 May 40 here. I was watching the TV show Billions last week and there was a great interaction. The character Michael Prince, he owns a big hedge fund. He's one of the two major characters on the show and one of his employees calls him boss and he says, I'm not the boss. The situation is the boss. I thought I loved that. The situation is the boss. And it's a quote that comes from a grateful dead roadie, making the point that if the carburetor is out on the bus that is transporting the band, then the situation is the boss until you fix that carburetor until you get an alternative source of transportation. You're in trouble. And so it's not the lead singer, it's not the lead guitarist. It's the situation that's the boss. It's the carburetor that's gone down. And suddenly you need a solution for that. And I was just thinking how true that is for the rest of our lives. For example, I could go do a great show on here and then I could walk onto the street and there might be an attractive woman I want to talk to and do I have the right stuff? Like do I necessarily translate my whatever level of mastery that I achieved on a particular show here back into real life talking to a woman on the street versus a talking to a woman in a synagogue that I attend regularly versus say applying for a job or applying for a contract or starting a new Alexander technique session with a brand new client or there may be some kind of awkward social dynamic between me and someone down the street. And so we're always placed into these different situations. And we may naturally think of ourselves as leaders or we may naturally think of ourselves as followers. But in the end, the situation is the boss. And so sometimes the situation calls for us to lead sometimes situation calls for us to follow. And what can we do, right? If we're wise, we simply adapt to the situation to follow and and to follow the cues. Alright, so I've been reading some books by Randall Collins, who's a sociologist and quite interesting. And he publishes these books with really boring titles that still still tend to blow your mind. And I'm reading his book called interaction ritual chains. And makes the point that when we interact with people, it's a ritual. And if we get on the same page with other people, so that we're moving with some kind of synchronicity, then we're feeding off each other or with the group that we're with and this creates this creates energy, he calls it emotional energy. And so people who are consistently successfully navigating interaction rituals throughout the day, they're getting energy as they go through the day. And when you get energy through the day, you'll usually be much more successful. And he makes the point that social class is the edit is largely to do with energy. The simplest version of social stratification, he says, is an energized upper class, loading it over a depressed lower class with moderately energized middle class persons in between. And so think about the the most successful politicians or social organizers, or live streamers, it's usually the ones with the most coherent energy, right? It's not the ones necessarily with the manic energy just bouncing off the walls. But with a coherent energy where they're tuned into their audience, they're tuned into the people they're talking to. And together, they're creating a shared reality. And when you're creating a shared reality and building a shared reality and bouncing off a shared reality with other people, then you can help but become energized from that. It's a successful social interaction. And the more successful social interactions you have like this, then the deeper the bedrock of of competency and energy. So you get energy, he makes a point he calls it emotional energy from successful social interactions, meaning you're on the same page with other people, you develop a rhythm with other people, you're ideally moving together with other people such as a yoga class, or you're marching, or you're participating in say religious rituals together with with other people. And then out of this shared development of emotional energy comes an ethic and a loyalty to your new in group and a sense of solidarity. So every time you create a solidarity with other people, you're also creating an ethic. So here's the guy who talks about this rituals can succeed or fail. Sometimes rituals are flat, boring, or even alienating. What makes the difference? Here are the ingredients. A successful ritual brings people together bodily in the same space where they can feel each other's mood and see and hear the expressions they give off. It has to build up a mutual focus of attention. Everybody paying attention to the same thing and being aware that each other is paying attention. It creates collective consciousness or intersubjectivity. It needs to start with a shared emotion. What emotion it starts with doesn't matter. It can be anger and fear, the emotions that Steve Jobs often launched his encounters with. It can be sadness like a memorial or happiness like a celebration. The key to ritual success is that the emotion is shared and that it builds up as the groups perceives. They're all feeling it. And good morning. We've got an energised caller on the line. So good morning. Energetic blessings to you, brother. Energetic blessings to you. How's it going, mate? Good. Let me shut off the mainstream for a second. Okay. So yeah, interesting topic. Important topic. Yeah, it's controlled energy. Yeah. So that's a really important point. The difference between manic energy and sort of controlled productive energy. Did I lose you? No, I'm here. Oh, sorry, sorry. Okay, I have a new audio setup. So I'm using headphones, like, you know, proper headphones, not those little earbuds. So is my audio good? Your audio is great, my friend. Okay, great. Yeah. Yeah, you know, with this topic, you know, I watched a documentary about horse trainers and breeding and horse racing, the horse, you know, what makes it, you know, the behind the scenes of creating a great racehorse. It was from Ireland. And they asked the, they asked one of these champion trainers who had trained a real great racehorse, what are the characteristics of a truly champion racehorse? And he said, they are very quiet and calm. They, they do the same thing every day. So they eat their food in the exact same way in a very calm methodical way. They're just very calm and methodical. And they don't get flustered. So they sort of, so the two things was like routine and almost methodical was the takeaway. How is that straight? Is that a planet? Yeah, if it's a routine that's working for someone, I'm sure a lot of people, for example, are in really bad routines. So and then for the racehorse would have also a great deal to do with genetics, but you get the right genetics in a racehorse and then, and then a good routine. Right. But the behavior traits that flow from good genetics, you know, and which does seem identical to what you're saying, like, I meet a lot of people that are, what do you call it? They're energetic, meaning they're very, they're extroverted. But they can't sit down and get something done. They're great to be around, you know, they're funny to the life of the party, but they can't just sort of do the plotting work that needs to be done when the time comes, you know, so they end up acting out and creating dramas instead. You know what I mean? Yeah. So it needs to be a coherent energy that's appropriate to the situation. We're talking about mastering the situation, not being, you know, off the wall and bouncing off the wall with your energy, but not actually moving anything forward. Right. Right. So what's, did you just happen upon this or did you go looking for some of this topic? I was rereading this book. And then he apparently he'd written a whole book on the sociology of philosophers based around this idea. So I became, I just became excited and I saw the application because the most successful live streamer in the distant ride is Nick Fuentes, who has unbelievable amounts of energy, but it's also fairly coherent. It's matched with his audience. And then the other most successful characters in this space, people like Jean Francois Garapie and Richard Spencer and Greg Johnson and Mr. Medica, Big Dalaska. I mean, these people have a ton of energy, but it's connected to their audience. It's not, you know, completely off the wall and manic. Yeah. And then think about like the biggest loser live streamers, like the ones and we'll just apply loser as in no views. They're depressed. They're mopey. They're they exude low energy and you you start feeling depleted when you when you watch them. And so people like Nick Fuentes or the high energy live streamers, I assume a Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh, they energize their audience. But the people who don't succeed in this space, they deplete the energy of their audience. That makes sense. Yes. There are people like that, that your interaction, you come away from your interaction, you feel depleted, you feel as though you can still improve. Yes. That's a that's a heuristic that I use. I'm dealing with people and avoiding people. Yeah, and people and you get energy when you're on the same when you're on the same page with other people and when there's a rhythm so that you're not talking all over each other. But there aren't also, you know, long awkward pauses as well. But when you're on the same page with someone else, when you're tuned into what's going on with them, and what's going on with you and you start creating a shared reality between you. And I think also the great radio broadcast is the great live streamers, the great TV personalities, they also are able to create this is shared reality with their audience or a Karen Carpenter, when you listen to her music, you feel like she's singing just to you. She's creating this shared reality with her audience. Yeah, you know, funny you bring her up, you know, I caught you know, you get these video suggestions. Yeah. And I think Karen Carpenter had like they have these things now that you can run audio through and you can see how on on pitch somebody is as a singer, you know, how how closely their their voice hits the exact notes. I think Karen Carpenter had like one of the highest scores of all time. Wow. That's interesting parenthetical. But yes, yes, people don't like people want, yeah, they want to be consonant with those around them and not just what's the opposite consonant discordant. Yeah, and so we call people charismatic, people who give us energy, like when we're around them, when they're around people, they they they give energy, like Donald Trump, right? People get energy interacting with Donald Trump going to his rallies. Yeah, as opposed to low, low energy Joe Biden. Yeah, what a gulf with a chasm. Don't you find it amazing? I mean, let's not to revisit the whole election. dispute, like let's just leave that to historians. But just that you look at a Donald Trump, you know, his face is flush. He's well dressed. He's well groomed. He seems present. And then you look at Joe Biden, who just seems like he's going to fall over. And then we're to believe that. Yes, the country went for Joe Biden. Yeah, and we never meet anyone who's enthusiastic about Joe Biden. I've never met. I mean, there aren't such people. No, there aren't. No, it's true. I mean, you know, Trump is a double-edged sword. And I do take I mean, there is validity the fact that he absolutely galvanized his opposition, you know, inside the government and outside with Norma, just your average voter. But you know, here's a but yes, people like to degree, but I can we talk about the Russian thing just a little bit? Yes, of course, it brings up a point. So I have like this guy I bicker with on Facebook, right? And I just casually mentioned that I thought Russia was winning this conflict. Now, I don't know. I'm just sort of, you know, I'm taking in all these information sources, and I'm making my best judgment. And my best judgment was, I think Russia is winning or will win. You know, and it's not like I was celebrating this fact, or decrying this fact, I was just simply stating it as that's my opinion, right? Right. And his reaction to this was completely irrational and psychotic. And he he couldn't. He really thought I was not only attacking. He said that I wanted people to die that I was celebrating this and that that I was stupid, you know, he just really had this completely outsized reaction to this. And he said, you know, just so it goes to the point that just people in general don't like to be disagreed with. And but he then he sends me all these links that I'm supposed to read, like that's what I need to do right now is read a bunch of blogs, you know. And, you know, and these links are all from all of these kind of fringy, lefty kind of blogs that have and the content that is just, you know, a few facts and lots of opinion, you know, but he he reads these things because he goes looking for it. He wants his world to be reflected back on him, like people on our side. And I was just I made the point is I said, listen, we're both utterly dependent on the sources that we seek out. I said that as a general term, there's a general statement meant to defuse the situation. And I said, you know, I'm not the general term. There's a general statement meant to defuse the situation. But he turned he entered around he took that statement as trolling. So I don't know. You have any insights? Well, yeah, there's I think there's such a thing as sacred, sacred persons or sacred totems or sacred spaces and and Ukraine has become sacred. Yeah. And it's just universal, universal support for Ukraine, outrage at Russia. And so when something becomes sacred, that on the one hand, it can powerfully unite people who will ascend to that, but it then becomes very dangerous for you to do anything to mock. So it's just like in the 17th century, I think John Calvin in one of those cities in Switzerland, he put someone to death who publicly disagreed with the doctrine of the trinity. So when the doctrine of the trinity is sacred, and you publicly or it maybe even privately disagree with it, you get put to death. And so different things become sacred and things can change in the course of a few days. And then if you do anything outside of the accepted narrative about that which is sacred, you are very likely in for