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#14: Labor, Immigration, Beef (feat. John Taylor)
1.5k Plays2 years ago
John Taylor manages a factory in the US. We discuss what he has learned about the state of American labor - it's both worse and better than you think - and how beef became the symbol of the Rights of Englishmen.
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Transcript
Introduction and State of American Labor
00:00:17
Speaker
Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
00:00:18
Speaker
This is Dr. Bennett, joined here by John Taylor.
00:00:23
Speaker
John works in manufacturing here in the States, and he and I have had some extended conversations about the state of American labor, the quote unquote labor shortage that is, I think, maybe rapidly drawing to a close.
00:00:38
Speaker
Wanted to get him on the show to talk about his experiences.
00:00:41
Speaker
He's got this very interesting vantage point that I think maybe nobody else does.
00:00:45
Speaker
at least nobody else who's willing to look at it the way that we're looking at things.
00:00:50
Speaker
So welcome to the show, John.
00:00:52
Speaker
Well, thank you.
00:00:53
Speaker
Thanks for having me on.
00:00:54
Speaker
You and I have come across paths in a lot of interesting different ways.
00:01:01
Speaker
I'm happy to be here.
00:01:02
Speaker
Yeah, let's talk.
Impact of Immigration on Labor and Wages
00:01:05
Speaker
Great.
00:01:05
Speaker
So first of all, you had an interesting take on the
00:01:11
Speaker
You said once that the immigrants lower wages people and the kids just don't want to work people are talking past each other.
00:01:19
Speaker
And what did you mean by that?
00:01:22
Speaker
Yeah, so what I mean by that is, you know, let me break down kind of each side.
00:01:28
Speaker
So immigrants lower wages, this is like an economic fact, right?
00:01:33
Speaker
Like if you think of labor as a product, then...
00:01:38
Speaker
If you increase supply, then the price is going to go down.
00:01:42
Speaker
And that's what we do.
00:01:44
Speaker
And in fact, I think it was Steve Saylor who said that Mexico recognizes this.
00:01:51
Speaker
When they have a labor surplus, that's when they deliberately turn on the hose.
00:01:57
Speaker
They turn on the faucet and send a bunch of their poorer folks to the United States.
00:02:05
Speaker
And so it, yeah, like it's a mathematical fact that immigrants do lower wages, but what you, if you work in blue collar jobs, and this includes, I think the trades, I think it includes, um, manufacturing that I work in.
00:02:21
Speaker
It includes a lot of retail and re like retail distribution, like warehousing, which is a huge, but it's not just, not just beyond, beyond the big players like Walmart and, uh,
00:02:33
Speaker
and Amazon, there's a ton of just retail warehousing that's associated with just-in-time logistics that goes on in America.
00:02:41
Speaker
And if you live in the suburbs, you might see it.
00:02:44
Speaker
If you live in the city, you almost certainly don't see it.
00:02:47
Speaker
But you have these like pockets all over America of just these like warehouse communities.
00:02:52
Speaker
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Warehouse Communities and Blue-Collar Opportunities
00:02:54
Speaker
Have you seen what I'm talking about?
00:02:56
Speaker
You mean like sort of communities built around an Amazon hub?
00:02:59
Speaker
Well, I think when they're not usually built or it's not usually the communities built around it.
00:03:03
Speaker
What'll happen is, you know, Amazon or Walmart will move into a, some small town that has the space to build one of these like commercial parks.
00:03:12
Speaker
And, you know, when Walmart crops up, then like they're, they're, you know, the distributors, it was really, it's really like the Toyota production system, like Toyota, you know, build a factory and then everybody else builds a factory around them.
00:03:24
Speaker
All of their suppliers build their factories around them.
00:03:27
Speaker
And the same kind of thing happens in distribution warehousing where you'll have Walmart or Amazon has a warehouse.
00:03:34
Speaker
And then there's all these like little satellite warehouses.
00:03:36
Speaker
And then that kind of becomes the industry of the community.
00:03:39
Speaker
But you usually crop up around existing communities, but you'll find them all over like rural America.
00:03:44
Speaker
I mean, that's like, that's what Bentonville, Arkansas is, right?
00:03:46
Speaker
Walmart headquarters.
00:03:47
Speaker
It's a little town.
00:03:49
Speaker
It was already there.
00:03:50
Speaker
But, you know, there's enough space to just build these, you know, mile, you know, giant square, you know, square mile after square mile of warehousing.
00:04:00
Speaker
Yeah, we've got a friend in the group who found out recently that his, like, family line back to, I think it was like the 1700s at least.
00:04:12
Speaker
uh is is like Bentonville people and so now he's so now he's on this crusade to like uh to defeat and destroy Walmart as foreign interlopers well they're they're they're fairly popular there yeah yeah they are well liked uh because they they bring a lot of money but um yeah they have brought a lot of money so if you work in any of these blue collar industries
00:04:38
Speaker
then if you, especially like people who have been in their, you know, older in their careers, the
Cultural Barriers in Career Progression
00:04:44
Speaker
boomers and the Gen Xers who came up in these industries, what they see is that there's tons of opportunity because when you talk about like, well, so I think a lot of what gets classified as privilege is really just cultural assimilation.
00:05:08
Speaker
because some of the higher function jobs in these industries, like maintenance, right?
00:05:14
Speaker
So you've got the people who just scan boxes all day, and it takes about 30 seconds to teach somebody to do that.
00:05:19
Speaker
But somebody has to maintain all the conveyor belts.
00:05:23
Speaker
Somebody has to maintain all the robotics.
00:05:25
Speaker
Some of that stuff is done by engineers, but some of it can be done by on-the-job training of technicians and stuff.
00:05:32
Speaker
And all of those jobs almost exclusively are held by Americans.
00:05:35
Speaker
I don't mean whites.
00:05:38
Speaker
Okay, I mean people who grew up in this country
Corporate Adaptation to Immigrant Labor
00:05:40
Speaker
and can read an instruction book.
00:05:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:43
Speaker
Who pick up on all the millions of social cues that it takes to do higher level learning, right?
00:05:51
Speaker
And so if you're a boomer and a Gen Xer and you're a mechanic who's making, you know, 30, sometimes $40 an hour, plus some significant overtime usually in these industries.
00:06:05
Speaker
and you look at you look at a kid coming out of high school is like you know all these immigrants taking our jobs and it's like well the job is there but if you were to tell one of these kids well like come come start out packing boxes and you'll move into a good job really fast the problem with saying that is like well why if if everybody could do that why isn't everybody doing it the answer is because a lot of the immigrant labor isn't
00:06:31
Speaker
isn't really capable of moving into those jobs because of the language barrier and almost as much the cultural barrier, just not knowing how to navigate the kind of organizations that exist in Western countries or in advanced countries.
00:06:46
Speaker
And so, but the problem is that if you say that, like, well, you know, come work in my factory and in six months I could have you working a really good job, that sounds like,
00:06:58
Speaker
That sounds like discrimination, right?
00:07:00
Speaker
Like, oh, you're going to move ahead of all these immigrants right away.
00:07:03
Speaker
It's not like anybody's doing that deliberately.
00:07:05
Speaker
And I think the problem with it is, how do I articulate this?
00:07:14
Speaker
The problem with that is the whole construct of disparate impact, right?
00:07:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:20
Speaker
Because if you point out that immigrants are at a natural disadvantage because of language and cultural barriers,
00:07:26
Speaker
This, I guess, like corporate America's, I mean, you maybe you can weigh in on this, but like, I think corporate America's response is like, well, that's not fair, and it shouldn't be that way.
00:07:35
Speaker
But yeah, how is it?
00:07:36
Speaker
How is how is it supposed to be?
00:07:39
Speaker
Like, if I need you to read a technical manual on how this machine operates?
00:07:44
Speaker
then
Transition to Service Economy
00:07:45
Speaker
is it incumbent upon American corporations to translate these into every language and to make it as available to these other people?
00:07:53
Speaker
So it's this secret that you can't let out because it would sound discriminatory or might sound racist to say, if you're an American, you can come into this factory and you'll do very, very well.
00:08:06
Speaker
But from the outside, it looks like you're going to get $14 an hour to tape boxes shut.
00:08:14
Speaker
So do you think that, I guess in this vision of the way that the system really operates, and we're looking at downscale whites who feel really sort of left out of all this money and who are the opioid crisis and just sort of dying on the vine.
00:08:42
Speaker
Do you think that's a problem that could be solved by sort of finding a way to communicate that or is it something else?
Value of Manufacturing Jobs and Stigma of Trade Jobs
00:08:54
Speaker
That's tough, man.
00:08:57
Speaker
So, well, in the, so this is going to sound, you know, a lot, a lot of, a lot of the best, um,
00:09:09
Speaker
A lot of the best thinking on immigration is done by Steve Saylor, so I apologize if I draw too much on him.
00:09:16
Speaker
He talks about Raj Chetty's research on economies in rural America, like the research that he did on income by zip code.
00:09:28
Speaker
And he said that basically the best thing that can happen to a poor white area is for some big manufacturer or some big factory to move in.
00:09:37
Speaker
And yet that's not anything that you can actually really do much about.
00:09:41
Speaker
So I do think that, so part of it, it's probably both, right?
00:09:48
Speaker
That's the classic like business guy answer.
00:09:50
Speaker
Well, it depends.
00:09:52
Speaker
Well, it depends.
00:09:54
Speaker
I think part of the move to the service economy is irreversible because unless we do something huge,
00:10:04
Speaker
about immigration, nobody is ever going to make a living as a waiter ever again.
00:10:09
Speaker
Nobody is ever going to make a decent living as trash collection or cleaning services.
00:10:20
Speaker
And I don't know if they ever were.
00:10:23
Speaker
I'm not an economist.
00:10:24
Speaker
I don't know if anybody ever raised a family as a janitor.
00:10:29
Speaker
I assume it happened at some point.
00:10:31
Speaker
I don't know.
00:10:33
Speaker
But I don't think it's ever going to be solved because one, I think the economy has transitioned too much to those kinds of jobs to provide good jobs for everybody.
00:10:48
Speaker
And two, corporate America is never going to let that happen.
00:10:52
Speaker
So you go to any of these warehouses, big warehouses or whatever, they never have more than like two-thirds of their employees are full-time.
00:11:02
Speaker
They keep at least like 10 to 30%.
00:11:04
Speaker
And I mean, that's at least, a lot of places are like 90, are third party labor, which is where Walmart or Amazon outsources the recruiting, but really it's the risk of hiring illegal immigrants, right?
00:11:23
Speaker
So if Walmart were to get caught faking I-9s, it would be huge, enormous scandal, right?
00:11:29
Speaker
Like they use E-Verify and everything.
00:11:32
Speaker
But if every small town that has one of these Amazon warehouses has a cottage industry temp agency, and they're faking I-9s, and that happens 3,000 times over America, well, then 60% of Amazon's
00:11:49
Speaker
Labor can be illegal immigrants, and Amazon bears basically no liability because what are you going to – which of these reporters, which of these mainstream media reporters is going to go out and catch all these people?
00:12:03
Speaker
First of all, they have no will to do it.
00:12:05
Speaker
They're on the other side of this, right?
00:12:06
Speaker
Sure.
00:12:08
Speaker
They don't want them found out.
00:12:10
Speaker
And even if they did, it would be the scope of it.
00:12:13
Speaker
I mean, you have to have like some kind of Project Veritas thing to go out and show how all of these temp agencies repeatedly and deliberately are hiring illegal labor.
00:12:24
Speaker
Even though it's in the contract, right?
00:12:26
Speaker
Like Amazon does not like deliberately, theoretically, pay for illegal immigrant labor, but they do.
00:12:33
Speaker
And they do everywhere.
00:12:34
Speaker
So I think there's a cap that corporate America is willing to put on this.
00:12:39
Speaker
But I think the other side is there is maybe a messaging solution where you can get the word out and say, there are still some good trade jobs out there.
00:12:51
Speaker
And you might have to start out at the bottom.
00:12:53
Speaker
Part of it's the college
Entrepreneurship in Trades
00:12:55
Speaker
lie too, right?
00:12:56
Speaker
We tell every smart kid in America that if they have any kind of brains at all, they need to be going to college.
00:13:04
Speaker
And then there's just not enough good, there's only so many fake email jobs out there
00:13:09
Speaker
for these kids to do.
