Michael Shellenberger: How Our Leaders Lost All Credibility

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Michael shellenberger welcome to Dad Saves America thanks for having me so you’ve done so many things and you’re out there in so many places so as I was trying to prepare myself for this conversation I’m like where can we go together and I think one of the things I’m really curious to dig in with is the concept of the elite because I feel like you have been in some ways doing battle along several different dimensions with Elite group think with homelessness with climate change with the uh the Twitter files and and the censorship industrial complex and I’m a very libertarian minded person which means I sort of in some ways haven’t grappled with a theory of elite power all that well so how do you think about the elite and what the elite is in a way that’s not like like a kind of Spectre like a they that’s just like trying to control us all but you know what’s your real how are you grappling with this concept well it’s such a yeah it’s a great question and it’s interesting you ask it now because we just settled on a subtitle of our next book so I’m working on a I’m really going to finish a Trilogy of books on civilization that starts with apocalypse never included in San Francisco and then the third book is called pathocracy and we just settled on the subtitle which is why Elites subvert civilization and it speaks to yeah so you’re thinking about this I’m glad yeah it speaks to well there’s so much going on just in those four words and um when you’re doing a subtitle you’re like what is the book about that’s what the subtitle is about and so I’m very interested in the ways in which the people that have benefited the most from civilization are also in the process and doing more than anybody else to undermine it and that means that the elites the people that benefit the most from civilization meaning the security and the prosperity and the status and the freedom that comes from being high on the totem pole I think the first thing though it’s like because Elites are obviously in the conversation right now we’ve been doing a lot of our own reporting on we’re certainly not the only ones I think it’s a big conversation because the the the public does not feel that the elites represent them in a healthy Society in a civilization that’s working you have in quality you have Elites but people are not mad at the elites people are mad at the elites the elites have failed in so many ways even if you look at Europe the heads of state are very unpopular in Western democracies and so so you sort of get at why is that and what what makes them unpopular you know I mean so there’s a lot of different directions we can go but I think the fact that we’re interested in Elites shows that it’s it’s in part because they’re actually not doing their jobs well and it’s not even that it’s not a radical IAL like there’s a certainly a socialist or a communist criticism of Elites which is that there shouldn’t be any Elites I mean that’s what Marx is saying that’s what the Communists want is there no Elites we’re not saying anything any that radical we’re just saying they’re not doing a good job and so when you look at the you know something like a third of the public approves of how universities the media and other Elite institutions are performing and that just tells you there’s something profoundly wrong with with our civilization all right here’s your obligatory reminder to hit the like button subscribe to the channel and ring the bell it really actually does help us out a lot when we’re trying to book awesome new guests they look at how many subscribers are on the channel and they say Yep this is worth doing and I want to bring the best possible people to you that I can speaking of which let’s get back to the conversation a good friend of mine Mike Gibson has a book paper belt on fire where he talks about that that sort of collection the paper industrial complex from DC to Boston uh Pol politics media Academia you it’s kind of a perfect like the basically you can get on Amtrak and and touch on all of the failing broken sort of collusive disasters of American society in like a 4-Hour Asel ride right is that part of the problem is it the connectivity is it the the community building that’s taken place where people that that are in positions of authority are just hanging out with each other too much I think it’s I’m not sure if it’s that they’re hanging out with each other too much but they’re definitely disconnected from working Americans ordinary Americans um disconnected geographically for sure one of the most famous stories that people like to tell in DC is that before jet travel the members of Congress had to live in Washington they brought their families there they grew up you know they would spend you know decades and they’ become friends with people across the aisle from them they still had partisan disagreement there were still fights but there was still they humanized each other when you testify in front of Congress right now the relationships between Republicans Democrats are so toxic you know at first I remember when I started testifying a lot more I testified a lot in the last couple years but when the first couple times I remember asking after I was like was that just for show are you guys just pretending to hate each other like that cuz surely behind the scenes you guys have a different relationship and was like no unfortunately that is how bad it’s gone and I think some of that then also is so some of it’s we know it’s Geographic some of it’s the change of jet travel some of it’s also we know is social media um social media because it reduces face-to-face contact it’s very dehumanizing so it’s very hard for me to dehumanize you right now because we’re here together and we can see the god in you sees the god in me and vice versa it’s very hard to be dehumanized like that but when you’re going after somebody online and they’re and they’re faceless and nameless I think those those natur naturally Psychopathic Tendencies to dehumanize the other come to the for more and then I think then then they then bleed over into real world interactions I think that’s one set of factors I think there’s another set of factors which is I just think Elite policies are not in the interests of the public and so the real challenge to this has come with the rise of populism particularly after 2016 with Trump and brexit and we’re still undergoing that transition is very dramatic moment obviously where the elites are trying to figure out what does our policy agenda need to be that’s in the interests of the public and not in the interests of oligarchs or foreign interests or foreign or oligarchs and I think that’s a a Big Driver as well of the dissatisfaction that’s occurring you have a new piece on um your substack about this about basic I think the title is basically how the Democratic Elite has um destroyed itself basically in the face of rejecting populism I’m I’m sort of paraphrasing there but um what’s your thesis in that piece well it’s interesting to look if you look at the two parties there’s these similarities and contrast I mean one of them is you have two populist presidential candidates emerg at the same time in 2016 one of them is Bernie Sanders on the left the other one is Donald Trump on the right the Republican and Democratic party Elites aggressively opposed both of those candidates at the end of the day the Republican voters went with the populist candidate and the Democrats did not now we look at we describe how the Democrats engaged in some machinations at the elite level the DNC level the party delegates and whatnot moving money around and favoring Hillary to make sure she got the nomination similar you know different but you know similar approach to then snuff out the populace threat in 2020 getting bu a judge and ab kashar to drop out endorse Biden and then Warren split the vote with Biden I’m sorry split the vote with Bernie Biden gets the nomination so one interesting question is why did the right end up going the populist Direction rather than the left and I think if you look over history I mean I don’t know I don’t know what the measure is but certainly we find left and right-wing populists you know throughout history so why did it work on the right rather left we gave one potential answer which is just that Trump had more money you was stronger in a lot of ways than Bernie was able to be just for who he was as an outsider business in person rather than a member of Congress that’s potentially one reason but then I think what’s so interesting about it is that the the fragilized so by subjecting Trump to this just you know whatever you think of the guy you know the trial of job you know like yeah like I mean they threw everything at the guy um from 2016 until today including you know lawsuits trying to get him in prison he narrowly escapes it in part because he gets this big truth social his company goes goes public he becomes a billionaire he’s able to you know pay this this this temporary fee anyway in New York so he gets through it all and he’s he’s the strongest guy whereas they protect Biden for so long they overprotect him I mean I just love the metaphor you can see the implications of it they overprotect Biden and then you end up in a crisis that we’re currently in and so I think one of the lessons is that because we say it all the time we go democracy is a really resilient system compared to authoritarianism but I we haven’t had good ex we often don’t have good examples of that and I think here you do have a really good one which is that subject your candidates to test a fire the guy who comes out of it going to be much stronger than the one who was sheltered and coddled and protected by the party apparatus you know one of the things that that leads me to think about is something that you know so you ran for governor in the state of California and um I don’t know if you’ve had any conversations with um biology shavasan oh Shashi yeah yeah yeah so he’s um I I I I met him years ago trying to keep up with his mind is a challenging thing when you’re talking to him he’s so fast he has basically laid said that California in particular is is an example of essentially like communist China it’s a single party state so there’s only really competition within the Democratic party right you ran you ran as a republican candidate for governor no or or how did you run actually that well I actually ran twice so I ran in 2018 I didn’t have any support and I was a Democrat I uh in 2021 I became an independent because I had just done all the research for San Francisco and I was like I can’t be a Democrat anymore just for moral reasons and then in 2022 I ran as an independent and there is a path as an independent if you can get out of the because it’s a they call it a an Open Primary so anybody can vote for anybody and so you could have come out of the primary two Democrats two Republicans two Independents independent Democrat whatever so my The Hope was we’d get out of the primary as an independent and be in a good position to win by having all the Republicans plus a significant share of Independence and some Democrats um I still think that’s possible we just didn’t have the time or money really to get there so um so I wouldn’t I think BAGI just uh as is sometimes the case uh overstates the situation spending time in that political environment um and maybe even just starting with San Francisco what has that told you about this the problems of feedback loops there because it does seem like one of the problems is it’s so lopsided and so single party in nature that it just gets crazy it just becomes like absolutely insane levels of policy that are happening that don’t pass muster I think I saw recently there was a there was um a bill to try to Federal uh make selling children for sex as a felony and there were actually activists saying this will harm the lgbtq community if we make child child sex trafficking a felony how’s that that’s like the level of insanity it feels like happens in this environment where there’s no competition is that fair I mean it’s worth taking a minute in understanding the madness and how bad it is I mean first of all it’s a lot of mentally ill and drug addicted people that are being left to die on the streets or revived a doz or two dozen times by you know teams of EMT professionals and then they’re no longer able to revive them because the fentanyl that they’re smoking is at such high doses that the that the Narcan no longer works you have um sex trafficking we discovered a 14-year-old girl who was being uh trafficked on the street uh the police had failed to get her we wrote a story about it able to get her off the street but that’s not uncommon there’s Street walking was basically decriminalized uh supposedly because it was hurting people of color disproportionately uh I’ll allow the viewers to judge for themselves whether or not that itself might be a rather racist uh formulation of the problem and then on the issue you mentioned around trying to increase the penalties for child sex trafficking and then also uh the latest one is effectively trying to get get the state set up to take kids away from their parents if the kids are identifying as the opposite sex and the parents are opposed to letting their kids go on drugs or have surgeries in a pseudo scientific effort to change their sex so things are absolutely out of control it’s not the first time that you’ve had cult likee behaviors by democrats in California in San Francisco I describe the Jonestown and this character Jim Jones in the 70s drinking the Kool-Aid famous drinking the Kool-Aid thousand people kill themselves in Guyana this country in South America after they’ moved but when you look at the the people’s Temple which was his cult in San Francisco they had huge support from Democrats and part because they were delivering votes and money to democratic candidates but very high levels of support and yeah it was just a it’s a religion so when you so so California look it’s always had more you know had when they first came in the 19th century they’re more saloons than churches it’s not like Boston you know I mean Boston the Democrats are not what they are in the Bay Area that he Eden ISM the the desire to create an alternative religion out of a kind of cult of compassion that’s why I sort of say sanr sickness is a is a sickness of compassion unbounded where it’s not it’s considered cruel to intervene in someone’s life so they don’t kill themselves on fenyl as opposed to being cruel to let them die from fentanyl on the street so that’s just how crazy it’s gotten and then it it fall it fals prey to other pseudoscientific Cults like the idea that you can change your sex and so yeah how do you get the feedback loop in there very it’s a very good question I actually think that there is a way in other words I think politics is what breaks that stalemate you have a lot of very affluent billionaires in California uh more than anywhere else that are capable of supporting candidates that can make change for a variety of reasons that organizational Clarity hasn’t kind of coalesced yet but who knows it may still happen it does seem like I’m I live you know we’re in Austin and Austin has been the beneficiary although it’s not without its costs of sort of you know California migration and to some extent Elite California migration the most elite of being Elon Musk moving to Austin building the Giga Factory right but but others as well Joe Lonsdale other sort of um right of Center or just not crazy woke right Californians so there does seem to be a vote with your feet the feedback loop there although also seems like well now maybe some of the people best equipped to stand up for sanity in California are just like it’s just not worth it and I’m out of here do you think that that’s just going to be is that that feels like it could be an accelerating feedback loop yeah in fact there’s a this is a pretty well it’s called I think it’s called the curly effect and it’s named after I believe the Boston mayor named Curly who I was hoping it was going to be the the stoe yeah no exactly I for one of the Three Stooges should be but yeah the effect is just that um the people that leave are the ones that would have created change and the people that stay are the ones that benefit from it and I think there is some truth to that I also don’t think it lasts you know forever you know a lot you know some Trends are linear some Trends are not linear so yeah I do think there’s some