a world of thought. Yeah. And I had kind of got the sense that that was the case with Ukraine. And I was really trying to tread lightly. And I didn't tread lightly enough, apparently. Now, why do you think this is like you'd have, you'd have Mitt Romney coming out and calling Tulsi Gabbard a traitor for basically admitting Russia had a point, right? And but because as you say, Ukraine is so sacred that people can use the language of treason to describe it. And you would think that Russia had invaded the United States in some of, you know, in a comment like that. I think it's several things. One thing is that I think there's a lot of pent up desire for something to unite on around the Western world, not just in America. And this is relatively bipartisan issue. All right, people are suddenly united for the first time since 9 11. And and that feels really good to people. Like there is an energy that comes out of being that united. I think the West is more energized now than it was five weeks ago prior to this invasion, because we suddenly have a cause to unite around. And so I think I think that's part of it. People really enjoy the unity that we're feeling right now across the Western world. And then the other thing that's happened is this is a big deal. It's the first time a sovereign nation in Europe has been invaded. And since World War two, aside from the Balkans mess. And so I think that is is triggering to people that just the potential of a chaos. Well, yeah, I think because it has so many parallels to mustache man, you know, like a ground assault, you know, and one sort of authoritarian leader taking, you know, decisive action like that, the parallels to or two are just so that there and so you've been screaming about if you're on the left, you know, you've been screaming about Hitler for the past, you know, 50 decades. And suddenly you have something that's, you know, very, very comparable. It really galvanizes them. So now it does make sense if you think about thinking about it that way. And it's bipartisan. It's not just it's not just on the left, people on the right saying, see this, this shows what happens when the US is weak and US has a weak leader now in Biden, and this wouldn't have happened under Trump. And I don't think it would have happened under Trump because I Trump had less commitment to NATO. And therefore Ukraine would have been less of a threat because NATO would have been less of a threat to Putin. And I think Trump and Putin had a better relationship. So I don't think this would have happened under Donald Trump. Well, there's, well, I think Trump actually, I think Trump exemplified the the madman theory. Trump was so capable of doing outlandish things that and that his ego was so obviously big and brittle that he might actually go for the big, you know, the big weapon, right? So his unpredictability gave Putin pause, but we're just speculating. But I don't put much stock in personal relationships the way that you do. I mean, you basically it commits me to become a structuralist. So I'm surprised to hear you argue the point of personal relationships. Well, personalities that I think personalities have some influence, but overall I'm much more of a structuralist. So I do think it was primarily matter of the structure of international relations that led Russia to the invasion. But their personalities play a role, I think a smaller role than structure. So the structure of international relations would have meant that anyone who was in charge of Germany in the late 1930s would have been very tempted to start a war to take control of Europe. On the other hand, without a Hitler in charge, there would not have been a Holocaust. So personality can count for a little bit. But we all thought like NATO was pretty much dead in Maribor. It had nothing to unite around. And so suddenly NATO seems strong and united. And I think it's also then a source of energy that people in the West, people in the United States and Western Europe, suddenly, you know, we've got something to unite around, we've got a bad guy. And so getting clarity about who the enemy is, is tremendously energizing. And so I think throughout the Western world, there's a sense that Putin is the enemy. And now, alas, having an enemy that both unites you and it energizes you. I agree. I agree that's all present. But NATO, it's sort of like the purpose of NATO was always it was to contain the Soviet Union or Russia, right? And so I mean, I never really thought of how I never really think of myself. I never really think of NATO, right? Until very, very recently. Like, yes, US is part of this international organization called NATO. But the fact that NATO is united right now versus being disunited a couple months ago has no impact on my life whatsoever. Well, it has an impact on the lives of people around you, which you're encountering. Like people feel energized by the emergence of an enemy. That when the enemy, when the enemy comes into view as an existential threat to kill you, and when Putin makes proclamations about nuclear war, that means that this enemy is a threat to kill you. And so as Carl Schmitt says, the basis of politics is the friend enemy distinction. US didn't really have an enemy for the last 30 years that threatened to kill Americans aside from that. That's spathem on 9 11. And now, now we have an enemy. And so I think that's both energizing and uniting. The enemy has come into view and he possibly poses an existential threat to kill us. And so people feel that threat. What is your opinion of the state of Ukraine in Russia right now? Where do you think things lie? Where do you think things are going? I think things are headed for a stalemate right now, unless there's some change. So I think right now we're looking at a stalemate. And is that effectively a Ukrainian victory? Or is there some sort of partition? Like, I always thought that sort of Russia would kind of grab up the predominantly Russian speaking areas, which is where the ports are anyway, and that there would be some sort of, you know, negotiated peace. But you think it's just going to drag on indefinitely? I expect a negotiated peace. But this, we could have had movement towards this a week or two ago. I don't know why it's taken so long to move towards that negotiated piece. So it must mean that Stalin wants to take, say Kiev, maybe once Stalin takes Kiev, then then we'll have negotiations. Yeah, you mean Putin, yeah, yeah, wrong, wrong century, bro. Yeah, I don't know, but why is, okay, is this situation a real threat to the United States, one way or the other? Like, is it a boom to America if Russia gets repelled? Or is it really that damaging to America if Russia is successful? Or I'm talking about like real economic terms, or is this just a non event? Well, I'm not talking about like emotions. I'm talking about like, you know, hard economics. Yeah, so we're going to have more inflation because of this. So you're talking about economics, we're going to have much more inflation. Oil prices are going to go much higher. So we're going to have more inflation as a result of this. And also we've, we've increased the risk of nuclear war. No, no, no, no, no, what affect the United States? I know, but the higher oil prices are a consequence of the sanctions, right? We're limiting the sale. We're taking Russian oil off the market. That's driving up the price. So Putin's actions don't directly create the higher prices. It's the reaction to Putin, which has caused the higher oil prices in addition to all of the money. That's true? Well, it's going to be much harder to transport Russian oil because insurance companies won't ensure tankers taking Russian oil because of this military action around the Black Sea. So, so Putin has done things that have dramatically negatively affected his capacity to ship oil even without sanctions. So sanctions are just one aspect. But another thing is he's created an unsafe environment. So insurers don't want to be on the hook, even if there were no such thing as sanctions because ships have been affected by this war in the Black Sea. Okay, that makes some sense. What about, okay, so, you know, the United States has been called the Saudi Arabia of natural gas or Saudi Arabia of coal. Like, we have a tremendous amount of energy resources domestically. And I don't understand why we insist on being dependent on foreign sources. Is there a rational reason for this? Yes, yes. So we're not dependent on foreign sources. It's just that our refining capacity is better suited for the type of oil that we used to get from Venezuela. And, and now when Venezuela start producing from Russia, and so we have to make changes to our refining industry to be able to process our domestic oil. So there are different types of oil. And so our refinery capacity was significantly shaped towards the type of oil that Russia produces and that Venezuela produces, rather than what we domestically produce. So there's interesting, I didn't know that. Now, couldn't we just invest in expanded refining capacity? Yes, and that will take a year or two to come online and it may be more expensive. I know, but so are military, you know, we can throw over billions of dollars of weapons, no problem. We don't balk at those expenses, but actually developing our own infrastructure, it's just off the table. Why is that always off the table? Well, you don't want to say invest in infrastructure that becomes useless a few years down the line. You only want to rationally invest in infrastructure that is going to work out for you. And so we had a refining infrastructure that was working if we imported certain oil from certain countries. And, and so it's going to be an added expense to make this transition. It may not be as economically efficient. So you wouldn't, you wouldn't start, you wouldn't start buying your groceries, say from a place that was further away than your, your favorite grocer, just in case your favorite grocer went out of business, right? You would keep using the most, we all tend to use the most convenient options for us. We don't think about, you know, what if our most convenient options go out of business? Yeah, that's a good point. Oh, well. You know, I went six weeks, I want to take a gas. Wow, you have a Prius? No, no, I don't, I don't. But I just, I decided not to, I started, I just started thinking about the trips I take, whether I really need to take them or not. And when I do take a trip, I just combine all of the things I would need to do. And I start planning ahead, you know, I buy more of something. So I don't have to make a second trip later on, just using the old noggin. You know, how many miles to a gallon do you get? Not too many. I guess about 22, maybe 24, just in particularly efficient. And what, what brings you energy into your life? It brings me energy, quality food, fresh air and sunshine, just the basics. Yeah, but what about social interactions? They tend to deplete me, Luke. That's right. So I'll tell you, like, so I have this little drama unfolding, like a friend of mine, his mother's getting old and she's on the, he's on the East coast, tending to it. And he was going to lose his apartment, you know, he had to give up his apartment. So I let him store all of his crap at my apartment. And so now my apartment is just completely stuffed to the gills. I thought he had, you know, a small amount of stuff. It turns out it's lots of stuff. And so basically my apartment has been torn asunder and just stacked with all this garbage. It turns out, you know, it's just one of those things where, you know, you reach your hand out and it gets bitten off. Yeah, I spent all of yesterday just trying to get all of his crap out of sight and out of mind. And it's, I spent all the, all of yesterday doing it. I'm only about half done. So it's just, I'm irritated. Why does this keep happening to you? Because I have some psychological defect, Luke, that allows me to think that one needs to do a good deep on someone. But yes, it keeps happening to me. This is, it's, it might feel easy old Luke. I'm just such a mensch, bro. I remember when I came to LA in 1994 and I was, I was living out of my car, as far as kind of getting established my first eight months in LA. And I met this woman and I stopped living with her. But then there's this other woman who's paid for me to fly to Manhattan for three weeks. And so I'm, I'm flying off to Manhattan. And so the one that I was staying with said, well, you know, you're going off to fuck some other woman. You know, that, that's it for us. And I said, okay, can I just store my stuff under your bed? He says, okay. So I go to New York, to Manhattan, stay with this woman. And she, you know, meets this great guy and brings him back to her place. And he looks under a bed and says, who's stuff is this? And that was the end of that. Yeah, yeah. People don't mix. You can't like, but that's the problem, Luke. We talk about the need for community, right? And sort of implicit in community is that you have to, you have to help out your tribe, Luke. You have to make sacrifices for your tribe. And so, but as soon as you do that, your, your needs as an individual immediately get, get trampled upon. And thus we have reality television. Well, do, do our needs inevitably get trampled on. I think you can extend yourself to other people without getting, getting trampled on. You just have to use some, some good judgments. So, for example, I volunteer about five to 15 hours a week. And that, that never tramples on my needs. I very set ties to when I meet with people, when I help, help with people. And so that doesn't, that doesn't trample on me. I've got it blocked out. And, and so then other people can't impose on me. But when you say you volunteer, do you volunteer like on an individual one-to-one basis, or do you volunteer in your community as a whole? Like, yeah, I'm part of two different groups. And I have certain commitments in these two different groups that may vary week to week, but I always keep the commitments within what is convenient for me. Yeah. See, I was, okay, you know what, you know what it is? Okay. You asked the question, like, why do I do this type of stuff? Now having thought about it a little bit, I, I understand why I do it, I believe. You know who Jonathan Edwards is? Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. So he's a Protestant preacher in the time of the colonial era. Oh, okay. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about? Yes. He had a famous speech, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, and it was basically Calvinist doctrine. And, you know, it was really, it was a very chastening speech, and it sort of, you know, represented the spirit of the times and people went out of their way to be virtuous, you know, in that, in those times. But I always think about, you know, things can go wrong. Like, you're, you're on a tightrope, right? You're walking and everything's cool, but, you know, the world's an unreliable place and you could find yourself truly in need. And you need a, and then you're going to be in, you could be in a position where you need somebody to make a really generous offer to you, right? And you need sort of, you need to be worthy of that. You need to be worthy of that generation, of that generosity should the time come. That's how I reason. So Jonathan Edwards is like, you know, you may think you're cool now, but you're really all your success, all your relative comfort that you have right now is, is really capricious. It can be taken away from you at any moment. And so you need to have some reserves of good deeds that you can call upon. So it's really an exercise of prudence, not altruism that I do these things. Right. So it's a question of how, how well tailored are these, these acts of generosity to, to your wellbeing. So for example, I invest in community. So I do things out in the community and I help people out, particularly in that context. And so if I were to be in need of help, I can turn to my community that I've invested in, but I'm not going out helping, say, rando alcoholics or people who are not reliable, people who are a mess, and hoping that they might be there for me because I've accumulated this reservoir of good deeds. Well, it's not necessarily that they'll be available for you, but somebody else will be available for you. Like, like there's, I really believe there's a scorecard, like this cosmic scorecard. And your, your, your, your merits and demerits are effectively being accounted for. And you need to, you need to tend to your, your karmic bank account, as it were. Yeah, I believe that. But I think the language you're using could just as easily be a cover for making really bad choices and having really bad boundaries and then justifying it as, you know, accumulating a karma in your cosmic credit score. I believe in karma and your cosmic credit score, but I believe also that the beautiful sounding language and be a cover for all sorts of dysfunctional behavior. And I absolutely agree with you on that score. But, you know, so that's where, that's where you need, like you need real guidance, right? Yeah, that's where you need to bounce things off other people, you know, have, have friends or mentors or people that you respect, because on our own, we can often make really bad judgments. Okay. We have to explain them to someone else, then we get a new clarity. Now, I agree with you that you do need, you can bounce things off, but the advice you get from other people could just reflect their own neurotic biases, right? Oh, it will. But the act of articulating it to someone else should, should force you to confront reality in a whole new way. We can justify anything around the minds, but to speak something out loud. It's not that you're relying on other people to give you wisdom. The act of speaking something out loud to somebody else. So, for example, in debt is anonymous, you, if you're going to make a, a gratuitous spending of say, over $300, then you call someone in the program and talk about it. It's not that you're giving someone else in the program a veto, but you're articulating what you're doing. The act of saying something out loud and explaining something out loud forces you to confront yourself in a way that you wouldn't do it just if you're talking in your own head. Yeah, that makes sense. Because often when you do say something out loud, you, you, you do get a, like a more objective, you have this moments of like objectivity. So there's definitely a merit to that. But on the flip side, especially my early 20s, you know, I would ask my peers about a situation and what to do. And I ended up getting a lot of really bad advice, right? And I ended up taking that advice because I guess I wanted to fit in. I didn't, you know, but all the advice I would get would be like, well, you know, basically do what you love and the money will follow type of advice or, you know, follow your bliss type of advice, you know, and I did that and I screwed myself even further. Yeah. I don't know. Like, like I said, like, see, if your friends, you would never get that, right? No orthodox Jew will ever tell you to follow your bliss, follow what you love, and the money will follow. So though you, you choose the people that you're turning to, you, you, you choose your peer group. And so I know, I know a certain peer group in my life would never buy into that in a second. Right. And, you know, and I think that's a report. So that's, that's truly where the value of community of community and tradition is, is because it's the elders that end up giving the advice, the people with actual life experience, right? Who have seen things and not these fresh faced little kids that just got out of college, out of high school who think they know everything. Right. We, we, we, the boomer generation sort of said, you know, the adults are the crazy ones. It's the kids you need to listen to. And basically that's where we are today, or that was part of where we are today. Right. But I guess our peer group reflects us. And so let's say people who are tuned into others and having a series of successful interactions. So for example, I went to a sports bar the other night, the first time in like 15 years, and I walked in and as I walked in, I started a conversation with one person. And then I made my order. And then I went and found a group. I didn't know anyone. I went on my own, went and found a group. And then I started conversing with someone else. And so I was like steadily building confidence and confidence as I was moving through this, this new and a little bit scary situation of, you know, trying to establish myself in a sports bar and find a community. So I ended up at a table with a lot of UCLA graduates. And I had a good evening because like one thing was leading to another, like successful interaction was leading to successful interactions. So when you have a bedrock of successful interactions with people where you're able to tune into them, you get on the same page and then get energy from that, that gives you a sense of confidence. And then you'll feel happy and you'll be unhappy being around people who are mopey and losers and completely disconnected from reality. On the other hand, if you get into a negative series of interactions where nothing's going right and you start feeling bad and you start doubting your own ability to navigate things, then you will look for a peer group that reinforces your sense that the world is unjust and that you're constantly being screwed over and that nothing you do will matter. So how competent we are will determine what kind of peer group we can develop. That's true. People seek their own level, right? So you went to a bar, Luke? This is a... I did. Yeah. Yeah. What did you do? Did you have a drink, Luke? I had some vegan nachos and then I said, why do you have to drink no alcohol, no caffeine, and no sugar? And the guy said, ice water. So I put down $13 for the nachos. I gave him 20, said keep the change. And then I had several ice waters as the night went on. That's a generous tip, Luke. That was sort of the tips not given among the drinks that you didn't drink? Yeah, it meant that I was going to sit there for two, three hours and enjoy the game. I was going to take up space and so I didn't want them to dread my appearance the next time I come. Oh, yes. Is this going to be a frequent occurrence? I might. I enjoyed it. I mean, again, there's like a feeling of shared energy because I was there for the UCLA game. And as I expected, there'd be a lot of UCLA alumni there. And so that shared energy when you're on the same wavelength, when you're watching the game and you're getting energy from each other. Yeah, that's amazing that you're able to resist like that. So I basically was, I wouldn't say a tea-teller, but a very, very light drinker. But then in my 20s, if I wanted to socialize, I had to go to a bar and go into a bar that we really had to drink. Then I really just got started just drinking very casually, very easily. And then I was, I started just gaining weight just on the fact of just all of this beer, which is actually very fattening. And I really wish, you know, I really wish I had the resolve that you had, Luke, because I really, I think I did a number on my health for doing that. But you want to socialize, right? You have basically two, you can either stay at home or you can go out to a bar. There's no middle ground unless you have some sort of- Well, there are meetup groups. I was just looking at meetup groups. And so there's like all these hiking meetup groups that are meeting today that I could go to, except there's an LA marathon. So it's a little hard to get around LA today. But I looked up Jewish meetup groups, book meetup groups. I went looking for a whole bunch of different meetup groups. So that's one possibility. Also yoga classes are a great way to meet people. And then 12-step meetings and Torah classes and prayer meetings. Yoga classes seem to be very asocial or unsocial. They're like, you know, people go, they do their yoga and they go home, right? And it's, I don't know. I've never found them to be very social experiences. But maybe- Yeah, I think it probably depends where. You're not wrong. I'm not disagreeing. I'm just saying that at the end of the day, people just want to chit-chat, relax. And that's the bar is the place to do that. Or it's a place with shared interests. Like if you have a shared interest in hiking or get interest in books or like having a shared interest makes conversation easier. But those are the weekend activities, right? Those are things you can do in the weekend. But during the week, after work, you want to chill for a while, you go to a bar. It's easier. Or a Minion, get her a Minion. Daven Minka, Shakhri, Ma'ariv, get her a Talmud class, get her a 12-step meeting, get her a yoga class. All right. All right. I think we find ourselves bickering more than we need to be. Well, I don't know, bro. Just so, I was hoping to get some wisdom on the Russia situation because I think I'm actually confused now. Well, what should be confusing is that it's sacred. And so you're going to get an enormous amount of opposition if you threaten the sacred nature of Ukraine's resistance. Okay. But there are experts on both sides of this saying contradictory things, right? And so how do you break the tie? How do you know your experts are the correct experts? Because they both seem to be making coherent arguments. But then you can be motivated, right? How do I know someone's not motivated in a particular direction? I think they construct a logical-sounding argument based on their emotional predilection. It's like right now on Fox, you have Tucker and Mark Levine going at each other's throats on opposite sides of the issue, right? Which is, A, interesting because you rarely see dissent on cable news anymore. But dissent was how cable news got started. Remember the days of Crossfire. But do you have a... Well, I guess you say stalemate because you just think it's going to be a stalemate. You have no more insight beyond that. Well, I guess you assess people's reliability. You assess their track record. You assess how their work stands up to criticism. But what is true and what is acceptable to say in two very different things? So when you're going to speak out on Facebook, you're going to do it within the framework that the Ukrainian resistance is sacred. And so anything that sheds a negative light on that, whether it's true or not, is going to cause you a lot of aggravation. Yeah. So I was reading the chat a little bit. Who's Sid Ragnuth? Hi, Tess Oster and Ultra Tess Oster and Halsey English, I think. Is he going to come on? It's been a while. Well, I don't know, bro. I got work to do. You know what I'm doing? I'm getting ready to do my taxes. And the first step of doing my taxes is I have to get my apartment completely cleaned and organized. It's like at three week process for me. But I insist on doing it myself as we discussed. Okay. Blessings to you, Elliot. All right, bro. Later. I'll be listening, man. Okay, man. All right, peace. Bye-bye. Here's Colin Liddell on Andrew Anglin. Who's Who in the Dissident Right? Andrew Anglin by Colin Liddell, the chief editor and main writer of the notorious Nazi troll site, The Daily Stormer. Anglin had a past as an SJW and race mixer before repackaging himself as an uber neo-nazi Jew hater in 2013, when he founded the total fascism site, The Precursor to the Daily Stormer. He is one of the most suspicious characters on the internet and played a key role in normalizing Big Tech's deplatforming of people with his international hate campaign against British Jewish MP Luciana Berger in 2014. Whatever the true story behind the man, he is clearly not what he presents himself as. His closest associate, Weave, Andrew Orenheimer, is a confirmed Jew, and there are suspicions that Anglin may well be one himself, and indeed, he bears a striking resemblance to Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL. If so, this would hardly be unique or even unusual, as many so-called neo-nazis have in fact been Jewish. Known to be very short and with an appearance that reminds some of an Albino, he is nevertheless a talented and industrious writer, although it is also possible that he is nearly the branding for a team of writers. Along with TRS and others in the alt-right, he played a key role in turning the alt-right from a potent and polymorphous dissident movement to the neo-nazi caricature it has become today. Following repeated attempts to deplatform the daily stormer in 2017, the site moved to a domain name controlled by Russia, DailyStormer.su, where it remains safely for nearly five years. This suggests that Anglin is most likely a Russian asset. It is