00:13:11
Speaker
But on top of that, they've now been conditioned to believe that if they don't take a college fake email job, they're not smart.
00:13:19
Speaker
Right.
00:13:20
Speaker
Some of these, some of these guys that can like the, you know, work as mechanics that,
00:13:25
Speaker
They don't write professionally.
00:13:28
Speaker
Their literacy skills are poor because they didn't excel in school or whatever, but they have the mechanical mind to do the job.
00:13:39
Speaker
Some of these guys make almost as much money as I do because once you factor in, they've got a pay rate plus they get stepped up.
00:13:47
Speaker
based on how many years they've been doing it or certifications on particular machines, plus all the overtime that they get.
00:13:53
Speaker
I'm a salaried employee.
00:13:54
Speaker
I don't get paid overtime.
00:13:56
Speaker
Then they get a bonus if the facility meets a certain threshold.
00:14:01
Speaker
Some of these guys make very, very good money doing it, but you have to slog it out and you have to be willing.
00:14:07
Speaker
You have to humble yourself to take
00:14:10
Speaker
a job packing boxes for $14 an hour and hustle until you can say, Hey, can I go be one of the guys that works on the machines?
Cultural Knowledge and Assimilation Benefits
00:14:18
Speaker
Well, and those are, those are even the employment side of it.
00:14:22
Speaker
I think if you're, if you're a smart guy with some, some business sense and some good, some good, like acumen intuition for that kind of thing, entrepreneurship in the trades is a hugely powerful field to get into because there's
00:14:40
Speaker
There are so few innovative types, business types.
00:14:46
Speaker
There's a lot of guys who are very skilled at what they do, but they haven't developed the project management and the marketing side of things as much.
00:14:59
Speaker
This is exactly what I'm talking about, right?
00:15:01
Speaker
Because when you tell every...
00:15:04
Speaker
Every analytically minded kid, well, you need to go to college, you need a college job.
00:15:08
Speaker
And there's this, there's a stigma on the intelligence of people in the trades.
00:15:13
Speaker
then that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
00:15:15
Speaker
People shy away from those jobs.
00:15:17
Speaker
And so then the people who, you know, the, the, the, it basically the only people who go into those jobs are the people who are forced into it.
00:15:24
Speaker
And sometimes it turns out to be like this very great, like, Oh, wow.
00:15:27
Speaker
You know, I, I had, you know, I graduated high school.
00:15:30
Speaker
I had no prospects.
00:15:31
Speaker
I wasn't going to go to college cause I'm not college bound.
00:15:34
Speaker
So I go and I get a, you know, I get a job at the local factory sweeping floors.
00:15:38
Speaker
I work my way up.
00:15:40
Speaker
Now I'm a mechanic.
00:15:41
Speaker
I make pretty decent money.
00:15:44
Speaker
But I'm not business minded.
00:15:46
Speaker
And I was never college material, which is why I got forced into this job, right?
00:15:50
Speaker
Forced into it, but it's not that bad.
00:15:53
Speaker
But the kids who could hack it at college are rarely going to take that path.
00:15:58
Speaker
And so yeah, those kids that
00:16:00
Speaker
Like those college skills, those soft skills of professional communication and some of the higher level analytics and stuff.
00:16:08
Speaker
Yeah, like that doesn't make it into the trades because those people never took that path in the first place.
00:16:14
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, even just, I mean, this is another one of these like conversations that kind of can't happen in public.
00:16:22
Speaker
But I've had several of our guys who have been in the landscaping business be like, oh, yeah, no, I charge a premium because I am able to speak English clearly.
00:16:36
Speaker
I am clean cut.
00:16:37
Speaker
I wear a polo and khakis.
00:16:39
Speaker
My truck is nice.
00:16:41
Speaker
And that ultimately makes a huge difference.
00:16:46
Speaker
And so people...
00:16:48
Speaker
Yeah, I think it just sort of generalizes to everything.
00:16:51
Speaker
If you're comparing yourself to, if you're viewing your labor as a commodity, then yes, you will always be undercut, but it's not a commodity.
00:17:05
Speaker
Right.
00:17:06
Speaker
So what we're saying, I think what you're saying, or what we're both saying, that nobody's allowed to say is that
00:17:14
Speaker
your citizen privilege, right?
00:17:17
Speaker
Your citizen privilege, having grown up in this country is a soft skill in and of itself, right?
00:17:25
Speaker
It is value added to have grown up here and just understand how things work.
00:17:33
Speaker
You know, like one of the things is like, we have some people, they're wonderful people, right?
00:17:38
Speaker
But they come from a part of the world where
00:17:41
Speaker
they don't have the pressure in their water systems or they don't have the sewage systems, even in major cities, to pull waste away, right?
00:17:51
Speaker
So there's a lot of places in the world where you don't dispose of toilet paper in the toilet, you dispose of it in a trash can.
00:17:57
Speaker
And these are like, some of these people are college educated back home, but they come here and they're throwing their toilet paper in the trash can and getting fired over it.
00:18:08
Speaker
It's, I mean, is that like, is that fair?
00:18:11
Speaker
Like, who's to say it's like, whatever, like, I don't know, like, there's nothing, there's fair, like fair is fair, nothing is fair, life isn't fair.
00:18:19
Speaker
But, you know, we could as a country say, okay, well, now it's okay to throw toilet paper in the trash, if we wanted, like, go that route of like full on equality.
00:18:32
Speaker
Or you can simply acknowledge that somebody that grows up here knows how our toilets work.
00:18:38
Speaker
That's one of a million little things that's going to make you a better employee in that country.
00:18:44
Speaker
I think bringing back an attitude of deliberate assimilationism, like, yeah, you have to come here and you have to have our values and you have to
00:18:58
Speaker
do things the way we do them because that's how we do them here.
00:19:01
Speaker
I mean, that's an expectation in every other culture on the planet.
00:19:05
Speaker
And they like, and the same people who get mad about the expectation here are also the people who are like, don't gentrify my neighborhood.
00:19:16
Speaker
Don't like, it's exactly the same.
00:19:19
Speaker
They're, they're, they're, they're people who, you know, they eschew the, the ugly American who goes to another country and expects people to speak English and
00:19:28
Speaker
And this is why I think this might be part of why you think I'm uniquely placed to talk about this is I do speak more than one language.
00:19:36
Speaker
I won't delve too much into that because I don't, you know, I'm trying to maintain the privacy of here, but I do speak more than one language and I can communicate with a lot of our workers.
00:19:47
Speaker
I speak a couple of different languages.
00:19:50
Speaker
And so, yeah, so I have this like unique insight where like I'm very much not the ugly American and yet I am full on ugly American in America.
00:20:00
Speaker
You know?
00:20:01
Speaker
Right, right.
00:20:03
Speaker
I don't think that's unreasonable because I have done that.
00:20:06
Speaker
I have done it in a way that the, you know, the semester abroad in Barcelona co-ed never did.
00:20:14
Speaker
you know, somebody that travels the world for a couple of semesters and thinks they've seen it.
00:20:18
Speaker
Like, no, like I, I have lived in the, the worst parts of some very bad places.
00:20:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:28
Speaker
And, and then, and then learned to have the humility to, to see the world from their perspective and, you know, and do as Rome went in Rome.
American Identity and Racial Differences
00:20:37
Speaker
And yeah.
00:20:37
Speaker
And so they, I don't feel like I'm being,
00:20:40
Speaker
imperial or racist or discriminatory by saying this is american in america we do it this way and i'm going to prefer a candidate you know a job candidate or an employee who already understands that yeah i mean it's impossible to be imperialist in like kansas if you're an american i will i will say it gets stickier right when you when you talk about this within the citizenry right this is why i like uh um
00:21:10
Speaker
Yeah, I've heard people I've heard people say that we should one way to sort of get rid of racial differences in America would be to sort of go all in on this like citizenship or like, you know, American identity, you know, as a as a sort of like the in group.
00:21:28
Speaker
Because really what we're talking about is the same thing that people complain about when they complain about privilege, right?
00:21:34
Speaker
That somebody who grows up in a wealthy white neighborhood just understands things about how the business world works, right?
00:21:41
Speaker
About how the upper class works that is inaccessible to someone who's poor and black.
00:21:48
Speaker
And so then there's preferential treatment for those jobs as well.
00:21:53
Speaker
So when you apply that preference in the exact same way, in America, we would say that that is explicitly racist.
00:22:03
Speaker
I mean, a company would have a lawsuit on their hands if they said, well, this person knows how to do this, and I don't really care that they grew up white.
00:22:12
Speaker
I just am going to hire whoever can do it, right?
00:22:15
Speaker
And I'm not going to pay attention to race at all.
00:22:18
Speaker
Well, again, I mean, again...
00:22:22
Speaker
what that presupposes is that these things can't be taught or adopted.
00:22:29
Speaker
And if that, I mean, if that is the case, then yeah, a lot of these inequalities are a lot stickier.
00:22:39
Speaker
But if basically, I think you can make a case that like,
00:22:46
Speaker
we should be teaching people explicitly how to climb the ladder the way the ladder is really climbed.
00:22:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:54
Speaker
And then let the chips fall.
00:22:57
Speaker
Yeah, there's some of that.
00:22:59
Speaker
And so the silver lining to the storm cloud of mass immigration is that the more America balkanizes, the better it's going to get for America's native poor.
00:23:15
Speaker
Black Americans in particular, right?
00:23:17
Speaker
Because whereas when America is just sort of like all native born and the difference between the way a white person grows up and the way a black person grows up,
00:23:29
Speaker
is more meaningful, all these white privilege things, things you learn and know and get brought into that you might not if you grew up poor and black, those are going to matter less when it's more about can you even hold a basic conversation with the guy behind the counter.
00:23:50
Speaker
Yeah, I think you see that a little bit with the people's admiration for Tariq Nasheed.
00:23:59
Speaker
and talking about like uh american descendants of slavery or i think he calls them foundational black americans like that like you know we we have our problems but we have some history together and uh and and that matters yeah you know i'm trying to remember uh you you might be able to help me with this there was a
00:24:24
Speaker
There was a black author during the like either the Belle Époque or the Jazz Age.
00:24:28
Speaker
He said he went to France because, you know, supposedly it was like more racially progressive.
Racial Sensitivity and Pluralism in America
00:24:34
Speaker
And and he he suddenly realized how American he was.
00:24:41
Speaker
Because nobody cared about baseball, you know, like I mean, like whites versus blacks in baseball in the early 20th century, like, oh, my goodness, you know, it was like.
00:24:51
Speaker
who's better, who can do it, you know, it was a great point of racial pride amongst both groups, right, both groups were convinced that they had the better ballplayers, and that has obviously played out in a certain way, right, like the 1936 Olympics, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, so, and, you know, he goes to France, and, like, nobody cares about baseball, nobody really cares about jazz, you know,
00:25:19
Speaker
I think now you go overseas and you realize nobody cares about racism.
00:25:27
Speaker
What I mean by that is we are the most obsessed with not being racist.
00:25:34
Speaker
I've said this once or twice.
00:25:40
Speaker
Your most racist uncle in America, literally nothing that he's ever said
00:25:47
Speaker
is possibly worse than like the median Chinese person on race.
00:25:51
Speaker
Like it's, there's no contest, no comparison.
00:25:55
Speaker
And that, you know, that, that right there, like that's another great example of, of that's also a tie this in.
00:26:02
Speaker
That's another great example of like a soft skill.
00:26:04
Speaker
So for better or for worse, we very much highly value this pluralism, right?
00:26:13
Speaker
Like racial pluralism in America.
Cultural Values and Economic Systems
00:26:16
Speaker
And yeah,
00:26:17
Speaker
You know, I deal with this every day, like racial cliques that that operate that scheme back and forth against each other, like people trying to get each other fired because I want I want this part of the factory or I want this part of the warehouse to to be all people from my country.
00:26:35
Speaker
And when when they hire on a new temp or somebody that's not from my ethnic group, like I will I will set them up like literally.
00:26:44
Speaker
like sabotage them in their work um tell them to do things wrong that kind of thing yeah exactly tell yeah tell them to do things wrong stash stolen goods on their like in their lunch bag um and so yeah like even native-born Americans who um you know even poor native native-born poor whites poor blacks like it to a certain extent they are far more above that
00:27:11
Speaker
just because of our history over the last 70 years or so, at least, far more above that than a lot of other people.
