culture, um you were talking in the
beginning about Marx that Marx has had a
huge influence on the right and the left
whether they want to acknowledge it or
not. Um, so far what you've put forward
about Marxism is it offers these
conflicting ideas with the expressed
intent of destroying culture. Um, what I
want to know, assuming that I've gotten
all that correct, what is Marxism hoping
to accomplish by destroying culture and
why is it so influential?
>> Those who lack wisdom lack wisdom. You
don't know what you don't know. And a
lot of people don't know a lot. In fact,
we all don't. In fact, um, we're all
infinitely weighed down by the things we
don't know. Um, and Marxists have a
tendency to sort of see halftruuds. I
could talk about the neurology of that
because there is a neurological
scientific argument. Um, but
for I've read most of the Marxist
thinkers who did this, Yuri Besmanov,
uh, Solinski, uh, Graky, and none of
them see the world or society as a
living thing. So when you look at
Marxist economics, they're like, "This
is the pie. Uh, we can just divide up
the pie." What they don't see is that
this pie was in at least a fairly
significant portion brought to you by
the corporations and the rich people and
the kulocks that you want to kill. So if
you kill the revol if you kill off um
the most sort of economically productive
people, this isn't your pie. This is
your pie. And Marxists really have an
issue with that where um Yuri Beesmanov
and this just shows how deep and
insidious it was. The Soviets literally
had a a department built around this
where they had set procedures and
there's a certain degree of like um kind
of funny horror about it where you can
watch again you can read this stuff. You
can you can read what GSKI wrote for
free online uh rules for radicals you
get at the library if they still exist.
um or I mean Yuri Bessonov has videos on
YouTube you can watch and the Soviets
came to the conclusion if we kill the
religion we can kill the rest of the
culture. Um and they had like a I can go
through each step of the process but
they had a multi-step process on how to
kill a society. And they'll literally
say stuff like make sure neighbors don't
trust each other. Uh make sure parents
don't trust their children.
Put a bureaucrat into everything. And
then the end point they came to was that
the functioning of a healthy society was
dependent on religion. But the Soviet
Union itself was an atheist state. And
so Yori Bezmanov was studying India
because he was supposed to destroy
Indian society. And he thought, wait, I
actually like Hinduism. I'm going to
leave for America. And so it's it's a
very sort of when you see half of the
equation, it makes sense.
when you see half of the equation of
what destroying the society makes sense.
>> Um so
>> so the only way that I can make what
you're saying make sense is if they are
driven by envy and a desire for control.
>> That's true. Um the argument I'm making
is from Ian McGillchrist's the master
and his emissary which is a book on
neurobiology. And uh the thesis he has
is there's two halves of the brain uh
the left and the right. And the thing,
the parallel that I love so much from
the book or the example is the left
hemisphere can only draw half of an
image. If there's a human, it can only
draw half of it. And it can only see the
world through money and power and
measurable things. And the right
hemisphere can see the world through uh
context flowing over time, immeasurable
variables, all these different things.
And um modern ideologies really wire
people to the left hemisphere. Uh
Marxism is probably the most left
hemisphere worldview where from their
desire for just power and destruction.
Uh then it totally makes sense because
they're not thinking of all the stuff it
took to build that world. They just want
to take from it.
>> That honestly sounds like mental
illness. Are you saying that that is
mental illness? I mean, where's the line
between malice and and mental illness?
You can make that a t-shirt. Malice and
mental illness. Um, but uh well, I can
actually answer that. So, I'll be
interested to see if they still overlap
for you if they're separate. So, the
difference between uh malice and mental
illness for me is if you're mentally
ill, you are no longer mapped to what is
real. Whereas, you can have malice and
still be mapped to what is real. So,
Genghask Khan had malice, but he was
mapped to what is real. And so as much
as I would not have wanted to live uh
anywhere near Genghask Khan, uh he did
give us a silk road. He did unify
things. He was very shrewd at leading,
conquering, all of that. So he clearly
understood cause and effect quite
deeply. Uh but he had a lot of malice.