also noticeable that daily stormer activity and internet prominence greatly increased in 2014, following the Ukrainian revolution. This was a watershed moment for the Kremlin, when Russian-backed Black Ops on the internet intensified. Sadly, very few in the alt-right realized the danger posed by Anglin and Russia's Nazification of the alt-right. Although I am glad to say I was one of them, making major attacks on the stormer, which provoked a major response by Anglin. For the last couple of years, his DailyStormer pieces have featured prominently at the UN's review, which claims to be a free speech for dissident site, but is obviously a Kremlin-shill site. Anglin's chief associate, Weave, was also widely reported to be based in Kremlin-controlled, Trans-Denistria, a breakaway sliver of Moldovan territory. In February 2022, the DailyStormer site was moved to a different domain name, DailyStormer.name, apparently in an attempt to better cloak its connection to Russia. The timing of this suggests that it was coordinated with other measures Russia was taking in the build-up to the attack on Ukraine. Since the invasion began, Anglin has boasted that his strongly pro-Kremlin takes are being recycled in the mainstream media by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard. Okay, let's get a little something here from Edward Dutton on Copium. You cope with your place in life by feeling that you have some gnosis about the nature of the world and therefore you rightly don't trust anyone in positions of authority. You go from moaning about and taking the cue and whatever and that there's a big pedophile conspiracy to reining it back in a bit and that we're all being lied to about Russia and that probably there's at least Russia is owning the libs and that maybe we're being lied to about Russia and it seems to have flipped over quite nicely. Okay, so Gay's shift toward Republicans says Richard Hanina as being a flamboyant liberal becomes cliche and they maintain the same need for attention. So you have two options you can keep voting blue and we can keep going straight to hell. We can go straight to hell Joe Biden full speed ahead to the gate gates to hell and saying hey we're going to fix the country and and we're all tapping on his shoulder going no this is the way to hell I'm pretty sure you need to make a U turn up there and he's like no if we if I just speed up a little we'll get there before too. You can keep going that direction or you can vote red. Okay so we're talking about the elements of charismatic leadership. Mutual focus and shared emotion feed back into each other. The group falls into a collective rhythm. When rhythmic entrainment builds up it is the most engrossing thing in human experience literally the high point in people's lives. One sees this in the most famous style of charismatic leader like Martin Luther King making a speech to a crowd that it operates on a smaller scale too. Successful rituals where the focus and the emotion are strong enough generate feelings of group solidarity and emotional energy in the individual. Failed emotions negate all these various points. Lack of a mutual focus. Lack of shared emotion. The result people are out of sync it's the result of that no emotional energy and the experience is energy draining rather than energy gaining. Go back and look at how Steve Jobs energized his group. He starts with the emotion of shock his obscene over-the-top insults get everyone's attention but he's not insulting them just for the sake of showing who's boss. He goads them into reacting with strong emotions. Anger is good at raising the intensity level but he keeps it focused on the problem. How are we going to make this perfect breakthrough computer design? Eventually they settle down into high solidarity working on the task. At the end he refocuses attention and tells them how great they're going to be. They feel like they've been in a time warp when they've been in one of Steve's visits. He energizes the group by transforming emotions. Okay so talking about the importance of emotional energy and this is from the Randall Collins book Interaction Ritual Chains. Eminent thinkers or eminent live streamers, eminent radio personalities, TV personalities or energy stars. They are highly productive turning out large amounts of published work only some small portion of which becomes famous. They work extremely long hours. They're obsessed with their work. Their thinking is energizing for them as they are magnetically drawn along by their chains of thought. At the peak of momentum in these spells of thinking, which often take the form of writing or live streaming, ideas come into their heads. They report it's like taking dictation. So this pattern is found among those who are most magnetized by their work and it gives credence to the whole notion of inspiration. It's the creative thinker as a genius uniquely in touch with a creative flow from some higher region. Wow, I managed to go an hour of my show and my microphone hasn't cut out once. I made some settings adjustments. I googled the problem and it looks like I've fixed the problem. Another big news. I'll say goodbye to my plastic water bottle. I bought a half gallon regular water bottle. So refreshing. Okay, so there are particular locations in intellectual networks where a few individuals become highly focused, highly energized, put together streams of symbols in new ways. These symbols do indeed come from the outside, not from a mysterious realm of creative spirit, but from the dynamics of the intellectual community that's internalizing the person's mind and is now on their way to being externalized again. So not all creative individuals have the same flamboyance or the same publicity focused upon their private behavior, but they all have relatively high degrees of emotional energy concentrated in their work. So the eminent teacher is impressive because he transmits this attitude, this intense focus upon intellectual symbols as important above all else. There's magnetically enthralling and energizing for those who come into their orbit. So intellectuals at the core of networks have an intuitive immediate sense of who lines up with and against whom on what issues their thinking covers ground swiftly. Unlike marginal intellectuals, there is no need to spell things out. They know what arguments follow from what concepts ranging ahead. They have a sense of what arguments can be further constructed, what directions can be opened up, what applications can be made. The symbols that make up the content of their thinking are loaded with emotional energy. They represent not just the object of reference, but the activity of thinking and talking that goes on in intellectual groups. So when there's a social, political, cultural, religious movement comes along and energizes you. This is what we're talking about whether it's say the alt-right or some new form of acidic Judaism or social justice movement when ideas start capturing your thinking and then provide emotional energy for you. So now you have for the core intellectual in the vortex of creative thinking, the symbols flow rapidly together into new combinations or oppositions zipped by magnetic attraction and repulsion. So Elliot Blatt, you're still in the chat. Why are you still here, bro? Oh, I called back because I had something to say. Go ahead. Sorry for the redox, but you mentioned Steve Jobs because I just recently had a conversation with a woman I work with and she used to work at a company and she interacted with Steve Jobs and she had some interesting insights to say about Steve Jobs. One is that everybody lived in fear of Steve Jobs. He was a complete, he was not a nice man and if he asked you what you did and you gave him your job title, he would freak out on you. He would just tear you a new one. He expected you to say literally what you were doing and not give him a bunch of titles. So this was something known about him. He had a very abrasive manner which led me to think that you can go through life and you can be funny and likable or you can be respected. So you can't do both. Well, the leader of Ukraine was a comic and he became president of Ukraine and he's being both funny, likable and now he's respected. Well, I think there's a certain artificial dimension to his respect. But anyway, I didn't need to call in for a long time. I just think it's a dichotomy that I've been thinking about, because I think people generally find me funny and likable, but I think people don't also respect me. Oh, is this, could this be applied to you, Luke? Yes, yes. A lot of people found me funny and likable, but not necessarily worthy of respect. Food for thought, bro. All right, later. Blessings. Okay, thank you, Elliot. Back to this Randall Collins book on intellectual energy. So intellectuals at the core of intellectual networks have an intuitive immediate sense of who lines up with whom and on what issues. So the role of the thinker is to concentrate his followers at one focus of attention in his consciousness and to set their flow of thinking in motion. But the law of small numbers shows another reason why network position is crucial in launching a star intellectual career. What one picks up from the eminent teacher beside his emotional energy and stock of symbols is a demonstration of how to operate in the intellectual field of oppositions. So each person's career trajectory consists in coming to grips with the recognition of what one's opportunities are in the intellectual field, each experiences in their own way, an impersonal sorting process going on around them. Some decide to become followers of an existing position. They become retailers of some other theorist ideas to a peripheral audience of students or textbook readers, rich representatives out in the intellectual provinces away from the hot center where the ideas were formulated, like followers of Parisian ideas in American literature departments. Another way to make your career as a follower is as a specialist applying theories and techniques to particular problems, especially on the empirical side. These moves create smaller attention spaces with their own jockeying for positions of leadership governed by their own local law of small numbers. Others stay the course of their youthful ambitions modeled directly upon their star teachers. So careers eventually pass through a tipping point. Humulative advantage goes to those who find a vacant niche in the attention space, one of the slots available. Their ideas receive attention from the field giving them still more emotional energy, more motivation, more capacity for obsessive work, more speed, developing the possibilities for expanding their ideas at the forefront of current debate. On the other side of the tipping point are those intellectuals in the process of being squeezed out. Their work though initially promising meets little recognition, thus sinking their emotional energy. They experience lessening confidence, less energy for performing sustained hard work. They become more alienated, less oriented toward the scene of current action. They become liable to extraneous problems. It becomes susceptible to being knocked off their career trajectory and bad things happen to them. And they become makers of excuses and embittered carpers. So the micro processes feeding back and forth between intellectual networks and individuals thinking accumulative, both in positive and negative directions. What kind of thinking one does depends on one's location in the network, both at the beginning of a career and as the career develops. So there is a whole sociology of unsuccessful thinking. And Randall Collins writes, like their white counterparts, black working class men appear to be creating an ideology that reflects not so much the actual patterns of their own behavior, but a favorable view of themselves in the light of the perceived faults of the outsiders. Where there is a repeated round of formal, highly focused ritual occasions such as weddings, dinners, festivals involving the same people, status group boundaries are strong. Who is included and who is excluded from membership is clear to everyone inside and outside the status group. So you have the 400 meeting to die in a dance in the ballrooms, the most luxurious hotel in New York City. And crowds of the non elite classes line the sidewalks to watch them enter an exit. So the status group boundary and its ranking system were widely public. So status here has a thing like quality. Following the principle, the more ceremonial, more public, the ritual enactment, the more real and explicit the social membership category. Conversely, the less scripted advanced scheduled and widely announced social gathering, more invisible the social boundaries. So formal rituals generate categorical identities. Informal rituals generate merely personal reputations. You don't have a lot of highly formalized occasions in the United States anymore to explicitly demarcate status. Switch now to another charismatic leader, Napoleon Bonaparte. He epitomizes another facet of charisma, that they're tremendous energy. Look at his daily routine. Napoleon got by on four or five hours of sleep working 12 to 14 hours every day at a stretch plus a couple of hours when he got up to work in the small hours of the night. He spent no more than 15 minutes at meals and was bored with formalities and polite chit chat. What energized him was his work. He read reports, sent orders, met with one department after another. He could rapidly sum up each topic, amazing his staff with his memory and grasp of issues, then shift gears to a new delegation. He was famously calm. He used to say he was made out of bronze, listening carefully to what others said, hearing bad news as well as good. When he was with his army in the field, he slept even less 15 minutes, snatches here and there before battle. He was up all night preparing battle plans, looking into everything while his soldiers slept. How did he do it? Napoleon got an extremely high level of emotional energy from his daily interactions. The incessant round of meetings did not worry him out because they were international successes. Energy gainers, not energy drainers. It helped that he was on a roll at France too. His army was pumped up by an almost unbroken series of successes. In every arena, he and his team were carrying out major reforms. They felt they