of that I think the thing to remember about San Francis about San Francisco but also about California is this just such a desirable place to live I mean we like the climate is such that like I mean the weather yes um the physical natural climate is just so amazing like my wife and I we struggle with it um we don’t have the community in Berkeley that uh we’re already developing in Austin even you know developing in London you know but it’s you know it’s Berkeley weather so I mean it’s really hard so but I think that also means that it has two effects one of them is that the politicians take you take it for granted that people that really love it there will stay there and they’ll put up with all sorts of awful awful uh things including just a decline of basic services but then the other effect I think is that then there you get some people that will fight for it so the people that you know like me that are like stubborn and love it a lot are not willing to just give it up and and sort of walk away from it I’ve thought about what is the right analogy for the relationship between government and and the public because the notion that it’s like some purely representational relationship is a fiction it’s it’s literally not true right like I know mathematically my vote will have no impact I’m not saying don’t vote right although you are encouraging the bastards when you do but um the best I’ve been able to come up with so far is that government is at its best is like a good Dairy Farmer so Dairy Farmers and I I’ve spent a bunch of time with Dairy Farmers actually because we’ve done some documentaries about Animal Welfare Dairy Farmer is among the animal food producers are maybe the ones that have to care about the health of their animal the most because there’s a real high correlation between health of the of the heer and milk production so that seems like what the government is they see us as their as their milk heers they want to keep us healthy enough to produce for them for tax revenue and if you’re in Berkeley California they don’t have to work even as hard because like oh you’re free ranging you’re grazing on grasses you’re looking at the redwood trees so then they can whip the heck out of us it’s fine yeah is that do you think that’s a fair analy yeah I think it’s well I think it’s sort of fair although I I also am interested I am really interested in Dairy Farmers as well um from my my mother’s uh family in Indiana were Dairy Farmers um um I have a friend who’s a Dairy Farmer in California in fact I just when I visited him the cows were milking on one of those gigantic merry go rounds and I became obsessed with this technology where you know the cow marches in there and they stuck the uter on there and then they go around in circles why because it hypnotizes them I guess there the cows love it um and there’s like two it’s mechanized and so there’s like two guys like in this room of like hundreds of cows I think they’re also coming off at a certain point and then I went and then when all the controversy was happened about new restrictions on nitrogen pollution were being put in place in Netherlands I went to the Netherlands and interview Dairy Farmers and I and the first Dairy Farmer I interviewed when I started asking him about his cows and his relationship with him he started to cry because he loves his cows that much so I would say the metaphor falls apart because the Dairy Farmers actually love their cows and the California politicians Really Don’t Care About Us um they really do take us for granted thank you thank you for this because they they know the names of their cows and they know their whole like literally they they he said he’s like the cows are my best friends he’s like he’s like I know that makes me seem ridiculous and I was like yes at one level but another level it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve heard on the entire trip is so moving and such a there’s a lot of different directions conversation can go but but certainly as just a really important counter to the awful disrespect that farmers have received in recent years deep disrespect deeply dehumanizing patronizing elitist you know that and and particularly like we are in this foreign capital and we know what the right nitrogen levels should be the main event is preventing the manure from breaking down not to get too gross but if you capture the manure um in the proper ways then you prevent the nitrogen runoff that everyone’s worried about they had done a good job in reducing the nitrogen runoff when the government was in a more collaborative relationship with Farmers it wasn’t this heavy-handed imposition it wasn’t just libertarianism I mean there was some sense in which let’s try to reduce the nitrogen runoff but it wasn’t this heavy-handed you know um top down regulatory scheme so I do anyway to the extent there’s a metaphor there that might be one of them too is that one of the things that is most profoundly happening in this question of populism versus the elite is it there’s a lot of threads there’s no one I’m sure of that but the urban versus rural is a big dividing line that when you actually travel you encounter really quickly it’s like we are in two different societies yes huge problem huge problem could be coming for some correction I mean it’s interesting because and this is where I get to the nonlinear part of the trends I mean one of the most interesting political Trends that’s breaking down now is watching black support for Trump increase they just did a Daily Show focus group totally unscientific or whatever but they had like six African-Americans interviewed um by the half were voting for Trump and they were a little bit like themselves they were kind of like I can’t believe I’m saying this you know they like I can’t believe that this is coming out of my mouth so that’s you know starting to change I see I credit Shane Gillis yeah um for this like he he made everybody laugh he made all the Liberals laugh about Trump and then I see it among my friends and family everyone’s softening a bit and being like okay maybe it won’t be a dictatorship if Trump comes back in maybe we overstated that a little bit I so I do think that that rural urban divide of course it can’t last and only 1 and a half% of the population are farmers so it’s not like that’s a governing Coalition or not or whatnot and yeah but I think you do start if you start to if it really becomes if the Republicans really do end up becoming a workingclass party and that’s clearly what they’re going for that’s uh that creates big problems for Democrats because people have to remember only a third of the of the population I think goes to college in the United States you know so still too many yeah exactly no I know we still have and we still over that’s the real problem got a third I know what do we do with them all I know they all then become they go into the censorship industrial complex so yeah I mean I think look we’re in a period of like significant political realignment that is clearly as significant as the one that occurred after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and so you see the Republican Party orienting towards working people also you know you see the Democrats orienting around educated Elites and and both in the United States and and in Britain but that can’t be the end of the story because if they are too oriented towards Elites they’re not going to be able to succeed politically and so you’re going to have to see the Democrats start to respond more with with policies that are more in the interest of working people one of the things um that we have as like this case study moment right now and I’m really curious how you think about this is Joe scarbo burrow saying there’s never been a better Biden and one week later and and and you know and sharp sharp Sharpie Sharpie Sharpie Sharpie Sharpie Sharpie sharp almost like they’re reading from a script right and then um one week later a debate that should have been surprising to no one with eyes and ears happens and it there is nothing surprising in at all those of us that watched it and watched CNN in particular like the slack jawed shock the van Jones being like on the verge of tears mhm how do you think about that because it is I’m not prone towards conspiracy because like I just don’t think it’s possible to coordinate on a mass scale the way most conspiracy theories assume like oh there’s this like elaborate web and everyone’s speaking in unison it’s like if that were true we wouldn’t have found out about Abu grae right but something’s going on right so how do you think about the like media turn on a dime like memory H holding of the thing they said literally five minutes ago well I’m so happy about it because of course I these are my competitors so the more that they destroy their credibility and legitimacy the happier I am and and and it comes as some relief because there is menace to this really it’s almost totalitarian uniformity and Conformity of the media where they’re just constantly gaslighting us you know the kind of classic is no that’s not happening and then quite Surly afterwards yes it’s happening it’s a good thing and we should do more of it I mean that happens so frequently gas stove bands was one that we saw you know IC bands and but you know trans stuff it’s constantly happening um there’s no mic there’s people always tell me there’s no they’re not doing this on miners you know but they but the miners should be able to have these you know drugs and surgeries so yeah I mean for me that was wonderful because clearly they got themselves in a is was reminiscent of the problems of the democratic Elites as well and they got themselves in a position where they they believed their own BS that Trump was this existential threat to democracy so much that they then defended the indefensible which was Biden’s obvious uh you know debilities and mental incapacity and then when it became you know they’re not very long-term thinkers obviously you know because if they were then they wouldn’t have had that defense for so long and then been gaslighting people about his condition so then they got them they got themselves in a situation where the debates occurred and he fell apart and their legitimacy suffered for it and I think it still suffered I mean you know like I said the trust in the media was like 30 I think it was like 33 to 36% before that occurred and now when you go online readers are there mixed like there’s some hardcore Democrat Biden supporters that are mad at the media for turning on Biden there’s others who are like why did you let it get this bad so I think it’s great and I’m really I think it’s a really positive development because the media had just grown too powerful and and I think it’s now the bro you know there’s other things that are going on like just the rise of the internet and podcasting and Twitter in social media means that the thing that is really delegitimizing for the media is when they they both lie and Gaslight and then people go find the truth for themselves in some other way and that’s ultimately what what undo it they can tell you that you’re don’t believe you know don’t believe Your Lying Eyes believe me but when people see it themselves that just means you’re suffering a huge legitimacy crisis what do you think is the mechanism that allowed this to happen in this way you said that like oh they’ve convinced themselves of this like the pending neoh Hitler tto yeah ego is the mechanism yeah but but if you believed he’s Hitler and you could see that the current president is ailing and maybe has Parkinson’s or something but like that can’t be good if you think the country is going to collapse into fascism wouldn’t you be so quick to be like we need to pressure Biden to step down now we need to get president Harris to be the president and and get a really strong running mate to try to so that so that we can have continu like like that that as your core concern would suggest courses of action if you see yourself as being influential that weren’t taken right well the key moment would have been this year right where you would have allowed a primary it would have been some you would have had the elites get together and demand on a primary of course you’re dealing with a president that didn’t want that and that has used I mean I think we don’t there there was this whole mythology of Biden as this sort of nice guy that was never the case he was always a ruthless politician always willing to use the dark arts and to be quite vicious in his attacks and to lie about all sorts of things including his own condition and I think we still don’t know kind of what was really going on medically we already know that there was discrepancies between what what they the white house has said and what he said particularly around Parkinson’s I should say I was I was I had a I had a story about him having Parkinson’s that I was going to run like a week before the debates and ultimately my colleague kind of decided not to mostly because it just was still speculative and we did a little conjecture it’s a little conjecture and it was um it’s also just not in our wheel it’s not really what we do you know medical reporting it’s probably a good call yeah but it is in but you know part of is my my both my parents have Parkinson my father has Parkinson’s and when I see Biden I’m like that’s Parkinson’s like I just was like it’s the face in particular but the shuffle and the the ability to only do this kind of movement and so for me I was like and then I remember then I saw that finally CNN had on a Parkinson’s expert and they were like well what you know like why do you make that assessment he’s like well because it’s obvious just look at him it’s like Parkinson’s and he’s like but don’t you need to do all those complicated exams and he was like he’s like I could see somebody across the room and be like that guy is Parkinson and I have that experience too you just see it’s a particular mask of the face so I mean I I mentioned all that just to say yeah I mean everybody knew there was a problem there and that that was the moment time for the elites to step in you know last year and and be like there needs to be an Open Primary and start to do this Revolt then and so yeah it’s just human yeah just it’s definitely not a conspiracy that’s all I’ll put that way when you um I think one of the things that is happening as the sources that had been authoritative yeah reveal themselves to be so rotten at least partly because of facing enough competition and now facing a lot right we have this Vortex of well I’m a busy person mhm how am I supposed to vet if this is true or not I don’t know I don’t know what to believe and then I go on to these platforms that we’ve heralded as being the competitive mechanism right and they rank and present material to me that confirms my bias so that I will engage with it and if I’m not and if I’m not aware of that it’s really powerful and it’s really powerful if I am aware of it because I’m still seeing a bunch of stuff that makes me angry so what do I do now what do I do now as a person navigating a world where it’s like well those guys are a bunch of Schmucks and liars and half the other people think that we shouldn’t get the MMR vaccine even though I’m pretty sure that’s good I’m pretty sure the mmr’s good right but but if they were wrong about the covid vaccine right but maybe maybe it was handwashing all along like right yeah it’s a Hu so this is one of the most important questions right is sort of what it there’s sort of two questions it’s like how do people decide who to trust and who do they trust and how is it changing so the the story that the Deep state for lack of a better word and the elites told after 2016 the story was voters are really gullible um the Russians are doing disinformation um anybody can make anything go viral um people are more likely to believe falsehoods than truths falsehoods travel faster than truths that all turned out to be a lie like the most one of the most important psychological findings there’s a whole book I just read about this going over this is that actually people are very slow to change their minds most people are not super open-minded most people are very skeptical of new information so that was one very important finding if anything anything we would say people are a little bit too slow to has changed their mind they should be a little bit more open-minded but without any that judgment this picture of people as like gullible and believing everything they see is just false it’s been absolutely disproven in