 Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson tonight. In July of 1993, a radio station on Kilgali, Rwanda began openly attacking one of the country's main ethnic groups, the Tutsis. The radio station was called RTLM, but many remember it as simply Hutu Radio because its audience was primarily Hutu. According to Hutu Radio, Tutsi people were responsible for virtually every bad thing that ever happened in Rwanda. Tutsis had way too much money. They had way too much power. Tutsis were way too privileged. They were greedy. They were bigoted. They were racist. They were dangerous. Everything about Tutsiness was repulsive. For the most part, actual Tutsis in Rwanda ignored all of this, Hutu Radio was not aimed at them. But then, in July of 1994, just nine months after RTLM went on the air, a genocide began in Rwanda. More than half a million Tutsis were murdered, in many cases by Hutus whose rage had been stoked to violence by RTLM's broadcasts. Entire Tutsi families were dragged from their homes and hacked to death with machetes. Hundreds of thousands of women were raped. The world watched in horror as it happened, but did nothing to intervene. Instead, our leaders told us at the time, the genocide in Rwanda would live forever as a lesson to the rest of us about the capacity for evil that lurks inside every human heart and the dangers of reducing our neighbors to the sum total of their ethnicity, their individuals, not ethnic groups. Bill Clinton gave an eloquent speech actually on the subject in Kilgali back in 1998. Look it up. And ask yourself, as you read it, if any Democratic Party official could today say those same words? It's hard to imagine, given what plays on a loop on that party's cable news arm MSNBC. Have you watched MSNBC lately? Likely you haven't. Like the Tutsis, you're not the target audience, but you should tune in sometime. It's remarkable. Given that opposing racism is America's national religion, it may surprise you to learn that open race hate forms much of the substance of that channel's programming. And when we say race hate, we're not referring to the subtle coded variety. You want border security? You giving your kids piano lessons? You like Shakespeare? You believe in the SAT? You must be a racist. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the kind of race hate you cannot mistake for anything else. The kind of people who just come out and announce, I hate this race of people. And here's why I do. It's hard to believe that anything like that is happening right now on American television. But it is, out in the open. And the most amazing and the most creepy part of all is that no one is saying anything about it. It's all but ignored. And honestly, we had no idea it was going on either until we started getting texts from people, are you watching this? Can you believe this? So we tuned in. Apparently on the left, what you're about to see is considered completely normal. Even good. And that should worry you deeply. You don't want to live in Rwanda. But in MSNBC, they're already there. Now you probably knew about Joy Reid, the race lady who's been fixated on race hate for years now. But MSNBC has a new host, someone called Tiffany Cross, who hosts a show called The Cross Connection. Here's a selection. Many of us have seen the dangers when powerful white people decide they want something, they annex it. And they've never had a problem replacing the people who stand in their way. We see American white people are going crazy. They're going, they're resorting to violence. This is literally what conservative white folks do when they don't get their way. They turn violent. White people deputizing themselves in some position of authority to have jurisdiction over their life when they need to mind their blinking business. I don't think it's our responsibility to be tasked with destroying and dismantling the racial oppression that's against us. That's just saying we're more at fault than the white people who constructed this system and the white people who continue to practice institutional racism. A majority of white people do not support policies that would unpack and unroll and reform this system of justice. This is what they want. Matt Gaetz is giving the white folks what they want. White replacement can strangle culture. So, yes, we should all be concerned about white replacement. It is, after all, a very threat to our survival here. Is there anything worse than white people? They're violent. They're heartless. They're cruel. They're deranged. They're secretive. They're dishonest. In fact, as you just heard Tiffany Cross say, white people are a mortal danger to you and your loved ones. They threaten your life. Are they poisoning the wells? Are they baking bread with the blood of your children? If not, according to Tiffany Cross and MSNBC, they're fully capable of doing those things, they've certainly done worse. This is Hutu Radio. But it's not an independent radio station in African country. It's part of one of the biggest news organizations in the world, part of the biggest telecommunications company in the United States, Comcast, which owns it. So you have to ask yourself, what does Comcast Board think of this? Comcast Board is mostly white people, white people who, according to the channel they own, decided they wanted something, then they annexed it. White people who steal because they're white. White people who could, quote, turn to violence where they don't get their way. White people are going crazy, endangering their communities. So you have to ask yourself, why are they putting this on the air? Why are they allowing this? This is not a policy debate. These are open attacks on people, on Americans, on the basis purely of their race. And that's just a selection. We could go on and on and on. Are they aware that this is happening? Perhaps they're not. We weren't, to be fair. But it is happening day after day after day after day. And at a certain point, you have to ask yourself, if it continues and nobody stops it, do they agree with it? Maybe they do. And just in case you think that we are taking Tiffany Cross out of context and pulling the worst quotes from a out-of-context segment to make her seem crazy and racist, here's more. Here's Tiffany Cross at MSNBC. Look, a lot of folks in that Capitol insurrection, some of these folks were white women. And I know we're talking a lot about oath keepers and proud boys, but I do think that some of the white women who have adopted this ideology is America ready to face the fact that some of those folks look like people they have elevated and put on a pedestal of being untouchable. What do you say about this wing of white women who have been radicalized and are enablers to this very dangerous domestic terrorism movement that we've seen increase quite rapidly? So it's not just whites, it's white women. They're women are bad too. Women, of course, are the key to reproducing the white race, which is clearly a threat, as she says again and again to you and your family. They're dangerous, they want to hurt you. Now, don't be fooled by the fact that Tiffany Cross can barely speak a coherent sentence. She was a communications major, apparently, according to the internet, that didn't work. But the gist of it is very, very clear. White women are dangerous because white people are dangerous. They are, by the nature of their DNA, potential domestic terrorists. Now you can play the game, well, if any other group were spoken about this way, this would be shut down immediately. And of course, that's completely true. There was no other group in America you could talk about the way that Tiffany Cross and Joy Reed and other anchors in MSNBC talk about white people. But you didn't even have to play that game. It doesn't matter what the color is. It's always wrong to reduce people to the color of their skin, to their melanin content, to their DNA, and it's even worse to attack them on the basis of that. And in fact, it's the basis of violence, actual violence, actual violence. But Tiffany Cross can't be criticized because she's oppressed. That's the key. Watch this. What we didn't see were enough voices willing to point out the deeper, festering rot that's plagued this nation since it was born. People who neither discovered nor built this land had been led to believe that America is theirs and theirs alone. Will this democracy survive? Well, a Yahoo News poll says no. But perhaps when you build a nation on stolen land with stolen labor, it was never going to be a republic. We could keep. And so here we are, celebrating the birth of a nation, independence for white men. Okay, once again, calling out a specific race by name. Now you have to wonder about the other anchors on MSNBC, MSNBC, some of whom are that race. Do they notice this? Do they know what's happening on their channel? Are they okay with this? What do you think happens if we continue to talk this way? You may not watch that channel, but some people do. What does this look like in a year or five years or 10 years? What kind of country do you live in? Well, a country at war with itself, race war. This woman, Tiffany Cross, whose clips you've been watching is so deranged by a racialist worldview that she believes all people of one color are oppressed by all people of another color. And to prove it, she says, even NFL players, some of the richest people in our society, some of the most celebrated, the most famous, the most privileged, even they can't escape the all-pervasive hatred of diabolical whites. Watch this. I gotta say, Mike, the optics just look bad. To see all these black men crashing into each other with a bunch of white owners, white coaches, and the complete disregard of black bodies and black life. I mean, it just represents a larger issue. So, I mean, the average salary for an NFL player is more than $2 million a year. 60% of NFL players are African-Americans. In some positions like cornerback, firstly, all the first-string players are black. So, okay, we don't have a problem with that. Most people don't have a problem with that. But if you look at that picture and say, this is white supremacy, what are you really saying? You're saying that anybody involved in the sport who is white defiles the sport because whiteness is itself inherently corrupting. White people are so evil that their mere presence in a sport that is overwhelmingly African-American and from which African-American individuals are benefiting is enough to destroy the whole operation because their whites are involved. What kind of talk is that? Well, it's genocidal talk, actually. Not an overstatement. That's exactly what it is. So again, you have to wonder, what does Comcast board think of this? It's not a rhetorical question, really, now that we're talking about sports, because Comcast also owns an NHL team, a hockey team, the Philadelphia Flyers. And maybe not surprisingly, the NHL just published its first ever diversity report. And according to that report, we have a huge problem with hockey. And the problem is there are too many white people in hockey. Now, why is that a problem? No one actually explains. It doesn't need to be explained because it's just prima facie obvious. We've got a lot of white people. That's inherently bad because white people are inherently bad. Again, do you want to live in a country where powerful people talk this way? What do you think it looks like in five years? The head of the NHL's, quote, social impact division said, quote, we have a lot of work to do. Hmm. Again, how does Comcast board feel about this? Will the board undergo some kind of forced diversification? What about the NBA and the NFL? And really, we're not following all of this, but as Joy Reid and Tiffany Cross tell us, that's probably because we're white and too stupid to understand. I think for Kamala Harris, she's had like the triple problem of being a woman. And so people not being willing to respect her the way that they would respect a male vice president or being black, which we already know that what that carries with it is the anti-blackness comes, you know, with the package. And then also being vice president at a time that is really, really difficult. Joy and I talk about this all the time. Madam vice president, and you know this, Charmaine, she black, black. Okay. She went to Howard. She at AK. And when she talks to you, it is, I mean, she sounds like she's so regular and approachable. And I just, it's unfortunate that more people don't see that. And there's also just the dumbing down of the American electorate. We could go on and on. We could read excerpts from Tiffany Cross's book, which are brimming with racial hostility. We could play you a million clips from Joy Reid, which are exactly the same, filled with open racial hostility. But you get the point. And if you don't believe it, just go ahead and tune into MSNBC. But it's not really about that channel or those hosts. It's about a society that thinks that's okay. Where it's not really about diversity, it's about hating other people on the basis of their race. And it's a little bewildering to the rest of us throughout the whole point of America was that we're aspiring to a country where we are judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin. And all of a sudden racial reductionists don't simply have the floor and the platform on cable news shows, but have apparently the unquestioning support of the biggest telecommunications company in the United States. What does that say about the country and its leadership? Jason Whitlock is the host of Fearless. He joins us to respond tonight. Jason Whitlock, thanks so much for coming on. This seems, and I'll just