Uh then you take somebody who's mentally
ill and they may be legitimately
confused about how the world works. They
may hear voices. They may be unable to
process certain data points. And so to
your point, they literally can't see or
experience a fundamental piece of what's
actually happening and therefore are
always, even if they have good
intentions, they're always going to
misplay the world because they are
blinded to some of it or they hear
things that aren't there. Jordan
Peterson has this foursided sort of
matrix of you deal with a different
difficult situation. You can either fall
to hedonism, nihilism,
totalitarianism, or rise to heroism. And
the people closest to Marxists
in history are religious fanatics. Um,
you could make a pretty good argument
that Marxism is a descendant of sort of
like radical Christian sects in the
medieval or early modern or ancient
world where they like in Müster in
Germany, radical Protestants seized
control of a city, went crazy, started
practicing communism, forced sexual
communism. Uh, they had multiple leaders
who would murder each other claiming to
be prophets. Um, and so there is this
tradition here and the Marxists fit into
that and they're very deluded. Um, I
mean that's just kind of obvious if you
take off the ideological goggles. Um,
and modernity creates lots of mental
illnesses though. Um, I read this book
from World War the World War I era where
he was going through all of these
different things. It's interesting to
see an author even a century ago state
it because like when I was growing up,
lots of moms were scared to let their
kids play outside or they'd walk their
kids several blocks to school until the
end of high school. And that's not
something that we would process as
mental illness in our society. But you
look at that and you think you have an
anxiety issue.
>> Yeah, I was going to say I would. Uh but
>> you're reasonable. Most are.
>> Yeah. [laughter] as as a feral Gen Xer,
I guess we definitely see the world very
differently. Okay. Uh I want to keep
putting these pieces together. So, uh we
have the starting my goal is to
understand what's wrong with society
because I for one find it incredibly
meaningful in my life to try to help
people write the ship. Um so we've got
culture transmits these incredibly
useful ideas. culture has ceased to
transmit these incredibly useful ideas
partly because there is uh modernity is
is uh helping people form certain types
of mental illness. The one that you
focused on so far and I obviously first
called it the mental illness. Don't mean
to put words into your mouth, but uh
Marxism where what's happening is
they're only seeing half the picture
because they are so leftbrain dominant
using McGill's
uh breakdown of that. And so they are
obsessed with envy, power, money. And so
their worldview naturally springs
forward from that. They exacerbated the
death of culture itself by intentionally
and documenting it. Shockingly enough,
intentionally going in and um creating
an ideology that is confusing,
leveraged the rate of change happening
at the industrial revolution to take
advantage of the fact that people would
be more or less distracted and having a
hard time categorizing things as a way
to slip that in. And so now you
accelerate the death of these
traditional things that were being
passed on that were in some ways um
holding society together by transmitting
these ideas. Now, this is now me totally
leaping forward with the prediction that
your statements have made so far would
be that now given the rapid state of
change due to um technology and
especially AI, we're going to go through
another revolution of sorts, third
industrial revolution, fourth
industrial, whatever you're going to
clock it as, but um AI is going to usher
in a rate of change that's absolutely
unparalleled. and already seeing people
like Mam Donni rise up um and see how
much energy is going over to that uh
that seems to fit in with what you're
predicting especially given that you
said economics is the most foundational.
You did a very good job articulating the
chain of logic there. Um,
besides that, to speak to your point, I
agree with that. I had a a failed
prediction that America that we'd have a
thousand politically motivated deaths uh
by last April. Uh, that turned out to be
incorrect. But uh, in the grand scheme
of things, I still think we're going to
have a revolution or a civil war. I just
don't think uh there's any sort of
causality here. Uh besides that, um and
>> you don't think there's any causality
between what we've been talking about in
the Civil War?
>> No, I I I said that incorrectly. What I
meant to say is this is where we are.
There's no trajectory where we don't
have one,
>> right?
>> Where this chain of causality doesn't
continue. Um and that's deeply
concerning, but uh I don't want to lie
to you. Um
it's interesting as well to see um
to see it just manifest on both the
right and the left uh and to see it also
around the entire world where uh I think
our our foreign news is really bad now.