the academic research the other issue is that our people online creating bubbles of information turns out much less than people who are not getting their information online if you are watching MSNBC all day and you’re not on Twitter you’re not getting a wide variety of sources if you’re on Twitter you’re getting a lot of them and I will say elon’s changes to Twitter have made it better I have we have these now we have these two columns on X right formerly Twitter one of them is the people you follow and the other one is for you I love the for you I think it’s gotten better that’s the recommendation algorithm that everybody’s obsessed with I like the people I’m following but the 4u is great and then sometimes I might even follow one of the 4 youu people and then I’m like that’s too much of them I’d rather have the recommendation engine um offer stuff to me on this political crisis my response and I’m not suggesting this was other people’s but I think it’s a it’s it’s one that people could consider I followed a lot more Progressive and Democratic and mainstream media voices than I had before because I really in a moment where I was starting to cover politics more I was like I just need more sources and so I’ve been doing a lot more following and unfollowing I think the other thing though that’s changed is that there used to be the kind of voice of God approach from journalism embodied by Walter kronite and the TV stations continue to chase that wrong the way it and that’s the way it is and I think that’s very bad I think it’s very it’s very outdated um I think it’s actually fragilized what they’re trying to do a more robust approach is the approach taken by two major media figures Joe Rogan on the one hand Elon Musk on the other they both admit that they don’t know things they both admit that they’re wrong they both ask questions Elon has done some tweets that he would admit were not great and he’s apologized for them them deleted them we asked about some of them you know um that is that’s Role Model Behavior I mean that’s good behavior um I believe I agree with I wrote two books and in my books I talked about how wrong I was about these issues in my previous years and what I’ve learned that’s I think that’s very very important for people to do so we need as like I think and I think that’s I think it’s also strategic in the sense that I think if you want to have influence it’s good to admit your fallibility it’s good to admit that you don’t know things you’ve made mistakes and to actually talk about why you made those mistakes what those biases were we trust people that have some self-awareness so I think that we’re we’re headed towards a place a relationship to expertise that is really different from the one that pervaded after World War II until the beginning of the century I um and I haven’t had a chance to read the underlying paper I came across a video that sort of made a summary of this which was I think it’s Daniel Kahan is the researcher MH that high IQ people will tend to be more numerate um because IQ is essentially a kind of like cognitive speed like how quickly can I crunch abstractions and come to an answer right it’s good for problem solving IQ is great correlates with a lot of stuff but high IQ people as I understand it are actually more prone when you encounter complex sort of more ideologically oriented questions like should we have gun control or not um to go way off the rails and to use their IQ as a kind of expost justification of whatever ideological bias they have and so it was kind of a case for populism in the sense of Beware of the smarty pants that can make lots of arguments for something that sounds crazy to your contractor because your contractor being like that guy sounds like a lunatic he’s proba right yeah sure there could be some truth to that um I mean we could probably find examples to where the contractor is has all sorts of crazy beliefs that we wouldn’t subscribe to um but I mean if you look at kind of structurally what it’s meant in terms of media the biggest change is having a huge number of content moderators at Twitter before Elon took over and now a small number of them and a heavy Reliance on what’s called Community notes which is the system where people can offer Corrections and context in a kind of community notes system that then’s voted on it’s not perfect um I’ve seen I’ve seen some things get community noted that I didn’t think were quite right but even then there’s appeal there’s an appeal process which is mostly flagging Elon and being like that doesn’t seem right but there was a study that was done on it and I found that it did have a much higher level of accuracy now of course it all depends on what people actually believe about certain things so if you think that men can change themselves into women and women can change themselves into men and that’s just something that you believe you’re going to have a different Community note if everybody believes if the majority believes that the community is going to be different before Elon took over they censored people who said men can’t be women like that was something that they censored my friend Megan Murphy was censored for saying to Vaya who was one of the lead Attorneys at Twitter but men can’t be women Vaya and that was the whole tweet that was censored so and that might be I think that’s a good example in your case is like here you have something where how do you how do you convince people after hundreds of thousands of years that something magical can occur that people can change their their sex it takes a lot of intellectual work and that’s not work that your contractor or plumber is doing that’s work that University professors are doing so yeah I think that just that’s um we all know Dunning Krueger which is that you know you’re if you’re bad at something then you’re also bad at knowing that you’re bad about it that’s what it is like if you’re dumb about something then you’re also too dumb to know that you’re bad at it which is why there’s people that that we all in our lives and maybe all of us have it in ourselves you’re doing something that’s like you’re not good at that but you don’t even know that you’re bad at it cuz you’re that’s a problem the other way it goes is that you’re so smart and you and you know and you are smart and you’re someone that does have a high IQ and you have a fancy university job and you’re really smart at something and I see this all the time and then they get outside their specialization or even within their specialization yeah and they’ll just be completely wrong but because they’ve got so much intellectual Firepower they’re able to provide the the intellectual linguistic justifications for something that’s that’s totally wrong either morally or analytically I either lucked into or have been hopelessly um uh distorted by being injected by a healthy dose of Friedrich Hayek early in my intellectual life and he has this paper that speaks to this it’s uh I it’s one of these things like it’s like the one of these things of our time that I feel like everyone should read even though it’s a little it’s called the intellectuals and socialism have you come across this paper I I may I remind me well the basic premise it’s got a bunch of different ideas but one of one of them at the heart of it is that a there’s there’s a class of people he calls them the secondhand dealers of information and they’re sort of the disseminators of the underlying like research so there’s people in Academia or whatever doing research and then you’ve got people like me you know far more people like you who are out in the media or in art um taking a very distilled and almost sometimes just flat out objectively like wrong version of that and disseminating it right but the other piece of the puzzle that I find that that’s so apt to this conversation is um he says there is a kind of attribution error we make when someone has expertise or a credential that they that not only that they get rewarded for and that the public in general kind of Rewards you mouthing off about whatever nonsense you want to talk about now like if you’re Neil degrass Tyson right you could say whatever you want about anything even though it has nothing to do with celestial bodies flying around right or if you’re a doctor and my dad’s a doctor you have you’re very narrowly specialized as a do as a as a medical doctor yeah but suddenly you can mouth off about whatever you want and non-medical things and people will take you more seriously than any jerk walking down the street that might actually know more than this doctor so hyek says beware of this yes how do you interact with this problem this the credential problem yeah the credential L which of course is is a is considered an illegitimate form of of debate of argument um credentials don’t tell you what the right answer is to a problem it doesn’t tell you so it’s used as a shortcut it’s a heuristic it’s it’s obviously a huge problem I mean it’s um I see it on climate change all the time you might be somebody like climate scientists Trad traditionally meant somebody who was good at measuring levels of greenhouse gases heat trapping gases and their impact on temperatures like that used to be all it was but now it’s becom your expert on you know the role of renewable energy well it’s a totally different field unrelated I just got off the phone with somebody who was trying to tell me that somebody who knew about hurricanes would somehow have something to say about whales I think there is a and that was among a sophisticated journalist so I do think there’s a A Primitive kind of well that’s the witch doctor and they they’re they’re like in this particular position some of it’s disingenuous it’s people just trying to make an argument that they want to make and and and using that as a shortcut knowing that it has some impact I will say I think it’s I think it’s been the legit the legitimate legitimation crisis that we’ve been talking about has been great for this so I think that the skepticism of experts is very very high right now and you know so you see Co Origins the idea that it was a debunked conspiracy theory that it came from a lab vaccine the idea that it would prevent infection and transmission lockdowns the idea that we needed to keep kids out of schools and that would be more positive than negative these are all things brought To Us by experts um and the experts have been proven spectacularly wrong the experts said that Biden was better than ever he was not better than ever yeah so I do think that it’s it’s positive in that way it’s also temporary in the sense that I think that the legitimation crisis is the exception to the rule that mostly and like the same thing I was saying about the distrust of Elites societies can’t go on with the elites and the experts and the sources of information having such low levels of trust something’s got to give and so I think it what it gives way to is just a broader number of experts a broader number of people who we trust as honest Brokers and I think some I think there is also the public is more Savvy in the sense that I think we are moving away from the voice of God type person to being like you know I might agree with Bobby Kennedy on Free Speech not sure if I trust him on vaccines I’m speaking personally at this point you know love him on censorship love him like I mean just incredible nuclear power I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about you know and he knows I think that so it’s not like I’m sorry Bobby um but I think that people are gaining that level of sophistication as well and I think that that will only increase as you know that is one of the benefits of this highly complex and fragmented media environment there has been a centralization of actual political power and policy Authority in the United States over time um and that hasn’t really abated the Supreme Court this supreme court has started to chip away at that in ways some of which are exciting like the Chevron the end of Chevron Defence so that oh if you’re the unelected bureaucrat that interpreted a vague statute the court just doesn’t bow before you like a mini King yes but has to actually do its job yeah that seems like a step in the right direction um how do you think about the the mechanism of politics starting to reflect the decentralization of knowledge and expertise because that’s kind of how I’m hearing what you’re saying that we we’re actually seeing in the best possible sense decentralization of expertise I think there’s two I think it’s I think it’s it’s both centralization and decentralization occurring at the same time so if we just take the big example of Twitter and now rebranded X I’m a huge supporter of what Elon Musk has been doing I I was Twitter files journalist um I was um I’ve written on there’s been some controversial Ed Edge cases around India and turkey where X was censorship was demanded of them I was involved in one in Brazil he did the right thing on Brazil and he’s also you know he’s got they’re trying to get along with different Power centers particularly the advertisers demand a lot of censorship and so just recently there was a congressional hearing actually yesterday there was a congressional hearing Ben ship hero testified about the ways in which the advertisers collude to deprive conservative and libertarian or disfavored Outlets of funding and they’re exercising control in that way and is that legal is it ethical what is it the big change here is that X is now a much more free speech platform than it was it’s not 100% but that’s not really possible the problem is that we’re really now dependent on one man to stay strong with us and I was actually very I’m not an electric car guy at all I’m not a rocket guy either but I was very happy that Elon Musk got that $46 billion bonus payment because I was like well that covers his loss for on Twitter and more and so there’s less like he’s less vulnerable to the financial pressure to censor on the other hand I don’t love it that our Free Speech rights depend on a single person just as a principle doesn’t matter who the person is you know it is a kind of benevolent monarchism he’s the king I mean he’s a king it’s it’s a monarchy so I I believe in the First Amendment which says as a spiritual and moral matter that Free Speech comes before the government government doesn’t give us free speech rights we have free speech rights that are inalienable to us as human beings that’s very clear in our founding documents and then we affirm the government should exist but free speech comes first you know what does that mean in the age of the internet I mean for me what I have argued is that the distinction in the law between Publishers and social media platforms gives special rights to the social media platform special liability protections if you this is section 230 section 230 1996 communication decency act my view is that if you’re going to be social media platform then you uh should have as a rule that you’re going to allow a adult users to decide on their own legal content so obviously what kids get should be up to their parents in some ways and restricted I think illegal content that we all agree should be censored should be censored without question but that adult users should decide is that what we have now at X we’re getting there a little closer I’d feel better if that were the law that required that on the other hand and I’ve testified on it and I’ve told Elon what I think there’s no movement towards implementing Michael schomberg’s proposal on this which some might call a common carrier proposal but but I would just call you know user you know adult user control of legal content um no one’s moving towards that you know um and I’m not pushing it aggressively in part because so far it’s looking pretty good on X but yeah if you get to a place where suddenly elon’s replaced or he loses his mind or whatever and he starts to become more sorious dies in a car accident dies in a car accident something happens forbid I would then worry about it because I do feel like and people accuse me of exaggerating but I do feel like if you don’t have X you really are in a more totalitarian type situation because the censorship on Facebook is off the just insane Tik Tok censors you if you refuse to go along with the company line that people can change their biological sex which is absurd and so where is the Free Speech platform I mean traditional media it’s just all the problem is traditional media so you only really have X and in the case of Brazil you had the Supreme Court a single Justice out of control