be honest as noted, I didn't really know this was happening. I'm not all that interested in hearing people talk about race and I'm definitely not interested in watching that channel. But once you do watch it, you think, how can this be happening and nobody says anything? Tucker, it's pervasive across corporate media. It's pervasive in the sports world. It's one of the reasons why I left ESPN and Fox Sports to be quite frank with you and wanted to do my own independent thing because of the way that we talk about race in the corporate media is very unhealthy, it's very toxic, it's intended. People have been bought and paid for to undermine this country. Tiffany Cross, Joy Reid, any of the other people doing this type stuff, they know exactly what they're doing. They're doing exactly what they're told to do. They're planting the seeds to make people believe that the American experiment is a failure and the Constitution needs to be rewritten. That's right, that's right. And they're using race as their disguise. That's the entire agenda here. They're not hiding it. America is a failure in their mind because the outcomes don't meet their demographic criteria or quotas. And so all of this is to bait all of us into a race war and distract us from an attack on America, its Constitution and primarily it's an attack on God. People get upset that, oh, like Christian nationalism. This country was founded on biblical principles. Period, end of story. This is a biblical experiment, the United States of America. And it has been a success. The atheists, the Marxists, the people hostile to God want to end this biblical experiment and they're using race to tear it down. That's the nuclear weapon. Race, race, race, race, race. We haven't treated race right. We gotta write a new Constitution. This whole thing's been a failure. It's a smoke screen. It's an attack on God. Those of us that are believers, regardless of our surface level differences of skin tone. If you're a believer, you gotta wake up and look at what they're doing. They're attacking God. You think they're attacking you. They're not, they're attacking God and they're attacking a country that was founded on biblical principles. Is this country perfect? No way. But it's better than anything else. It's the only biblical experiment that's ever been tried with the nation. The results are better than anybody else has ever gotten. What the steps we've taken in this country to correct our racial problems or steps other countries haven't come close to, this is satanic what they're doing and they've been paid to do it. Okay, I just find that a bit much. I mean, he's just aping Jordan Peterson there who claims that this and that, it's all an attack on God. You can look at the United States and see it as the most secular nation in the world. Sure, a lot of people go to church every week, but Christianity in America, as my father said to me 40 years ago, is about a mile wide and an inch deep. So the way that the economic system is run here, the way that people move around for work, the way that people live their lives is overwhelmingly secular in the United States. And religion is a way to try to recapture in a very superficial sense, the virtues of what it used to be to live in an old fashioned community where people knew each other, grown up together, had lived there for generations. And so in this constantly changing United States of America, this hyper competitive, hyper rationalized, hyper economic man country, people want a taste of old fashioned community and they turn for religion for that. But this idea that America is some, Bible-based principles, country just imbued with the spirit of the Lord and biblical ethics is nonsense. And the idea that what's going on at MSNBC is some sort of revolt against God. Right, there's just no basis for that. Jordan Peterson comes up with that, like he'll say, he was asked what's going on with Antifa and he says, well, I think at core it's just a revolt against God. Okay, I wanted to talk about Kanye West. I was particularly amused by Richard Spencer's critique, amused and interested because Richard is credibly eloquent speaker. He's compelling, he's fun to listen to. I do think the whole situation was rather funny. And it's made even funnier by the fact that Kanye as this extremely successful music artist is connected to all of these big wigs that he's allowed back on social media platforms by our courage to come back by you, I must. And then the moment he comes back, he effectively says the N word or maybe even worse in a way going after the holiest of holy taboos was rather hilarious, I have to say. But I also think that looking at a situation like this and saying, oh, this is great for us or nationalism is rising or he's our leader. I think all of that is extremely silly and wrong. So anyway, those are just my thoughts on Kanye. I do find the whole thing rather fascinating. And I do think they're also just these little in Kanye's incoherence, they're these little threads that you can follow that I actually think reveal a lot about his personality. Okay, so what's going on politically in a country is not primarily judged by the profundity of its political conversation. People do not have to have this well-developed political philosophy to make a difference in politics. Politics is this externalized expression of evolutionarily adaptive impulses. So we've evolved over thousands and thousands of years through evolution and those forms of life that are most adapted to their environment and then therefore best able to pass on their genes to the next generation, right? They survive over the generations. So both the right-wing impulse, so the right-wing impulse means hierarchy, ultra-concern about order, fear of contagion and left-wing impulses, egalitarianism, willingness to try new things, right? New ways to organize life, diminished fear of the stranger, right? These basic impulses are adaptive depending on the situation. So in certain situations, the right-wing conservative impulse is more adaptive to the situation. So for example, if your community is threatened by outsiders, right? You are going to have a better chance of passing on your genes if you take action to protect your community against outsiders. On the other hand, your community may well prosper and do far better if it becomes more open to outsiders. If it embraces outsiders, it says, come on in, right? Sometimes outsiders have the magic, right? Sometimes outsiders have tremendous skills. Sometimes outsiders bring a lot to the table and they should be embraced. And so in those circumstances, the left-wing more open embracing approach to strangers is more adaptive. In other situations, a right-wing skeptical, concerned approach to strangers is more adaptive. So we have these basic evolutionarily developed impulses to react to life. And you can intellectualize these impulses and you can develop political philosophy based on your impulses, but that doesn't make the impulse more valuable just because you can develop a philosophy around your impulse, right? We feel all sorts of things that we can't put into words and those feelings aren't of less value than those feelings that you can put into your words, right? Poets are not inherently more valuable than someone who can't write poetry. We have instincts, right? In certain situations, if we give full vent to our instincts, that would be a highly adaptive response. In other situations, if we just give full vent to our instincts, that would be a maladaptive response. But the ability to provide an ideology and a philosophy and some worked-out system of thought to back up what our evolutionary instincts is nice, but it's hardly determinative, right? It's not what makes for value, right? Sometimes it makes for value, sometimes it doesn't. So just because people can't articulate something as well as you do, doesn't mean that they're necessarily of less value or that they have less significance, right? Sometimes emotions are more compelling and more important than your worked-out reasoning. But in his own kind of personal relationships. But anyway, those are just my fake thoughts on the matter. What do you guys think? And she was wearing practically no clothes. And the caption was some kind of Trump-er, sort of a host of phrases. And I remember, and that was back in maybe like 2017. I remember for the first time, thank you. So I've been reading a lot of books about Donald Trump, including Maggie Haverman's new book, Confidence Man and Peter Baker's book, The Divider. And there's a lot of critique in there that Donald Trump does not have this well-developed, finely-tuned political philosophy, that Donald Trump just has certain instincts and that somehow these are very primitive. So let's get Doovid into the show. So Doovid, how's it going, man? Hey, Brookersham. If you wanna go forward, I didn't get rid of Maggie Haverman's book, but I saw her interviews and I thought that was interesting if you want to give your full review. Well, I was just making the point that just because someone doesn't have this highly-developed political philosophy, doesn't mean that they don't have important things to say, that we have certain basic instincts that often serve us pretty well, even though we can't quite articulate what's going on. For example, the power of Orthodox Judaism is not something for most people that primarily relies upon the beauty of the philosophy. For people who appreciate the Orthodox approach to life, who fall in love with Orthodox Judaism, it's there's some mystery in the practice of it that moves them. It's not primarily a worked-out system of thought. And so someone who resonates with the feelings and the interpersonal connections and the sense of the divine in Orthodox Judaism, even if they can't articulate it, it doesn't make them somehow lesser humans or less valuable just because they can't articulate the philosophy of Orthodox Judaism. For me, Orthodox Judaism was something that I primarily experienced and had deep meaning to me. It wasn't primarily a philosophical system. I studied a lot of Torah and I studied books about Judaism and I appreciated the philosophy and the theology and the thinking behind it. But what made Orthodox Judaism so superior for me compared to other forms of Judaism was the experience of it, the existential experience of it. Frequently, it has moved me in ways that I can't articulate, but that doesn't make me lesser or the experience lesser just because I can't put it in the finest philosophical terms. Is there anything you want to add on that? Yeah, definitely. I remember Rabbi Kaplan at Orsamayek, a popular lecturer, I think he said he had only met one or two students that he thought became Balchubas because it was true. You know, almost all Balachuba become Balachuba because they think the lifestyle will work for them. And especially you talked to Kato, Joseph Kato in terms of you saying like, well, do I really believe this? We're saying I think I could successfully integrate into a community and build up a happy family despite the problems facing the world. And politics is the same, like, okay, I'm an INTP. I did a stream on my channel today, 13 books that changed my life. And I think I was more philosophical because that's my personality type and I have a unique personality type that's a minority that's more intellectually philosophically based, but it's still lifestyle, it's a lifestyle. I even mentioned it many times. Orthodox Judaism was a lifestyle that I thought I could fit into and would work for me and match my personality type in many ways. And probably politics is the same way. Conservatism, they thought out the issues versus it's a lifestyle like, okay, I'm gonna be a Republican or Democrat or I'm gonna get involved in this cause. There's social truths to it. And I'm always stressing to Charles Moskowitz cause you got forbid we talk about like anti-Semitism almost every week. And it's saying that a lot of people use anti-Semitism. It's a strategy. And the reason they use it as a strategy is cause it works. And I think people in general just fall into strategies, not necessarily cause we thought it out and had like in-depth plans, but just cause it worked. And so politics is about winning. Like Trump, the Republicans chose someone who could win and didn't really care much about anything else like Herschel Walker's the app in the New York times on like Herschel Walker still might win. And Republicans still might vote for them cause at the end of the day, elections are like popularity contest and politics is about winning as opposed to a cultural type things and finding a lifestyle that we could fit into and be successful at. Right, we do most things because of the way they make us feel. And sometimes that's dangerous. You should not give your feelings 100% domination over your life but sometimes your feelings will lead you to greater truths than your thinking. Frequently our thinking is just an artificial intellectualized attempt to try to come to terms with what we're feeling. We're trying to rationalize what we wanna do. Like we choose the direction we wanna go in life whether it's towards God or towards a hedonistic life and then we try to rationalize what we're doing but the human being is not primarily driven by abstract intellectual concerns. If you have the ability to think abstractly you will enlist that ability in support of what you wanna do which basically boils down to what you feel when you do certain things. So you've diminished going to synagogue because it hasn't felt great for you but if you were to have more positive experiences in synagogue real life interactions with Jews in synagogue