00:27:23
Speaker
Or at least they know that they're supposed to be above that.
00:27:26
Speaker
Yeah, at least they know that they're far more conscious of the consequences and probably far more hesitant to...
00:27:39
Speaker
to deliberately engage in that kind of behavior yeah and i mean i i think also about not just sort of racial or tribal favoritism but just like personal like oh yeah no i totally um let my cousin come and and have some stuff for free or whatever like the the expectation of that and other you know what i mean like that to them like well of course
00:28:06
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's a really good point.
00:28:11
Speaker
And I think this is just – I think this is one of the – probably another thing that can't be said that's an important part of this conversation is American blacks are far more assimilated into European culture than we give –
00:28:31
Speaker
that we give them credit for, right?
00:28:33
Speaker
Because it's bad to be colonized, right?
00:28:36
Speaker
We're all about decolonization.
00:28:38
Speaker
You'll never decolonize.
00:28:39
Speaker
We have Nordic names for our days of the week and Latin names for our months.
00:28:45
Speaker
Like, I don't know, I don't know who came up with this idea of like decolonize or whatever, but like you ain't decolonizing shit.
00:28:56
Speaker
There's no going back.
00:28:57
Speaker
And sorry, we were,
00:29:02
Speaker
we have to like cut this out or something.
00:29:03
Speaker
Cause I'm trying to remember the, the, the thought that I was, we were talking about, Oh, Oh, like nepotism towards my ethnic group or whatever.
00:29:10
Speaker
So, you know, the idea of just sort of like the basics of like a free market honoring contracts, you know one of the things I deal with a lot is like the, the Western Christian ideal of, of personal honesty and integrity as an ideal versus the,
00:29:31
Speaker
like shame versus guilt, right?
00:29:33
Speaker
Shame culture versus guilt culture.
00:29:35
Speaker
Christianity and the Western world more broadly is a guilt culture where being right and doing right is about your own honor and your personal integrity versus other cultures where it's really just about whether or not you get caught and how it might reflect on the group.
00:29:55
Speaker
There's one person that I work with
00:29:58
Speaker
From from one of these very shame oriented cultures, where if this person gets something wrong, or if they see somebody else getting something wrong, they will very publicly put this other person, especially if they're not especially if they're not of the same ethnic group, they'll put the failure, the personal failure on a big giant display.
00:30:20
Speaker
I mean, like shouting about it, literally shouting about it.
00:30:24
Speaker
You know, how could you do this and this and that?
00:30:26
Speaker
And then if it's ever revealed that it's actually their fault, it'll be like, we as a team failed today.
00:30:34
Speaker
Right.
00:31:02
Speaker
which I think some of the more moderately minded people on immigration, I believe there's a little bit of nillism involved where it's like, well, we just can't compete with China anyway.
00:31:15
Speaker
Even if we brought all these jobs back or whatever, there's no competing with China.
00:31:18
Speaker
So we may as well just go all in on the global market and just being a global market, start to finish for people and goods.
00:31:33
Speaker
But what I think we underestimate is how difficult it is to really imitate the system of capitalism and ownership that came out of Christianity.
00:31:51
Speaker
I know that makes it sound like I'm some kind of Texan bringing Christianity and capitalism together, but
00:32:00
Speaker
But it is true that the idea of personal sovereignty, personal accountability to God, a personal relationship with God, that really is the root of the way that we developed our economic systems in Europe.
00:32:16
Speaker
And imitating that when you don't believe in any of that is a lot difficult.
00:32:21
Speaker
And I think a lot of Americans overestimate how capable China and India are.
00:32:28
Speaker
and a lot of these other countries really, really are to compete with us.
00:32:31
Speaker
They're kind of, in my opinion, they're kind of paper tigers.
00:32:34
Speaker
And Donald Trump proved it, and the Chinese knew it, and we didn't.
00:32:38
Speaker
Donald Trump punched him in the frickin' face, and they were on their heels, and every American is like, what is this guy doing?
00:32:44
Speaker
He's going to crush our economy.
00:32:46
Speaker
And China was, like, scared to death of Donald Trump, and we weren't.
Quality Control in International Products
00:32:51
Speaker
And it's insane to me that we can't figure this out.
00:32:56
Speaker
We get, you know, we get supplies everywhere I've worked, we get supplies and everybody knows.
00:33:01
Speaker
I don't know.
00:33:01
Speaker
I don't know how much the average American knows that like the stuff you get from China, like isn't as good.
00:33:06
Speaker
And even if it looks as good, it's like poison.
00:33:09
Speaker
You know what I'm saying?
00:33:11
Speaker
Like, like if you like, if you're buying clothes from them, you know, if you're like, well, you're buying clothes, right?
00:33:17
Speaker
Like they'll, they'll use chemicals to like make the clothes lay flat so that they come out looking ironed.
00:33:24
Speaker
and it's like poison to your skin.
00:33:26
Speaker
You know, we, I work, I've worked in a couple of places where it's like, we're getting on ourselves for, for the way, like things I'm trying to, I'm trying to not delve into too much, like where specifically I work, but when you, when you get raw materials from India and China, they're just not high quality.
00:33:47
Speaker
Like when we order something, when you order raw materials from Germany,
00:33:51
Speaker
It's just known that they're going to be good.
00:33:52
Speaker
Like, honestly, it's probably not even worth doing the quality checks because their quality checks are higher, like, stricter than ours.
00:33:59
Speaker
And they would never even ship anything to us that couldn't pass our standards.
00:34:04
Speaker
But you get stuff from China and India.
00:34:06
Speaker
Do you think that's happened in Japan?
00:34:11
Speaker
You mean like things going to Japan or things Japan sends us?
00:34:15
Speaker
Things coming from Japan having that level of QC.
00:34:17
Speaker
No, no, I think Japan is different and I don't know enough about Asia to tell you why.
00:34:24
Speaker
They seem to have somehow adopted at least incorporated these systems in a way that works.
00:34:33
Speaker
But China and India, I don't think have.
00:34:35
Speaker
And I think...
00:34:38
Speaker
if they become the world economic leaders that they want to be, you will see things get crappier.
00:34:46
Speaker
And I think our intuition is to blame it on ourselves.
00:34:52
Speaker
Again, to like take personal responsibility for it.
00:34:55
Speaker
But a lot of these, a lot of bad things come out of China.
00:35:01
Speaker
I mean, even just look at this.
00:35:03
Speaker
Isn't it like nine out of the 10 last major epidemics in the world all came out of China?
00:35:08
Speaker
Right.
00:35:09
Speaker
But you can't say anything about why they can't seem to get their hygiene under control or their public health under control.
Cultural Assimilation and Systemic Change
00:35:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's... We're way off topic, I'm sorry.
00:35:21
Speaker
No, no, it's fine.
00:35:22
Speaker
There's so many like... Well, and so I've spent time in the Middle East and I think I'm probably...
00:35:33
Speaker
I guess you call me like an Arabu, the Arab equivalent of a weeaboo.
00:35:39
Speaker
I just found a lot.
00:35:40
Speaker
Hold on, what does that mean?
00:35:41
Speaker
You have to explain this to the other initiator.
00:35:44
Speaker
I'm a simple man, Bennett.
00:35:45
Speaker
A weeaboo, weeb, is somebody who is weirdly obsessed with anime and all things Japanese.
00:35:52
Speaker
Okay.
00:35:53
Speaker
So an Arabu would be the... Lawrence of Arabia was an Arabu.
00:35:58
Speaker
Oh, okay, okay, okay.
00:35:59
Speaker
And...
00:36:01
Speaker
And, you know, I would, I would temper, like, basically, by comparison with most of the guys that we hang out with, who have a lot of content for those people, I find a lot to admire.
00:36:12
Speaker
And I definitely see, like, I go over there and I see how their emphasis on the personal and their shame culture and, and
00:36:25
Speaker
the different ways that they take responsibility for things, uh, cause a lot of diseconomies and a lot of inefficiencies.
00:36:34
Speaker
But I kind of also see that as like trade-offs, like going back to the Japanese, the way that I used to compare it is like,
00:36:41
Speaker
If you went over to Jordan or Syria and you were like, all right, we're going to introduce like American notions of time, American notions of like, you know, you don't do favors for your friends.
00:36:58
Speaker
You hire the best man for the job or woman, you know?
00:37:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:03
Speaker
It would kind of be like the Japanese coming over here and being like,
00:37:10
Speaker
you're going to be here at 520 in the morning to do group calisthenics.
00:37:15
Speaker
And then we're going to go drinking with the boss until 10 PM.
00:37:18
Speaker
And like, just this, like, like, like, and, and they'll be like, well, we wait, we make way more money.
00:37:25
Speaker
And like, we're way successful.
00:37:26
Speaker
Like this system totally works.
00:37:29
Speaker
It's very efficient.
00:37:32
Speaker
And we would just be like, I don't care.
00:37:35
Speaker
Like, I'm not going to freaking do that.
00:37:39
Speaker
So there's this like sci-fi novel that's been rolling around my head because of all this.
Sci-fi Allegory for Cultural Integration
00:37:44
Speaker
Like, knowing that you and I were going to talk about this.
00:37:47
Speaker
And the story I want to tell is like two...
00:37:53
Speaker
basically two people who are completely blue-pilled on all of this, like two, two like totally, you know, like moderate left guys or, or gals, you know, I'm not discriminating, but like basically two people who like travel to a foreign planet.
00:38:10
Speaker
That's like even more along the same, like the same thing in extremis.
00:38:16
Speaker
Like I was thinking, I'm thinking of like a race of aliens that like they eat their trash so that they don't pollute the earth, you know,
00:38:23
Speaker
And it's like, I would never eat my trash.
00:38:28
Speaker
And even if I think I care about the earth, there's no one in the world that, there's no conservationist or ecologist or greenie on the earth who would like eat their trash and try to like biodegrade styrofoam.
00:38:44
Speaker
And I think that's kind of how it, I think that's kind of, no, because I think that's kind of how it is, right?
00:38:49
Speaker
Like people come here and it's like,
00:38:52
Speaker
I'm not, I'm going to do this.
00:38:54
Speaker
Right.
00:38:55
Speaker
And, you know, it's a man to make the counter argument, right.
00:39:00
Speaker
To make like the multicultural argument, there is more than one way to skin a cat.
00:39:05
Speaker
Right.
00:39:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:07
Speaker
Cause you can wake up, you can do your work at night.
00:39:09
Speaker
You can do it in the morning.
00:39:10
Speaker
It doesn't necessarily matter.
00:39:13
Speaker
You can do your socializing before you can do it after there's, there's different ways of socializing.
00:39:18
Speaker
solving these problems, but it's all our cultures have scrum up, sprung up organically, which means that you can't in many ways, it's kind of all or nothing.
00:39:31
Speaker
You know, that's why that's why people converted by fire and the sword.
00:39:36
Speaker
You know, they didn't they didn't come and say, guys, it would be really great if you the Romans didn't come in and say, like, it would be really great if you if you built some roads, you know, because nobody's going to because like,
00:39:47
Speaker
Because nobody cares, right?
00:39:49
Speaker
Like if the Romans had like created some NGO, you know, road building, you know, road building of Rome and they're getting like government, you know, they're getting gayest bucks, or guys bucks to go to go build roads in like in Galicia, wherever the hell that was supposed to be, somewhere in Ireland or Spain or Romania.
00:40:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:17
Speaker
And, and they like, they go build it like, no, why would they care?
00:40:20
Speaker
They're like, we don't even have wheels.
00:40:22
Speaker
Right.
00:40:23
Speaker
There's a whole system that has to be introduced out of whole cloth.
00:40:27
Speaker
There's a whole system that has to be introduced out of whole cloth.
00:40:29
Speaker
And we don't, as humans, we don't even understand ourselves well enough to break that down into any kind of coherent system.
00:40:36
Speaker
Really the only way to do it is to just come in and say, I don't really understand why this works, but you have to do all of this.
00:40:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:44
Speaker
Yeah, and that's that's sort of where the imperialism comes in you have to have the confidence in your own culture to say, this is good, this is good enough, and doing it this way is important enough that I'm going to make you do it like you if you don't accept doing it this way, then you simply can't be part of this community.