that was trying to not just censor people but to ban them politicians we’re talking about politicians and journalists which is career death I mean that’s it if you can’t be on social media platforms he wanted to ban them entirely well if that were to occur you’re in a totalitarian situation so on the one hand I think we’re in a really dangerous fragile moment on the other hand I’m a little bit more relaxed we also lost a supreme court thing which we don’t need to go into but basically that’s kind of where we’re at yeah the Missouri case I mean that’s kind of where we’re at is that please God protect Elon Musk and also at some point I would love to see a stronger foundation for our Free Speech protections uh it’s funny you’d mentioned common carrier uh yesterday I had um Randy Barnett who I don’t know sure if you’re familiar with him but he’s um he’s a one of the sort of leading intellectual architects of originalism he’s also basically like an anarco libertarian minded person so he’s like simultaneously been he’s like a radical and been effective in having an impact on legal thought on the conservative libertarian side of the spectrum the Federalist Society Etc right and he made a similar argument um we didn’t dive super deep but he was basically saying that like look this issue of are you a common carrier are you in a platform form position where there’s other things happening I’m not sure quite I haven’t grappled with this enough to think about fully like what are the criteria is it about Network effects is it about yeah infrastructure because you know I think some of the arguments historically were well once you’ve run the telephone lines it’s really really expensive it involves all kinds of complex property rights in eminent domain so you no longer have by virtue of the physical infrastructure easy entrance and exit right and so we need to have some essentially regulation right in the form of common C I mean it is it is a regulatory regime to say oh you’re going to build this platform but you have to abide by these rules right yes well I mean you basically just described this very long argument that had existed before the internet and the social media had risen to power and now we’re coming back to it but yeah I mean it’s called a natural monopoly like you and it first starts with the electrical grid something I because I work on energy it was a very known thing where yeah I mean you don’t want to have like five companies stringing electrical wire to every house I mean it’s insane then you choose which company I mean it’s so total everybody recognized as a waste of resource so it was a natural monopoly in the sense it made sense for it to be a monopoly and then you have these regulated Monopoly utilities and they can either be government-owned or they can be private but either way they’re really heavily regulated so they can’t price gouge they can’t just be like or they can’t deprive you service because you’re a Libertarian they can’t say we’re not going to provide electrical service to you because you’re a Libertarian some people want that yeah so so then the question is so everyone’s accepted that on electricity markets I mean for the most part there was some it doesn’t matter there’s some tangents there but but then you get to the social media platforms and you go well are there Network effects and even Jack dorsy the found the creator of Twitter has been sort of a denier of these Network effects so they go we’re going to go do decentralization so we’re going to go do I think this was blue sky and there’s one called Mastadon there’s one called Noster you sort of Federated yeah you kind of go and I you know when I’m open I’m an open-minded guy I mean I’m skeptical because I think Network effects are very real I mean they’re dead like you go there and you’re like that post has zero views and zero likes and whatever and meanwhile like X is just like it’s just I mean even threads where they which is the new Twitter clone that that Facebook did it’s also like they’re throttling the social and political news so there’s really nothing like X Twitter that gets you this intense like just density of information and virality and so the virality is this new thing and interestingly enough the censorship the people that want more censorship are also obsessed with virality like virality is like the main event in some ways because if you’re viral then you’re actually reaching a lot of people and you’re changing opinion and you’re it’s also how you make a business and there’s all sorts of reasons to be concerned about that how do you get virality on these decentralized Networks works I don’t think it’ll ever happen I that’s my my own personal VI view of it hence my view that you need that that condition that if you’re going to have the social media status but it’s complicated because I’ll tell you the other complicated thing when you open up your New York Times app now on your iPhone or your smartphone what’s so interesting is that in the lower right hand corner there are a little blue there’s a little blue notifications uh signal that looks identical to the little blue notifications on Twitter and such basic animals like you open up I got notifications so the I think the New York Times in particular is becoming more like a platform and then the platforms like Twitter are becoming more like Publishers and so when you and I’ve been working I mean encouraging this trend that I mean so you see on Twitter you can now publish articles and the the format looks a little bit more like substack and they really believe in this and they want to do that I’ve encouraging them to have like pay walls and so you can make money so you’re starting to see a a blurring of the line between publisher and social media platform which just makes it even more complicated and actually I think kind of in some ways I think I don’t know if it undermines my argument but it certainly complicates my argument for what I think we ought to do but I don’t know what else to say I I I just describe what I’m seeing to policy makers and others and I think that they’re kind of like let’s just see how this all shakes out a little bit right now the other observation I was going to make is that I I think in a moment when you have this high level of polarization and nothing’s been able to happen in Congress you have seen more Reliance on the Supreme Court and I think to some extent I think it’s been wonderful and I think that some of the Supreme Court decisions I agree with the Chevron decision for example you know but um I also agree with the decision they made on homelessness they just made a decision that the local cities can clear homeless encampments but it was also a decision where I was like that only went to the Supreme Court because they’re not able to deal with this problem but like the Supreme Court like homelessness needs to be dealt with in I don’t want to overstate complexity but I wrote a whole book on it and obviously I think it requires a whole set of things Supreme Court that’s not their job they don’t write policy they’re mostly out there to say yes you can do that no you can’t so I do think though that in a kind of legitimation Crisis and also a political crisis a governance crisis things are going to the Supreme Court where the Supreme Court can be like yeah yes or no but we can’t solve that problem that has to be solved by government in this media world that we live in um one in which anyone our own kids can become influencers because of the virality function that’s that’s biged into the platforms one thing that clearly happens is audience capture which is to say you develop an audience almost always that audience and certainly the one that’s the most financially viable is the one that best alow LS with your actual values and they then start to make it not great when you challenge them right like you know we’ve been yeah um and it’s because it’s like I I didn’t come here for this like I don’t like this I mean we’ve been doing this shows for two and a half years and the past past year is it’s starting to got get more traction um organically I had an interview with Bill DeBlasio mhm people didn’t like that you’re based in like no no no that that was it was quick it was and and it didn’t get any um viewership as a result because it was like oh none of the engagement metrics are working here the dad Saves America audience doesn’t like Bill de blasia right now part of that breaks my heart because it was like I think as a dad and as someone that wants to have a positive impact on the world like I kind of want us to be able to reach across the The Divide and we had a nice conversation and and and I and I didn’t talk about Co for a bunch of reasons they weren’t like Oh I’m a coward it was more like no we had a very specific conversation we were going to have yeah and it’s like n that guy sucks and that’s that right how do you as someone that cares about pursuing truth and is doing that along a lot of different issues that are really you we’ve mentioned them like yes climate trans censorship um homelessness these are all hard hard things yes how do you keep yourself from getting sucked into a Vortex of ideolog audience capture yeah um it’s such a it’s a it’s a huge important question there’s I have a a a simplistic uh tactical solution um and then a more that’s easy and then a more difficult one the simple one is that you can just have debates with people and so I think if it’s more of a debate with Bill DeBlasio or debate between Bill deasio and somebody else your audience would have been happy and so you can deliver both you can deliver having the other view there but also that and then people actually really love debates right now in fact I think there’s we’re we’re there’s not enough debates um I just did one for Barry Weiss’s the Free Press on crime in San Francisco and it’s sold out in like 10 minutes like all my my my friends were like oh we can’t go it’s just sold out and everyone’s like why is there not a bigger venue but I think it showed people want the debate I also think people want people want in-person Gatherings cuz I think that there another Paradox is that we’re so offline we’re so online that people actually do want the in person so that’s one thing the second one is yeah I mean obviously you you don’t want to be captured by your audience and so the best way to not be captured by your audience is to not be captured by your audience and how do you do that well you do have to write the you have to do that stuff and I think that we had it on Israel where you know October 7th happens and we’re just all floored by one of my colleagues heard father’s Israeli but he was you know an anti-zionist Israeli so it’s very complicated and they were you know very left wing but she’s moved more to the right and but we wrote a we wrote a pretty simple thing which was sort of like Israel has a right to exist it has a right to defend itself and we should and it should minimize civilian casualties and Protect free speech I mean it was about as like you could be accused of being uh rather basic milk toast Middle East commentary yeah milk toast but of course it was just too early for our readers and we lost a bunch of readers and we kind of processed that and then a few days later we were like um we lost readers and if that’s what if you wanted to be you know just have you know us repeat back to you what you already believe then you’ve signed up for the wrong publication so um it was good that you left um long story short it’s a happy ending we got more subscribers than we had lost you know and I think there is something there where readers I had one person wrote me a nice long email and she was like I was I’m back on I was mad um I still probably disagree with you you know in terms of cuz it’s a little bit on a it’s a little bit like how much civilian casualties in a certain way cuz it is war um but she was like yeah I don’t I don’t want to just be told what I think either you know so you do cultivate your audience a little bit and I think you you do you do train them a bit to say yeah you’re not going to agree with everything here and you’re not going to even read everything I mean you know like our open rates are you know you wish it were 100% it’s much lower and there’s some people that just resubscribe and they don’t really read a lot of it there’s some people that might read it but then unsubscribe so it’s just so that’s and the other thing I was going to say though is that there’s also critic capture which which I will shout out to Ethan Strauss who wrote a really good essay about it that some people are captured by Their audience other people can be captured by their critics in other words you get criticized and then you end up they’re in your head and you know I and people get in people always say oh living rent you know the whole expression is living rentree in someone’s head and you know and that and but I I think it’s okay in other words I’m always sort of like like I got a bunch of little voices in my head you know I definitely have some of my readers in my head I have some of my critics in my head and yeah and you need to you know I think especially with difficult ones take the time this is going to sound really weird but honestly I I’m so much better at making my judgments after I’ve done some physical exercise in particular both cardio and weight lifting because there’s no you I was like cardio for anxiety you know weightlifting for anger but once your head is more clear of the emotions that are stirred either the fear of losing subscribers or the anger at being criticized which totally natural reaction I think you do come out of it being like all right you know here’s my view and I think you’re also in a much better position to be like I might have been wrong about that I might have overstated that or I got this thing wrong I think uh there’s so much to that just at the you know the Andrew huberman of it all like needing to walk needing to be able to process with forward motion and all that stuff absolutely it’s amazing that his recipe is so simple and yet the the demand for it keeps going up and people want more and more from him it’s like it’s like I know that I need Morning Light and exercise and to eat right and to get a good amount of sleep but I would like to you have you tell me it again and show me more signs I’m the same way I’m a huge huge fan of his I think the related piece of the that I wanted to ask you about which is I think a deeper question is how do you where do you find your source of Courage because it feels to me like the demand for courage is it’s always great it does feel like it’s especially great now in this domain to be courageous as someone in a public in the Public Square trying to impart information and trying to stay truthful trying to stay open-minded and it seems like one of the dangers isn’t just audience capture as a matter of an incentive but ego capture like a yeah addiction to success as a matter of am I good am I worthy and that is more fundamental and it’s more difficult to contend with if you’re struggling with that and I I don’t think that’s just in media that’s in everything but how do you you’re you’re very successful you’ve made a huge impact out there thank you how have you kept yourself from getting a giant head and being a disaster oh man well first of all there’s so much in that that’s really important I mean first of all there’s too much pressure on us to be good like there’s way too much pressure on us to be good and uh we have to repeat these ancient wisdoms to ourself about the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man suen or sorry is that doski I think it’s okay yeah I think so it’s like you know forget about it’s Mark Twain you know like and N has it too and and it’s in Jesus says it and and I think it’s it’s hard but I think it’s also yeah it means also then if you really believe that then also you’re a little bit more forgiving of others and you’re you open more space up for people to to be wrong and not punish them and to be um forgiving including of yourself so those are all very very important practices I mean the other one I really love is the one about how it’s not courageous if you’re if you’re not scared like courage people are always like you must be Fearless it’s like oh no no that’s not it it’s like it’s not courage if you’re like I’m unafraid of it then it’s it’s like then there’s nothing at stake you do it because you do it when you’re scared so I mean there’s a calculation that goes involved in it first of all like the people that were hiding Jews in their