feeling like a valuable part of the community then that's going to change your approach to Judaism. Any thoughts? Well, I just said I'm an INTP and I use the expression work and you use feelings and it could be one we're saying the same thing in the sense it feels good when it works and it doesn't feel good when it doesn't work. So I become a Jew and go to synagogue and it works. I've created a social structure and something that works for my life and gives me relatively successful life. So I feel good. If it didn't work, I wouldn't feel good about it. So I'm wondering if that's just our proclivity inclination and are we saying the same thing when I say because it works and you say because it makes you feel good? Yeah, I think we're saying the same thing because things that work are not gonna make you feel bad, all right? If you go out and you do something that most people are unable to do but you're able to do it easily you're gonna feel good about that. If you take on challenges that most people struggle with but you can do them easily you're gonna feel good about that. If you go to social gatherings and you're able to navigate the gathering, get along with people and you're successful you're able to accomplish what you want at that gathering, you're gonna feel good about it. Certainly if you feel good about where you're at you're gonna be much more likely to be successful at whatever it is that you're doing. Yeah, because I use the expression anti-semitism because it works. As they generally anti-semitism doesn't work and that's why anti-semitism in America is small and maybe in Arab countries or different countries where anti-semitism is high it works much better and for the people that employ it it probably to some extent works for them like if I forget your exact expression but dissident ineffectual people choose ineffectual strategies but relatively okay I'm gonna become an Orthodox Jew because I wasn't that popular or my life wasn't working out that good so that I thought I could find a group that I would be able to make with and because I'm half Jewish I chose a group I had ethnic affinity to or if you were going through troubles in your life and at that moment Judaism worked for you but had things been going better you probably wouldn't have chosen Judaism it just happened to be the circumstances of that time where Judaism worked for you and then as your life started turning better that Judaism continued to work well enough with you that you stuck with it that even though had you not been in a negative time you might not have been in a situation where you would have done Judaism because it worked in the same way as a generic psychological sociological process that would apply for antisemites that people are broken people and at the broken time that whatever reason antisemitism is the strategy that works for them at that time and they might stick with it if it continues to work and if it doesn't work they're less likely to stick with it. Right I've spoken to Orthodox rabbis to work in Bate den Jewish law courts that administer conversions to Judaism and they frequently told me that 99% of the people who apply to convert to Orthodox Judaism are crazy and so usually people who convert to another religion they're coming out of some great personal crisis. Usually one does not, for example, convert to Judaism on the wings of success it's usually you experience some devastating failures that cause you to reassess how you operate in life and you see a more effective system for operating in life and because you've been so humbled by your failures that you become open to something you otherwise would not be open to. So I was very sick when I became interested in Judaism and in my illness then as in now when I get sick I tend to see my life in a whole new light I tend to lose many of the distractions that have kept me going and I realize oh I've kind of been fooling myself in this area, that area and there are these gaping holes in my life and out of that failure comes a humility and an openness to try things that I otherwise would not be interested in trying and so I assume also for you when you became interested in Orthodox Judaism there was a large amount of humility there that the default way that you had approached life was not satisfying, was simply not getting it done and you got a glimpse and intimation of a better way of living and perhaps that's what led you to explore Orthodox Judaism while if you are flourishing in your present life when you were at age 14. That's something that worked for me that's something that's objectively better like I'm gonna say Orthodox Judaism was objectively better but for whatever reason that mainstream society I was failing that Orthodox Judaism might work for me. Yeah, is that what happened for you? You got an intimation of a better way of living? Well, I could use their better way like objectively and I think you mean like better objectively or meaning better for me that it would work for me. Better for you, better for you. You thought that this would be better for you that you would thrive in this new Orthodox way of living compared to your default approach to life. Yeah, I don't know, thrive but it would work better for me than what the way it was brought up for my default. I didn't necessarily think I would thrive but I would be more successful than I was in my former state of life or any of the other possibilities I could see going down. And so how was your Sheminiat Sarat and your Simkhart Torah these traditionally very social times for Jews? I honestly, I didn't go to school again. I said all the prayers, I did all of the mitzvahs but I didn't go to school because like even God forbid I feel isolated from the community because I have been isolated from the community and so I just didn't, I didn't feel like I had... It's hard to say why I just didn't feel like I was gonna go to school. And then in the morning, I decided not to and whether there were things in my head like, oh, they probably don't like me or I'm not sure what I'm gonna do with my life or like I'm not a paying member or whatever reason I just didn't go, I was up in the morning and I could have went and so it's tough to know what really motivates us or how to you'll resolve an identity crisis because like you said, a lot of people, you know COVID-19 I went to shul because I went to shul. And then I stopped going to shul so I've just stopped going to shul because like in Hebrew, they call like a chazakha I do what I've been doing. So I haven't been going to shul, I didn't go to shul. I could have came up with a bunch of reasons I should have or shouldn't have, but in essence I've been isolated from the community. I'm not part of it. And for whatever reason, I've continued that as opposed to trying to reintegrate myself with the community. I'm not really sure you're just suffering this identity crisis. Well, Jess, as one mitzvah leads to another, you know, one act of isolation leads to another act of isolation. It's very hard to get out of an isolation spiral. Yeah, and I'm not sure, you know, I mean you could look at any social context or like business and so it's just synagogue, you know, I know people maybe, you know, someone would have invited me a meal. Maybe I would have struck up a conversation and you know, one thing would have led to another and I would have been reintegrated into the community at some level, or maybe I would have just said the prayers and went home and not spoke to anybody. But you know, something has to drive me to pick up and go. And so, you know, whatever drove me for decades of my life to, you know, just always do that once I stopped doing it. Now I have to revive like the reason or the motivation that I had done it for years. You know, if it wasn't for COVID-19, I probably just would have done it because I'd always been doing it. But because that caused me to stop doing it, now I need something to reinvigorate that motivation. Yeah, whatever you look for in synagogue, you're gonna find it. So if you expect to go to synagogue and find a bunch of ganathim, a bunch of thieves, you're gonna find that if you go to synagogue expecting to find a bunch of unfriendly people who are gonna shun you, you're usually going to find that. If you go to synagogue and expect, you know, a friendly situation, you're gonna find that. If you go into almost any situation in life expecting certain things, you're going to find that. So I'm thinking about a few years ago, there was this somewhat moderately mentally ill woman and there are quite a few, you know, mildly to moderately mentally ill people who go to synagogue and some of them hold down jobs. But this woman, she'd gotten thrown out of one Orthodox synagogue in the community because she'd sent a note to the canter saying that they were destined to get married and it kind of freaked the canter out. And so she was asked to leave the synagogue. So she starts, she walks up to my synagogue that I was in at the time and I'm standing outside with the security guard and she comes over and she says, are you guys banning me? You know, am I banned from this synagogue? And we say, no, you're welcome to come in. But if you walk up to a synagogue expecting to get banned, you're very likely to have that, you know, to precipitate that situation. If you're in a social group and you think, oh, they're going to exclude me, then that tends to happen. Like whatever is going on inside of us tends to play out socially. And so when we're feeling good about ourselves and looking forward to seeing other people, then social interactions tend to go much more smoothly. But when we're at a time of tremendous doubt and introspection about ourselves and our own life, we're likely to find things in social situations that reinforce whatever darkness is going on inside of us. What do you think? Yeah, I agree. And, you know, somewhat life is, in many ways, like that Choose Your Own Adventure book. I was, you know, thinking of when I did the stream today of the 13 books that changed my life. And I started with, you know, like a chess book that I read when I was young. And I thought when I was very young, I read a whole bunch of Choose Your Own Adventure books. I read all the ones at my local elementary school, probably like 100 of them. And I think life, in many ways, is a little bit like that. And I don't think I had like a negative expectation, like, you know, realistic. Some people, you know, may not have been excited to see me, but I assume there would have been some people I would have been able to, you know, make conversation, talk positive things. I think it's more like the identity crisis that I'm going through that just, okay, I've been doing Judaism for decades, Orthodox Judaism, is it working for me? And then a question, well, maybe it's not working for me. And then, you know, so should I keep on doing it? And then, well, what else am I gonna do? You know, like I've been doing it for decades, like I can't even imagine doing something else. And so it's more of a question of, for me personally, like an identity crisis because I don't think I had like a negative occasion and my conflict within the Jewish community, I think has been relatively small. I've generally been pretty good at avoiding conflict. So when people walk down the street, kind of on the lookout for the police, people who have, you know, tremendous fear and loathing for the police, they're much more likely to end up on the police radar. I mean, you can sort of spot, you know, sketchy characters walking down the street or just constantly looking around. Someone walks into a room and they're making, you know, a bunch of furtive glances or you're interacting with someone and they're just doing these kind of awkward, quick, the opposite of smooth. So awkward, I guess, would be awkward. You know, they're gonna stand out and they're gonna come to the attention of police or security guards because they're gonna make other people feel uncomfortable. So I noticed a lot of people feel intimidated and scared or upset just by the presence of police or just by the presence of security guards. Yeah, but I ran through my head like doubts, like, oh, the synagogue maybe has a different combination. I mean, because there's only one synagogue in walking distance from me and I could have probably arranged a different one. You know, maybe they've changed the combination. You know, maybe I'm gonna get there and it's gonna be someone who doesn't like me who's gonna be doing security at the door. But I mean, it's pretty unlikely. I think it's more an identity crisis because I mean, I agree with what you're saying, but I think generally I've been a mind my own business or doing business. Generally, I go to places where I have business or it's clear what I'm doing. And if I went to synagogue, I would have said the prayers. I generally take the prayer seriously, don't talk during prayers and you'll know how to do the prayers. So even if I had just went in, said the prayers, didn't talk to anybody and left, which I thought about doing. Or, you know, like I know a lot of people all over that I probably could spoke to people and brought up a conversation, maybe even got myself invited to a meal. It's just, yeah, I guess an identity crisis. I mean, maybe you're comfortable that I thought I'd been comfortable like you, like I was just gonna do this the rest of my life. And I still feel like doing that, like I just like, oh, I've been orthodox Jew, basically my whole adult life. I always assumed I would do it the rest of my life, but for whatever reason, you know, when it came the morning time to go to school, I couldn't get myself to go. So I