00:41:04
Speaker
Well, and that's like the softest form.
00:41:06
Speaker
Like, this is America, we speak English.
00:41:10
Speaker
Like, you know, we're not going to come to your country and make you do it this way.
00:41:14
Speaker
But like, if you sneak under the barbed wire and come here, yeah, you got to do it this way or else you can't have a job.
00:41:24
Speaker
And instead, it's like, well, you know, basically, the idea of coming here is,
00:41:33
Speaker
to be American has has become not only not only is that not what they're doing but it's like it's offensive it's offensive it's disgusting that you would even contemplate yeah yeah yeah we we encourage people not to do it we just we discourage them and we're doing and this is where it's like I mean this is where it becomes kind of like a unipart
00:42:00
Speaker
party conspiracy theory because it's like why would you discourage them from doing like the only I mean it's it's almost like I have no evidence for this conspiracy other than it's like the only logical thing like Sherlock Holmes who's like well I've eliminated every other dumb reason so this must be what's happening yeah you know why would you discourage people from doing the one most important thing that will benefit them
00:42:29
Speaker
And the only answer, like the only logical answer is so that you have a permanent underclass,
Economic Pressures and Immigrant Labor
00:42:34
Speaker
right?
00:42:34
Speaker
And the left enjoys having a permanent underclass because those are their voters.
00:42:38
Speaker
And the right enjoys having a permanent underclass because of the profit margin.
00:42:44
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think you could almost, if you view it as a distributed problem where there's lots and lots of different stakeholders making independent choices in a particular direction.
00:42:55
Speaker
I mean, I've talked to lots of,
00:42:58
Speaker
entrepreneurs, even guys who are, who are sort of believers in the kinds of things that we're talking about, you know, believers in like America should be a country.
00:43:13
Speaker
They're at this point where they're like, you know, I'd like America to be a country, but it just isn't.
00:43:18
Speaker
And Philippine labor is really cheap.
00:43:21
Speaker
And, you know, so I'm just like, I'm, I'm not going to be the last sucker left holding the bag.
00:43:29
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you have to compete, right?
00:43:31
Speaker
So this is something that I deal with on a daily basis, right?
00:43:38
Speaker
Because I do believe that some of what goes on, and this is to say nothing of where I work specifically, but across all of these industries that are immigrant heavy labor, there is a certain amount of exploitation to it, right?
00:43:58
Speaker
And it's somewhat exploitative.
00:44:02
Speaker
In what way?
00:44:05
Speaker
Well, the wages are poor, right?
00:44:07
Speaker
Like it's not a living wage, not remotely.
00:44:13
Speaker
I mean, any warehouse job is, I mean, maybe you get two parents.
00:44:21
Speaker
I mean, I don't know.
00:44:22
Speaker
You can't raise a family with two people
00:44:26
Speaker
who pack boxes for 14 hours a day.
00:44:30
Speaker
Sorry, for $14 an hour, you know, 10 or 12 hours a day.
00:44:34
Speaker
I mean, I, you know, like government assistance or whatever, but you're not, I mean, it's going to be two or three generations before those people are not living in, in something resembling squalor.
00:44:48
Speaker
Well, and I almost think that like, I almost think that, that if,
00:44:55
Speaker
if you had, well, if this is, you know, wish casting, this is dreaming, but like the argument that I've heard against like the concept of a quote unquote living wage is that if you didn't have an endless supply of immigrant labor, adult immigrant labor, then essentially all of these
00:45:21
Speaker
all of these not enough to live on jobs would be staffed by teenagers.
00:45:26
Speaker
And they'd be making more because the labor market would be tighter, but it probably still wouldn't be enough to raise a family, but there would be a class hierarchy that extends across time rather than across people.
00:45:43
Speaker
So this is the dream, right?
00:45:45
Speaker
Everybody starts the bottom, everybody's packing boxes and they sort into where they belong.
Societal Obligations Beyond IQ
00:45:53
Speaker
Yeah, but some people just simply aren't capable of a lot more though.
00:46:01
Speaker
I mean, what do you do with those people?
00:46:04
Speaker
Even people that were born in this country and raised in it, some of them simply aren't made for a lot more.
00:46:09
Speaker
Again, unless one of the advantages of growing up in America is that you're one of the 40% of people in this country that speaks English and
00:46:20
Speaker
And that becomes like a huge asset.
00:46:23
Speaker
But otherwise, I mean, I don't know what you do with people who are like permanently low skill.
00:46:29
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's, I mean, you want to talk about an elephant in the room.
00:46:34
Speaker
I mean, that's it.
00:46:36
Speaker
And I think we have an obligation.
00:46:39
Speaker
I feel an obligation to my fellow citizens to not, you know, I had an experience when I was a young man.
00:46:48
Speaker
that is this is like this impacted me profoundly.
00:46:52
Speaker
You know, I was in college.
00:46:54
Speaker
I was I was raised conservative and I was in college, which means I was like de facto a libertarian.
00:46:58
Speaker
Right.
00:46:58
Speaker
Because I'm I'm cringe and I think I know everything.
00:47:02
Speaker
Sure.
00:47:02
Speaker
And most people grow out of it and a few people don't.
00:47:06
Speaker
And, you know, I'm having this conversation.
00:47:09
Speaker
I'm quoting Scott Adams to a co-worker.
00:47:11
Speaker
I say, well, you know, Scott Adams says,
00:47:15
Speaker
in the Dilbert Future, he makes a joke saying that capitalism isn't the best system.
00:47:21
Speaker
It isn't the best system because it doesn't discriminate.
00:47:24
Speaker
Every system discriminates.
00:47:25
Speaker
It's the best system
00:47:27
Speaker
because it discriminates against the two groups least likely to complain, stupid people and lazy people.
00:47:32
Speaker
Stupid people because they don't know they're getting screwed and lazy people because protesting is too much like work.
00:47:38
Speaker
And I thought I was being coy with this quote.
00:47:41
Speaker
And he says, this friend of mine who was left-leaning says to me, well, what are stupid people supposed to do?
00:47:51
Speaker
Just crawl in a hole and die?
00:47:52
Speaker
And I felt like really embarrassed because I was like,
00:47:57
Speaker
Yeah, you're like, what am I supposed to do with my stupid co-citizens?
00:48:03
Speaker
Do I owe them any less loyalty?
00:48:07
Speaker
And we have aggrandized IQ way beyond its capabilities to solve problems.
00:48:16
Speaker
Right.
00:48:17
Speaker
IQ is useful.
00:48:20
Speaker
Having a high IQ is useful, but it can't give you – I was going to say it can't give you a good marriage, but I dare say it gives you a worse marriage.
00:48:28
Speaker
I don't know.
00:48:29
Speaker
Maybe not.
00:48:30
Speaker
But I mean isn't like – aren't like psychiatrists, like psychologists, like the most likely profession to get divorced?
00:48:40
Speaker
It's like these are the people who are the most expert in the human mind, and they can't like get along with one other human mind.
00:48:47
Speaker
Well, I think it's just because they're wrong.
00:48:48
Speaker
Like, I don't think it's necessarily because knowing more hurts you.
00:48:54
Speaker
I think it's because they know things that are not true.
00:48:57
Speaker
Yeah, that's absolutely true.
00:48:59
Speaker
They know so much that just isn't so.
00:49:02
Speaker
And I think, like, I look at it like, so I've had this wrestle on IQ for a while.
00:49:10
Speaker
Like, it seems like the two camps are like,
00:49:16
Speaker
we need to pretend that's not real.
00:49:20
Speaker
And so that's like your standard conservatives and liberals who are like, conservatives are gonna pretend it's not real and it's all about hard work and it's all about like, you know, your bootstraps and everything.
00:49:29
Speaker
And liberals who are like, oh, IQ isn't real.
00:49:32
Speaker
It's all oppression.
00:49:33
Speaker
It's all systems of oppression.
00:49:36
Speaker
And then on the other side of that argument, really all that exists is like,
00:49:44
Speaker
IQ is real and therefore we should sterilize all the morons.
00:49:50
Speaker
And like, I'm like, no, that's not the answer.
Military Experience and Societal Structure
00:49:56
Speaker
And part of the reason why I think even the people who propound that don't really believe it is, and this is something that I've just, I haven't really like fleshed out or developed, but like they love dogs.
00:50:12
Speaker
And they love dogs in this like admiring, respecting like way.
00:50:18
Speaker
Like dogs are not just, you know, lovably stupid, but like they have these virtues that are so appealing.
00:50:27
Speaker
And like, you know, you think about the military dog that goes and dies to save somebody and then they get a full military funeral with honors and all that stuff.
00:50:38
Speaker
And like,
00:50:41
Speaker
I'm thinking like, so a dog is like way dumber than anybody, anybody.
00:50:50
Speaker
But they have these virtues and they have these, and we respect their rights.
00:50:56
Speaker
Like we say, a dog has a right to be treated a certain way.
00:51:00
Speaker
And I think part of the reason that the relationship is so healthy is because it is honest.
00:51:08
Speaker
Like nobody's bullshitting about what the dog's capabilities are.
00:51:13
Speaker
Nobody's expecting that dog to like go way outside of its lane.
00:51:19
Speaker
And, and, you know, obviously I'm, I'm comparing people to dogs because I'm a monster, but the, the, the point that I'm making is like, the point that I'm making is like, if you can extend that level of honor and that level of respect, um,
00:51:35
Speaker
and to something that is dumber than any living human, then like, I feel like the differences between humans should not matter as much as it does on that axis.
00:51:48
Speaker
For the people who are being realistic about this, who are like, okay, eyes wide open, we're not all the same, but like, clearly we're more the same than we are to the dog.
00:51:59
Speaker
You know, this is something really, really interesting because I dealt with this when I was a military officer.
00:52:05
Speaker
So there's certain requirements becoming a military officer.
00:52:08
Speaker
You have to – and it's really – anymore, it's like you have to have a certain level of integrity.
00:52:15
Speaker
So first of all, it's a college degree.
00:52:20
Speaker
You have to have a college degree, which in the Second World War of Vietnam, whenever they came up with this, there weren't that many people.
00:52:27
Speaker
The GI Bill is still relatively new.
00:52:30
Speaker
There weren't a lot of people in the military who already had college degrees.
00:52:34
Speaker
There weren't a lot of people in the general population.
00:52:37
Speaker
The college craze hadn't happened.
00:52:39
Speaker
So when it's a rarer thing, that's a marker of the upper class.
00:52:44
Speaker
You have a college degree.
00:52:49
Speaker
You can't get waivers for an officer as easily.
00:52:52
Speaker
Like if you, let's say, have an assault charge or something.
00:52:57
Speaker
Sometimes you can get those waived if you're enlisted.
00:53:01
Speaker
So it's just a little bit tougher to become an officer.
00:53:04
Speaker
And yet, de jure, on paper, none of these requirements is insurmountable by anybody that I worked with who was enlisted.
00:53:17
Speaker
And yet, again, it was really the sort of manner of growing up, the culture folks were raised in,
00:53:27
Speaker
that had an enormous impact on whether or not they could actually meet these requirements and whether or not they were comfortable in that meeting.
00:53:35
Speaker
And trust me, there was a ton of crossover.
00:53:40
Speaker
I met some enlisted guys, especially during the global war on terror, when there were people who in 2001 and 2003 volunteered, the Pat Tillmans of the world, who had much better options and enlisted out of the love of their country.
00:53:54
Speaker
And there were some people that snuck in as officers who probably didn't necessarily belong there.
00:53:59
Speaker
Hell, you might throw me in there.
00:54:00
Speaker
I don't know.
00:54:01
Speaker
But what it seemed to me was there was just – there was still this – and this is going to make me sound like I came out of 100 – like I got a time machine from 200 years ago.
00:54:14
Speaker
There was like this natural divide.
00:54:16
Speaker
between the way the officers carry themselves and the way the enlistment carry themselves and the hierarchy is very explicit and everyone pretty much accepts it and they're okay with it and there's almost there's just very much this sense that like this is how the world is some people are officers some people are not and and it you know it's funny there's there's so many things that don't even operate along that axis right like as a as a
00:54:45
Speaker
as an 01, as a new officer in the military, the amount of power, influence, or respect that I commanded compared to someone who was a command sergeant major or a chief petty officer or whatever, those guys had a lot more experience.