were doing something heroic. Right. They felt like they were changing the world. That was a tremendous source of energy. Speaking in social class, you've got an energized upper class lauding it over a depressed lower class with a moderately energized middle class in between. The winning generals are usually the most energetic ones. The richest financiers in the specialized realm of intellectual domination, the stars of world science, philosophy, and literature are energy stars. The most successful people are the most energetic and charismatic, giving energy to others. People with low amounts of emotional energy tend to be impressed by those who have a lot of emotional energy. People with a lot of emotional energy have an emotional energy halo that makes them easy to admire. These are people who get things done. They have an aura of success surrounding them. Since having high emotional energy allows one to focus your attention, one can get a certain amount of rise in one's own emotional energy by following them. You can become part of their entourage, take orders from them, or even view them from afar. High emotional energy gives dominant persons a kind of micro-situational legitimacy when you are giving other people energy by being around them. You are charismatic. You'll notice emotional energy in thinking. Your thinking will tend to be smooth. When you're filled with emotional energy, your thinking will tend to be smooth. Your posture will tend to be upright. Your voice will tend to be calm. When I listen to a 12-step phone meeting, I can usually tell within a few seconds the level of somebody's recovery because it expresses so much in their voice. When people are dominated by negative emotions, they tend to be drooping, to be depressed, and to have very low amounts of emotional energy. Let's have a listen to Richard Spencer here talking about his experiences going on Russia today. Many times I was invited to go on RT. They had a number of different producers that I would speak to, usually Russian names, Russian speakers. They'd talk to me in English. Every time I went on, I think, well, most every time that I went on, it was about some American foreign policy adventure. They would bring me on to bash American foreign policy about Obama's Libya. I would say the Obama-Hillary Clinton-Libya campaign about the Iraq war fallout, et cetera. An issue in the Obama era was the Syria, the second term, these red lines, what you should do. I never went on there and spoke about a lot of the things that I was writing about on alternativewrite.com or Radix. I imagined that the producers knew about the fact that it was radical. If I would go on, I could probably easily be mistaken for a leftist in the sense that I was speaking out against the American Empire and its foreign policy blunders. You have to also think through this. I don't disagree with any of the opinions that I had about those conflicts. I think that I was right and I think my instincts were good. It's very hard to find someone who thinks that the Iraq war was a good idea. The Afghanistan war is almost schizophrenic where most everyone wanted to get out, promised to get out, and then once we get out, everyone, you know, oh my God, how could we have pulled out? Or at the very least, it was incompetent to pull out. It makes no sense. I think I was right on all those things, but I wonder the degree to which I was being used by Russia in the sense that not that my opinions were wrong, but that they saw a kind of advantage in promoting alternative voices that they viewed as effectively pro-Russia. That if you're demoralizing America and you're demoralizing NATO, you are effectively demoralizing Russia's perceived geopolitical enemy. Again, it's a tricky issue. As you can tell, I'm very ambivalent about this issue, but I also noticed that Russia today issued a missive, or they probably issued, I think they issued it yesterday, basically saying, kind of denouncing all of these dissident right Putin fanboys who are talking about Russia striking out against the gay empire or whatever, and basically saying, we don't care about you. You're harming us, in fact, is what the missive said. We are not actually fighting for white Christian. Quite Christendom. We're not fighting for what you think we're fighting for. We don't like you, and I think that was, in a way, a very honest statement by Russia today, which is obviously a Kremlin organization to the extent that it still exists. They ultimately don't care about anything that I care about. They don't, I want the West to be strong. I want the West to be revived. That's the last thing in the world the Kremlin wants. The Kremlin might find me useful in the sense that I have strong opinions on American foreign policy that they could view as just generally demoralizing. When I look back at it, I do have a great deal of ambivalence. I don't like being used. I don't like being played. I don't like being a pawn at someone else's game. To a very large degree, I think that's what it's about. It's not only me. The degree to which Russia has been promoting a cut to a certain degree of mainstream strategy and to a certain degree an alternative strategy. During the alt-right heyday, you could find Alexander Dugan publishing on his website tons of pieces that are pro-alt-right. This is the greatest thing. It's a way of the future pro-Trump. What did they really want from all that? Were they enticed by Trump's calls to end NATO or at least demoralize NATO? Why are we protecting these Germans? They should pay up. Basically not seeing NATO as a really important alliance, a force that is directed against Russia, protecting Europe from Russia. Did they like that? Did they just like the Trump movement because it just spread chaos in the West? When I look at a lot of Dugan's what he supports later, I generally think that anything wild and chaotic he signs off on. The Trump movement, 2016, the alt-right in 2017, the stop, the steal, truckers going in and shutting down Canada for a few weeks, just anything that generates chaos. Now that's not to say that there isn't some sincerity in each of those things that I described. I don't necessarily support some of those things, I guess, but I'm just saying I do think that there are people in those movement, in each of those movements, including myself in regard to the alt-right, who are sincere and who genuinely do want a revival of the West. But that is not how the Kremlin and Kremlin-connected people like Dugan view it. They view it as a way of spreading chaos in the West. And when you look at their ultimate actions, I mean, at this point, it's indefensible to support the invasion of Ukraine. I would never do it. I don't think anyone can really do it. And so what we're left with in the wake of all of this outreach to various right-wing movements, remember, $12 million loan from a mysterious Russian bank to the Frull National, I mean, I could go on. There are the whole entire alt-right these people, Psobiak, etc. It is very curious how much just kind of disinformation that ultimately kind of goes back to supporting a Russian aim, these guys are promoting. So they were deep into it. And I feel like at the end of the day, the dissonant right, which is kind of like the bastard child of the alt-right, or the dregs of the alt-right, they're just kind of left basically passively aggressively being pro-Russian Stooges. I noticed one, when I was financing a Twitter earlier today, I noticed this one meme of there is a report on a Ukrainian refugee woman who, and I believe she fled to Germany, might be Poland, I might be wrong. But she was ultimately raped by Muslims in some kind of refugee camp. Now, that is a terrible situation. Yeah, sure, on some level, it's just a consequence of the 2015 refugee crisis. And it should be talked about with seriousness. I can't imagine someone would wish that upon a woman. But I actually did get the impression that the dissonant right wished that upon her. There was a kind of shod in Freud or a cackling about, oh, look, you're now enriched by NATO, i.e., you're raped by a Syrian refugee or whatever exactly happened. This kind of shod in Freud about something like this, that I just find really repulsive. And the people did this, I noticed it on Darren Beatty's account, because someone sent me something, he was tweeting about me a little bit. What kind of sick freak thinks that that's funny? And why do you think she ended up in a refugee camp where she was unfortunately raped? Why do you think that happened? Do you think she wanted to go to the bright lights big city of Frankfurt or whatever? Or do you think that she fled a country that was being invaded and bombed by Russians? I mean, I look at this stuff and I cannot take any of them seriously. And I also just think that the amount of just bad character among the dissonant right is extreme. So why are Israelis more energized than, say, your typical American Jew? I think it's because they have much more cohesiveness. I'm looking at an article that just came out in the Miami Herald. It says, Israel ranks among the top 10 of the world's happiest countries. So after the Scandinavian countries, then comes Israel. And number one, the student machine characteristic in happy countries is very strong social network with their support from family and friends. Their friendship doubles joy and cuts grief in half. Also being in a country that is often attacked by its neighbors and the people have been victims of persecution for thousands of years gives many Israelis a sense of mutual reliance and social solidarity. So in times of war, in tough times, people get together and support each other. And then there's the Israeli army service, which is mandatory for young men and women that helps unite Israelis with recent immigrants, gives many a sense of purpose. You also see it among those working in Israel's thriving technology sector. It's not just about relationships, it's about an overarching sense of meaning and purpose. So social cohesion, meaning, purpose, these are crucial to producing happiness. So when I was in Australia, I was more energized than here in Los Angeles. Why? Because it's more social cohesion, social connection is easier. And you walk down the street, you have more friendly interactions with people, and that's a tremendous source of energy. So Richard Spencer has done a recording on why he was, he was wrong about NATO and wrong about Putin, and some interesting stuff here. So let me, let me play next up. This rock on me at this point, I'll keep going. You can finish your point. And then I, I used to-arianism. Or it may be this kind of idea that Putin is a strong leader, and it would be nice if Western people had a strong leader who wasn't trying to sort of undermine them, and maybe that could be Putin. But that's sort of not, that's not who he is. He's, he's a Russian mafioso who has like an oil fortune. He's, he's not, he's not, quote unquote, our guy. I mean, it's a difficult one because, you know, the district of right doesn't like the current Western power centers. And I think for good reasons. And so they see like somebody who's opposing that, and they're like, well, you know, we need, we want anything other than this, and this is anything. So we'll take it. Yeah. I think that is a lot about it. But, you know, it's, it's one thing to kind of say that on Twitter. Like, you know, I've heard, I've heard this joke for like a decade now. It's like, what would you do if Red Dawn happened if like the Russians invaded, you know, America, and it's like, it'd be like, we're liberated. Like, you know, we'll, they'll be greeted as liberators. You know, and it's, it's, look, it's fine to tell you, to tell that joke, you know, but when you start to believe it, and when that, that is your mindset in a geopolitical struggle, you are a traitor. You are not the person we need on the team. And you can't undermine a country that is engaged in a serious geopolitical confrontation. You cannot undermine it. And so I don't know. I mean, I guess I just, it's like, I was, you know, for most of my twenties and thirties, I was effectively anti-war. I saw everything happening in the U.S. And it was just like, this is awful. This is a wrong decision. It's for the wrong reasons, etc. But I, I'm not like, it's just my instinct. I can't really, I understand when something is, is under threat. And I understand when there's a struggle going on. And I live here. And I'm not a traitor. And I'm not a subversive. And it's just who I am at heart. I think with a lot of the malcontents, I don't think you can say that. They are people who do not demonstrate any sort of loyalty. And I think there is a deep nihilistic streak. And, you know, I remember I was in this one chat, these people were like complaining about inflation and stuff like that. And then they were like, then in the next message, they were like, isn't this great that Bhutan's, you know, bombing global homo, ha ha ha. And it's like, you're complaining about, like, you know, a bad, but minor thing, like paying more of the pump. What do you think is going to happen if NATO and the American sphere starts collapsing? You think you're going to be paying more of the pump? You think you might have some financial difficulties? So that's how I mean, I just, I just see these people, it's just like they're, they've lost touch with reality. They live in an internet realm. And you're up against like a couple of bad actors. Richard, next winter, how I returned to a lot of end of the day, they're all mine. And I'm not going to erase a single one of them. And I will admit that that was the direction that I was thinking at that time. There was a lot of, I was, there was a lot of noise about, and this is why I on some level understand the dissident rights position today, although I do strongly disagree with it. And I think that taking it at this point in time, when there is a full on invasion, and just terrible suffering, I think it is unthinkable to be taking these positions. This war is indefensible. And yeah, we can have a long conversation about NATO expansion and provocation, totally legitimate conversation. We can have a conversation about how the West could have nipped us in the bud and solved the problem earlier. That's also a highly legitimate conversation. I might agree with many people who are sympathetic towards Russia in the sense, and