don't know, what's the security situation like at synagogues in Detroit? So in Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles, every synagogue has at least one armed guard out front. And this I noticed intimidates people. Like certain people are afraid to step up and even be questioned or have a wand waved over them or to have their bag opened up or to be asked any questions by an armed security guard that I noticed that frightens a lot of people. But do synagogues in Detroit have much security? Yeah, I would assume that for the Soka holiday, there probably would have been a police officer. The Jewish community of Metro Detroit has through the Federation, a group of mostly retired police officers that do security. So the more upper class synagogues actually have either police or private security that's retired police officers. And I would probably know them. I'm generally the type that I would introduce myself, say hello or say thank you to the security. But yeah, I could have assumed that there probably would have been a police car outside and at least one of the official Jewish community security services there, maybe a congregation member with them by the door that would have been able to tell them whether this is someone they know or not. And it's been like that for years. It's expensive. So during COVID-19 for a period of time, they didn't have the security every week, every Shabbos. But I was almost guaranteed on Soka, they would have had the police there. I'm not sure in LA if it's like that. Also where like on the holiday, they'll actually have the official police there. And the regular week will be private security. And I think it's generally a higher level, more expensive private security where you get a retired or former police officer that costs more money than just your rent a cop. Yeah, I mean, there are varying degrees of security. I mean, on Yom Kippur and the Jewish holidays there are a lot of LAPD, like a far extra number of LAPD on the streets and in the Jewish community, driving around, keeping an eye on things in addition to security guards. And then a lot more Jews are getting armed these days. A lot more Jews are getting certified to carry weapons. So Orthodox synagogues in particular are kind of bristling redoubts of armed security. I mean, you try to mess with an Orthodox synagogue. The odds are pretty good that at least one person if not several people in the synagogue has a concealed weapon permit and has undergone firearms training. And synagogues are not like easy push-overs as in days of yore. Do you shake hands with the police when you come and go to synagogue or at least say, hi, it's my personality that I know Deborah Lipstadt, that's one of her famous things where she's like in this identity dilemma with her niece or something or kids at synagogue, whether she should tell them to say good shabbos to the security guard or not. I'm not sure if you listen to Deborah Lipstadt, but she constantly tells that story. But I'm the type that I say hello or usually make a point to introduce myself to the police officer. Is that your personality too? Generally speaking, yeah, I'm fairly friendly to police and the maybe private security. I haven't volunteered. We talked about this before where I was on the volunteer, you know, I guess guard standing that just watches the door or the security cameras. And in Michigan, there was actually the Supreme Court case in New York. In Michigan, you don't have a right to concealed carry in a synagogue. It has to be approved by the board. So if there's one person or a person designated by the rabbi and the board of directors to carry a gun, I think Halsey had that problem. He said also where they didn't allow him to carry his gun to his synagogue, but it has to be approved by the rabbi and the board. And you know, now God forbid they might have more than one person, you know, before there was one person and when I did watch at the door, you know, they told me, you know, something happens, hit this button, and if it gets worse, you know, tell this guy he's got a gun. Yeah, so speaking of blocks that most most influence our life, there was a book on screenwriting that I read about 20 years ago and it was based on the teachings of Joseph Campbell. It was dealing with archetypes. And one of the archetypes described was the archetype of the border guard. So people who kind of stand between you and where you wanna go. And I used to always resent these kind of people because they would determine if I'd get to cross over. So enforcers, you know, people who would determine whether or not... Yeah, gatekeepers, yeah, gatekeeper. I used to always hate gatekeepers. And then I read this book on screenwriting. I learned about the gatekeeper as an archetype and realized that they just have a particular job to do and that there was no inherent reason I need to, you know, fear or hate gatekeepers. And that was like a transformative moment for me. So I think a lot of us kind of go through life with an instinctive hatred for certain types of people, whether it's, say, could be, you know, someone in religious authority or it could be a policeman or it could be bosses or someone who reminds you of your father or gatekeepers. And then you can have a transformative experience and you realize that this whole group of people that you instinctively hated that they had a valuable role to play. So I've often immersed myself quite deeply in various subcultures. And there are always gatekeepers that you have to maneuver and get their approval to enter a subculture. And at first I just hated the gatekeepers. But after reading this book, I realized that gatekeepers play a valuable role. And I learned to extend my empathy towards the gatekeeper and to understand what their role was. And I was able to let go of my instinctive fear and hatred for gatekeepers. Have you had any sort of psychological hangouts with regard to gatekeepers? I mean, definitely. Because I mean, when you're on the ups or doing well, the gatekeepers are usually gatekeeping for you. And when you're on the low doing bad, they're gatekeeping against you. So when you're on the outs and you're worried that they don't want you there and the gatekeeper is gonna keep you out as opposed to when you're comfortable on the inside, and the gatekeeper is keeping the people that I don't want there out. So from that perspective, and you also kind of like violence, people like to do what they're good at. So if you're not a violent person and you're saying that the person's like, they enjoy violence. I think the expression in the army, we don't run away from trouble, we run towards it. And I mentioned when I was day trading that you're like the entourage that my boss was basically always nice, but he didn't feel that way. So when he wanted to be mean, he outsourced it to someone else. So like whenever I wanted to get yelled at, I would come into the office and there was this other guy who was just kind of always a jerk that would yell at me and he would just sit there and let that guy yell at me. And I kind of interpreted it was really my boss yelling at me. He just doesn't have it in him to do that. So he outsources it or he'd kind of like an Israeli friend that wasn't making in the business. And he basically bankrolled. And he was there to intimidate. He was just looking like, I would love to beat you up. You give me the word, the boss and I would be happy to bounce this guy out. And so in that respect, these guys were gatekeepers and they kept me in a state of fear. And that was the point, that was their job. But when I was doing better, they did that for me, like security and bouncers at the door. I'm sure you're in LA or just at synagogue and social scenarios. It's like that. And it's a natural order of entirages or social hierarchy and ranking. Generally when I have debated counter-Semites and I talk about Jews, elites are more friendly to Jews because I talk about mortgage brokers and life insurance and lawyers and accountants and dentists and doctors. And you're saying like, well, I'm a property owner, a business owner. You have a bank account. And I like my insurance brokers and my stock broker and your Jewish stereotypes of lawyers and doctors and accountants. But if you're in a bad financial situation, and you don't have any of those insurance, the only time you've dealt with a lawyer or an accountant was then they were telling you that you have to do things you don't wanna do. And so I think Jews in general, to non-Jews and especially counter-Semites, that we're the gatekeepers. And so if you're from the elite, you like the Jews because we're keeping the gates in a way that benefits them that when they call their lawyer or their insurance, you're like, yep, policy, it's good. You're like, yep, you got this money in the bank or yep, you're on this side of the law. But if you're on the other side and it's the Jewish lawyer or accountant telling you like, nope, you gotta pay, that's the law. So I don't know if you thought about that perspective as to non-Jews or counter-Semites that we're kind of gatekeepers. And that's why a lot of people don't like us. Interesting, I hadn't thought about that but I looked at the gatekeeper archetype. It says also called a threshold guardian before being able to enter a strange world or obstructing the treasure that is the goal a hero is likely to encounter an opponent in the form of a gatekeeper or guardian. The term threshold guardian refers specifically to the point in the hero's journey between the ordinary world that the hero must leave and the unknown world she must enter. In other words, the threshold between act one and act two. So I saw you talking in the chat about Scott Bernstein. So I just looked him up, best-selling true crime writer, organized crime historian, American mafia expert. And I think you went to school with Scott Bernstein. Anything you wanna say about Scott Bernstein? Yeah, I think even when I was school, I'd kind of known that in Detroit there's what was called the purple gang which was the Jewish mafia. And it goes back decades. And I guess some of the main members were Bernstein's and he actually said like he knew Mayor Lansky I mean, his like great uncle, you know, like a known Mayor Lansky who was at his like Bar Mitzvah or something like that. I don't know him well, but you know, there's an alumni, high school alumni and this is of the elite private school I went to that he's part of. And so I saw that he became a, I mean, he's kind of a big, big mouth in the high school alumni also. He's on the news pretty often. And you know, so they made a clip about me with Bruno the Doberman, God forbid. And I saw on the same channel had Scott Bernstein. So I guess he's a prominent mob talk person. And I was mentioning today in my stream, I mentioned on your stream that to some extent becoming an Orthodox Jew is like joining the mob. Not in the sense that you're like, all Orthodox Jews are part of the mob or like a crime syndicate, but generally that especially in Brooklyn there's a connection between the mob and Orthodox Jews. Like, you know, we live next to each other, we have partnerships in business. And he was mentioned like Scott Bernstein focuses on crime and drama and stories. And I think, you know, John Wolf who's been in your chat forever has started doing his own stream and mob talk. And you know, you also I guess have had mob connections. And I mean, to a certain level, if you just want to talk like, there's the violent arm of the Jewish community. There's the violent arm of the Catholic community, of the Italian community, but as a whole, most people never experienced that violent arm. And it's also kind of like the gatekeeper. Like I mentioned, you know, my boss ran a business. And he was always the nice guy, but he had a few tough guys that worked for him. And if you know, you made him mad, you know, he wouldn't have, you know, those tough guys would have bounced you out on his whims, but he wouldn't have done it. Wouldn't have been him. And it's like that for all communities. And that dynamic, I'm not so much into crime or you're like Bernstein and say he focuses on sensational stories and drama and gossip and actual stories of crime. I was more focusing on, you know, the business connection and you'll got forbid the occasional use of violence that I said most Jews never feel that arm. But when you're part of an orthodox group, they're just like, it makes you feel more comfortable having that cop outside. And if you're in an orthodox synagogue, I don't know, like palsy or something like your JDL guy, there might be a JDL guy in your synagogue. And he might be like, you don't really want to get that close for him. He might touch you or he might, you know, like, but he's probably not going to beat you up. You might want to avoid him. He might be kind of a bully, but you're assumed like largely he's there to protect you and he's on your side. And like you mentioned, the gatekeeper, once you get past the gatekeeper, he's now your gatekeeper, like in the hero's journey that, you know, there's the threshold to becoming a hero when you're on the outside. But once you get to the inside, now that same person that was an obstacle to you is a benefit to you. Yeah, and I'm just thinking some of the similarities between orthodox Judaism and joining the mob. Mob one, when you convert to orthodox Judaism, they make it very clear you're converting for life. And this is a lifelong commitment. And as you become immersed in orthodox Judaism, it kind of gets its tentacles into you. So it very much feels like a lifelong commitment. Also, both being in the mob and being in orthodox Judaism