00:55:07
Speaker
All these other axes like experience, acumen, professionalism,
00:55:13
Speaker
just a little bit of age too, you know, connections.
00:55:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:17
Speaker
Connections and networks, right.
00:55:19
Speaker
All of these things they had in spades that I had nothing.
00:55:21
Speaker
And yet they called me, sir.
00:55:23
Speaker
And they saluted because that was, that was like the, that was just the milieu we were in.
00:55:30
Speaker
And I couldn't, I mean, it was just the most bizarre thing.
00:55:33
Speaker
Here's it.
00:55:33
Speaker
Here's an episode.
00:55:34
Speaker
Here's a really funny episode from it.
00:55:37
Speaker
We have this like government bureaucrat who comes to
00:55:40
Speaker
give us one of our yearly briefings on like God knows what.
00:55:43
Speaker
And I think it was about health.
00:55:45
Speaker
It was like we were supposed to, she was coming to tell us not to smoke and chew tobacco, LOL.
00:55:49
Speaker
Like why this even matters to the army is beyond me.
00:55:51
Speaker
But this lady comes and she's like, hey, who can tell me what the number one cause of death in America is?
00:56:00
Speaker
And I shout out heart disease.
00:56:02
Speaker
She's like, that's correct.
00:56:03
Speaker
I'm surprised that somebody knows it, right?
00:56:06
Speaker
And yeah,
00:56:07
Speaker
She says, who knows what the second most common cause of death in the United States is?
00:56:11
Speaker
And my buddy, who's also an officer, says cancer.
00:56:15
Speaker
She's like, that's also correct.
00:56:16
Speaker
And one of the enlisted guys shouts out, that's not fair.
00:56:19
Speaker
They've been to college.
00:56:23
Speaker
What the hell is going to college?
00:56:27
Speaker
I didn't get a nursing degree.
00:56:28
Speaker
You know, but.
00:56:30
Speaker
But there's this sense that it's all part and parcel, right?
00:56:33
Speaker
That like having the self-discipline to not smoke and to know that that's going to kill you or at least to care, I assume at this point, everybody knows, to care that it's going to kill you.
00:56:46
Speaker
Like somehow that correlates with a college degree and somehow that correlates with being a military officer and not being enlisted.
00:56:54
Speaker
And somehow that correlates with being able to own property
00:57:01
Speaker
There's all these things that are like surrogates for something.
00:57:07
Speaker
And right now we're using IQ.
00:57:09
Speaker
I think it's because it's safe.
00:57:13
Speaker
It's super objective.
00:57:15
Speaker
But honestly, it's not even as good as some of this other stuff.
00:57:19
Speaker
But all these other things have already been...
00:57:21
Speaker
So they're not rigorous, right?
00:57:24
Speaker
And so when you run into the disparate impact aspect of it, the implication, the explication is, well, these are racist, these are systemic, systemically racist artifacts from another society.
00:57:39
Speaker
And I don't think that's true because this cuts across race in the military.
00:57:46
Speaker
Yes, obviously that statistical reality exists.
00:57:51
Speaker
But it's way more than that.
00:57:54
Speaker
And yeah, it's like there's no – the military is the only place I've been to dream honesty because I can look at your chest and I know how much money you make.
Meritocracy and Class Divides
00:58:06
Speaker
I see the rank and I see the salary.
00:58:08
Speaker
I see your rank and I know your salary.
00:58:10
Speaker
And I know who your boss is.
00:58:12
Speaker
I know how much money your boss makes.
00:58:14
Speaker
And it's like – it's just – it's so out there.
00:58:19
Speaker
Like it's so out there in the open.
00:58:21
Speaker
that it never even needs to be discussed.
00:58:24
Speaker
You beat it into people for like nine weeks when they're 18 years old and it's like, I get it.
00:58:31
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:58:33
Speaker
There's, yeah, I think one of the things that we're seeing is the hypocrisy of
00:58:44
Speaker
pretending that everybody's the same either in terms like like you know we're looking at this uh this meritocratic elite that we're supposed to have and you go on twitter and you dunk on them because they're stupid like like they're just really really stupid people um
00:59:04
Speaker
And there's like a hypocrisy about like, oh, these people are there because they deserve it because they got the credentials.
00:59:11
Speaker
But at the same time, there's also this like dishonesty about everybody who's on the bottom deserves to be on the bottom or, but it goes both ways, right?
00:59:25
Speaker
It's like, if you're downscale whites,
00:59:29
Speaker
if you're doing the fentanyl thing or you're doing the like the meth thing, then like you are where you are because of character failings, which is also why you voted for Trump.
00:59:41
Speaker
Right, you're a pillbilly and you deserve it.
00:59:44
Speaker
Right, right.
00:59:46
Speaker
And then, so this meritocratic argument just flips whenever they need it to for when it's one of their downtrodden classes.
00:59:54
Speaker
And I think that hypocrisy is what causes people to reject
01:00:00
Speaker
the idea of, of egalitarianism or, or, or this pretense that we don't have class.
01:00:07
Speaker
And I think, yeah, it's so much more healthy.
01:00:12
Speaker
Like, and, and, and obviously like I know enough enlisted guys to have heard their, their opinions about officers and, and how they kind of like, don't,
01:00:24
Speaker
don't know what they're talking about when it matters.
01:00:26
Speaker
And, and it's, it's actually very similar to the dialogue between like doctors and nurses.
01:00:32
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:32
Speaker
I don't know if you've noticed this parallel, like nurses are like, Oh, we do the real work.
01:00:35
Speaker
We really know what's going on.
01:00:37
Speaker
They're just, you know, whatever.
01:00:38
Speaker
And, and there's, there's a very clear class divide there too, but just the acknowledgement of the hierarchy, even if it's not a perfect hierarchy, even if it's not perfectly meritocratic or, or based on intelligence or skill, um,
01:00:54
Speaker
seems to me to be so much healthier than the pretense that there isn't a hierarchy.
01:01:01
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, well, and we, you're absolutely right, like this, the fake meritocracy that elevates
01:01:14
Speaker
elevates the skill list right in you know under the pretense that there's no class like you do start to get some truly incompetent people out there some of that's just class resentment right like that guy makes more money so i'm you know i would take my my smarter non-commissioned officers
01:01:31
Speaker
And I would train them in a lot of tasks.
01:01:34
Speaker
I was like, listen, if you understand what it is that I do and what I bring to the table, then you can help me communicate why we're doing things the way we're doing them so that when there's a last minute change or something, it doesn't seem like this arbitrary whim.
01:01:50
Speaker
There was probably a time when society was too much to the other way of the underpinning of...
01:01:59
Speaker
of classism so it's like yeah people can make bad decisions and they get away with it um you're perfect right perfect example being uh you do you know like the story behind the charge of the light brigade no go ahead so the chart you know ours is not to question why ours is but to do or die they were ordered they were supposed to be ordered to attack some artillery that was retreating and
01:02:23
Speaker
Because there was no sense of probity on the part of the soldiers executing the order, like the NCOs and the junior officers, they were like, got my orders, I'm going.
01:02:34
Speaker
They didn't realize that the order had been miscommunicated, misinterpreted, and they attacked artillery that had not moved head on.
01:02:43
Speaker
But they were never ordered.
01:02:45
Speaker
They weren't supposed to be doing that charge, right?
01:02:48
Speaker
So there's a point at which implicit class structure is bad because there's no pushback whatsoever.
01:02:55
Speaker
Well, and I think you see that in China.
01:03:00
Speaker
Oh, yeah, for sure.
01:03:01
Speaker
I mean, that's a big part of why things don't get solved and don't get seen.
01:03:08
Speaker
Yeah, incompetence goes unchecked when there's no meritocracy.
01:03:13
Speaker
But if you pretend it's all meritocracy, you get the same problem in a different form where you get people who are selected for certain tasks that aren't necessarily the task actually being done or needed.
01:03:29
Speaker
So doctors, I think, are a really good example.
01:03:32
Speaker
Our selection process for doctors selects for a certain kind of intelligence.
01:03:37
Speaker
that's not the thing doctors do most of the day in and day out, right?
01:03:42
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:03:43
Speaker
Your ability to pass the MCAT, your ability to pass the MCAT, it only correlates so much with your ability to console a grieving parent or make a sound decision when you're watching someone bleed to death, right?
01:04:05
Speaker
Yeah, that creative problem solving.
01:04:07
Speaker
I mean, they're basically, they're educated.
01:04:10
Speaker
They're educated for a system in which search engines did not exist.
01:04:15
Speaker
And so a big part of their job is to be the search engine.
01:04:19
Speaker
And that, a big part of their training is to be the search
American Creativity vs. Analytical Skills
01:04:25
Speaker
engine.
01:04:25
Speaker
But like, they can just go on Google now for a lot of that.
01:04:29
Speaker
And so these other sets of skills that they're not trained for become so much more important.
01:04:35
Speaker
Yeah, you're right.
01:04:37
Speaker
So this is another hobby horse of mine.
01:04:41
Speaker
My disbelief in Asian analytical supremacy.
01:04:48
Speaker
So again, I think there's this paper tiger out there that we think that these Asian countries are so, so far ahead of us in math and science.
01:05:00
Speaker
And I do think that there is some
01:05:02
Speaker
Kevin Nielsen, Strive and going on, they either are some people who really do want their countries to succeed and have focused on stem in a way that we ought to and are not.
01:05:10
Speaker
Kevin Nielsen, But I also think that it's a little bit of a. Kevin Nielsen, A little bit of misdirection on the part of corporate America to bring in people for relatively simple tasks.
01:05:29
Speaker
that don't actually require a lot of this higher level learning, but these cultures have developed these education systems that get people to like rote memorize, derivative, go to school, get married, learn differential calculus, right?
01:05:48
Speaker
And so, yeah, differential calculus is cool.
01:05:53
Speaker
And yeah, you have to have a certain IQ to be able to do it, but
01:05:58
Speaker
Again, think of it this way, like if the job is to create some sort of algorithm that is going to please the American consumer, what's more important, being steeped in the culture of the American consumer or like knowing how to write a VBA algorithm in Excel?
01:06:20
Speaker
Right, right.
01:06:23
Speaker
And which of those is harder to learn?
01:06:26
Speaker
I think there's also just an element of creative problem solving that Americans, for whatever reason, seem to excel at.
01:06:39
Speaker
And that's probably cultural because you don't necessarily see it in Europe.
01:06:46
Speaker
And I think that does have to do with this like
01:06:51
Speaker
snowflakey, you know, you're the protagonist of the universe kind of mentality that we inculcate.
01:07:00
Speaker
Like there's definitely, it's not something where you can just like take
01:07:06
Speaker
some other it's like just like you said you can't take some other cultures solution to one particular problem and like patch it in um it's it's it's it exists as part of a system so yeah i i think um there's definitely an element of a paper tiger there besides which i mean they cheat like oh yeah all these exams that display this this uh this tremendous analytical ability um
01:07:29
Speaker
like all stats from China, are the product of a communist regime and a Confucian bureaucracy built on cheating.
Cultural Symbols and Economic Liberty
01:07:39
Speaker
Basically, I think a lot of stuff out of China is just sort of taken at face value that absolutely should not be taken at face value.
01:07:45
Speaker
Yeah, I agree.
01:07:46
Speaker
I agree.
01:07:48
Speaker
Well, you said you wanted to talk about beef.
01:07:50
Speaker
Beef as liberty.
01:07:52
Speaker
That's right.
01:07:53
Speaker
Yeah.
01:07:54
Speaker
Tell me about why beef is freedom.
01:07:58
Speaker
So there were a couple of, it's too bad, there were a couple of times I could have segued into this.
01:08:04
Speaker
I didn't know.
01:08:04
Speaker
I was kind of waiting for the alley from you.
01:08:11
Speaker
So beef is liberty.
01:08:13
Speaker
I once under, you know, in a former life had a Twitter account under my name, John Taylor, where I had this epic thread.
01:08:23
Speaker
I think it had over a million interactions on it.
01:08:26
Speaker
So, you know, I'm Twitter famous, whatever.
01:08:28
Speaker
No big deal.
01:08:29
Speaker
And no, so I read Inventing Freedom.