I don't think Americans know what go on
in the rest of the world. But if you
look at Germany or France or Britain or
South Africa or Brazil or South Korea or
China or Malaysia, I have hobbies where
I like watch documentaries from
different countries or look at travel
guides different countries. In all the
issues we have in America are occurring
in all of those countries. It's really
remarkable to see how unstable so many
global governments are.
>> Do you see connective tissue? Of course,
it's um I mean I we spoke about this
last time on the podcast. Uh there's
various historic cycles that predict
that the world goes through these sort
of cyclical patterns um where the mid7th
century nearly every country on earth
was having a civil war and an external
war often with plague thrown in. Same
thing as the mid4th century. So these
things happen or like the the Roman the
Roman Empire fell at the same the Roman
Empire's crisis of the 3rd century
occurred at the same time as the fall of
the Han dynasty. So these global trends
are sort of synced up. Um and I I
predicted that it would be a global
crisis a few years ago because these
trends are
it's I mean it's the same causal
variables in each region of the world.
>> Okay. So, I'll give you the breakdown
that I think is happening right now.
I'll tell you why I think that it's
connected to the other places. Let me
know if you see something I don't. To
me, this is this is purely about the
economy. And whenever a currency is
debased, whether the Roman daenarius and
you're just chipping away at the silver
or whether the US dollar and you're
money printing at infant item, uh what
you end up doing is the average person
cannot save. And I think it's an immoral
decision that people make because the
people that are doing it know the
average person doesn't understand
investing. They don't understand how to
escape this. And uh it puts them into a
mechanistic situation where they will
get poorer over time. And so anytime
that you put people in a position where
they cannot save their way to success,
they cannot pass their wealth on to
their children, you break a unspoken uh
promise that hey work hard, uh be
disciplined, res don't eat the
marshmallow now, put it off till
tomorrow. All the things that basically
religions have been telling us forever.
This is how you win in this survival
crafting game that we call life. And
it's like once you uh mess with the
underlying economics and you can no
longer go uh mine the ore, find the
gold, whatever, and build your stable
society, pass things on and feel like
you have been justly rewarded for your
efforts, you stop putting forward
effort. And once you stop putting
forward effort, then things begin to
break back down. And so if you have,
like we do right now, where people are
like, "Oh, Tom, what are you talking
about? It's no big deal that we're money
printing. All the countries are money
printing." Yes, [ __ ] And that's
why we have problems in all the
countries because you are breaking the
physics of the way that this game works.
And the second you break the physics,
like people are not being honest about
the fact that we have algorithms that
run in our brain and they are
evolutionarily placed and when you build
the game, you have to build the game
around the algorithms that are going to
run in the human mind. And so we get
into these delusional periods largely on
the back of success. And I would be very
interested to see if most of these
repeating cycles happen just on the back
of big debt. And big debt is the answer
to, hey, things are going great, print a
little bit more money. And then you just
get caught in this needing to print to
keep it going. All of your economy
becomes a Ponzi scheme. And then finally
it hits a tipping point. It breaks. And
to your point, line go up turns into
line go down. And that's why you're
going to see this stuff happening in a
whole bunch of places all at the same
time. Because if you are in a globally
connected world in the way that we are
now, in the way that we were in the
moments that you're talking about, once
that debt gets out of control, like it's
going to spread like wildfire. Hang
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[music] And now back to the show. or or
the best history of economics books I've
ever read is The Great Wave by David
Hackett Fischer. Uh you should read it.
It's like a 100 pages. Um and it goes
through correlating the history of
inflation over western history with the
history of uh political
crisis. Um it's really good and uh it
says exactly what you say where over
these rhythmic uh polit periods of
political crises in western and the
churchin data says global history
inflation's correlated with political
disturbances and you don't see
this kind of inflation not have
political issues.
We talked about last time uh French
Revolution
uh 30 years war, black death. Um I would
connect uh the cultural issue with mouse
utopia. I think uh the political and uh
revolutionary whatever crisis is of
economic origin. I think mouse utopia is
of cultural origin.