Attic in Germany you know or in Poland or you were hiding them in the cellar the people that were doing that yes were they more empathic to their Jewish neighbors for sure but they’re also calculating can I talk my way out of this you know and I think you don’t underestimate that either that courage it’s not sometimes it gets presented as a sort of like just you know oh you know just do you have it or not and are you you know Warrior are you a warrior or not just just pound you no no like you don’t want to get killed and you don’t you don’t want to lose all your friends now that may be a consequence one of the consequences of what happens um but I do think yeah I mean the decline of courage in the society as and the the la the declining appreciation of it as a virtue I just saw this whole I just saw the suan someone did a Twitter thread on the suan nson Harvard address I think and that was part of it it was like the decline of courage and as this really essential virtue to teach people and so yeah it’s um it’s not something you can moralize against it’s definitely something that has to be inculcated in kids and they have to be taught to take risks I mean I worry about it because I do think that kids that were raised on social media they have that Fishbowl effect and so there’s so much anxiety around risk taking this is something that that Abigail shrier and Joe Rogan were talking about where you were not seeing the entrepreneurial we’re not seeing the risk taking we’re seeing a much much greater fear of failure so some Yeah Boy something’s got to be done to to reassure people that it all just comes with just huge quantities of failure like there’s no successful person that didn’t have a a fair amount of failure along the way and found and usually the greater the success the more significant failures they had I mean really it’s just it’s awful it’s so cliche so cringe at this point to have to talk about but it’s just like it’s all about the adversity it’s all about the test if that’s not occurring then be worried you know it’s the it’s the over protectionism and the codling are in some ways at the heart of our culture’s biggest problems this show began Life as a documentary that I was um working on called The Working title was the kids are not all right and it was inspired in part by experiences I was witnessing from my my son who’s now 19 but the time was in you know the beginning of middle school and he was doing great but a lot of his peers were like really nervous like what are you nervous about you’re like you’re well off kids like what’s the problem here yeah um but really seriously like suffering from anxiety that I didn’t I couldn’t relate to as like a gen xer you know the Forgotten generation Gen X we’re all Boomers according to everybody no um no we’re having Gen X is just having a moment right now I think we’re having a moment right now so yeah Gen X it’s it’s our time to assert our existence our time to rule it’ll be a don’t worry it’ll be a very narrow won last long but yeah we’ll have Winona Rider by our side um but but you know and then the coddling of the American mind that book yeah articulated a lot of what just struck a nerve in me that how are you going to have a free Society if there’s a generation that hasn’t practiced mastering your own agency you’re a father how how have you how has thinking about these kind of things change the way you approach fatherhood I mean it really came because I was raised like that I mean I was raised by parents that were like life’s not fair it’s not fair life’s not fair you know that was all that was like it from beginning they were also they were really good because they had a they had a philosophy and it came from a German parenting it was not Spock it was drers and it was about a couple of things logical and natural consequences for behaviors um good and bad and that do not protect your kids from logical and natural consequences behaviors and then don’t do anything for your kids that they can do for themselves MH you know so it would be you want to snack well push the chair over to the counter in the kitchen and you climb up and you’re little toddlers so I mean yeah it’s like all like little kids can chop vegetables I mean at very young ages by the way I mean little kids can clean you know so for sure that was always something I wanted to see the kids participating in was the cooking and the cleaning I wanted to do more of it it’s you don’t your kids are not entirely your own you’re not able to do it all so but I think it’s huge you know like I love when you go to Japan and you’re at the restaurant it’s like there’s the top chef he’s the top chef but he is washing he’s cleaning he’s doing the dishes like there’s that part of the work I think is so essential so yeah I mean I even before but when I was still on the left I and identified on the left I still was really had in conflict with parenting culture in Berkeley which was already that helicopter parenting that overprotect and then the moralizing on top of it so if you were like I’m not into that and and as opposed to being like well you do it differently then you’re a bad parent and then of course for the mothers in particular being called a bad mother it’s like the worst thing you can say about a mom so it’s very very hard I mean I think that um there has been enough been a lot of push back on it you know the French parenting the the kind of the you know that there’s been where there’s an aware ESS of it feels like it still hasn’t quite broken yet uh no I think um I think there’s a couple forces at work uh it’s funny you know you were talking about your German uh descent upbringing there’s a book called I think it’s akung baby about an American who um moved to Germany and sort and gave birth to her kids in Germany or they were very very young so for the first like eight years of their childhood she was in Germany and when and then they moved back to the States and not to Berkeley to Idaho mhm she’s like oh my God Germany’s a Freer country than America mhm like her experience of the anxiety and the overprotection and the safetyism and was there in Idaho even it was in Idaho yeah like what are you what are you leaving your kids at the park by what’s wrong with you what are you like this is neglect like let’s get let’s call the cops it’s like well he’s nine well how about the Danes who just leave their their the baby strollers outside the restaurant while they go inside the restaurant and have dinner I mean it’s amazing this is something that I find hard to Grapple with in a age where there are people that need therapy but we got here as a species through some really hard stuff oh for sure for hundreds of thousands of years most of which was traumatic at almost every step and we didn’t necessarily have a whole lot of therapy right and we’re still here and I don’t have I don’t think I’ve got some equilibrium on the where is that useful and where is it not is the body keeping the score what does that even mean and um you know how do you think about that because it does feel like so it does feel like this this therapeutic mindset it’s a big part of the pathologies in the homelessness issue yes so how do you think about that yeah it’s all it’s all the same thing it really is I mean what one of the interesting things for me was always like why is it that the Christians in the Society or or and Jews and Christians really seem like they’re the stricter ones when you know Christianity in particular was all about being compassionate and it was the big correction to the Old Testament it was Jesus being compassionate and helping the poor and there was St Francis well it’s because actually there was always a big stoic core inside of Christianity and that that was really what started falling apart over the over the last several hundred years you know if you kind of start with Russo’s advocacy of codling your children um up until now I mean some ways it’s a slow process some some ways it’s it’s obviously accelerated but yeah I mean the basic stoic principles are are there in Judaism they’re there in Christianity they’re there in Hinduism you look at Indian parents and how they rais their kids and and it can go too far and you’re like well for sure push your kid to be a doctor to such an extent that they jump over a Gulch and Cornell yeah for sure and you would even argue I mean one might even argue that you’re actually that would even You’ be getting into a violation of of the stoic princip principles which are then also trying to support individual agency and so when the parents are over involved you can be over involved in coddling you can also be over involved in demanding that they pursue a particular career and and not making choices for themselves so I do think there is clearly a stoic middle path it’s cognitive behavioral therapy it’s not that you know um it’s not the victim victimhood ideology which is really what’s taken over so for me that is like the main event in the culture and it I see it’s just driving everything it then gets picked up and turned into an ideology and a Dogma in politics and that is what we I think that’s what that is what wokeism when people are like what is wokeism I think that is at the heart of it it is victimhood ideology it’s both the idea that some people are victims and other people are not but it’s also the idea that if you are a victim then the best thing for you is to be coddled and sheltered and to be shielded from the consequences of your own action that’s not true either I mean the better view my view is this older Joseph Campbell Heroes Journey view where you when you the the process of maturation is a process of being victimized and suffering and going through adversity and then coming out of it um a wiser more mature and stronger individual but there’s been a strong effort I mean that’s why when I say my book is why Elites subvert civilization it gets at that that entropy to some extent that codling that decadence that has that sets in inevitably I think really with most civilizations all civilizations really my son in seventh grade wrote read a book by choice that I just read last summer and it is um man searched for meaning by Victor Franco one of my favorite books yeah and the thing that’s so crazy because he read that in meditations um he was going to act in Academy which is like radical monor on steroids the the guides are not to answer questions so they had to read a deep book they had a bunch to choose from he picked those two kind of in succession he came out the other end of just reading those books like transformed wow amazing and so last summer I was like I maybe I didn’t read this book I thought I did in college but let me reread it and it feels like the book of our times oh it’s incredible so why do you love it oh I mean I well was so so I have a long relationship with Victor Frankle and and and but I came to him right as Co hit and I was a little bit depressed I mean I don’t want to say depressed cuz it makes it that would make it too Grand but it was just feeling like like you know like what am I doing and like you know I was supposed to travel and you’re all home and and then I started watching Victor Frankle I there were videos of Victor Frankle on YouTube I mean you I haven’t even seen oh God they’re incredible he would do ones he did one in Berkeley in the’ 60s and I remember seeing it and it was just the Classic Victor Frankl it’s all about mentality I was also really into I’m still into Liverpool and they had a new coach at the time and he was always about mentality mentality mentality and you you think soccer is a physical game it’s a mental game I think every game is a mental game every game is a mental game um everything’s mental and so so yeah you read that and you and then you I would I start watching these videos and I’d be like wow I feel better watching the videos the video is performing cognitive behavioral therapy on me and then I also he was also very good about you need a goal not just a life goal like you need a goal right now you know like you need something to do and I was like oh I need something to do so then I did the book contract for San Francisco and I was Off to the Races I knew that I knew that Co was just going to be this this is going to be shut down for a while so I needed something to do in that period I needed something and I’m always like that if I don’t have I have a high need for that I need something to chase after and so it’s the pursuit and and I that was was one of the big lessons you know from that was just having the the pursuit that the happiness is in happiness is a byproduct of pursuing something that gives you Pur it doesn’t you don’t pursue happiness it ensues yes that’s a very nice way of putting it it’s um well that’s him I can take zero cred okay yeah that’s great yeah he’s full of those I went and read all of his books I read man from me and I went and read all of his obscure essays and I just I was like this is and of course it’s funny because you’re like it’s just so simple like why do you need what how much more is there to say about it but it didn’t matter it was very satisfying for me and that was at a late stage I mean I’d already known him and read him and it still benefits me mankind has a final freedom and that is the freedom to choose how to respond to your circumstances so you know the first half of the book it’s about going through all the worst concentration camps in Nazi Germany right and observing the difference in those who could like hold on to their sanity and those who couldn’t and he’s basically saying like even if you’re in a concentration camp you still have the freedom and it has struck me that that is not the final Freedom that is the First Freedom that is the that is the foundation of freedom is recognizing that no I have to choose how to respond yes and that feels like the vaccine to victimhood it is the antidote right and what’s funny is how Central that is to Liberal pop psychology you know and so even in the 60s like that was the human po potential movement it’s called the human potential movement and it is Victor Frankle and it’s uh you know maslo and it’s um Fritz pearls and it’s all these people that are say it’s Ein Rand and and Rand yeah for sure you know on the right you know these other characters were more associated with the left with esselin with Big Sir with hot tubs and sunsets and whales and LSD and but certainly even in the Psychedelic culture there’s some freeing your mind that’s what that was was this experience of oh I don’t have to do really anything all you have to really do is die that’s the only thing you have to do that means everything else is open up all these possibilities open up and that it’s really up to you and then you get to the politics the leftwing politics and it’s the exact opposite it’s that you’re completely determined by your race and gender and class and it’s just awful it’s a totally oppressive and I was trying to figure out how did that happen like how do you go from this totally liberating ideology on the in the Progressive culture and left to this just awful you know disempowering dispiriting ideology that Victor Frankle would have hated like how did that occur so I mean the fact how did occur how did it occur and so well I will say the fact that it did occur also means that I think it doesn’t have to go that way there can you can go you can fight back against it yeah I mean there’s obviously a bunch of um I mean some of it is the modeling culture some of it is entropy it’s just easier to be lazy you know it’s just easier to I mean I love Instagram like it’s easier to go through the Instagram reals they’re amazing like I watched parkour you know I’m like this is fantastic it’s just easier to do that than it is to get yourself up and sit down and write a book that is hard so there is just something about the energetics of it and then the prosperity it means that you know I I wealth disease we’re just lazy it’s you don’t have to do it even like my kids it’s like you know it’s like what do you want for Christmas I don’t know I got everything I need I mean it’s kind of nice in that way but it is like there’s like not there’s not that pressure that you need in order to to go and make a life so I think all those things have something to do with it it’s going to have to come back through language and through podcast I mean maybe we’ll have some awful financial crisis that’ be great in some ways if you did or some awful external shock or something to make people have to do it but I just think it’s we can’t count on that and it means that you