quit essential examples of in-group versus out-group morality. So mobsters are not particularly careful about their ethical treatment of people outside the group and strongly identifying in-groups, whether they're Japanese, Chinese, or orthodox Jewish, they also tend to be fairly relaxed about how they deal with out-groups and incredibly committed to how they deal with in-groups. So they're both tribal ways of life that are very much focused on the family and very much focused on doing business with people you can trust to or in your in-group who share your way of life. There's particular foods and particular culture, particular customs that all go together. So yeah, I think there are a surprising number of similarities between joining the mob and joining orthodox Judaism. Any similarities that you see that you'd like to add to? Yeah, definitely. And I was saying they're actually connected because there's usually direct connection between the orthodox community and the mafia, especially the Italian mafia, where you might not know the connections as a low-level Jew, but you know the connections existed. And I would add to that the accepting, I mean, you might have touched a glance on it, for the accepting of friends and foes, where like generally, I don't hate Arabs or Palestinians or I don't really want to go to war with Iran or even like anti-Semites, I'm talking to like counter-Semites, pardon me, but generally there's that kind of thing, like you're now part of the mob and your enemies are our enemies. And that's why you become powerful when you join the mob because you're part of a group and now you don't want to be this guy's enemy anymore because he's part of a group that will protect them, but you have the problem is that you take on their enemies and also their friends. So like I said, when I was an orthodox Jew in the business world, I had all these contexts in everywhere, you like in terms of all the businesses, day trading, real estate, stocks, insurance, there were people in the synagogue that people that I knew that they could refer me to and I could give a name, like I know this rabbi and I would be in good with. And then they're also the enemies, like this guy's not our friend and you're part of our group. And so it's inherited these group conflicts upon you. And there's just such an incredible sense of camaraderie in orthodox Judaism. Like there's a relaxed ability to speak your mind and you don't have to explain an awful lot of things. You do have to explain when you're with non-orthodox Jews. So I would imagine that it's fairly similar when you're in the mob. I mean, you can let your head down. You're with people like you and you don't have to explain so much as opposed to when you're an orthodox Jew and you're primarily interacting with non-orthodox Jews, there's just so much that you have to explain. It's much more tiring. And there's a path laid out for you probably that you could really largely just do what people tell you and you'll have a decent life. I mean, in the mob you might have more likely to end up in prison or something violent happened to you, but mostly likely not. Most people in the mob, like, okay, they're gonna start working in construction or waste management. Maybe at some point they'll be called upon to do something criminal. And even if they do, you know, get caught or in prison that they'll, you'll be part of a prison gang or when they get out in terms like there's women, you know, saying like, okay, I'm just a geek. Like I would have never had the courage to ask a girl out, but you're in the orthodox community, they'll set you up. So like in that way, the mob and orthodox Judaism, you could just do what they tell you and you have, like we said, a life that works for me. That if I'm just out there on my own as a lone goi, it's a cold, scary road out there. And I don't know if I'll make any friends or meet anybody or have any successes. But like, you know, at least I'm in the mob, I'm an orthodox Jew. I have a life laid out for me that will likely work. Yeah. And you mentioned it in the chat that you've had some experience dealing with organized crime. Could you say more about that? Well, I day traded. I worked at, you know, firms. And I mean, what's actually mafia? A lot of them had cousins or you could tell the connection, but it's okay, these are our Italian partners and they're part of the mob. And you know, their connections and some of them you could actually trace names or cousins and these were legitimate businesses to some extent, and especially in the construction trade. So I said like, when you join the mob, people think crime syndicate or something like that. But I think like if you're Italian or like Catholic in Italian neighborhoods, it's kind of like being an orthodox Jew. You join a gang and the gang is a bunch of kids that work for the same construction company and they might do some crimes. There might, you know, be called upon like there has violence and you gotta do what the gang demands of you, but most of it's not crime related. And so let's say like in New York, it's just construction like Jews are management and we don't do labor like that. And so we have, you know, mostly Hispanic, but if you're doing better in the real estate or stock industry, you're more likely to have Italian partners. And I know you from pornography, you talked about the Jewish, Italian connections and like pornography is not a crime syndicate. It's more criminal than construction. But within construction, there's people that are in and out of prison and even on a lot of construction places, the majority of the people have been in and out of prison. And you know, it's just like, oh, they're in the mob. You know, they beat somebody up or some people may have even killed somebody. It is like, well, they're in the mob, but what's that matter to me? They're doing construction as long as they do their job. And you know, saying if you're higher up in like the stock brokerage firm where you have Italian partners, I mean, these guys may also be lawyers or MBAs. And so mafia has a negative connotation where you're talking about crime syndicate as opposed to the family network of Italian Catholic families that run businesses and have, you know, Jewish partners. Right. If you don't have effective police, if you don't have effective institutions in your society like Eastern Europe and Russia after the fall of communism, it's no more natural and even healthy to have the development of mafia. So many people have this instinctive negative reaction to mafia or negative reaction to the word tribal, but a tribal or mafia organization is often an adaptive, healthy response to a world around you that is unsafe and filled with turmoil. So I mean, Jews understand this, Italians understand this. I don't think Anglos perhaps understand it as well as other ethnic minorities, but in a difficult, confusing, unsafe world, it makes sense that people would want to seek out the protections that come with organized crime and generally speaking, organized crime is a lot less lethal than disorganized crime. It's disorganized crime that I fear much more than organized crime because organized crime knows that to make the maximum amount of money, they don't want to be murdering civilians, right? They want to keep their noses clean with regard to civilians and operate in a way that is most efficient. It's disorganized crime that is usually the most scary. Any thoughts on how mafia tribal links are frequently very healthy and an adaptive way to deal with a confusing environment? Yeah, I mean, mafia just means family. And I know like Jews, like Israelis, like Mishpachah, people say like, in Hebrew, Mishpachah, you're just like your family and it's kind of like your mafia. And in that sense, let's say mafia just means family. It doesn't mean organized crime. And if you're talking about the organized Italian community that includes the whole community, including the criminals. I mean, you could look at Orthodox Judaism like that. I mean, we were talking about things that shocked us was a lot of Orthodox Jews are in and out of prison or arrest, trouble with the law, mostly for financial things. And so if it's Italians and it's violence or Hispanics and drug dealing, people don't go away. So you're in a large synagogue and they're extended and it's also extended family networks like big rabbis usually come from rabbinic families and have hundreds of cousins and it's known. Like if you're in Borough Park and there's a major rabbi, their cousins and family are also people in power in the community all over the place. So if you're just a lone convert or Bolchula, you wanna be connected with a powerful family. And like I said, the connections, like you have jobs, possibly your shittoks, dating, housing, there's someone in the community like, okay, like speak to my cousin, he owns apartments or speak to my cousin there, he'll give you a job. And the parallels the exact same in the Italian community through the Catholic church where you have large extended family networks and in order to rise in the community, you have to make yourself subservient to the family, which is usually a selective family, like in Judaism would be a rabbinic family that has a token leadership opinion in a position. And people don't go away. Like if you're part of the Orthodox community, even if you do bad things, you're still gonna be there. So if you're in a very large synagogue network in New York, all the people that have been in and out in prison still go to synagogue, there's still cousins with people. And in that it might be exactly parallel to the Italian except most Jews are in and out of prison for financial crimes and maybe the Italians are in and out of prison for violent crimes. Now in your list of your 13 books that changed your life, you mentioned the culture of critique, is that right, by Kevin McDonald? Yeah, I included that cause I think it did change my life. And I put that in terms of my whole streaming and just the concept of group conflict, even though like, you know, called group evolutionary strategy, you know, I dedicated my life to Judaism. I had never, you probably also, maybe if you say the book, even you as a, you know, grown man, you know, you were a fully mature grown man before you came across the book, but I had never looked at Judaism in the light of a group strategy. And when I saw it, I was like, you're right, it is a group strategy. And though I'm still philosemitic and part of this group strategy, it changed my interpretation that like I was like, I never thought about it as a group strategy. And yes, I do now see it as a group strategy and not only Judaism, but I see human interaction in general in a different light through group strategy and group conflict and I think anti-Semitism in terms of Kevin McDonald and a lot of Jews are, you know, we're all worried about anti-Semitism. And now that because I read that book, I said, well, anti-Semitism is just kind of conflicting group strategy and group conflict. And if I hadn't read that book or heard about that, I would probably be like the majority of the rest of Jews or you were just like, you know, why did they hate us? Or, you know, as opposed to more rationally like, well, use group conflict in competitive group strategies. Yeah, I mean, it does influence the way you see the world. It does open up new vistas, even though I think there are many excellent rejoinders to Kevin McDonald, but this idea that different groups have different interests and that what's good for one group is not necessarily good for another group. These basics of group conflict, I think that part of his work very much stands up. And if people want to understand how the world works, that these are important concepts because without this awareness of group conflict, people tend to have the attitude, you know, whatever's good for blacks is good for America. Whatever's good for GM is good for America. What is good for Jews or Mexican Americans or women or homosexuals, you know, whatever is good for one group is automatically good for all groups, but groups are frequently in conflict. They frequently have very different ways of understanding life and operating in life and what helps one group get ahead is often at the expense of another group. So just thinking about civil rights legislation, for example, it undoubtedly helped many black people in the 1960s that they could no longer be discriminated against on the basis of race in lodging. On the other hand, for many older people who relied on the income of renting out a spare room or a guest house, and now they were faced with a law that they couldn't racially discriminate, that legislation came at the expense of their feeling of inner security and their safety and their welfare. So what's good for one group, not necessarily good for other groups. And that's an important insight that comes from Kevin McDonald's work that still holds up even though there are other powerful critiques of much of the rest of his work. Anything you wanna add on that? Yeah, definitely. And I still, I'm not saying I agree with Kevin McDonald in his thesis that Jews have been a negative influence in the West. You know, might argue or he might even agree with Nathan Coughness, but it did open my eyes to that, yes, we do have a group strategy and group conflict is at the center of anti-Semitism. So I didn't say, I agreed with his thesis of the book, but it opened my eye. And I didn't do book recommendations. These were books that factually changed my life. And I mentioned like in high school, I popped on this channel, this guy Thorpe, Abel Thorpe and his daughter are streaming. It