01:08:34
Speaker
So there's just been thoughts.
01:08:35
Speaker
There's some thoughts are rolling around my head.
01:08:37
Speaker
Inventing Freedom by Daniel Hannon and Great Tales from English History was another book that I'd recently read at the time.
01:08:47
Speaker
But there's a lot of thoughts that just kind of congealed in my head, which is, you know, beef.
01:08:52
Speaker
So beef's expensive, right?
01:08:55
Speaker
So first of all, let's back up and address the mayonnaise sandwich in the room.
01:08:59
Speaker
There's this accusation thrown at Americans that we have no – white Americans specifically that we have no culture.
01:09:07
Speaker
We're all just mayonnaise sandwiches.
01:09:10
Speaker
And the contention of Daniel Hannon and a few other people who are willing to make this argument is that Anglo culture is actually so much the culture of the world and the global market…
01:09:24
Speaker
that nobody recognizes it for being uniquely American, you know, Anglo-American, English and American, right?
01:09:33
Speaker
And one of the things he talks about it, like one of the examples he gives is like the business suit, you know?
01:09:39
Speaker
Everybody who wants to be respectful wears a business suit.
01:09:42
Speaker
Well, the business suit, like when did that, you know, 200 years ago, people were wearing like, what do you call them?
01:09:46
Speaker
Like pantaloons, bloomers, like, you know, Beethoven, because like tight little stockings.
01:09:51
Speaker
I mean, that's like,
01:09:52
Speaker
Like you've met people who met people who dressed like that.
01:09:56
Speaker
It wasn't that long ago.
01:09:58
Speaker
Right?
01:10:01
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:02
Speaker
really old people know really maybe maybe like maybe three degrees moved at this point but it really wasn't that long ago that a business suit so what is a business suit well it's it's the class it's this it's the clothing of an English merchant and I don't know why it became popular amongst them but we all dress like middle class English merchants because that has become
01:10:23
Speaker
the world ideal for most people is to be middle class in the way that an Anglo person is middle class, right?
01:10:33
Speaker
But nobody's willing to give them credit for it.
01:10:36
Speaker
So when you wear jeans or you wear a business suit or you listen to a violin or whatever, no one's willing to give Anglos or Europeans more broadly credit for a lot of these things, right?
01:10:52
Speaker
So
01:10:53
Speaker
You see the same thing with Christianity.
01:10:57
Speaker
Yes.
01:10:58
Speaker
Atheists will be like, oh, I don't believe in any of that fairytale nonsense.
01:11:02
Speaker
But also, we're all men are created equal, like all this stuff that's very clearly Christian DNA.
01:11:13
Speaker
You took the parts that you turned into this universalized thing.
01:11:19
Speaker
And you've said that those aren't Christianity.
01:11:21
Speaker
Those are just common sense.
01:11:23
Speaker
um but then you go to you know but you realize how idiosyncratic they are right you you asked them epistemologically like how like why how did this happen why is this true and right you know the answers are just like feeble you know if you try to take if you try to take the the christianity out of it it's just like
01:11:45
Speaker
Well, we're all just like, we're all just meat robots that suddenly realize that we're all created equal.
01:11:50
Speaker
And it's, yeah, it's ludicrous.
01:11:53
Speaker
So part of that is beef.
01:11:58
Speaker
You know, beef was something that,
01:12:01
Speaker
almost nobody in Europe could afford for a very long time.
01:12:04
Speaker
It's because cows, cattle require so much land, so much grazing land compared to any other animal.
01:12:12
Speaker
Every culture in the world has a chicken dish and it's because chickens eat garbage basically.
01:12:20
Speaker
And the yeast arrays, they don't eat much, but cows require infrastructure.
01:12:26
Speaker
And so what is that infrastructure?
01:12:28
Speaker
That infrastructure is private property,
01:12:32
Speaker
a large middle class and like some kind of reasonable assurance against excessive taxation and bills of attainder, you know, just sort of unfair, you know, the way, you know, unfair targeting of the middle class by the ruling class.
01:12:46
Speaker
And England, you know, people, I guess the sort of consensus is that like capitalism sort of started with like Dutch traders or whatever.
01:12:55
Speaker
But, you know, England really jumped on this early on with English common law.
01:13:02
Speaker
you know equality before the law creating a system of precedent so that people can be treated equally and and then all in and also these these private property protections and so you see beef take off in in england a lot earlier than it did anywhere else to the point where like america i mean think this is one of the one of the weirdest like
01:13:31
Speaker
incongruencies in history that I think of is like that Joseph Smith and uh uh spoiler alert I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Joseph Smith and Beethoven were contemporaries or take somebody else right like from the same time maybe like isn't that weird right yeah Joseph Smith he's like wearing wearing clothes that almost look like clothes you would wear to Sunday church and then you've got like Beethoven with his with his wig and his powdered face and you know
01:14:01
Speaker
They lived at the same time.
01:14:02
Speaker
And so you have Americans that like they have cowboys.
01:14:05
Speaker
They have people who's literally they don't even own the land.
01:14:08
Speaker
Right.
01:14:08
Speaker
They're not ranchers.
01:14:10
Speaker
They just they make money.
01:14:12
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:13
Speaker
So their so their only job is to like take cow like take cattle from one place to another.
01:14:18
Speaker
Meanwhile, in Europe, it's like, you know, Bessie, the family cow can't die.
01:14:22
Speaker
We're all going to starve to death.
01:14:24
Speaker
And that's a direct result from the fact that the peasantry in Europe didn't have what we would consider the civil rights or the individual sovereignty of private property and due process until well into the 1800s or a lot of them even into the 20th century.
01:14:43
Speaker
And so England just became a much wealthier country because of English common law much earlier.
01:14:49
Speaker
And beef is representative of that system.
01:14:53
Speaker
The idea – the French call the English les rouss beef, right?
01:14:57
Speaker
And it's like it's this sort of like pride looking up, snooty, like, oh, they think they're better than us because they can afford this expensive meat.
01:15:08
Speaker
And because England adopted capitalism, and I don't even want to use that word because of what we act like it means today.
01:15:16
Speaker
It's dirty now.
01:15:19
Speaker
Well, not just – not the socialist stigma, but the fact that capitalism, free market economics is actually something horrifying now I think.
01:15:27
Speaker
Right, right.
01:15:30
Speaker
But just the fact that you are allowed to own property and profit from it.
01:15:37
Speaker
That adopting that idea earlier than other Europeans made England a wealthy country earlier on, and it's not just gun germs and steel.
01:15:45
Speaker
It's not just the fact that they're an island.
01:15:46
Speaker
It's not just the fact that they're isolated from diseases and wars.
01:15:51
Speaker
It's the fact that they very eagerly gave at first their nobility and then later their lower nobility and then later their middle class the right
01:16:03
Speaker
the right to keep private property and to profit from it.
01:16:07
Speaker
And so beef is this like really expensive, it's this infrastructure heavy product that correlates with being a free and individually free people, not just self-ruling people, but an individually free people that can engage in commerce.
01:16:23
Speaker
In the 1800s,
01:16:28
Speaker
or 17 and 1800s in Britain, men belonged to steakhouses like you would belong to a country club.
English History and Economic Freedom
01:16:43
Speaker
So we had some technical difficulties and now we're back.
01:16:46
Speaker
We were talking about beef as emblematic of the tradition of English liberty.
01:16:51
Speaker
And I wonder if...
01:16:56
Speaker
I wonder if the causality doesn't go the other way.
01:17:00
Speaker
Because as far as I can tell, it's not necessarily the case that the farsighted English elites extended these protections and liberties to the gentry and then the middle class because they had this vision of capitalist freedom.
01:17:21
Speaker
More so, it seems to have been the case that
01:17:25
Speaker
the money that was flowing in through English commerce and manufacturing made those classes powerful enough they could simply seize that from seize these liberties and demand these liberties from the ruling class and I wanted to get your read on that well yeah I mean I think that's well that's certainly the mythos of of the English right you know uh
01:17:53
Speaker
Magna Carta was signed at the point of a sword by the arguably universally.
01:18:02
Speaker
It was Prince John, wasn't it?
01:18:03
Speaker
It was.
01:18:06
Speaker
The first time.
01:18:07
Speaker
Yeah.
01:18:08
Speaker
So, you know, universally accepted as the worst English monarch of all time.
01:18:14
Speaker
You're forced by his nobles to sign it.
01:18:16
Speaker
I mean, I'm not.
01:18:18
Speaker
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question.
01:18:20
Speaker
You're saying that because they were wealthy, they demanded freedom.
01:18:23
Speaker
I mean I think that's – I don't know.
01:18:25
Speaker
That's very much the normie con approach to global politics.
01:18:31
Speaker
Like, well, if we just make people free – if we make people rich, then they'll demand to be free.
01:18:36
Speaker
No, not necessarily that they were so rich that they wanted freedom, but that they were sufficiently rich that they had the power to demand freedom.
01:18:46
Speaker
As opposed to all these liberties just making them rich.
01:18:52
Speaker
Well, I don't know.
01:18:52
Speaker
It almost seems like a virtuous cycle.
01:18:54
Speaker
It seems like it compounds upon itself.
01:18:57
Speaker
It probably is.
01:18:57
Speaker
I mean, I think I read somewhere that the Anglo-Saxons had universal property rights.
01:19:05
Speaker
And it was like later the influence of Rome that they did away with them.
01:19:11
Speaker
But I mean, I could be screwing up the timeline because when did the Anglo-Saxons invade England?
01:19:14
Speaker
Like really early on.
01:19:16
Speaker
Yeah, so that would have been like, what, 800 AD?
01:19:18
Speaker
So maybe it was the Celts.
01:19:20
Speaker
Anyway, whoever was living in Britain when the Romans conquered, like had – they had like universal property ownership.
01:19:27
Speaker
And the Romans came in and said, no, no, no.
01:19:29
Speaker
Only men own property.
01:19:30
Speaker
So I don't know quite how far back it goes.
01:19:35
Speaker
I mean not that gender equality is even remotely a part of this.
01:19:39
Speaker
I'm just saying – I'm not sure I have a good answer to this question as to which came first or why.
01:19:47
Speaker
I hate the deterministic approach that says, well, the… Strictly economic factors.
01:19:55
Speaker
Yeah, purely economic factors like, well, the Renaissance – the Europe warmed up, and that made them…
01:20:03
Speaker
you know, made their, their, uh, their agriculture more productive and then they became healthy and
Founding Fathers and Capitalism
01:20:10
Speaker
wealthy.
01:20:10
Speaker
And I'm like, yes, however, there was also this guy named Jesus that told them you have to respect everyone.
01:20:20
Speaker
And that actually turns out to be a really effective way for running a society.
01:20:25
Speaker
Yeah.
01:20:25
Speaker
Yeah.
01:20:25
Speaker
And I think, um, I actually talked about this in my last podcast about, um,
01:20:32
Speaker
founding fathers and how essentially like liberal not not egalitarianism but but but liberalism in terms of like you know affording everyone uh equal protection under the law etc that these were things that
01:20:56
Speaker
they were reacting to their ruling class in much the same way that we are currently reacting to our ruling class.
01:21:04
Speaker
And like our ruling class pays lip service to all of the things that they did, or like, at least they used to.
01:21:15
Speaker
They used to pay lip service to all these things the founding fathers believed in, like liberalism and the rule of law and economic liberty.
01:21:25
Speaker
But they've become the same kind of like entitled, unaccountable elite that the founding fathers created all these institutions in reaction to.
01:21:36
Speaker
I think you can acknowledge that like those things have become corrupted and still be like, but they were, they made a lot of sense at the time.
01:21:45
Speaker
And like, they really were better than the thing that was before.
01:21:49
Speaker
Yeah, so there's two points I want to make here, which is when I had my epic Twitter thread, I sound like Uncle Rico talking about how I almost made state because I had a great tweet once.
01:22:01
Speaker
You said something that I thought was really interesting in response to what I had been saying when I published this thing, which was that the reactionary hatred of capitalism
01:22:19
Speaker
as such is really kind of foolish because what's being sold as capitalism is, you know, true, true capitalism, unlike communism has been tried and is really rad.
01:22:30
Speaker
Right.
01:22:31
Speaker
And has like great results.