are going to have to and this kind of conversation and people changing how they raised their kids and opting out of of these toxic you know disempowering you know parenting cultures that have really taken over at least among kind of elite and upper middle class cultures one of the things the other things interesting in Frankle and it led me to want to explore this more not I haven’t really yet but um he’s talking about the the the comfort and the Cod of the generation in the 50s right and and I’ve talked to some other friends who got more time on their hands I think who have said oh this is the perennial problem the sense of the of the sort of decadent coddling sort of getting lazy this is not new this is not new to our time now this is part of this whether it’s cyclical or or what it’s it’s something that kind of might be cyclical going on yes um although although one point I’ll just jump in if you don’t mind um was that you know um and not to again we’re obviously biased because we’re gen xers but what happened with the Gen xers is that the Boomers who were raised at you know with with Mom at home you know Mom was at home for the for the you know 1945 to 1965 1970 mom’s at home you get to feminism and women also changes to the economy but for whatever reason the you know a significant share of the moms leave and it’s also not just that everybody’s mom was was not at home when the kids came home from school you know we weren’t all lashy kids but the ones whose parents weren’t home would bring the kids whose moms were home and then their moms who were codling them they would escape the mom and they would we would go in the house and you’d have this un what you know what John Hy and yeah and they all talk about this unstructured play is so important Peter gray is great on this yes so he’s great on this and so we were out there you know I mean look we did crazy things right we set things on fire and there was sex there’s a lot more early there’s a lot younger sex and Drug experimentation going on with Gen xers than there are with kids today in some ways thank gosh you know thank God that’s the case because like my kids are like have to see them do that but it’s like you know you watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High and you’re like I can’t believe how young they are when they’re doing all these things and but that was that did I think provide that some amount of adversity that I think kids that came after us and even that kids Boomers before us didn’t have yeah I’m I’m I’m big into Gen X life I think uh my memories of my childhood and I have a super neurotic Italian mother who if you talk to her now you would think oh you must have been super coddled cuz she’s constantly worried about me like I’m at all times on the verge of like catastrophic risk oh oh my God you’re going to Vegas it’s 115 be careful it’s like they’ve got air conditioning at Harris’s Mom it’s going to be all right but I’d get home from school and she was there but we would go out into the neighborhood yeah unsupervised with no GPS tracking device until the sun went down there is something you know you talked about exercise I think there’s something about the lessons of physical reality that if you don’t experience them you can be stuck in utopian thinking I like construction I I I if I was going to do some other field I would go into construction I just happened to like building stuff I was a Lego kid and when you’re when you’re framing a door in a house no matter what the architecture plan says there’s a bunch of imperfections and the way you get it to be Plum and flush and able to close and have that hinge leave the door open at any distance without swinging is shims a bunch of little wedges that you have to manually tap in to get it right yeah and that’s reality reality requires shims at every turn it is not Blackboard theories about mathematical proofs of regressions of XYZ 100% 100% well it’s coming up I mean there a great uh I you’ve seen there’s a bunch of Steve Jobs stuff that’s going on on Instagram yeah and he does the same thing people think that 90% of it’s is a great idea it’s not it’s 10% is a great idea 90% is execution 100% agree I even sometimes call myself like a physicalist you can say pragmatist but that sometimes sounds like you’re just willing to compromise your principles but like I’m almost like a physical so when I looked at the home when I came to the homeless issue cuz I just done this book on the environment on the environment it’s like you’re transforming energy and materials into food electricity fuels Vehicles Transportation like it’s a phys the environment is and energy is a physical set of processes and it’s farming and it’s like power plants and it’s machines like that’s it and like all the ideologies that come in after the fact they need to respond to those physical realities so then when I came on to homelessness I was always like okay you’ve got this person on the street they’re living on the street what’s wrong with them what needs to happen with them like these are people yes you know these are physical bodies of people they they got to go somewhere where are they going and what happens to them there and it was a very much more of a kind of I remember thinking about it that way and then that was how I came to this view that you needed a Statewide system that so you could have people moving to where they needed to be at the state level rather than just trying to treat every schizophrenic and and heroin or fenel addict in San Francisco it’s not going to work because everyone’s going to come there San Francisco can’t doesn’t have the physical facilities to do that it’s come up in another way I’m really obsessed with this question you and I are very aligned on this it’s come up in this other way where I’ve been noticing that Millennials and Zoomers are struggling with the distinction between uh Speech and action a lot you know so one of my one of my not favorite but a moment that I’m obsessed with is this moment where these black lives matter protesters in Washington DC demanded that this young woman not she wasn’t young she in her 40s a mid you know middle-aged professional having a glass of wine outside at a at a at a restaurant in Washington DC I remember do you remember this and they’re demand there’s a video of it and they’re demanding that she raise her fist um and so they end up screaming at her with their fists over their heads um they thought I mean giving them the benefit of Doubt and these are kids that you know I’ve had some arguments about but I think these are probably pretty sensitive kids I call them kids like college age kids pretty sensitive kids they’re very upset about George Floyd and you know black lives matter whatever but they’ve turned into total psychopaths in that moment and I there’s there’s situational psychology that’s I think different so so I’m not saying that they’re Psychopaths I’m saying that in that behavior with a mob of people holding but I think that they’re also they’re they’ve lost sight of that they’re in a real situation that young that woman is afraid she is going like this that’s a moment that should like make you kind of go oh wait a second guys we’ve gone too far like she’s scared she hasn’t done anything wrong she’s sitting here having a glass of wine we’ve gone we’ve lost our minds that’s one case and then the other case I would get it was in Brazil before you go to the other case there’s another piece of that that’s easy to just forget yeah which is I’ve seen that image I I can’t I think I’ve seen the video too yeah if you are a man in that mob threatening that woman right what has broken in you about the nature of what your role should be that you would terrorize a young just a an innocent woman that you would be raising your fist in the name of social justice that that is it is it is angering to me as a father as a man I see that and I say as your daughter You’ be yeah how dare you raise your hand to a woman in the name of anything it’s like you like I’m sorry like like I my my defensiveness no no it makes you mad yeah for sure gets me on this we we handwave that away like that’s some ancient something or I don’t know it’s like no that’s as fundamental the kids were raised wrong this they were they were not raised right there’s something wrong with that yeah I agree is a virtue yeah yeah well also it’s empowering to be someone who’s a protector like I it’s awful there’s more to say about the other it’s such a fascinating case right before that the black leaders of that black lives matter mob which is what it was they said they said let the they have the white kids get in front to terrorize this woman and the white kids did it and you know so you’re in a clearly hierarchical situation where the black kids are saying go ter you go terrorize your own deeply problematic in a lot of different ways um the other one I had is that in is both in Brazil but also in the United States Brazil had a January 6th type event that similar to ours and similar to here the Brazilian media and Elites demanded online censorship because they blamed election misinformation for people invading the Congress us how convenient yeah so so they would kind of go but so a very strange situation where like you kind of go well there was a security breach and people broke the law and they went inside the building that’s a problem a of security and B people trespass and they should be arrested and in trouble that how do you get censorship online censorship out of that I there’s a lot of there’s a more of a backstory to it which is that I think there was people that really wanted to use the events and I know it for a fact that people want to use these real world events as justification for censorship I also do think it shows that this distinction between your mental your mentality and your physical reality has broken down and that or it’s not gotten it’s not as clear for for younger Generations as I think it was for people that spent you know if you were like if you are raised in a physical environment Enon where you’re scared of bullies and you’re like you really have that I mean I think there was probably more bullying you know when we were kids we’ve overcorrected on bullying yeah we’ve overc corrected on it exactly and so then when does it come out it comes out in a situation then where they don’t even think they’re bullying I mean to be fair that mob they didn’t think they’re being bullying they thought they were spreading The Good The Gospel of BLM but I do think that it sort of shows that something’s been something needs to get reoriented like we need to get kids out into the world you know doing service work going camping whatever there needs to be some re-engagement with physical reality there’s something that’s happening for me personally that I feel like I’m on guard for a confirmation bias of and that is I am finding myself pursue my faith in a different way as an adult for in some ways for the first time so I was born Catholic 12 years of Catholic School Italian Catholic so it’s really like the closest thing to a Jew besides maybe an Irish Catholic that you can get as a Christian oh like you know Rome sending my son to Rome next year to college so it’s very ingrained it’s comfortable but there’s a intellectual or there’s a there’s something else happening that is drawing me to say all these abstractions about rights and laws and libertarian Do no harm that’s all well and good but below the surface there’s something else here that feels like it’s withered M and it might even be the soft underbelly of liberalism that there’s a there is a spot that’s open to get stabbed by bad guys in the liberal order and I mean liberal in the broader sense not in like the American politics but liberalism as an openness tolerance you know the enlightenment project and I’m grappling with that I get the sense that you are too mhm and you you know talked about it in some of your other interviews yeah some people are starting to talk about like oh there’s like a cultural Christian moment or something but I’d love to hear how you think about where Faith where the transcendental where the well why should people have individual dignity what what’s our under if we are equal in some sense that’s not Material because it’s obvious that no one’s equal materially right where’s that coming from right how do you what are you grappling with on this yeah and are you seeing this too you do you feel like this is happening Beyond just us oh for sure 100% it is I mean I sort of start with I I think the really the cultural product that really captures this is flea bag are you a flea bag fan did you ever seen yeah I uh wait did I see that whole show the second it’s I think it’s a I think my wife watched the whole thing and I caught a couple epis Phoebe Bridgers I don’t want to mix her up with Phoebe or Phoebe yeah there’s another there’s a singer right but she got tragically roped into being being party to the wrecking of Jones but she the flea bag is fantastic and the second season is is really about that it’s about faith and about you know the importance of it and yeah because anybody that does anybody that has any kind of philosophical awareness or has done a good college course on this knows that you really can’t derive an a from an is and people try like you can sit there and be like you know why yeah why why have laws against Thomas why not let people you kind of go well because it would be worse for you know people if we didn’t well you’re still making a moral judgment about you’re still making a judgment that you that you don’t want to do certain things and so there’s a sort of there is a kind of bottom you know Faith there certainly you’re using reason but I don’t agree that science and reason tell us what’s moral like these moral these moral decisions are much more complicated than that and they are based to some extent on tradition but also on experience so yeah I mean I think I think we’re going to I just think it’s a crisis of Faith Like that’s ultimately what’s driving all of I think a lot of these problems I mean when you are allowing predators to medicalize children who are autistic anxious or confused about their gender when you’re allowing surgeons to engage in surgeries on minors in an effort to change their sex you’re pretty far gone in in a way as a Society you’re pretty far gone when you’re when you’re going out there enchanting black lives matter and how we support black lives and then you’re you’re demonizing the police resulting in the Police pulling back and emboldening homicides and seeing you know you know deaths of black people from homicides increase by at least 3,000 when you’re letting black you know I discovered a young black girl on the street naked psychotic in a vulnerable situation on in San Francisco when you’re allowing people to die in those ways when you’re sending the firefighters out to just revive people for the 12th or 20th time from a drug overdose you’re kind of far gone like as a society like I can see the really dark view of it is that we’ve gone really far gone and that and that liberalism didn’t just you know not didn’t just fail to prevent these awful things but it really enabled them and provided the justification you know for hey well people you know people are going to want to you let people do their own thing you know people want to do that you know to their genitals they want to they want to smoke Fentanyl and meth that’s fine so liberalism you know it’s indicted by it you know it’s I think it’s it has to deal with that and that’s the that has been the conservative criticism of liberalism and comes right out of n right where he says if God is dead then everything is permitted doesn’t say everything is possible you know it’s not possible to change sex but everything is permitted and so we’re allowed to do these absolutely awful gruesome experiments on vulnerable people on mentally ill people the people that are most are least likely to protect themselves and the people doing the experiments are liberals and progressives by their own definition it’s a hugely damning indictment of liberalism the conservative remedy is to kind of go back to some religious basis of society I I don’t even know what that would look like I mean obviously it hasn’t worked there’s been Christian conservatives that have made the case for decades but not everybody’s Christian and Christians disagree with Christians and there’s Jews and there’s Hindus and there’s atheists and so you got to find a way to make civilization work for all these different groups of people and so