was interesting, it reminded me in high school I'd read this book, Beat the Dealer by Edward Thorpe on Blackjack. And I hadn't thought about that for decades, but I really studied that book. And I'm not sure if you have heard of Jesse Livermore and there's a famous book called Reminiscence of a Stockbroker. And I was just thinking about that today when I made this list. And it's not necessarily a great book, but when I started day trading, they told us to read this book. And it's just 1923 book about kind of like a random smart guy who beats the stock market and biography of his ups and downs. I'm not even a book recommendation, but that's the book I read. And while I was a successful day trader, I didn't study a bunch of economics. I read two books. I read a book called The Electronic Day Trader that went over the basis of like the new internet and how to trade. In this book, Reminiscence of a Stockbroker, in 1923 book about like a country guy who comes to New York and makes a whole bunch of money on the stock market. So it just happened to be that that book was the one that I read and it influenced my life. So Kevin McDonald, I'm not necessarily making this a book recommendation or saying it would change your life, but I think that that book in and of itself or the hype around the book changed the way that I perceived and interacted with the world because I'd never really thought about Judaism as a group strategy. And after I saw it that way, now I look at it that way, even though I disagree with many of his findings or even if I did agree with his finding, I'm still kind of on the side of the Jews just to let me understand things in a way that I see most people don't understand. I also included The Creature of Jekyll Island as kind of a conspiratorial book. But once I read that book, it was kind of like no turning back and the mechanism for like bailouts and the Fed that even though I follow economics and watch Seaspan and try to be mainstream, that there's kind of no turning back. I read The Creature of Jekyll Island and that conspiratorial mechanism is embedded in me. And God forbid, it's probably like that with anti-Semitic literature on the alt-right where people maybe come across the book and that's like a magic key mechanism that explains things and it works for a person for a certain period of time. And your day trading didn't work long-term. I did it for a few years, but it was this book, your reminiscence of a stockbroker that put in my head this concept that like, yeah, you could just be a guy who's really smart and beat the stock market even if you're not educated. Okay, Deva, I'm going to move on. Any final words for this evening? Yeah, thanks for having me on. I've been following that Kanye West, but if the story goes on, maybe we'll talk about it more, but I appreciate talking and God bless, have a great night. Okay, take care, Duvud. So let me play a little bit more here from Richard Spencer's analysis of Kanye West. On the part of many people who participated or supported, there was a kind of retreat into Christianity and maybe there's, there'd be a certain amount of psychologizing one could go into. Yeah, so this is a conversation between Richard Spencer and his supporters on Substack and mentioning that many people used to be into the alt-right and now into Christian nationalism because it's much more socially acceptable. I should explain that, but it's like there was a kind of a sense that people in the movement just weren't ready for the blowback they got. They felt like they needed to sort of validate themselves and justify. Right, a lot of people not ready for the blowback they received. So many people take on heroic quests. Many people take on heroic roles. Many people are willing to throw down and sacrifice, but when it comes time to actually pay the price, they're not so tough. There are many pains that you only realize are far, far more painful than what you want to pay. You only realize that in retrospect when you experience them, right? When you're just behind your keyboard and you're a keyboard warrior, you think that you can handle when it feels like the world's coming down around your shoulders. By themselves to broader conservative America and the embrace of Christianity seemed to me to be a big part of that. But that's what I always kind of go back to when I see this Christian element of this new alt-right. It definitely was a lot of it going on right after Charlotte's failure. It was a big change. Oh yeah, it was dramatic. And it was definitely aimed at me to a large degree. I think even then it was, I'm just a normal nationalist kind of retreat of saying like, I'm not one of these... Now, was it really, was it really primarily aimed at Richard Spencer? I mean, I'm sure he experienced that, but I think the falling apart of the alt-right was not primarily with regard to aiming anything at Richard Spencer. It was a way of life that stopped working, right? Richard Spencer played a huge role in making it toxic. I mean, I can't think of anyone on the right who did more damage to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement than Richard Spencer. And what makes Richard such a compelling commentator is that he doesn't care about how many people he hurts. He feels no custodial sense of care towards people who listen to him or people who follow him. He's absolutely reckless. He has absolutely no regard for the consequences of what he says, which makes him a lot of fun to listen to because careful, responsible people, right? Not necessarily so fun to listen to. If you're careful, you're very likely responsible. If you're a responsible person, you're very likely careful, careful and responsible. Don't tend to make for exciting live streaming. It's like with talk radio, right? The money in talk radio is not in being right. The money in talk radio and in live streaming is in being interesting. So Richard Spencer's consistently interesting. Now, I try to put a premium on as much as possible. I try to be right. And so I'm willing to sacrifice a whole bunch of interesting to be right. So when I was describing my show to friends, they say that sounds kind of boring because it's much more interesting to be for the flat earth, to be for voter fraud conspiracies or COVID conspiracies or this or that conspiracy where you take on the conventional wisdom and talk radio, all right? Again, that's kind of a conspiratorial approach to life where the elites are out to screw you, but I'm fighting for you, the little guy and we're gonna take back this country from these dastardly elites. And so I'm thinking about a 2016 article I read on Sports Talk Radio where Colin Coward made the point that the money is in being interesting, not in being right. There's no money in being right when it comes to sharing your opinion on the radio or on live streams. The money is being interesting. And so Richard Spencer is incredibly interesting because he feels so little concern with the consequences of what he has to say. Tattooed trailer park lunatics. I'm actually just like you. I'm just a conservative nationalist and I'm a Trump fan. I think there was a major retreat in that sense. And I think that move almost kind of, not necessarily invariably, but that move kind of spills over into something else where if they say they're a nationalist now, they don't say I'm a normal nationalist. They say that I'm a Christian nationalist and some of them have just retreated into Christianity altogether. Yeah, it is pretty. So in this live stream, Richard is saying, Kanye West, he can't present a coherent worldview. He's no political philosopher. He doesn't have a political agenda that makes sense. Kanye West is a rapper. I've never listened to Kanye West. I didn't listen to rap. I have no interest in that type of music, but I didn't expect Kanye West to be a political philosopher. To critique Kanye West for not being a political philosopher is to make a category error. It's like critiquing Richard Spencer for not being a rapper. Some people are just incredibly compelling, provocative personalities, but they may have very little compunction about being right. Their agenda, their appeal, is that they're so provocative and interesting, like a Richard Spencer, but you don't want that type of personality checking the engines on a plane before it takes off. You don't want that sort of personality doing your accounting. I mean, Donald Trump is an incredible risk taker, but not a very effective leader. So he's kind of similar to Richard Spencer. Richard Spencer, not a good leader, incredibly compelling live stream personality. Fascinating, psychologically speaking. And just in terms of uselessness and the sense that it just becomes this incoherent, inco-hate ideology. There's nothing inherently inferior about an incoherent, inco-hate ideology, unless you look at it through the lens of, is this coherent, all right? But we are driven by all sorts of incoherent, inco-hate things. And sometimes those incoherent, inco-hate things are more powerful, more adaptive, more useful to us, more of a sense of power and energy and connection with other people and with a meaningful life and a sense of the transcendent, then that which is coherent and meaningful and philosophically rational. Of resentment that is what they are kind of putting forward and Kanye West is perfect. So Richard almost never has a good word to say about anyone else on the right, all right? He wants the right-wing punditry exclusively to himself. And that makes him a lot of fun because he always has these very sharp, biting, entertaining critiques of virtually everyone else on the right, including Kanye West. And what makes it so compelling in part is that you feel the resentment in both Donald Trump or Richard Spencer is like, at court, why is Kanye West getting attention the better belongs to me? Now, why is Kanye West getting money the better belongs to me? Now, why is someone else articulating a right-wing perspective and getting success, money, attention, law of adulation? All that stuff better belongs to me. That's very clearly what drives Richard and what drives Donald Trump. How shocking that the right is turning to a charismatic, but highly narcissistic billionaire who says incoherent stuff and has a weakness for conspiracy theories. Never saw that kind. Yes. It's very sad. What's really sad is that Richard's not getting all the money and adulation and attention and power as being the premier right-wing intellectual of our time. That's what chokes him up. I don't know. I find it very, very discouraging. I do feel like I'll never have a place in the American right. Yes, I feel this is very sad, very discouraging. Why does Richard find this so sad and so discouraging? Because other people who he regards as distinctly inferior to him are getting attention, fame, money and adulation. Yes. It's very sad. I don't know. I find it very, very discouraging. I do feel like I'll never have a place in the American right. And I had this place in it just for this brief moment. But even then, you know, like, I don't... Jim Goad said that Tucker told him when they went out to dinner or something that, oh, I like Richard Spencer. I just don't like the fact that he's an atheist or whatever. So it was almost a kind of funny statement of, you know, I'm not offended by any of his racial views. You know, it's, you know, anyway, you can take that for what it is. The other Fox people were pretty hostile. But I don't know. Just speaking personally, I do feel like I have absolutely no place. This is so similar to Donald Trump, like the prism through which Richard views life is whether or not he will get attention, money and power. And how do people feel about him? And that's what it boils down to. Like he will make, you know, philosophically rational arguments. But what it comes down to is this emotional or other people getting love and adulation and money and fame that more properly belongs to me and the American rights. I just can't. I just can't even with them really. So I don't care. Jim Gold was at the dinner. Of course, did I hear that right? That's what he told me. Yeah. Oh, no, no, it's few years. I mean, it was probably four years ago. OK. Again, I don't think he has any reason to lie. And and Jim is a pretty straight shoot. I don't see really see Jim Gold as like any one of these liars or something that you do find on the right quite a bit. I think he's right. I think he's telling the truth. Yeah, he's probably true. That's like a big team of his writing, his relationship with people of dishonest. And he's like this guy who's he sees himself as this honest, innocent person in the middle of all this dishonest. So I've been a fan of the National Football League since about 1977. So I came to America in May of 1977. I had a whole summer ahead of me where I didn't know many people at Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley. And so I spent pretty much every day in the library and I started out just reading books about World War Two. Then I transitioned over to reading the back issues of Christian Science Monitor. Then I transitioned over to reading the back issues of Reader's Digest magazine. Then I transitioned to reading all the back issues of Time Magazine. Then I went through Newsweek Magazine, all the back issues going back to the 1920s. I didn't read every single issue, but I looked at every single issue and I'd pick out the articles that interested me. I went through Time, Newsweek, Life Magazine. And then I went through Sports Illustrated, all the back issues back to the 1950s and became quite compelled by the drama of sports. I was listening to Skip Baylis on his podcast