in terms of the things that NATO or the United States could have done. But that is water under the bridge at this point. And if you are actively defending this war, you are putting yourself on a side for no reason that I can see. You are putting yourself on the wrong side of something, and you cannot get out of that. And to just jump on this bandwagon when it doesn't, you know, Russia's military strategy in Ukraine does not seem to be an essential matter for any of these people, you know, Americans and the dissonant right or whatever. The fact that you would go all in on this issue, and you can never get all out, you have made your bed and you're going to have to lie in it. It is indefensible. And from my perspective, unthinkable. And you are at the end of the day, you have jumped on the wrong side of a situation in terms of a geopolitical struggle that involves the country in which you live. And again, there's a word for that. And that word is traitor. I've said this. I've said this numerous times. I've said this to people privately. I've said this to people publicly. You know, take it or leave it. It's just my advice. But I am right on this. I, you know, I'll go back a little bit to my thinking on these matters. So as many of you know, I was born in 1978. I came, you know, as a child during the Cold War in the 80s. I was a young person in the 90s, post Cold War, kind of the end of history decade. We didn't know what was going to happen. NATO was used in humanitarian interventions that I imagine if I were older, I would have opposed. I didn't really oppose them when I was a freshman in college or whenever. And then I kind of became a young man in the 2000s when I was, you know, developing a political consciousness when I was engaged in the political scene to a very small degree, but still engaged in it. Let me pass forward here. You can agree with that, whether you, and we're guided by neoconservatives, we're guided by humanitarian interventionists who want to, you know, intervene everywhere and save the world, the kind of Samantha Power type, or, you know, or the harder strategic humanitarian interventionists like Kraut Hammer, Wolfowitz, who want to, you know, engage in preemptive regime change in nations that are oil rich and affect Israel. It seemed to be all part of the same fundamental problem. NATO was adrift. After all, Russia, you know, went through a lot of hard transitionary times in the 1990s, but, you know, why would we want to oppose Russia? Russia is our friend, as it were. And there's no reason to jump on Putin's back, because he isn't a consistent liberal. Now, I would add something here. As legend has it, and I think this is probably true or very close to the truth, Putin was the first leader to phone George W. Bush after the 9-11 strike. Bush went to Russia, he looked into Putin's heart or something like that, and he found someone he could work with in America's adventures abroad. But that was my conception. Now, when I was in college and just doing reading on my own and to a degree in graduate school, I mostly studied European Intellectual History and Graduate School, but I also studied the Cold War. I was very interested in NATO. And I understood NATO as using the term, you know, gross realm, you could say, or sphere of influence. And I understood that it was an American sphere of influence. And first, and in a Western European sphere of influence, second, but I did find that it was necessary. And I didn't agree with every opinion or every action rather taken by NATO, but I did understand it. And I understood it as a necessary, absolutely necessary, existentially necessary counter sphere to the Soviet sphere. Now, immediately after the war, Stalin believed that, you know, well, we did most of the fighting and dying in the Second World War. Yeah, sure, we promised free and fair elections, but no one really thought that was going to happen. And Stalin believed that the capitalist powers in his mind were so selfish and lacking in vision that they turn against each other and that hard times were imminent for Britain and other countries. And so soon they would have socialist and maybe even communist governments and that sooner or later they'd kind of roll on it. Well, that never happened. And we went to a period not of a battle of small nation states, but a battle of a bifurcated world, a battle of two large spheres of influence. And however much we might say that, you know, America and capitalism and the West is kind of nihilistic and all that kind of stuff. The fact is, those two spheres of influence were not created equal. Very few people, maybe no people, jumped over the Berlin Wall to get into East Germany. And we really need to be honest about that. However critical we might want to be about the West, and I think a lot of it is warranted, that was a fact. And it wasn't a perfect system. While some conservatives would say things like better dead or red or we went to roll back the Soviet Union, etc., what happened, certainly under the influence of Kennan, the Mr. X paper, or the long telegram, was a containment strategy. That is to say, there was a lot of stability. And in these gross round, these great sphere game that was being played, it wasn't a matter of lots of different nation states battling each other and playing this game of chess. If either of these spheres ever directly attacked one another, then yes, we could, we should worry about nuclear annihilation. And so there was a brewing conflict, but that conflict was ultimately the source of stability. And I know that, you know, however much you want to criticize the United States, that Western and Central Europeans were deeply grateful that they lived in that sphere of influence. And that was my perception of NATO when I was in my 20s and such. Now, the world had moved on. I felt that a neocold war was unimaginable. Barack Obama agreed with me when Mitt Romney said that Russia is our greatest strategic enemy. Barack Obama in a debate in 2012, Barack Obama effectively said, okay, boomer, the cold war is over, we need to move on. Barack Obama looking back at him often seems like a rather reserved, restrained, Republican foreign policy leader. His interventions alongside Hillary Clinton and his first term aside, that is how he looks now. He didn't go into Syria even after a red line, quote unquote, was crossed. He showed a lot of restraint towards Russia. He did not try to engage in this level of sanctions after the 2014 Maidan crisis and the taking of Crimea and the kind of secession slash civil war, which was really terrible in the Donbass region. He was restrained in all of these things. Nothing happened in Georgia as well during the 2008 crisis. Well, we are in a different world now. This has been brewing. And I was talking with some friends last night. And I think with the cold war, there's a lot of a good comparison could be made with the first two world wars in the sense that no one was predicting war in 1913 on the eve of it. People were actually predicting lasting peace. Well, one thing led to another. Wheels started turning and there was a continental wide war that was absolutely destructive. We had to wait between 1919 and 1939. We had to wait a generation. And then the actors, although the actors were transformed, their abdications of the ruling royal families. But in the case of Germany and Russia, most prominently, but we, in a way, had a reiteration of that conflict with some differences, of course, Italy being one. I think we might be seeing a similar situation where this 30-year cold war period is a kind of interregnum, the interwar years, this period of American unipolar dominance. When the American military was going to be used for humanitarian interventions and the Balkans for regime change in the Middle East, all of it goes poorly. And we, in a way, don't know what to do with ourselves. And we are now back in a state of a cold war. These sanctions that we're seeing, they are not sanctions. I don't think we should even be using that word anymore. There is a bifurcated world and we are back in it. We have re-entered the 20th century. You live in a sphere of influence and at some point you need to take a side. All of the kind of romantic dreams which I shared to a degree about, you know, oh, Putin, what a great guy, what a badass, what a traditionalist. That is over now. You cannot plausibly say that for one thing. And for another, you are a traitor to your country if you are saying that. And I will not say that. I cannot say that anymore. So I do have a right to evolve, first off. I have changed my mind about certain things. And, you know, look, yeah, sure, if someone is floating this way and that every two weeks they have a new opinion, it's like a fashion, sure, they can be criticized. If someone evolves, because time evolves changes, because the phenomena changes, because you have new information to process, that's a good thing. I remember hearing some Christian fundamentalists who said you should have an open mind but not too open so your brain doesn't fall out. I thought that was pretty funny, actually. I think that's the right balance. You need to have an open mind but not too open so that you're floating this way and that. Your brain is spilled out in the floor. But you do need to have an open mind. You do need to be able to change. And you do need to make decisions that aren't merely the product of who likes what. So, Biden doesn't like Putin. Therefore, I like Putin. Oh, Marco Rubio, he's calling for a no fly zone. So I hate the no fly zone. You know, this is just hyper polarized, hyper partisan, bullshit. Again, I think the alt-right or the dissident right, whatever, they learned that lesson really well because they felt that during the campaign of 2016 that they were really doing something. That just being like jumping in, being a contrarian to the liberals, pushing agenda, et cetera, that was actually helping out, helping Trump win. It was having an effect anonymously on the world. And I actually agree with them. I think they did. I think the alt-right had a huge effect in the election of Trump. I think it might very well have been decisive or indispensable in getting Trump elected. But you can learn that lesson and then never learn another lesson. And keep doing that over and over and over again until the point that it just becomes pathetic and you're sharing, you know, dark MAGA memes pretending that we didn't live through the Trump presidency. I also want to mention this. I think that the love that the right has for Vladimir Putin is an unrequited love. And what I mean by that is that I, when I would say pro-Russia stuff, when I would, you know, talk with, you know, hobnob with people like Manuel Oxenreiter, et cetera, who are, to be frank, he's dead now, a pro-Russian asset, a spy, if you will. When I was doing that, I had all the best wishes in the world for Russia. I understand that I am not living there. I understand that I'm not Russian. But I also thought of Russia as part of the broader European family, different, of course, but I had all the best wishes in the world. Vladimir Putin has never had all the best wishes in the world for the West. Vladimir Putin likes division. Vladimir Putin likes the culture war. Vladimir Putin likes anything that will weaken NATO. He likes Brexit. He likes secession movements. He likes January 6th. He likes endless bitterness in culture wars and polarization. He loves that shit. Because that means he, unlike me and unlike the West, still thinks in a gross realm, sphere of influence, wet. And anything that weakens the West is good. It could be the alt-right. It could be Brexit. It could be January 6th. It could be the anti-war left. It could be the anti-woke left. It could be the anti-war right. Whatever it is, anything that is demoralizing is good. I would never in the world think about attempting to demoralize Russians. I would want to promote things that are positive for Russians because I have no ill will towards any Russian. That is not how Putin thinks. And so we have witnessed a kind of like transatlantic brainwashing strategy on behalf of the Kremlin in which they have taken pre-existing biases and twisted them into things that are effectively pro-Russia and anti-NATO. And I'll just give you an example. I'll give you a few examples. The first one was something that got a lot of play on Twitter a few days ago. It was Candicellans. And she said a few things to the effect that, well, Ukraine is not a real country. Ukraine was invented by the Soviet Union and just became a country in the 1990s. I mean, give me a break. Putin, when he's invading Ukraine, he's just invading Russia. You can't invade your own country. That type of thinking. I said many of those same words. I mean, I think Nietzsche said somewhere, I think it might have been the joyful science. He said, you know, when I hear my own words in someone else's mouth, I start to question them. I'm kind of like that. When I hear means that I was saying in 2014, now in the mouth of someone as just toxic and dumb as Candicellans, I begin to question myself. Who was feeding me those lines? Why was I ever saying something that Candicellans would agree with? Probably because I was getting fed those lines. And I'm not going to be anyone's puppet. And if I think that I am acting in that way, I will stop. And I will, in fact, furiously take the other side because I'm no one's fool. The other thing that I noticed was a tweet by Marjorie Taylor Green in which she said, ah, you know, Joe Biden, this embarrassing president, not my president. He's supporting Nazis in Ukraine. He calls conservatives Nazis, but now he's the one funding them over in Ukraine. Now, where's an opinion like that coming from? First off, there's, of course, a kernel of truth to it as off battalion. Now, I could, I think we should take a very, we should have a nuanced take on as off battalion. They could be described as Nazis. They could be described as white nationalists. They could be described as skinheads or a biker gang. They're rough and tumble people. You could also offer a more chertable view of them that they see the Maidan not just as an episode of Ukrainian nationalism, but actually as an episode of a European awakening. And they, in fact, wanted a Maidan in Russia as well. That is a Russian awakening to its European-ness, anti-Putin. They also, have no doubt, are