where I go to is just more like let’s just start by being pro-human and recognizing that we are very special and that we don’t have to you know suggest that we have the right to wipe out all animals or something like that but like humans are special and we’re humans and we love ourselves and we love we love our families and we love each other if you’re prum then you’re pro- civilization if you’re Pro civilization cuz that’s how you protect human life is with civilization if you’re Pro civilization then you’re for Law and Order meritocracy cheap energy Equal justice and the law Free Speech free enterprise um and I think a few other things and that’s a for me a practical gen xer plus agenda that you could actually get a majority of people in the Western World to support even in places like like California and San Francisco I had a conversation with Peter bean and we went back and forth on this a bit um and one of the things that it it I don’t know if this unlocked an empathy for the woke alternative Dogma but it it occurred to me in talking to him that if you don’t believe in a frankly in a soul in a in an ineffable immaterial equality that that underpins the dignity it’s a it’s a measuring stick that’s outside of the material order right and if you’re saying I am going to just try to observe the material order as it actually is you said how do you go from an is to an art yeah if you’re just looking at the is we are tribal um yes there is a certain Zero Sum game battle in which the strong will win and if there is no moral yard stick to say that winning in the wrong way is is morally wrong right well then winning is just called Evolution it’s the survival of the fittest it’s the so it seems like the victimhood the woke view that we are the product of a kind of material tribalism that is that cannot be you can’t abstract away from it it is what it is in the legal sense I I understand they they basically say no no judge can be impartial so throw that even as an ideal out the window ideals ideals are irrelevant it’s this postmodern there is no real truth there’s just the truth of the reality of the power dynamics right I mean that does seem like a a way to to understand the world if all you’ve got to go on is material observation if you are like looking at human existence like an alien species that the planet yes I was just thinking that the other day I was like it’s so dehumanizing it is as though or like a god you know I mean so one idea is that people are actually swapping themselves in for gods and they’re they’re playing with human life I mean that’s you know changing trying to change somebody’s sex or you know trying to protect people from you know laws trying to have different laws for different groups of people I mean these are um this is a kind of it’s a a loss of boundaries these are this is a pattern of civilizations when they’re just breaking down and so the question is sort of is are we doomed are we resigned to that is are we doomed to the civilization breaking down or is there a better outcome I do I like to look at places like the Netherlands you go the Netherlands it’s pretty functioning I mean they’ve got some internal conflicts and we talk about the farmers before but I mean there aren’t open air drug scenes they did have that actually in the ‘ 880s and ’90s they shut them down but it’s uh you visit Amsterdam and you’re kind of like why can’t we have this you know why can’t we I mean wealthy but without having lost you know their you know I asked him about the opio how come you didn’t have an opioid epidemic because we just felt like it was okay for people to experience some pain I mean a very important part of that which was like we got oh well we don’t want to have any we don’t want you have any pain well I don’t know you just said back surgery I think you’re going to have a little bit of pain and then there’s a risk of addiction so you’re not going to over prescribe Med there was a kind of a core inner fiber there with the Dutch that they were the you know they were the richest one of the first civilizations in Europe after Spain and capitalism is born in Holland basically and then the Scottish Enlightenment you know adjacent to it and they were they were so rich that there were there’s a famous book called the embarrassment of riches where they were so rich that it was embarrassing to the Dutch obviously they’re now just a kind of you know not to be mean about but they’re not a particularly relevant country in the world anymore you know they’re not even Germany or France but yet things are working and so I do think there is a way I think like I mean now it’s a little different for the United States because we are still the global hegemon we’re still the greatest country in the world there’s just no question that we’re at the Center of Western Civilization so I do think yeah I mean hopefully we’re in for a period of some political change but I think if it’s not accompanied by the cultural changes that we’re talking about the changes to parenting culture the changes to mentality and attitude and what gets taught in the schools then I don’t think it’ll matter I think that there’s something interesting in in looking to the Dutch and I would also say to um Denmark and the Scandinavian countries and that um in my documentary The Pursuit with Arthur Brooks we actually went to Denmark and we talked to a bunch of folks and um because you know who were leaving the strollers outside the restaurant doing these things you know and the Danes actually do even they do a lot of stuff like that in their in in education it’s very normal Finland which many progressives love to tout as this right one like that’s what we need we need to pay teachers more it’s like well a um yes they pay them more but your math teacher has a PHD in math and it’s actually really really hard to do right so it isn’t like oh you’ve got a degree in nonsense and and then you’re protected by teachers unions that are basically like structurally corrupt it’s like you there’s there’s this selective let’s take from these things it’s hard to escape that those are very genetically and culturally homogeneous societies and so the Huga and the yant LA the trust right yeah cuz half of your friends names are Sven so you trust Sven you trust the Sven you don’t know because he probably is your cousin and I I don’t mean that like they’re they’re like they literally are genetically way closer to each other right so they’re kind of relying on an older deeper reptilian tribal loyalty solidarity thing yeah which means they do they have high degrees of trust they have lower amounts of like liability as a result they have less lawsuits there’s like a bunch of other stuff that like they have lower transaction costs on things that we will never have the judicial system is more collaborative and less antagonistic between prosecutors and defendants the American system is different and I think that is very important to keep in mind and you know I think we’re also able to handle the immigration and assimilation question much better than the Europeans are they’re terrible at it’s breaking I mean talk about the Dutch and you talk about what’s happening politically there it’s not exactly like they’re all super stoked about what’s going on in their country it’s a huge huge crisis so we’re much but I mean if you kind of go what do we what do we have here I mean look we’re Continental size country two oceans on both sides zero chance of any real military you know threat abundant natural resources I mean just abundant and we have had a we have had a stoic a semi- stoic culture for a long time we’ve also had an you know we’ve had a an anti-racist act truly anti-racial non-rational assimilationist program and you know the woke left has been trying to attack it I mean I remember when they were they tried to get rid of the English only education which is known as teaching English to immigrants for a while they thought that somehow it would be better the kids didn’t learn English they had to get rid of it so I I’m I’m B if I had to bet on something I would Bank on American pragmatism it’s it’s also the the the only philosophical tradition that we invented is pragmatism and it comes you know it’s John Dewey and Pur and all these guys it’s a very we’re practical people we’re affiliative you know voluntary associations type people we are bootstrap people I think at our core and we’re just having to kind of we’re going to have to schluff off this awful woke radical left dehumanizing overlay that’s been put on top of us again I hope I think it’ll happen to some extent politically but it’s got to be matched by this cultural program to get back to the American creed which is yeah it’s individual liberty it’s like our best attribute it’s free enterprise it’s free speech you know there’s some things you have to we have to work on repatriating some of our Industries improving the schools I mean you know I think for Mo you know for most of our adult lives we heard Democrats talk about improving schools that’s all stopped I mean now it’s 25 to 30% um rates of chronic absenteeism and and yes Co made it worse but it was going in the wrong direction before that student performance is going down on every category for every group so clearly it’s not working and so there needs to be some significant cultural course correction there um for it to work because I think once you do get it to work yeah we’re going to I’m sure you know Trump is elected we’re going to end up expelling a fair number of migrants but we’re going to keep a bunch of good ones too you know they’re going to keep the ones that are on board with the American creed and I do think there’s a chance for us to get back to growth you know that is ultimately what America has been able to do is this thing of a degrowth you know declining population as long as our domestic populations aren’t going to be reproducing at 2.1 um we are going to need immigrants and so I think being able to to to answer that immigration challenge with those educational Solutions you know and other things is going to be really the key to our Rejuvenation I chose to not dive into one of the so many areas that I find so fascinating that you have worked on and to keep this conversation at at at meta themes cuz I and I encourage the viewers to to dig in to to your work along several Dimensions the wath files revealing what the I mean truly demonic activity on behalf of this trans transgender youth mutilation Dr mangay level Evil yeah I I won’t mince words on say what do you really think though yeah I don’t mece words on that I I I don’t I will not yeah I will not abide by any of that I think I personally think that if you do that to a child as a doctor you should be put in jail we’d have to change the laws first yeah but yes but that would be my dad’s doctor I said dad what do you think he’s like oh yeah like wood chipper so yeah maybe I’m retrograde maybe that’s not libertarian I’m sorry I don’t care yeah um climate change uh you’ve done incredible work to bring sanity to that issue homelessness and journalism The Pursuit Of Truth as you look at this as you you now you’re now you’re embarking on I think a meta question like what where do we go as Western Civilization yeah um keeping it a little smaller how do you see and this is my sort of final question how do you see your role in the American story you talking about American pragmatism MH what do you want to do on behalf of this country and the best of what it is I want to be I want to continue to be of service I go back and forth between what that is and it’s basically I’m a journalist I mean I’ve been doing journalism since I was 15 so that’s 38 years I’ve also been I’ve been an activist and and you know my wife is all I’m always like I get frustrated with both sometimes I’m I’m like I’m not going to do any more of the advocacy cuz it’s just so it’s just so um if you’re a journalist it’s it’s easy in a sense that you write about something but you’re not responsible but then it’s the man in the arena problem you know then there’s in my in my head there’s Teddy Roosevelt being like it’s any man can be a Critic it’s the person in the arena so yeah I mean I’m always I’m always looking at that and obviously I care about California and you know there will be a moment where we have to figure out if we’re going to run again for governor it’s a genuinely difficult decision because I think that the quality of my life and I would just say my Baseline happiness is happier as a journalist you know it really is but that frustration at how badly things are being run and my sense in which it could be done better and my I’ve had a just a sense always that that was the right job for me and that that was I was like that like I know how to do that job like if I could do that job I could solve a bunch of these I make progress at least on solving a bunch of these problems but yeah it’s difficult because it’s also like you have a nice life like why would you want to go and run for political office I’m going to ask a bonus question um which is how in the world could America possibly end up with Gavin Nome as the president there’s no sense that his governance could be deemed successful in my eyes and this is not about partisans ship I don’t really care about that but San Francisco got materially worse under his mayorship and he has presided over a California that is bleeding population which of all the things to measure at the most basic level if people are voting with your feet their feet to leave your state you are failing how can that is it just cuz he’s like a slick talking split tongue Prince of Lies like how is this possible I mean in person he’s physically impressed mive I mean when you I’ve met him in person I went up to him and it was like wow you’re really like taller and bigger and you know it’s like that uh you’re like wow and you’re really beautiful and so you’re kind of like all right I can see he’s one of those trickster Greek gods that’s really like a bastard I mean he’s like I mean he’s like better looking than like most Hollywood actors I mean he’s really um he’s a great speaker his voice is got that little gravel to it he’s an incredible fundraiser he’s very discipl about his Communications you know I mean it’s not a um I mean I would like to believe that his record would make it impossible for him to become president and I’ve I criticize him constantly on Twitter so but it’s like yeah I mean like people like you know Matt by Washington Post uh Bill Maher Nelly BS these are these are important political journalists they all see Gavin as a major potential Contender he would have to just be like like hey all that stuff in California that’s just in the past and it’s going to be different now and I think he would need to also really focus on abortion in a way that I think he would bring a lot of discipline and focus to abortion I think the Republicans have done a really good job at trying to take abortion off the table Trump has done like he sometimes he been criticized as not disciplined but if you had seen what they’ve been doing in the way that he talks about it and how they were really aggressive Rive and not letting that IVF uh the anti-f stuff coming from some of the Backwater parts of Republican land get in the way of them but they hey I’m a Catholic here sorry but there’s been you know that stuff that’s really unpopular and that could hurt them seriously you know like that would I would see Gavin being able to focus everybody on that for a lot more even if the Republicans are like look we love abortion you know whatever nobody believes that you know and and and nobody trusts Trump so you know and then so they you know if you kind of look at a Gavin versus a trump I think that is tougher for Trump than a certainly than a Biden or a comma I mean kamla can’t speak I mean she just struggles to say anything and I think if you’re in a debate kind of context and the Press context I think it be increasingly difficult so yeah unfortunately he’s the kind of character now you know it’s like classic um you know weak men make bad times bad times make strong men strong men make good times so I think we’re you know he’s a weak guy that creat ated really bad times and so the question is is the moment are we still in a moment that is favorable to him or do people sense that we’re entering into a a more difficult time that requires a stronger leader if you decide to take on the governorship once again I wish you godp speed sir thank you very much thanks for being on Dad Saves America thanks for having me John good to be with you