>> Okay. So, uh, Mouse Utopia speedrun for
people that don't know it, uh, if you
create a situation where the mice have
everything they need, plenty of space,
plenty of food, uh, they end up
imploding. Uh, they end up stopping
having children, they end up killing
each other, it's wild. Uh, do you like
if you had to shorthand that, would it
be something like this? When there is no
adversity that you have to face, you
turn inward. when you turn inward and
become self-obsessed,
uh that you're no longer thinking about
the group, what's good for the group,
you're no longer disciplining yourself,
you're no longer um like reigning in our
worst impulses.
>> Yeah. Uh what you said earlier is true
that a lot of these previous cycles
because empires come and go, uh there
have been lots of times the world has
ended over history. It's just the world
was the world they knew. Um and that's a
lot of cases you can either be hurt by
wealth or you can be hurt by poverty. Uh
crises of wealth or I mean the ones we
spoke of before where because inflation
is an overabundance of wealth where it
stops having value. Crisis of poverty
are situations like in Africa in the
19th century where you have mass famine
and migration or um the huns the
barbarians coming out of the grasslands
because they need to to conquer
outwards. As I like to say, you're going
to die anyway. So, it's better to die
rich than poor where you're going to
have problems no matter what you do, but
it's better to have more interesting
problems. Um and uh that that's that's
kind of what's happening here. And um
>> things have been too good for too long.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay. Uh yes, I very much agree with
that. Uh my whole thing is I think some
people need to be chased by a lion. And
by that I mean really we all need to be
chased by a lion. There needs to be some
adversity. Adversity is the thing that's
going to keep us um disciplined. It's
going to keep us focused. It's going to
keep us cooperating. all the things that
as a species we were meant to do. Okay.
So, help me understand how this ties
specifically to the left. You did a
video called WTF is going on with the
left. Um,
what is happening? What what do you see
there? Why was that worth a video and
why is it one of your highest performing
videos? It's one of the highest
performing videos because it's politics
content and politics content is always
the one that does best because and I get
it like um it's perfectly reasonable to
care more about the things that affect
your daily life than
>> What's interesting though, I didn't take
that video to be overtly political. It
certainly is talking about a political
class, but you weren't talking about
policy or anything like that. You were
talking about a mindset. It felt more
culturally
to me. Um, did that one feel overtly
political to you?
>> The reason I say political is that um
with um when I make these videos with um
like uh you met Merrick and my editor
and whatever um I subdivide the videos
by subtopic. So I'll have the political
subtopic, I'll have the anthropology
subtopic, I'll have the history one. So
I jump between them. So in my internal
mental I put all modern things in the
political category. [snorts]
So, I put um everything like um Incel
Revolution or uh that video or will
America have a civil war in the
political box. So, that's why I say it.
You could move the categories around and
I wouldn't care much. Um but the thing
with the left is
um they're in a weird place. One of the
things people don't notice is that the
different subcoalitions of the left are
fraying. Where, for example, the Tik Tok
viewers don't trust the NBC CNN viewers
where there's been a generational rift
on the left where um the Zoomer left
really does not like the Boomer left
because they see the Boomer left as the
capitalist oppressors. So they've
stopped listening to um their pay
masters at DNC and then uh instead they
follow accounts on Tik Tok and Instagram
that have no factual basis. So they are
the people who are turning up the
throttle for violence and it seems
nearly every day at least in my feed
leftists are calling for violence in one
form or another. Um, and I think the the
NBC CNN left um don't really know what
to do with with this because on top of
it, they've built out their ideology and
coalition in a certain way that they
can't back down. They uh fired all the
reasonable people like a decade ago. If
you've made it this far into the left,
you cannot be reasonable. They've
removed any way they change their
ideology,
but the American people have sort of
seen through it enough and they've lost
all of their flexibility. Look at the
presidential candidates. I don't think
anyone who the left is pushing as
leadership either for that or for a
variety of things, they they're so
lacking because the left has pushed this
culture of inauthenticity for so long.
That's their core issue.
So if their core issue is pushing an
agenda of inauthenticity,
um would becoming authentic solve the
problem like this feels I don't know how
to make that
>> I as I said that I thought I should take
that back. They have lots of core
issues. I can't I shouldn't say um I
shouldn't say that they have one. They
have several that are eating them alive.