funded by oligarchs. They're funded by their, you know, padded on the back by the Lindsey Graham and John McCain and so on. So, I mean, I think our view of them should be nuanced. It's gray. It's not that they're evil Nazis that we're funding for no reason. So, what basically this kind of propaganda takes a pre-existing notion. That is, Marjorie Taylor Green, first off, is an idiot, so can be manipulated. And Marjorie Taylor Green hates Joe Biden. Marjorie Taylor Green also gets called a Nazi or a white nationalist or a racist or whatever. So, she wants to throw that back in Joe Biden's face. Isn't it remarkable that Marjorie Taylor Green is offering the same justification for the invasion of Ukraine that Putin is? Isn't that remarkable that she is spreading Russian propaganda? Now, she's not literally brainwashed in like a Manchurian candidate sense, of course. It's subtle, but it is happening. Just because something might be true doesn't mean that it is not propaganda. I mean, I'm reminded of a famous Lacan statement of, you know, the guy who's obsessed with the notion that his wife is committing adultery. Even if it were true that she's left with another man, it doesn't lessen the pathological nature of his jealousy. So, even if it's true that as a battalion is, on some level, a bunch of Nazis, doesn't mean that what Marjorie Taylor Green is doing is not propaganda. And it is. She has been brainwashed in this very subtle way of brainwashing that we've experienced throughout the Trump era and with things like QAnon, etc. And she is, at the end of the day, a traitor. An unwitting one and an unintended one, but a traitor nonetheless. I am not a traitor. I also have a right to evolve in my opinion. I'm also not a fool. So, all of these notions of, you know, I just come out with these opinions to shock people or I just want to do the opposite of the dissonant right to differentiate myself, blah, blah, blah. Well, I do, you know, to be over, to be fair, maybe overly fair, I do want to kind of trigger people a little bit. I do want to provoke them. Sure. That isn't the fundamental reason why I take these opinions. The fundamental reason, of course, is that I live here. I live in this sphere of influence called NATO. And I'm not going to betray my own country. Second reason is that the invasion of Ukraine is indefensible. And I will not do, I do not, I'm associated with enough bad stuff as it is. I don't want to be associated with the bombing of a maternity ward. And the third reason is that I'm no one's fool. Okay. There it is. It was basically what I was suggesting with the type of no-fly zone. It's saying that, you know, no more, you know, America, it's like, it'd be like, okay, let me, let me get back to a little, I am a bit more here from Richard. Congress members, and my lieutenant governor, Nick Gitchin, covering for him and pretending not to know him when they're taking selfies with him and attending his F pack. Yeah. And the other one, I don't know like how big this crowd is, but Michael Panovich is a national justice party. I was reading about a guy in Charles 1000 or I think his name is in 2014, he emigrated to he was an immigrant or an ex patriot in Russia and launched Russia insider, like a website that's pro Kremlin. And this guy owns a barn in Lancaster Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. And that barn was the site for the inaugural opening ceremony of the National Justice Party on August 15, 2020. Yeah. Charles Valsman's a ruption agent, or he wants to be one. It's one of those two, because there's been evidence that he's sought out support from oligarchs and so on. I've met Charles Valsman on a number of occasions. Yeah, I have again, I've rubbed shoulders with people who were absolutely Russian agents and who cheered me on. But at the end of the day, never really saw me as what they wanted. And I think I know this is a bit self serving or puffing up, but I think they kind of realized who I am. I'm not going to dance to their tune. And I am not going to dedicate my energies towards, you know, the wishes of a foreign power. But yeah, Charles Valsman is actually absolutely a bad actor. He is from what I understand he fled the United States after January 6, but he was pumping all of that stuff up. He was writing these posts about how after January 6, the American people have awoken and they want the kind of Russian orthodoxy and traditionalism and will never go back. And he was just saying all of this stuff. All that means is that America is at the worst kind of weakened and chaotic and so NATO is going to collapse or you could even say that he's saying that they're they're now. So Richard Spencer's ex-wife, Nina, she has a YouTube channel devoted to toxic narcissism. Hey guys, my name is Nina. Welcome to my channel inside the mind of a human predator. I felt compelled to make a video about trolling. First, it is something that affects a lot of people on social media, regardless of their status, whether they're just a private individual with occasionally public content or whether they are a public figure with a large following. Second, it is something that is somewhat more nuanced and at times less obvious than what people perceive it to be. And third, of course, it pertains to maladaptive personalities, which is one of the focal points of this channel. Before I get into it, I have to apologize. I'm sitting on the floor. My hair is almost up from hiking today. It's getting late. I have to work soon. Unfortunately, this is the only time that I could film. So please bear with me. So let's break this video down as follows. First, let's define what trolling is. Second, let's look at some examples. Third, let's look at the personality types that engage in trolling. And fourth, let's look at the ways in which we can protect ourselves. So what is trolling? Well, in my opinion, trolling is a systematic pattern of behavior coming from usually anonymous accounts on Okay, let's get back to Richard here. Pro Russia. So he says in this space that much of his pro-Russia orientation was because he was married to a pro-Putin woman, Nina Kuprianova. And that she wrote many of the pro-Putin pro-Russia tweets that were on his account. And that anything can be done. Russia can expand its sphere. Russia can consolidate, etc. It's all bad. And it's all traitorous. Again, Manuel Oxenreiter did half a dozen podcasts with him. He was engaged in terrorism in Ukraine. He's now dead under mysterious circumstances. He died in Moscow, by the way. He's my age. He died of heart attack. Make of that what you will. Kind of sounds like I was rubbing shoulders with traitors. Manuel Oxenreiter was a German citizen. And he absolutely betrayed his country. He was a Russian asset. One thing about NATO that I think maybe would make it more aggressive or tougher that I think they should do is they keep saying they don't want to play Putin's game because he has nukes in Social Security. He has the most nukes. Well, I've heard so many different theories on how to create peace or to appease him or to like make some sort of deal. I don't think he's that type of person. But if I was in... Okay, Richard is live here with that, Yes, I've had a productive weekend. I went swimming with my son yesterday. Good. Yes, and... So you carved out a hole in the ice and just... I carved out. It is melting. As you know, I've melted the news of driving. And when I drove back today from a restaurant, I got stuck in the snow that I managed to reverse out and then go in a different way. Well, you've written in a book that's yet to be published about allergies. But my allergies and my son's allergies, both of us had to leave early, very early. But my daughter really got into it. That's very maladaptive until very recently. I mean, society was chock-a-block with horses until about 120 years ago. There's just horses everywhere. I'm a spiteful mutant. Yeah, you know, how you would have coped with the amount of horses that would have been the only form of transport until 150 years ago. So that's not good news. Perhaps it was the hay rather than the horses themselves. You know. That's my sense. But it was quite bad. But yeah, I think we might actually go swimming indoors as well later on this afternoon. So we're going to talk about Ukraine. It's hard to talk about anything else, to be honest. And I think there's actually a lot to say about it, particularly in terms of the right-wing response to Ukraine. And if you want to support the show or get a word in, you can do so at entropy. Now, we will... Okay, let's go back here to Richard talking about how he regrets some of his pro-Russian activism. It's not in the world. And then the next week, these literal, you know, the hours of battalion, well, you know, it's complicated. It's nuanced. Those guys literally nailed a guy. I don't know if you've seen the video. They nailed a guy to a cross literally put nails through my understanding once about Nazism is because it's really... It's a conflict of empires, right? Putin is running an empire or he's trying to. It's not doing very well, but he's trying to run an empire, which is also a diverse empire, right? He's got Muslims on his side. He's got Syrians. And he's also trying to recruit black Africans to go and invade Ukraine. So, you know, the idea perhaps that some people on the right have that Putin is going to be the kind of savior of Western civilization and he's kind of not corrupted. I think this is nonsense. He's just an emperor, you know, of a different empire that has its own military goals and happens to have 7,000 nuclear weapons. And I think that's where this kind of like suddenly the Nazis aren't so bad after all is coming from. It's a clash of empires. Maybe there'll be a little more nuanced about me, huh? No, they won't. Well, we'll be nuanced about that, but Richard did this Roman salute thing once and he's like, definitely, definitely asset. Yeah, Richard's problems don't stand from doing the Roman salute once. Richard's problems come from a whole string of antisocial decisions. Yeah, I get it. I get it. But like even saying, when you say just something like we're living in a clown world, okay, yeah, is there a many kernels of truth to that? Of course there is. But like, we're also living in a real empire that Putin clearly hates and fears. Putin doesn't think that he is in a geopolitical battle with clown world. He thinks that he's in a geopolitical battle with NATO, a giant that's rearming with the European Union, which is very powerful economically. I mean, I think this is where I think like the right wing Twitter sphere just is kind of like a version of this kind of propaganda. It leads people into these like kind of lunatic notions that like, you know, you see a provocative video on Twitter about like gender reassignment surgery and you think that that's like every child is getting mutilated. Right, this widespread notion where we're living in clown world, it's a code for failing to understand and deal with reality. We're not living in clown world. What's happening in the world today is explainable. And it takes a little bit of work, but you can understand and explain what's happening around us. So there's this widespread desire to dismiss reality on much of the distant right by saying things, oh, the West is gay, we're living in clown world. When it's really only a tiny percentage of what's happening that is particularly bewildering. My father had a great comment that problem is not that life doesn't make sense. Problem is that life doesn't make perfect sense. So we're living in clown world is a code for being unable to navigate and understand reality. No, NATO is just a bunch of like, it's just a drag queen show at this point. They don't even have weapons. They just have dildos. Like you start to like fall into this trap where you just get disconnected from reality. And it's like Putin likes that kind of stuff because that makes NATO a joke. It makes people demoralized about it. I have heard so many people effectively argue that when they're arguing against me, all they are effectively saying is that America is gay and NATO is gay. Well, that's not true. NATO commands thousands of nuclear weapons. NATO has a much larger economic base than the Russian zone. Like NATO is a real thing. And it's like, you know, again, the Marjorie Taylor Greene stuff, I get the Yeah, calling science gay, the news gay and NATO is gay and the West is gay. Yeah, a little bit of that is funny. But people have taken many of these distant right memes and jokes and started believing them as a substitute for doing the hard work of understanding reality. And so what starts out as an adaptive cope with a bordering world becomes maladaptive unfairness. I didn't I don't support the truckers. You know, I kind of mean I didn't I didn't really I wasn't rather flamboyant about it. But like I, you know, what are you protesting guys at this point? But I didn't support them. I obviously don't think it's fair to call them Nazis. I mean, that that is totally out of bounds. But like, don't you like that? Don't you think that like, the the the Marjorie Taylor Greene stuff, she's responding to that kind of stuff, while unwittingly promoting Russian propaganda. It's like the way I think about it is this way, like Indiana Jones four. So the most hated Indiana Jones movie, the McGuffin in that film was this alien skull. And into the lock it says I'm much more worried about our ruling elites and whatever Putin is doing or planning in Ukraine. Well, things could change. So what Putin is doing in Ukraine, what does it do to us in America? Well, it raises prices for energy. It fuels inflation. And it also dramatically increases the risk of nuclear war. So yeah, we get a nuclear war out of this, that's going to be more important than drag Queen story hour that could talk to people around the world. And so the Soviet Union could like influence the mind of some housewife in Nebraska with this magical device. That it seems to be I don't know if the filmmakers intended it this way, but it seems to be almost like a metaphor for the internet in the sense that Russian probably they don't have to spend a huge amount of money. They don't have to go and like build Russian cultural institutes in Paris and London and New York or whatever. They in fact can like push and nudge people through the internet into a position they can take pre