01:22:32
Speaker
And so we're, we're kind of like in the opposite of the true capitalism, your true communism has never been tried.
01:22:37
Speaker
Like true capitalism has been tried and it's not what's going on.
01:22:41
Speaker
You know, you know, all, all the corporate welfare and all like the,
01:22:47
Speaker
semi-private, semi-public institutions that just play by completely different rules and get all this, you know, they get all this funny money to influence elections and industries.
01:22:59
Speaker
I mean, it's just, it's bizarre and perverse and has, you know, is not what, not what these men fought and died for, right?
01:23:08
Speaker
Yeah, and like the fact that you're, the fact that you're disgusted by these people who pay lip service to it doesn't mean the thing in itself is bad.
01:23:16
Speaker
Yeah.
01:23:16
Speaker
So the other thought, the second thought that I have here, this is something I reflect on a lot, and I don't know what to make of it.
01:23:25
Speaker
We are almost exactly as far from our own American revolution as the revolutionaries were from the English Civil War.
01:23:37
Speaker
And I'm trying to wrap my head around what precisely that means for us.
01:23:44
Speaker
Because when the framers, like when they, you know, it's like the British are coming.
01:23:50
Speaker
Like, no, they said the regulars are coming because they were still British themselves.
01:23:55
Speaker
In all of their writings, they said they were defending their rights as Englishmen.
01:24:00
Speaker
I just can't, I don't know.
01:24:02
Speaker
I don't know what to make of this.
01:24:04
Speaker
The American Revolution is so sacred to me, right?
01:24:09
Speaker
It's like, it is the milk I was raised on
01:24:14
Speaker
by my father, the things I was taught to care about passionately.
01:24:18
Speaker
Yeah.
01:24:22
Speaker
So I don't know what to, I don't know what to make of that other than there's these things that are profoundly part of who I am.
01:24:28
Speaker
And you're right.
01:24:28
Speaker
It's, it's very much only the surface of, um, it's only the surface of, of what is, you know, what is,
01:24:39
Speaker
has the image of it, right?
01:24:44
Speaker
I'm borrowing the biblical phrase, an image of godliness but denying the power thereof, right?
01:24:50
Speaker
We have an image of Americanism but are denying the power thereof.
01:24:54
Speaker
I mean literally we slander everything they were except the trappings, the visual trappings of it.
01:25:05
Speaker
Yeah.
01:25:05
Speaker
And I think the fact that even that is going by the wayside and we're, we're sort of renegotiating and subverting like Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln.
01:25:13
Speaker
And like, I think it's,
Frontiers and Economic Sovereignty
01:25:16
Speaker
I think it's great.
01:25:16
Speaker
I think it's very, very healthy because they're divorcing themselves from the imagery so that we can see them.
01:25:23
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
01:25:24
Speaker
And they can't hide behind those, those, those coattails anymore.
01:25:29
Speaker
And I think, and going back to this point about, you know,
01:25:35
Speaker
which came first in terms of the tradition of liberty, the reason that I, well, the reason I would like to believe that it has to do with prosperity and the ability to demand freedom is that that's kind of what I'm trying to accomplish with my group.
01:25:58
Speaker
And what I'm trying to build is like people who have the means of
01:26:06
Speaker
to say no.
01:26:07
Speaker
And I think a lot of what has happened as the so-called frontier has closed is basically our economic system has been captured to a point where people don't have that independent
01:26:29
Speaker
They don't have sovereignty over themselves economically.
01:26:31
Speaker
And so they can be told what to do on that basis.
01:26:36
Speaker
Right.
01:26:37
Speaker
And so, so I have this idea that if we can find those, find those new frontiers, find the places where there's a lot of risk, but a lot of reward, we can find those places where there's opportunities to be seized and,
01:26:59
Speaker
It's just like in the Americas.
01:27:05
Speaker
A lot of these people were not necessarily the myth of them being just farmers.
01:27:11
Speaker
A lot of them were English aristocrats who came here and became American aristocrats.
01:27:16
Speaker
But there was a social mobility here that was not possible over there.
01:27:22
Speaker
And they did become an aristocracy unto themselves.
01:27:29
Speaker
that wasn't dependent on the economic and political and social system of England to survive.
01:27:38
Speaker
And that's why they were able to basically tell them to pound sand.
01:27:44
Speaker
And I think it's probably time to start working on something like that again.
01:27:52
Speaker
Yeah, so, you know, and this is just one, I think this is just one example of kind of what you're talking about is
01:27:59
Speaker
feudal European society was largely based on how much land you own.
01:28:04
Speaker
So you have your little fiefdom, and then you have an overlord who is steward of many fiefdoms, and then the top lord is the king who personally owns the country.
01:28:17
Speaker
So what do you do when you flood that market with millions of acres of free land for the taking?
01:28:25
Speaker
You just have to go out and fight the bears and Indians for it.
01:28:28
Speaker
Well, I think two things happen.
01:28:32
Speaker
One, you completely abolish the relevance of that system.
01:28:35
Speaker
It's just no longer valuable in the same way.
01:28:39
Speaker
And two, you select for people depending on which system they prefer to live in.
01:28:46
Speaker
And America for a very long time selected its immigration for a certain kind of person who wants
01:28:58
Speaker
who wanted to go out there and make his own way.
01:29:00
Speaker
And I think, like you were saying, talking about creatively solving problems, I think that goes a lot.
01:29:07
Speaker
It says a lot about the individualism that drew people here.
01:29:11
Speaker
And in 2016, there was someone who was criticizing the white nationalists who were excited about Trump because they were saying, yeah, now we can restrict immigration
01:29:26
Speaker
to like just European countries.
01:29:28
Speaker
And the guy was like, you don't get it.
01:29:29
Speaker
Like we already took all the good ones.
Immigration History and Cultural Impact
01:29:32
Speaker
Like your modern European is descended from people who were either powerful enough to remain in the aristocracy or content to be peasants.
01:29:41
Speaker
They don't understand why you should be allowed to own a machine gun.
01:29:43
Speaker
They don't understand fuck you as an ideology.
01:29:46
Speaker
Like they don't understand, you know, like the exit mentality of like, I just, I want to be left alone.
01:29:55
Speaker
And I, I am obsessively interested in finding the means to do so.
01:30:01
Speaker
And I think that's, that's part of the big danger of not demanding assimilation is, you know, it's not just, it's not just that one political side is,
01:30:13
Speaker
Everybody who works for me is on Medicaid, that their kids are on Medicaid and they get school lunches and stuff.
01:30:19
Speaker
That's a big part, like the voting block, like voting for the Gibbs is a huge part of the immigrant labor thing.
01:30:27
Speaker
But another huge danger of refusing to assimilate these people is the type of person we select for, the type of person who wants to come here because of the...
01:30:41
Speaker
because of the gifts, right?
01:30:43
Speaker
And we're just, we're selecting for a peasant class.
01:30:45
Speaker
And that's a little bit what I'm talking about when I say that the silver lining is like the future is bright for anybody who is willing to be kind of an individualist American, but the future is much bleaker in the sense that, you know, there's somebody above you and there's somebody above that person until you're actually truly independent and free.
01:31:09
Speaker
Yeah.
01:31:10
Speaker
Yeah, I've often wondered about how pacifist and arguably feminine most of the Scandinavian countries are, given their history.
01:31:28
Speaker
And I really believe the answer is that all of the good ones came to England or to southern Italy or to the Ukraine.
01:31:39
Speaker
And they became the ruling class there.
01:31:41
Speaker
And everybody, like, there was... Oh, you're going back to, like, the Vikings and stuff.
01:31:47
Speaker
Oh yeah, no, but I'm going to bring it to England as well.
01:31:50
Speaker
Like all the good Anglos put on the pith helmet and they went to, you know, the Zambezi or they went to Australia or America.
01:32:04
Speaker
And you can even see that in terms of the different cultures between like Canada and Australia and the US.
01:32:11
Speaker
Because so many of, like if you came here,
01:32:16
Speaker
You know, they tried to do the indentured servitude thing and bring a lot of people here.
01:32:21
Speaker
But even the indentured ones, they were coming because they wanted to.
01:32:25
Speaker
Like, you know, the power dynamics were complicated, but like they sign on the dotted line to come here and then we're supposed to work off their bus fare, basically.
01:32:38
Speaker
Yeah, you're right.
01:32:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:32:41
Speaker
But like, like they were slaves here, but they, but they came here because they were like, I'm going to go be a slave to like, take this opportunity.
01:32:48
Speaker
And, and in Australia, it was much just, it was more like, you know, you're, you're just being transported here.
01:32:55
Speaker
And I think there's, there's, there's definitely cultural and maybe even biological selection effects at play there.
Cyclical Nature of Societal Strength
01:33:04
Speaker
So two things, two things about that.
01:33:05
Speaker
One, I thought, where I thought you were going with the Scandinavian thing is,
01:33:12
Speaker
After the end of the Civil War, when we reopened the frontier for settlement, one-third of Scandinavia moved to the United States between 1865 and – when did they close the frontier officially?
01:33:26
Speaker
Like 1892 or 1891 or something like that?
01:33:30
Speaker
In that 30- or 40-year span of the westward expansion, one-third of the population of Scandinavia moved to the U.S. That's what I thought you were going to say.
01:33:41
Speaker
bring up well it's both i think it's both you're talking about like single single shocking event you know that's it's huge yeah absolutely and and yeah i i totally agree that i think i think we got the good ones you know maybe what what i think is probably more likely you say it's like i i think that in the short term yeah there's some like biological and biological maybe not the cultural i think is is obvious
01:34:08
Speaker
biological, I would guess that there's probably something of a regression to the mean.
01:34:12
Speaker
And what you're seeing is you see something that's kind of cyclical where you basically have like these malcontents that go and do something and create something and build something.
01:34:26
Speaker
And then their great, great, great grandkids are like, wow, that's really cool what he did, but I'd rather have the Gibbs.
01:34:35
Speaker
And so then you have a Gibbs society.
01:34:39
Speaker
Good times create weak men, right?
01:34:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:34:42
Speaker
You've got the good times, great men or whatever cycle.
01:34:48
Speaker
And so you've got just these periods of time where you just build up malcontents because the system is too much built for the weak men.
01:34:58
Speaker
And the strong men are just either bored or unsatisfied or feel oppressed.
01:35:04
Speaker
and they just want to go somewhere where they are allowed to achieve their potential.
01:35:10
Speaker
I don't know what that, maybe right now that's like the moon.
01:35:13
Speaker
Yeah, maybe Elon's going to lead like another American renaissance.
01:35:18
Speaker
Yeah, well, and I think it's entirely possible that there's, you know, we would need to conquer some pretty steep technological barriers, but like, I almost think that it's,
01:35:35
Speaker
it's technological in a different sense where like, like a lot of the problems that we're facing right now are not, it's not literally the Stasi kicking in your door.
01:35:48
Speaker
It's these sort of underhanded tactics used to control people.
01:35:53
Speaker
And I think part of, part of why the, the establishment is so terrified of,
01:36:02
Speaker
of disinformation, misinformation, people being allowed to talk to each other, basically.
01:36:09
Speaker
Like, I can't remember who I was talking to, but they were like, you know, what is the frag?
01:36:14
Speaker
Oh, I think it was, so Dave Smith did like a comedy routine at the Tom Woods thing.
01:36:19
Speaker
But he said, the system is so fragile that like, they heard Elon Musk wanted to buy Twitter and
01:36:29
Speaker
and let people talk to each other.
01:36:31
Speaker
And they're like, that will destroy democracy.
01:36:34
Speaker
Like that will collapse the American system of government if people are allowed to talk to each other.
01:36:41
Speaker
And so I think, you know, I don't necessarily see it as like this system that is so powerful and so stable that the only way to defeat it is to escape it.
01:37:00
Speaker
And there's like a branding issue there because we're called exit, right?
01:37:03
Speaker
But I view the exit thing as tactical.
01:37:09
Speaker
I view it as exit from the things in your life that are making you weaker, more vulnerable.
01:37:20
Speaker
It's about, if you're in a position of influence, stay in that position of influence and
01:37:28
Speaker
but the set of guys under the sound of my voice that are in positions of influence is pretty small.
01:37:34
Speaker
And, and, and the rest of us are pretty much just sort of being bossed around in exchange for a paycheck.