Um, but
>> I mean, doesn't this really go back to
if you were right in the beginning that
this is a Marxist thing? That was the
first thing you went to when I asked my
first question. And then I said, "Okay,
this all makes sense if and only if that
group is driven by um envy and a desire
for control." And you added uh power and
money to the equation. It's like, okay,
yes, that that all makes sense to me.
Um, when I look at the far left, and
there are plenty of people that I
wouldn't put into this box that would
selfidentify as left, but when I look at
the far left, uh, they don't make sense
to me until I clock envy. Once I clock
envy and control, like, oh, they just
want to be in control and they want to
be in control in a in a like spiteful
way of I want to tear this down. I want
to stop people. They don't have a clear
vision of what they want to build. It's
a like anti-ag against movement instead
of a for or a building. Um, if you were
saying that was a problem, I'd be like,
"Ah, yes, that maps what I see in the
world." Does that seem accurate or is
that a misread from where you're at?
>> So, the reason I said inauthenticity is
I was thinking, what's the core issue
with the left changing strategy? And the
issue is they live in such an artificial
world. They can't relate to other
Americans or know what they did wrong.
They've made
>> and they're in an artificial world
because they're telling each other a
story about what's happening that isn't
accurate
>> because their way of life is in direct
opposition to what humans would normally
do. Where if you're in an environment
where men have certain biological urges,
women have other certain biological
urges. If you're in a society which
doesn't let you think about them, you're
going to constantly be feeling a sort of
internal jostling between your social uh
performance or your internal self. Or in
the left, they have enormous amounts of
aggression and hatred, but they say that
hatred is the worst possible trait. So
on top of that, they've cut out any sort
of new ideas or even aesthetics. There's
no good new left-wing art because
they've sort of cut themselves off from
everything that's not ideology. So,
at this point, they're just so deep into
the cult and the cult has so much
programming
that they can't program themselves out
of the cult. That
>> out of curiosity, so I like this idea of
biological urges. I think that one of
the things as somebody who came to
politics very very late, I felt like um
I was the kid saying the emperor had no
clothes. Uh seeing people say that men
and women are the same. I was like you
guys haven't been married. Like there's
no way you've been married and think men
and women are the same. Uh so on this I
take a very nonchalant approach of um
that like if you're building a worldview
in a way that's detached from things
that are self-evident, you've got a
problem. So uh are the urges that you're
referring to largely sexual in nature?
Are they about aggression? like what are
the what would be the clear distinctions
that a sane grounded person would make
that the left is failing at?
>> In the premodern world you had a concept
called natural law and America was built
off the concept of natural law where it
was sort of lost between the American
and the French Revolution. The idea
behind natural law and it it stems back
originally to the Greeks but it was
codified in Christianity is the
structure of society and the legal code
should be a representation of real the
real world. And so when they were doing
various things um like setting up the
American Constitution, they were saying
we're going to build this system working
with human nature. And their idea was
we're going to work with God's reality
because if you lie against it, you're
going to get punished. And so when they
set up this the checks and balances,
um their idea was that humans are
naturally greedy and selfish. So let's
make a system where if humans are greedy
and selfish, it works for
the society in general. And that's same
with capitalism, with science. You're
working with an accurate understanding
of human nature. Um and the reason that
um
basically every every other society
besides us had had sexual norms
is because of natural law. But it's not
just that. That would be a
simplification where social class is to
agree natural law. Same thing as a legal
structure. Same thing as how a society
wages war.
Augustine had the principle of just war
which was um there are certain
conditions under which war is okay and
others where it isn't because they had a
sense that there's human nature and it's
best to work inside the the sort of like
the range of human nature because you'll
actually get the result. And so, um,
what the left does is they just shot
natural law and then laughed at its
corpse where they just have no concept
that there is human nature to work with
where um,
>> do they really believe that or is that
one of the [ __ ] ones that they throw
in to confuse people?