the other day, saying that he doesn't know of any TV show or movie about sports that's nearly as compelling as the real thing. So that's a huge difference, right? Yes. Yeah. So, Richard, go back to what you said about a place in the right. I'm curious if you could ever find a place in the Bulwark, for example. So you're talking about the Never Trump kind of thing? Yeah, pretty much the Jaded Neocons. So you ever find any common ground with them at all? Well, kind of, I don't think there's no reason for them to ever reach out to me or something like, you know, they don't gain anything from that. And I don't know, it is kind of funny. I had a little DM exchange with David Frum, believe it or not, about six months ago, when the war was beginning. And he was surprised that I think he just expected that I was going to come out like, you know, Putin should conquer Europe and America, too, or something. And I don't know if he even thought I might be dissembling or something, but he just kind of, we just talked over DMs for a little bit. We've done that, believe it or not, before. And, yeah, I was just basically saying he was like, you're carving out a kind of niche, just like you're almost like putting forth a, a neocold war with Russia will kind of promote a certain level of centrism, which, you know, again, I have said that. I'm not not sure I'm even right about that, but it might be wishful thinking. But, yeah, I mean, I feel like I do feel like I have a different conception of a lot of these neocons now and that so much of my own, like, personal trajectory was coming of age during the Iraq war and just, you know, lashing out at anything in the icon said as, you know, just some kind of evil scheme on behalf of Israel or something. You know, I just, I just really was absolutely against the invasion of Iraq and solving the icon to the enemy and so on. But, you know, I don't know. Is the bulwark kind of like more correct on a lot of their political analysis? I mean, I think so. Are they correct about MAGA descending into madness? I mean, yes, as I said, you know, a few weeks ago when Liz Cheney lost her congressional primary in Wyoming. Ah, I just remember the point I wanted to make about the NFL. So Skip Baylor made this point that whatever you see an NFL player become born again and starts organizing study groups with his fellow teammates. That player is always on the descent in his career. You can see it with like Dion Sanders with the Dallas Cowboys circa 1999. So to succeed in the NFL, it often helps to be a jerk, right? It's a violent, dangerous sport where the kind of mindset that helps one to succeed tends to be selfish and cruel. So. Richard is so compelling with coming up with new ideas, new perspectives, you know, fresh takes because he doesn't care about the consequences just like an NFL player, you know, throwing his body at the ball carrier. It doesn't care about the long term consequences to his body or to, you know, his family or whether he's going to break the other player's neck. And so that sort of recklessness, it frequently makes for more compelling football players, it frequently makes for more compelling live stream personalities. Like, you know, Richard has access to a far wider pallet than to someone whose primary concern is being right. If your primary concern is being responsible, if your primary concern is the welfare of someone who might listen to you and be enchanted by the idea that you're presented, then you can only paint from a much narrower pallet. But Richard's able to access so many more ideas because he is not weighed down by concerns about safety, responsibility, being right. He doesn't care how many people's lives he helped to destroy with his movement, his ideas, his charisma. He doesn't care if he leads a million people off a cliff as long as he has a parachute. And I don't criticize Richard for this or don't criticize him very much for this. He's he's not a responsible man. He's not a pro-social man. He's a me first provocateur who's incredibly entertaining and compelling as a personality. I mean, nobody else comes up with as many hot tanks as Richard Spencer because almost nobody else has, you know, ZFA, zero Fs given, right? Richard just has zero consideration for for other people, for other countries, for other movements, for his followers, for his followers, the consequences of his philosophies. Like he's not a partisan for any political party or philosophy or movement or country. He doesn't care what or who he burns down. And that makes him incredibly compelling, right? Now, if you are hamstrung by feelings of safety and responsibility and trying to be a positive influence in the world, you're never going to have to sling out as many new ideas as a Richard Spencer. You're going to be hamstrung by considerations for, you know, what will be the consequences of what I say on the whole variety, the whole panoply of people who might listen to me and there's a chance that they might take something I say seriously. So Richard gets to paint with this incredibly broad palette. He's not also constrained by reality, right? He lives in delusion. He thinks that he can cryptically influence things in many ways. He's a lot like Kanye West and Donald Trump. Whatever you want to say about Luz Cheney, and I certainly have plenty of bad things to say about Luz Cheney. She didn't. Why is Hailing Victory bad? Well, Hailing Victory is simply the English translation of Seek Hile. And so Hailing Victory in and of itself is not bad. But if you're invoking a famous Nazi salute in an Anglo country, that's a recipe for failure. And people who follow you and Richard's had many people who followed him were influenced by Richard and engaged in this kind of language and behavior that had a very negative effect on their life. It blew up a lot of lives. So that's why it's bad because in certain circumstances, like an Anglo country saying Seek Hile or the English Equivalent Hailing Victory is a recipe for social destruction and personal destruction. And that's bad. It's bad to destroy people lose because of any of those bad things. She did not lose because her constituents were suddenly anti-war or genuinely or seriously anti-war. She didn't lose because of her anti-abortion stance, which she actually does have. She lost because of the top steal. The woman she lost to was actually anti-month in 2015 and endorsed Cheney multiple times and does not have a really coherent difference from Luz Cheney. It was simply about that chivalry. So chivalry, that refers to a story in the Bible where certain people could not pronounce a certain word. And as soon as you recognize that someone could not pronounce chivalry, you realize that they weren't a member of your in group and you could therefore arm yourself against them. Jim Bowden says, look, where the hell you been the past two weeks? I went through Luke withdrawal syndrome. Please do not do this to me again. Well, I've taken time off a lot of time off the last three weeks. First of all, there were the two days of Rosh Hashanah, then there was Yom Kippur, and then the first two days of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. And then the last two days of Sukkot, Sheminiat Seret and Simchat Torah finally ended last night. So now there will be no more major interfering Jewish holidays for six months until Passover. Right wing politics that are chivalry based like that are just going to descend into madness and also descend into stupidity. There's just no way. I mean, again, whatever you want to say about Liz Cheney, she's a pretty coherent woman who's intelligent. You OK, coherent is a beautiful thing, but it's not like it's the overarching value. The that just simply subsumes and defeats every every other value. A lot of incoherent inchoate. Perspectives, feelings, desires, drives are more adaptive, more effective than the most rational sounding. So for a philosopher, incoherence is the mark of the beast. I mean, that shows that you're a rank emitter. But coherence is beautiful in some circumstances, maladaptive and others could talk to her. Whereas I don't think you could have a coherent conversation with these night of people. You know, I could have a conversation with Liz Cheney. I doubt that will ever happen. I don't think I could have a conversation with Mike Lindell. That might happen. He's so wacky, I think. Why would Richard expect to have a conversation with Mike Lindell? Mike Lindell is not in Richard Spencer's category. I mean, Richard's category of people who love to talk about philosophy and ideas, Mike Lindell and Kanye West, definitely not that type of people. So did I enjoy dancing with the Torah? I love dancing with the Torah. So Simcot Torah is perhaps my favorite Jewish holiday where we all get to hold the Torah scrolls, which weigh about 30, 40 pounds. And you carry them over your right shoulder and you dance around the beamer. And then you trade off. You eventually you give up your Torah to someone else. And it's just a big dance party. There's singing, there's dancing, there's carrying the Torah. It often spills out onto the street. A lot of good food, good dance. There are still sukkahs at the the booth of of leaves and branches. So Sukkot happens. It begins about four days after Yom Kippur. I think it's my favorite Jewish holiday. It's just nothing but joy. Right. You eat your meals in the Sukkah. You drink in the Sukkah. Sometimes many people sleep in the Sukkah. It's a reminder of the fragility of life, but it just gets you out of your habitual patterns. So it's an opportunity to just be with your friends, to have meals with your friends. And Judaism is such a physical religion. It's not primarily about coherent philosophy. You step into the mitzvah of building a Sukkah, right? You you physically build a booth of branches and leaves. You physically construct a temporary dwelling to live in, to eat in, to perhaps even sleep in, drink in, dance in. You then physically you step into it and you celebrate building it, being inside it. There's the dancing with the Torah on Simchat Torah, where you rejoice as they come to the end of the Yelit Torah cycle. So you read the last last chapter of the book of Deuteronomy and then you start reading from the beginning of Genesis. So you come to the end of the reading cycle. And again, such a physical religion, you're holding on to the Torah scroll, going round around the Bima, so the Bima is like the the lektun. And it's just it's dancing. It's it's swaying, it's you know, holding on to the Torah. It's kissing the Torah, it's touching the Torah. It's like feeling feeling the Torah right there beside you. And you're in in an ecstatic dance. And there's many mysteries in life that are only available to those in the dance. Unless you're in the dance, you're not likely to know the joy of being in the dance. Just like there are all sorts of mysteries out there that I've never participated in that I won't understand. But you're surrounded by 50, 100, you know, 150 men who are in a similar state of ecstasy. And so you create this shared reality together. But you get on the same page with each other and you build up this the state of ecstasy and love and joy and passion. And you're doing it collectively. And so the emotions are that much more amped up because you're you're on the same page with other people and you're building an experience with other people. And you're forming bonds with other people. And you're you may be looking over the the beamer, the separator between the men and the women, you may be checking out what who are the women there. And often they're looking really good. And so you're you're holding the Torah scroll like, you know, your friends are draped all over you, their people are drinking and and singing at the top of their lungs and you're just in ecstasy going round and round dancing around around the beamer and you're looking over the looking over the mechitza, the divider, you know, looking at a beautiful women say, oh, boy, you know, I'd like to date her. You know, I wonder if she might be interested in me. Everyone's in a good mood. So people tend to be open. People are accessible. It's easy to, you know, start up, you know, conversations with people. If if you get tired of the prayers, you go outside to the beamer and there's abundant food and drink and you can just sit there for hours, you know, carry on conversations with friends and you'll get up and dance for a while. Then you maybe just stand back and watch everyone else dancing. Then you'll get back in the dance. Then you'll you'll step away. You'll go back to the booth. You'll sit there with friends. I mean, you'll go to 10 p.m. 11 p.m. Midnight, 1 a.m. 2 a.m. Dancing, singing, drinking, eating, go home, get some sleep. Come back at 10 a.m. Do the whole thing all over for five hours. I mean, five hours of singing, dancing, eating, drinking, hanging out with your friends. I mean, it is absolutely gorgeous holiday. Just the barriers come down between you and the Almighty. The barriers come down between you and your your fellow Jews. The barriers come down between you and acquaintances. Acquaintances turns into friends. You know, friends turn into bonds. You you open up new vistas. You see new possibilities. It's an ecstatic experience. And it doesn't require you to believe anything. All right. You just join the dance and the dance is self authenticating. So when I became interested in Judaism, I thought, oh, Orthodox Judaism, that's kind of backward. It's not very rational and much more impressed by, say, reform or conservative Judaism, they make more rational sense to me. But then the experience of Orthodox Judaism was absolutely