Truly Right View: Advocating for Free Speech in the Age of Political Censorship

Introduction: What is Free Speech Today?

In a world where political discourse is dominated by big tech, cable news, and social media influencers, free speech is constantly under threat. From censorship of conservative viewpoints to the silencing of dissent on controversial issues, we are witnessing an alarming trend of restrictions on the most fundamental rights of any citizen in our Constitutional Republic: the right to speak freely.

But what does free speech truly mean in today’s context? Are we protecting it, or are we allowing authoritarian ideologies like socialism, communism, fascism, and dictatorships to erode it?

The Constitutional Perspective: Why Free Speech is Non-Negotiable

The First Amendment of the United States Constitution is crystal clear: “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech.” The Founding Fathers understood the importance of free speech in preserving a free society. Without it, the ability to challenge government, expose corruption, and advocate for truth would be crushed.

Yet today, under the guise of protecting people from “misinformation” and “hate speech,” powerful institutions are curbing our ability to express ideas that do not conform to their narratives.

Do we not see this as a slippery slope toward authoritarianism?

Shouldn’t we, as citizens, be the ones who decide what we can or cannot hear, not a centralized body or corporation?

Social Media and Cable News: Platforms or Gatekeepers?

Social media was once hailed as the bastion of free speech. It allowed ordinary individuals to share their thoughts, advocate for causes, and hold the powerful accountable. However, over the years, major platforms like Twitter (now X), Facebook, and YouTube have become gatekeepers rather than facilitators of free expression.

Algorithms favor certain ideologies, while alternative viewpoints—especially those with a more conservative or constitutional slant—are shadow-banned, demonetized, or outright censored.

Does this not resemble the tactics of monarchies, communistic or fascist regimes that control what their citizens can see and hear?

Shouldn’t a true democracy allow the free flow of ideas, even if those ideas challenge the status quo?

Social Media Influencers: Fighters for Freedom or Puppets of Censorship?

Many social media influencers, especially those aligned with constitutional values, have become modern-day warriors for free speech. Yet, they face intense backlash, censorship, and de-platforming for voicing opinions that challenge globalist or left-leaning narratives.

How many times have we seen influential voices banned simply for questioning government policies, election results, or health mandates?

Isn’t it concerning that only a select group of elites can decide what is “acceptable” discourse?

While some influencers fall in line with these restrictive policies, others have emerged as champions for free speech, using their platforms to resist censorship and uphold constitutional rights. The question is: Will we support these voices, or will we allow them to be drowned out by corporate and governmental censorship?

The Dangers of Socialism, Communism, and Fascism: A Threat to Free Speech

At the heart of socialism, communism, and fascism lies a common tactic—control over speech. These ideologies have historically sought to suppress dissent, limit expression, and create a monolithic narrative that favors those in power.

Look no further than authoritarian regimes past and present, where dissenters are imprisoned, media is state-controlled, and free speech is criminalized. Can we really ignore the striking similarities between these oppressive ideologies and the current state of political discourse in America?

Is the suppression of speech today not a precursor to more draconian measures tomorrow?

Should we not fight to preserve the right to freely express political, social, and economic ideas?

The Truly Right View: Defending Freedom in the Digital Age

At Truly Right View, we believe in the unwavering defense of free speech as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. We reject the encroaching influences of socialism, communism, fascism, and any form of dictatorship that seeks to undermine this fundamental right.

Our platform is dedicated to bringing you uncensored news, analysis, and commentary from a truly constitutional perspective. We provide a space where voices that have been silenced or marginalized can be heard, and where you—the citizen—can engage in the free exchange of ideas.

Join the Fight: Sign Up for Our Channel and Newsletter

Do you value free speech?

Do you believe that the right to express your thoughts, opinions, and beliefs should never be compromised, no matter how controversial they may be?

If so, we invite you to join the fight for free speech by subscribing to the Truly Right View channel and newsletter. Stay informed on the latest developments in free speech advocacy, political commentary, and constitutional rights. Together, we can stand against the creeping influence of censorship and authoritarianism.

Why wait for others to defend your rights?

Become part of a movement that fights for the truly free society envisioned by our Founding Fathers.

Will You Speak Up or Stay Silent?

In the end, the future of free speech rests in our hands. We can either stand idly by as it is eroded by corporate and governmental overreach, or we can take action to protect and preserve it.

Will you speak up for your rights, or will you allow them to be taken away piece by piece?

The choice is yours.

Subscribe to the channel for Truly Right View today, and support our patriots shop together, let’s ensure that free speech remains the bedrock of our Constitutional Republic.

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Michael Shellenberger: How Our Leaders Lost All Credibility

Truly Right View: Advocating for Free Speech in the Age of Political Censorship

Introduction: What is Free Speech Today?

The Constitutional Perspective: Why Free Speech is Non-Negotiable

Social Media and Cable News: Platforms or Gatekeepers?

Social Media Influencers: Fighters for Freedom or Puppets of Censorship?

The Dangers of Socialism, Communism, and Fascism: A Threat to Free Speech

The Truly Right View: Defending Freedom in the Digital Age

Join the Fight: Sign Up for Our Channel and Newsletter

Will You Speak Up or Stay Silent?

Warning: NY’s ERA Is a “Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing” That LEGALIZES Discrimination

Joe Rogan Experience #2204 – Matt Walsh

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