>> So, I think they actually believe it
because
they would make so many better decisions
if they did believe it. So, I'm reading
um a really brilliant book now called
Modern Times by Paul Johnson, and it's a
history of the 20th Century um and it's
talking about the Soviet Union where
they kept on making all of these
staggeringly terrible decisions. And
partly Stalin was literally a criminal
before he got power. So, he is sort of
that backdrop. Uh but at the same time
Stalin shot all of his officers right
before the war with or 80% of his
officer corps before the war with Hitler
because the Soviets thought hierarchy
doesn't matter. You can replace the
officers with sort of like um privates.
But in reality
the most important variable for a
successful military is a strong officer
core. And so he shot all the people with
experience and they didn't think about
how are we going to pass on the human
knowledge between these two
>> and he shot them because he thought they
weren't loyal.
>> Yes. Because Stalin um went through
phases of paranoia where he just killed
people. He killed off like a dozen
different groups in Russia and he each
time he thought they were going to be
his rivals. But in the process he killed
Russian society because he killed off
everyone who could have been productive
or helped Russia where they they went
through a they killed off the rich first
then they killed off the kulocks or the
independent farmers. And keep in mind
this is just a generation after the end
of surfom. So all of these people were
new money. They would have like a few
more cows or a tiled roof. Stalin killed
all of them.
>> It's one of the most horrifying stories
in all of history.
>> Yeah. Um because you're you're just
imagining like I'm from um rural
Pennsylvania. It's like imagine going
into a town and just killing off all of
the most respected members of that town
and most of the time the other people in
the town don't dislike them. Um and
you're just destroying the society. And
it speaks to your mental illness point
that if you were in the Middle Ages and
you had an understanding of human nature
and you wanted to wield power that
brutally, you'd be like Mchavelli where
Mchavelli has this highly structured and
logical sense of when he's going to be
brutal. And Stalin is just like kill
them all and that betrays they actually
believe it. or same thing as importing
immigrants. You if you know enough
anthropology and even left-wing
anthropologists agree with that.
>> Hold on. Let's go back to that because
that's a really interesting point and
I'm it's hitting me weird. Okay. So,
what I just heard you say was, "Hey,
Tom, as proof that these guys really do
believe that it's all blank slates,
generals, the same as a private, doesn't
matter. Kill them. If they're not going
to be loyal, just promote the next guy."
Do you think that the first order of
what drove him to do that is paranoia or
a belief that everybody's the same?
>> What anthropology has found is that
culture
varies a lot and it's very deep. Um, and
you it's sort of lots of implicit stuff
where there's still a significant amount
of cultural differences between
different sort of ethnic different
subreions of British Americans from
hundreds of years ago as well as
different groups of white American. So
generations later, there's still you can
still see if someone's culturally
Italian or Irishamean from a variety of
things. And so culture is very deep in
the vast majority of its unconscious.
And so when the left does a lot of
things, they're acting out sort of very
complex subconscious beliefs which have
sort of been uh transmitted to people
unconsciously. where children pick up
all the elements of their society's
worldview without being taught it sort
of directly where a child will know for
example that their society values
equality a lot because people in that
society just won't brag or uh they'll be
uncomfortable with stating one group uh
is more successful than another group.
So people act out very complex
psychological principles that they don't
understand the full implications of. And
so Stalin's first motive was paranoia,
but then inside his sort of deck of
logic was everyone's interchangeable.
[snorts]
Okay. Uh yeah, it feels like mental
illness is a key ingredient, but that is
very fascinating. I never saw Stalin
through that lens. Uh Stalin being one
of the most terrifying figures of the
20th century. Um, okay. So, we've got
the left. They believe that everybody is
an interchangeable cog. This is one of
the things that they actually believe.
Uh, and that is certainly creating the
problems. Why do you think that this is
gaining so much steam right now?
>> Uh, it's gaining steam for the economic
issues you describe. Um, but why does
that push people to the left?
>> So, bad times bring radicalization.
That's just a consistent principle. And
that could be religious fundamentalism.
It could be radical nationalism,
leftism. Um, I read this really
fascinating book called The Psychology
of Socialism by Gustav Leon. And it was
written in the 1880s. And uh, it's
absolutely insane. He totally nailed the
left psychology back in the 19th
century. And it's one of