intoxicating for me. It just spoke to something deep inside me and it was inchoate and it might have been incoherent, but I was moved like switches started shifting in my mind. I felt like I was I was coming home. I felt like. My God, there's a place for me. There's a place for me. I'm like, I belong here. Well, good, man. Well, really good. Even if it was incoherent or inchoate, called him up and said, let's meet at the local water burger. He would probably do it. Whereas Les would return the email, I'm sure. Anyway. So, yeah, I mean, I do think that like David from has said things that are much more coherent, much more based in reality about the Russia situation than all of these mega commentators. And I have more in common with him now common ground working together. I'm not leading any coalition and I'm kind of trying not to lead one. I think that I'm still going to comment on the passing scene. And, you know, I'm still somewhat of a public figure. I mean, I'm much reduced. So where's my crystal light? Well, I stocked up on so many groceries for the holidays that I have three refrigerators and they're all absolutely stocked for. And there's no room for my crystal light, for my chilled crystal light. So I've got to eat my way through and drink my way through of what's in my refrigerator to try to create space. And I mean, this has been the situation for a week now. But my refrigerator has been bursting and I've been trying to eat my way through just absolutely delicious yogurts, man. The Wee Yogurt OUI. Just delicious. And then then there was this. Oh, this this yogurt from NUSA NUSA yogurt. Have you had NUSA yogurt? So it's from NUSA heads, which is just north of Brisbane in Australia. The creator of NUSA yogurts from there. So I've just been, you know, chowing my way through delicious yogurts and all this delicious food, trying to find, trying to create space for crystal light. So now where is God? God's wherever you invite him in. Like, you have to create space in your life for God. You have to create space in your life for recovery. You have to create space in your life if you want to get anything done. If you want to start a business or work on your voice or become a better singer or work out, right? You have to create space. And I right now, I desperately am trying to create space in my refrigerator. It is all I want enough space to put in a bottle of crisp, delicious crystal light. You know, I like it. Sure. Right. I'm not into lukewarm crystal light. So I've got, I've still got some work to do before I can enjoy a cold crystal light. So I've been without it for for about a week now. At this point. But I just have a very different vision about where we want to go with this. And I do think that there is going to be a little more criticism involved in that, that is kind of hiding out, laying low, maybe, maybe kind of distracting or getting. I mean, that's hilarious. Richard Spencer believes he's going to be able to shape the right, affect the world with criticism, meaning in disguise. So this new religion. R.E.M. theory that he's developing, like he thinks that he's just going to be able to cryptically influence the world with R.E.M. Theory and people are just going to ignore that it's that it's Richard Spencer, who is doing this. I don't know. I don't think he's going to be able to pull it off. I don't think that Richard Spencer is going to be terribly successful using crypts on the wrong track thinking that you're a liberal or something. I'm not a liberal, although I do agree with Democrats much more than I agree with Republicans. So everything I say is genuine. But I can kind of see how there's a little bit of a deflection going on. But I think we just need to form a coherent ideological and intellectual movement and just by necessity, that's going to have to be something that's rather small and that can hopefully have an impact. And I think we'll actually, I would say this strongly invariably will have an impact, but it is going to be down the line and it's going to be subtle and it's not going to be as a. So Richard believes R.E.M. theory, right, his new religion is subtle, but it's going to change the world. Right. Help me skeptical kind of, you know, online cheerleading squad for some crazed Republican, right? So for Richard, just making a pragmatic difference in the world today, such as reducing immigration, you know, maybe rolling back some of the civil rights bureaucracy, maybe getting a conservative Supreme Court. These are boring compared to the gargantuan changes that Richard wants to make. So so normal politics does not interest Richard. He wants to transform people's souls. So that's my view of the matter. It's pretty complicated. On a slightly different subject, Richard, did you see that leaked communication from speaking of neocons from Ann Bremmer of the Eurasian? The word I've heard. Again, I have no idea how preposterous it is, but this kind of looks like Musk trying to try very hard to get his proposed acquisition of Twitter blocked on national security grounds since he talks to Putin and also. Oh, wow. OK, well, OK, first up, just in case anyone else hasn't seen it. So Ian Bremmer is a maybe not like a pure neocon, more kind of a globalist. I guess you might even talk like that. He's written a number of best-selling books. He's one of these kind of public intellectual thinkers like Nile Ferguson or what is his name, Marquesas? He's actually someone I found really interesting. Now, what is his name? I have this book right here. Yeah, Masseus Bruno Masseus. Is that how you pronounce it? Masseus. Anyway, he's been like that for decades and he's part of the Eurasian group. He leaked on, I think, like his sub-stack or something like his email list that Musk put forth all of his plans for a ceasefire after speaking with Vladimir Putin directly. And, you know, Ian Bremmer, whatever you want to say about him, he's not the type of person who would just spread a false rumor. He could, you know, he's not just some Twitter account or something. Like he could even get, I don't know, sued for defamation or something if he's just knowingly. So Richard does not approve of Elon Musk talking with Vladimir Putin, right? That's that's wrong. That's irresponsible. That's out of control. But if Richard had the opportunity to talk to Vladimir Putin or Chairman Xi or any other famous world leader, do you think he'd turned out that that fame and influence? No, it's because Elon Musk did something cool that Richard would have loved to have done. I think that's what's underlying his critique here. Maliciously spreading rumors. So I think it might very well be true. But so Putin must put forward this plan of, you know, giving Crimea to Russia officially. And I think something that Putin might not like exactly, but redoing the referendum in the Russia, not no longer Russia controlled regions under UN auspices or something, just letting people vote of where they want to be. And then he posted this, you know, like appalling data from, I guess, pre-2014. Kind of looking at whether you liked Yanukovych or not as kind. So anyway, let me just address the title of tonight's stream. Kanye West is not a political philosopher. One of the insights that I've gotten from doing these shows is how important it is to put people in their proper genre. So just as you don't read a love letter the same way you read an electricity bill, you don't expect a Richard Spencer type to be a great rapper. So too, you should not expect a Kanye West type to be a political philosopher. So I'm not a bad person because I'm not a great singer and you're not a bad person just because you can't throw a baseball 100 miles an hour. Right. So some people are very good at accounting. They do not make compelling podcast personalities. So once you put someone in their proper genre, I just find it brings a lot of inner peace. Like you kind of situated them and so you can better understand them just as you can better understand a piece of writing once you put it in its proper genre. Kind of a way of partitioning Ukraine and then preventing Ukraine from ever entering NATO. So kind of offering a reasonable solution, but one that is implausible now that things have occurred. But yeah, I have never thought of it whether all like you're even having an even more cynical view of Elon Musk, that everything he's everything he's engaging is just some weird way of weavesling out of this deal. Which, wow, that might be true. But I and what's underlying this critique by Richard at at core, Richard is saying Elon Musk is a fraud. Right. So Elon Musk, all right, he has accomplished 10,000 times more substantial things in life than Richard Spencer. But Richard is outraged that Elon Musk is a fraud. I mean, does one not see the hilarity in this critique? Richard Spencer, a man whose actual intellectual output is tiny, right? He's never published very much. He's great at live streaming. Very compelling personality. But, you know, part calling kettle black. Richard Spencer, the live stream personality, right, is calling Elon Musk, one of the world's richest people, a fraud. Kind of. I think there's, wow, that's an interesting take on it. Yeah, and I don't think the Twitter and the government would just crack down and say no. Yeah, I don't think there's any Western health either. I don't think that any West situation healthy either. I think that added to, you know, that's like another reason to jump off the boat. You know, yeah, like he's really scared. I think I just do not know what to make of Musk's Twitter acquisition. I don't see the motive outside of he got excited and high one night and just did it on a lark or something. But the fact that there aren't people preventing him like saving him from himself also strikes me as strange. But I just don't see the motive because he clearly wants out of it. He doesn't want to go through a trial and discovery and losing a trial and all that kind of stuff, because I mean, I think Twitter basically hasn't dead to rights because his whole argument about bots and stuff. So the essence of Richard's critique is that Elon Musk is a fraud. Greg Johnson is a fraud. Donald Trump is a fraud. Honey, West is a fraud. Notice any. Common thread to Richard's critiques basically boils down to everyone else that you're paying attention to in life, particularly with any connection to the right. They are frauds, except for me. Stuff is negated by Richard's waving of due diligence, which was insane on some level and only makes sense if you actually believe the Twitter, you know, just a vanity project. Or, you know, I really believe in Twitter and it might gosh, it might take 10 years for this deal to ever pay off. But, you know, I'm willing to suffer through it for a little while because this is a which I agree with, which this is a social platform that's just going to stick around due to its nature. But, wow. But talking about playing with fire, I mean, that's a pure picture. I mean, at some point, this is going to really hot Musk, all of this shit. And then the Kanye stuff as well. And then I'm having a phone conversation with Vladimir Putin. I'm not a head of state. I'm going to get, I mean, what the fuck? Getting your acquisition of Twitter blocked on those grounds does sound. Yeah, Richard is outraged that Elon Musk had a conversation purportedly with Vladimir Putin. Like, you know, Richard is outraged that someone else might be getting attention that Richard is not running the show. So all those other people who are running the show out there, they are outraging Richard like very dangerous branding. Then again, trying to get ahead of it. I could definitely see that making Elon more of a martyr figure on the right. I mean, can you just see the Carlson? Can't you see the Tucker Carlson monologue? Like, so now it's bad to even talk to someone. A major businessman is having an acquisition block just for talking about in your Putin or on the cusp of nuclear war. I can see that. Yes. But I think again, like my view of Musk and I did not think this, say, three months ago, I, I got red-pilled on Musk to the point that I think he is an absolute fraud. Not that Teslas aren't a real car that might even be a pretty good car, but everything surrounding that. But think about how much more interesting it is to listen to a podcast where you are being told that that which is conventional wisdom is utterly fraudulent. Right. That's compelling. That's entertaining. Right. That holds your attention. It's great fun to listen to these kind of critiques. And it's a lot easier to do these kind of critiques if you have no sense of responsibility, very little care about whether you're right or wrong, very little care about what could be the consequences of what you're saying. Right. The money, the fame, the audience goes to that which is interesting. Not to that which is right. You know, I'd rather be right. Right. I'd rather have one percent of the audience and be a lot closer to that which is right rather than have one hundred one thousand times the audience and simply be consistently interesting, but wrong. Certainly devaluation, Tesla, is just beyond absurd. You know, the idea that Tesla is worth more than, you know, GM, Ford, Mercedes, BMW combined is absurd. And it's like some weird, almost 90s era Silicon Valley fascination where it's like, oh, he has first mover advantage and, you know, no one will be able to stop him at some point. I mean, you could say the same thing about toys.com or whatever. Although it kind of works with Amazon, right? But I know that. Oh, sorry. You know, if you go ahead, I was going to say the problem with that, though, is like, OK, I think I'll do it.