existing biases and resentments and nudge them into a position in which they are absolutely spreading Russian propaganda. It is in a way the kind of simplest and like low key way of doing it, but it's also in a way the most sophisticated. And it works. It has worked. And to a degree, it worked on me. I mean, I was never a Russian asset in the way that like someone who is an RT employees a clear Russian asset. And you see that from these people, you know, they denied that Putin was going to invade for months. And then once he invades, they're like, this is just about Donbass and the Nazis or whatever. And then they're like, we'll roll, we'll steamroll Western Europe. They say that of course, the three weeks, the same people have said all of those opinions only Washington who once were only this is only about Donbass and the Nazis. And then it's, we're going to crush you. Those people are actual propagandists. And they're also midwits. Because one aspect of recruiting people is there's this, there's the concept of an unrecruitable asset that is someone who thinks for himself or is too outrageous or too uncontrollable. You can't recruit him. You can't control him. Now a midwit like he'll have mouth and you can absolutely control. You can give him talking points and he will talk them. You can change them. And I completely agree with everything Richard's been saying here the last five minutes. He's too stupid to even recognize that it's logically incoherent. He will do it. That's a recruitable asset. An unrecruitable asset is someone who has passion and enthusiasm, intelligence, thumos, etc. And they are going to ultimately, they could turn against you. So like, yeah, you know, you know, I mean, there's Taylor Greene morons across America, this, these, this like lump and bourgeoisie that they have attracted, they are recruitable assets, and they can be brainwashed. Go ahead. Yeah, I was just Putin doesn't want those people to have any power because they could be a threat to him. He Putin also wants these kinds of midwits who will just do, you know, do your bidding. He doesn't want an organic Russian nationalists scene that he doesn't control, which I think is quite interesting from that point of view. Yeah. All right. Why don't you stay on? You can add some more. I've been enjoying your spaces by the way. I appreciate your position. And let's get a little bit here from Richard talking live with my profile, or maybe even I'm going to put a Russian flag in my profile. We all are obsessed about it on social media. We're kind of all conforming in a global way. Whereas, you know, previously you might conform in a pretty local way. You know, I'm a member of this Methodist church or I am wearing the colors of the school football team or what have you. But now we're this hive mind mentality of human beings. We're conforming on a global scale, which is fascinating. Well, yeah, there have been global conformities before on all kinds of things. But yeah, it's very it's been very, very clear over the last 50 years, particularly in social media, that you can globally conform. I mean, come on guys, I'm sure. I'd be my wife having some wine and cheese and cheese without thinking about it. Got a blue plate and a yellow plate. I said, surely you're not going to virtue signal, even with the plates. Then we thought it might be good to make a photograph with us with the plates with the cheese and the biscuits on and say, you know, stand with Ukraine, cheese and wine. So did she do that unconsciously? No, I think it was just that they were the two plates that happened. But she might have done it unconsciously. They're at the top of the pile of plates though. There are no coincidences in this world. It could have. It could have possibly. But it is dominating everything. Well, I thought it was particularly interesting. Did you say to me recently, I think we were corresponding in writing that Joe Biden had removed his pronouns from his Twitter profile. Yes, he has. And so did Kamala Harris, I believe. Right. Well, I think that's very interesting. I agree. Let's talk about that because the idea that this is causing this is causing a pushback on some level, people are realizing that even people in positions of power are realizing that the silliness or it's not silliness because people have lost their lives over and lost their careers over it. But the whatever you want to call it, the degeneracy has gone too far. And while while people while the woke mob are looking the other way and are concentrating on you, let's take it back in a bit and hope nobody notices. Well, this is what I was. Yeah, I mean, I predicted this when the Ukraine invasion began. And I Yes, the world's become a much more serious place since the Ukraine invasion. And the sanctions just happened. Boom. And I don't even think these sanctions should be called sanctions. I mean, I think it's a bifurcated world that a sanction is kind of like when you want to punish some company or try to nudge someone in a different direction. I mean, the sanctions are tremendous. They demonstrated bifurcated world and in many ways, it's even more intense than what we saw once the Cold War got going. I mean, again, I don't support these things. And I think it is going too far. But Gagarin has been his there's some symbolic way in which he's been removed from a US based space agency to obviously rightly congratulate him for for being the first man in space. There are, you know, notices I saw like the Bavarian state opera has removed, maybe it was the Bavarian state symphonies, removed a conductor, Gergiev, I believe is his name, I've known about him for a while, who's a very famous Russian conductor, the Kremko, the Krimadana, the Metropolitan Opera. Other weird rolling it back in other other, let's call it a right wing backlash of a sort are happening concomitantly. So for example, they're speculating on who the next doctor, who is going to be, and it's looking like it might be a man, a white man. Now, what's that? That's insane. It's not allowed to have white men on television. And they're certainly not allowed to be in significant roles that are part of our sort of earth, that's Bible or whatever, that are significant to the culture, but they say it might be Hugh Grant. So that's a bit weird, isn't it? And then there's other things like that as well. There was something that was published today. There was a woman called Helen Morrissey who argued 20 years ago, oh, women can have it all women can be going to have careers and they can have children, they can do it all and they can be happy. And now she's extoriating herself with this Mayor Cooper saying, no, you can't. And you do, you do have to choose between having kids and a family or whatever, or having a career or to say something like that would be unthinkable to 10 years ago. And it's all it's as if it's as you say, the hive mind that there might be, I don't know, I don't want to get too excited about this because I don't want to, but it's there's indications of a turn in the hive mind and that the hive is changing. It's as hives do that, by the way, hives will will notice that a particular queen is not laying as many eggs as she used to or whatever. So they'll eat her and then they'll focus on another queen and then they will they will split up into a new hive and they'll swarm and and and after a new queen and that's what they'll do. So there's a number of things just today in the newspaper. I always look at the mail online because the mail online is the largest website of news in the world and it does America and England and Australia. And a number of things like that going on going on just today. And as I said, very little coverage to this black this female black lesbian march or whatever that's happening in happening in Hackney. Very little coverage to it. Nobody cares about that. Some people saying we might have to have a lockdown and the powers that be asserting that there'll be a riot. It will not be tolerated. No lockdown. That's out. That can't happen. So it's as if we've we've stepped over that. That's that's absolutely not happening. And and and also there's I mean there's the general as well as the anti-Russian thing, you've got the insane pro-Ukraine thing going on. So for example, it's been reported that works by Ukrainian writers. Suddenly they want to translate them. People are fine books written by Ukrainian people. It's just everything's Ukrainian at the moment. People want to they want to learn Ukrainian. People want to absorb Ukrainian-ness because Ukrainian-ness Ukrainian is the new black basically. Yeah. Well, let me I we have three super chats about 25 bucks or so. So that's far from Yehuda Finkelstein. A little bit of pushback against my longtime supporter Yehuda. This one is quite relevant to what you just said. Richard and Ed, you both have stated that woke Tartary will fade with the grim reality of facing down China and Russia. But the West in the Cold War saw increased debauchery and moral degradation. Won't the left continue to move from strength to strength as it did during the Cold War? Can I answer that first? Yeah, you can go first. I think I think that so you did have yeah it's true the Cold War that you really from the early 60s onwards. Yes, you did have this tipping point that was reached and you had this movement towards being increasing. Right, you're taking the Cold War and you're thinking if there's debauchery then that proves that the thesis is wrong. No, you have to compare what would life be like in the West without the Cold War or now without the threat of rising Russia invading Ukraine. Now one's going to argue that a war in Ukraine is just going to completely change western political culture. But the more relevant argument is that it will have some effect which it does seem to be having. The left-wing and individualist and whatever on sexuality, on women's rights, on race, but I think it's perfectly conceivable that it would have been much more dramatic and that there would have been much less pushback against it. Have we not been in a situation of peril? So I think that's the that's I think that that was bubbling under the surface for a very long time even in the 1920s and whatever you had these kinds of people these the Bloomsbury set people like this E. M. Forster who said that if I had to choose between betraying my friend and betraying my country I should hope I betrayed my country. These these these these kinds of even if you go back as far as people like Oscar Wilde and Swinburne and these these kinds of degenerate decadent poets so it was there bubbling under the surface and those tipping point was reached in the sixth way off it goes and it does get quite noticeable but I think that there was there was a lot of pushback against it at the time and it was nothing like as dramatic as it could have been. It was certainly nothing I think like the speed of change that you see once sort of new labor come into power and then you see or even after 2010 and transects who out and all that shift has been incredibly fast and I so I think that the Cold War perhaps would have would have slowed it down and certainly in the 80s I think you had a reaction against it for a while particularly with the rise of AIDS. There was there was a reaction so that's my answer to that. Yeah I would say that also you you need to gain a little nuance in terms of the kinds of transformations that occurred. I of course agree that there was a great deal of transformation across the 1960s the United States but I think there's this tendency of right-wingers to to basically I mean as you can see in this in this post you know the left is just going to move from strength to strength the left is just totally inevitable the left is invincible. Well I mean I I agree with that to this certain extent I think we do live in a kind of liberal secular age but I think you need to bring in some nuance to that so I mean what was happening in the 60s now by the late 60s and into the 70s you did kind of see a shift in social mood towards the the kind of you know almost nihilistic tear everything down I mean in many ways things that were as you pointed out in your upcoming book I mean in in some ways in through the 70s you had almost worse more toxic versions of sexual liberation than you see today particularly in the acceptance of pedophilia and and so on but in the 60s itself I mean you have to look at something like the Civil Rights Act the Civil Rights Act was a kind of expression of national strength and purpose on some level it wasn't coming from some you know I hate myself white guilt type of mentality now I'm not saying the Civil Rights Act is good or that we should support it I'm just saying you have to look at the kind of context and social mood at the time it was a way that we're going to overcome this history that America obviously has of slavery and reconstruction segregation etc and we're going to kind of bring them into the family African Americans we're going to end poverty with a great society and we are going to be we're going to cut in some ways out Soviet the Soviet Union in the sense that in the 1950s and into the 60s there was a lot of a lot of sense including among conservatives maybe even particularly among conservatives that the socialism is the way of wave of the future we you know khrushchev is right as he said to Nixon in the kitchen speech you know we we will bury you with all of these products greater efficiency you know lack of competition it's going to it is going to be a more efficient system and it was a kind of way of out so being this out soviet the soviets we are going to create an egalitarian middle-class society that is going to compete with the soviet union and be just as good or out do it and I think that was a lot of the impulse now you know over the past 30 years all of this stuff that we find more toxic has come about after the end of history in in this kind of unipolar moment global moment where we have no enemies I also think we should remember people sort of think of it as it's cartoon it shows 60s turning point to generosity well that's not quite what was going on in the 30s you had that kind of thing going on as well and that's why you had to have that that rule about films the censorship of films I forget the name of it there's something about all kinds of dodgy stuff into film okay I think that will do it for today take