01:37:40
Speaker
And you can alter that arrangement.
01:37:46
Speaker
You can get to a place where you're, you know, um, some people have said there's no such thing as fuck you money.
01:37:52
Speaker
And I would amend that to say, um,
01:37:56
Speaker
you know, a rice farmer in Vietnam could have fuck you money and, and the CEO of a fortune 500 company cannot have it.
01:38:03
Speaker
And it's just a question of how bad do you want to say fuck you?
01:38:06
Speaker
Like, what are you willing to pay?
01:38:15
Speaker
Like, how, how, how hard are you, how hard are you trying to shoot the bird?
01:38:22
Speaker
And, and, and it's so, so like number one, it's about finding that answer for yourself.
01:38:30
Speaker
Like, what are you willing to sacrifice?
01:38:31
Speaker
What are you willing to pay?
01:38:34
Speaker
And then it's about how can I get the resources so that I can, so that I can do that.
01:38:45
Speaker
And, uh, so anyway, it's, it's, uh,
01:38:50
Speaker
It's an exciting time, I think, to be an American.
01:38:52
Speaker
You get the opportunity to stick it to them.
01:38:58
Speaker
I think it's beautiful.
01:39:01
Speaker
There's something to be said.
01:39:02
Speaker
There's a couple of things I think going on here.
01:39:06
Speaker
One is, you're right.
Economic Instability and Historical Comparisons
01:39:10
Speaker
The system is not as stable as it's made to believe.
01:39:12
Speaker
I think the stability of the system is in fact one of the trappings of
01:39:18
Speaker
of the way things used to be that they no longer possess.
01:39:23
Speaker
We talked about the US economy.
01:39:26
Speaker
What is the US economy?
01:39:27
Speaker
Because it sounds to me like the US economy is something that when a war pops off in Ukraine, prices double here.
01:39:35
Speaker
That to me does not sound like the global juggernaut, the artist formerly known as the US economy.
01:39:45
Speaker
So yeah, I think there's a lot of weakness there.
01:39:47
Speaker
Because the more divorced their goals and aims and motives become from the populace, the more coercion is required.
01:39:55
Speaker
And that's like a giant coordination problem on their end.
01:40:00
Speaker
Right?
01:40:01
Speaker
And you know what?
01:40:04
Speaker
Go ahead.
01:40:06
Speaker
So really quick, what it reminds me of, and this is like, this is the thing that I've been thinking about that I'm trying to wrap my head around is,
01:40:13
Speaker
sort of the impact of this English Civil War on our own revolution to understand how I think the revolution informs how we think of America today.
01:40:21
Speaker
Charles I and his, was it called the long parliament or the, I can't remember, but when Charles I dismissed parliament for like years, the problem for him was that, because he didn't want them passing laws that went against what he wanted.
01:40:38
Speaker
Now the flip side of that is he couldn't raise taxes because it had been,
01:40:42
Speaker
clearly enshrined in English law that only Parliament can raise taxes.
01:40:48
Speaker
So he doesn't call a Parliament for like a long time.
01:40:52
Speaker
Right?
01:40:53
Speaker
And the workaround was that in order to maintain a Navy, which they felt was like a constant security, rather than like an army that you only raise in time of war, it was expected that the King would always have a Navy.
01:41:05
Speaker
That's actually why it's the Royal Navy, but it's the British Army because it's Parliament's Army, but it's the King's Navy.
01:41:12
Speaker
So the king was expected to always have a navy.
01:41:14
Speaker
So there was like a special tax called ship money.
01:41:16
Speaker
It was like this port tax tariff thing that the king controlled.
01:41:20
Speaker
And that was like the one tax that the crown controlled as opposed to parliament.
01:41:25
Speaker
So he did this like John Roberts, like nexus of thought workaround to say, well, actually this tax applies to every, you know, like anybody who lives next to water.
01:41:37
Speaker
Yeah.
01:41:39
Speaker
And it was like one of these infuriating events that when he finally does have to call parliament back in because even after that, he still runs out of money for the wars he's trying to fight, that he ends up being accused of treason.
01:41:54
Speaker
And it's because he was trying to fight a war that nobody but him wanted.
01:42:01
Speaker
He wanted to get France back and nobody – like every regular Englishman, every English aristocrat, nobody wanted this war.
01:42:08
Speaker
And so eventually he was forced to exercise a system that no longer worked in his favor.
01:42:15
Speaker
And I think you're absolutely right that these are the opportunities we need to be looking for.
01:42:21
Speaker
Where are the chinks in the armor?
01:42:23
Speaker
What are the systems that this meta system that's actually kind of a wounded bear depends on that actually we control?
01:42:34
Speaker
And like a lot of it's, I think, I think of a lot of it's like more local governance, like getting involved in your community.
01:42:40
Speaker
A lot of it is networking, things like exit, just knowing people who can help, who can help the right kind of men stay stable.
01:42:48
Speaker
You know, I don't know.
01:42:53
Speaker
I mean, there's probably better ideas or more ideas, but that's just, that's just kind of a thought that's off the top of my head because at some point, at some point the bill will come due, right?
01:43:01
Speaker
Like at some point these people will come
01:43:04
Speaker
We'll have to come back and either come back for our money or our votes or somehow curry our favor or, like George III, finally admit that it doesn't actually matter to them.
01:43:15
Speaker
Right.
01:43:16
Speaker
Either way, it's going to come to a head.
01:43:19
Speaker
And the whole thing is going to get laid out for what it is.
01:43:23
Speaker
Yeah, that's what I see as sort of the lesson of that story about King Charles is –
01:43:30
Speaker
they they were forced into increasingly absurd contortions to have to just admit like i don't care like i don't i don't actually care about the tradition of english liberty i don't actually care about the rule of law and you're seeing some of that with trump and this january 6 thing you're seeing like a lot of the contradictions that are being exposed there or the epstein thing for that matter like
01:43:59
Speaker
you have this opportunity to press on them and say like, all right, but, but if you, this doesn't make sense under the assumption that you actually care about these things.
01:44:10
Speaker
And they're having to sort of admit that like, no, we don't actually care about these things, which, you know, so much for the tolerant left, right.
01:44:18
Speaker
Or like, here's, here's the liberal hypocrisy.
01:44:20
Speaker
Imagine if the situation was reversed.
01:44:22
Speaker
Like, I get that that's, that there's a, an impotence to that.
01:44:27
Speaker
If that's all you're doing.
01:44:29
Speaker
But, but like, for example, Chris Rufo, one of the things that he's doing that's really cool is he is, he is requiring them to put up or shut up.
01:44:43
Speaker
Like in terms of, in terms of parents are forcing their hand.
01:44:48
Speaker
Parents are forcing them to come out and say like, oh no, we think that your kids should read about sucking dick in school.
01:44:54
Speaker
Like that's, that's what we actually, that's what we actually support and believe in.
01:45:02
Speaker
And that's more important to us than educating your child in the three R's.
01:45:07
Speaker
Right, right, exactly.
01:45:09
Speaker
And so it can be powerful.
01:45:10
Speaker
It's not all just, you know, running your mouth on Twitter.
01:45:16
Speaker
And it can, you know, in defense of guys who run their mouth on Twitter, it can start there, right?
01:45:20
Speaker
Like that can be, I mean, you know, I sort of built the network that became this thing by running my mouth on Twitter.
01:45:29
Speaker
You just can't stop there.
01:45:30
Speaker
You know what I mean?
01:45:32
Speaker
Um, and we're making, we're making a difference.
01:45:35
Speaker
You know, it's, it's, it's, we're, we're still small.
01:45:37
Speaker
We're still very much at this, like, uh, you know, throwing starfish back into the ocean thing.
01:45:42
Speaker
But I think on that, like on that level, it does matter.
01:45:47
Speaker
Right.
01:45:47
Speaker
It, it, it, it has to start somewhere.
01:45:50
Speaker
And I do think, I do think these cultural memes are important.
01:45:53
Speaker
Like, and the reason is like I was saying earlier about, um,
01:45:57
Speaker
you know, markers of cultural markers that sort of encapsulate a lot of difficult to quantify phenomena.
01:46:09
Speaker
Beef is still more expensive than pretty much any, like pretty much any other meat, right?
01:46:16
Speaker
And then any other meat because of the nature of it.
01:46:19
Speaker
And so like when we have these aggregation of like really stupid policies that,
01:46:25
Speaker
make gas too expensive and make food too expensive and lower you know lower your wages because of inflation and like all of a sudden people are like i can't buy a freaking hamburger like that's it's like it's like the deep lore of america has been wounded and in a way that you may not even be able to articulate but it's like i ought to be able to buy a damn hamburger
01:46:50
Speaker
you know and you can't like why why does that even matter to you and like and your average your average american isn't like well i'm gonna draw back to magna carta and charles the first and and but like but it's there right like it really it's it's a it's a you know it's the tapestry of history that like manifests itself in in cultural ideas and i think that
01:47:14
Speaker
I do think that the memeing matters.
01:47:17
Speaker
I refuse to eat the bug burger.
01:47:19
Speaker
Well, it's obviously a proxy for all of these other things that can be difficult to articulate to people.
01:47:28
Speaker
But if you just tell the average guy, you're not a man if you eat a bug burger and you know it and you know you shouldn't have to eat a bug burger to survive.
01:47:36
Speaker
You should make enough money.
01:47:38
Speaker
Your job should pay you enough to not eat bug burgers.
01:47:40
Speaker
The average guy is like, hell yeah, I get it.
01:47:44
Speaker
And all this other stuff that they may not understand, but it is the culture and the natural rights that they've inherited, they do understand in a visceral way.
01:47:55
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:47:56
Speaker
They just want to grill.
01:47:59
Speaker
fundamentally i literally just want to grill you know and and you have to explain to somebody who just wants to grill that like well the fact that you get to grill depends on like property rights and yeah like there's this deep infrastructure behind your ability to grill and so you might have to fight for this bigger thing in order to continue grilling
01:48:24
Speaker
I guess that's the larger fight is getting people to understand it that way rather than like, you know, I should vote for the guy who's going to give me the federal grilling subsidy gives.
01:48:39
Speaker
We're going to print even more money so that we can have the facade of the right to grill.
01:48:45
Speaker
Yeah.
01:48:47
Speaker
Have you read Age of Entitlement?
01:48:49
Speaker
I assume you have.
01:48:51
Speaker
Not yet.
01:48:52
Speaker
Oh, man.
01:48:53
Speaker
Okay.
01:48:53
Speaker
Top of list, dude.
01:48:54
Speaker
That's a great one.
01:48:56
Speaker
I read The Revolution in Europe, and that informed a lot of the things that I've talked about.
01:49:02
Speaker
Okay.
01:49:02
Speaker
Okay.
01:49:04
Speaker
So Age of Entitlement.
01:49:06
Speaker
He talks about how Reaganism basically involved this massive deficit spending to paper over the contradictions created by the Civil Rights Act.
01:49:20
Speaker
And it's very much in the vein of that like federal grilling subsidy.
01:49:27
Speaker
Like let's just keep pumping, you know, fake stimulus into this beast so that we don't have to deal with the contradictions.
01:49:41
Speaker
You know, people are, you know, what's that chart where like real wages diverge from
01:49:49
Speaker
uh real wages diverge from like productivity productivity yeah like what's the year that everybody's like 1971 or something when like yeah america is totally haywire so yeah so that's a perfect example of like you have the you know you you have all this deficit spending so that people can live the american dream of affording a house housing is not affordable has not been for a very long time but
01:50:15
Speaker
We kind of, yeah, like you said, papered over it for a while.
01:50:18
Speaker
And we, and at various and sundry times since have continued to do the same thing.
01:50:23
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that creates, again, opportunities.
01:50:30
Speaker
We are not in a stable equilibrium with them on the top and us on the bottom.
01:50:37
Speaker
Like you gotta view this volatility as opportunity.
01:50:41
Speaker
It's a great time to be an American, but I wanna let you get back to work.
01:50:49
Speaker
But John is an exit member.
01:50:51
Speaker
And if you wanna meet guys like John, and there's a bunch of them, it's smart people in this group.
01:50:58
Speaker
If you wanna meet guys like John, come check us out at exitgroup.us.
01:51:01
Speaker
Thanks for coming on, man.
01:51:04
Speaker
Thanks.